tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-179798722024-03-27T17:29:38.703-07:00BobzhumanContemporary and meaningful thought, both my own and someone else's.Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comBlogger1127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-1926278981875095452024-03-27T17:28:00.000-07:002024-03-27T17:28:41.482-07:00“The Hard To Employ”: Do People Ever Change?<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizPz7GwwdaCyPOhfIgWj_8k6b5RKvXi4RBSr3hR_buQum-4KWRvGPb9QPBY1RbbQF9EcWuWRi8mEHejqR0tnN9G7HIPBhvgur0airvEJJ0rhiqUSRFmEFqI3Bff1AAKFOpq-3Sd5eaHqsLzKtIB-H0hGkP10rBHeP7fDRa3iyM4wztfeD_EF-UDg/s318/images-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="159" data-original-width="318" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizPz7GwwdaCyPOhfIgWj_8k6b5RKvXi4RBSr3hR_buQum-4KWRvGPb9QPBY1RbbQF9EcWuWRi8mEHejqR0tnN9G7HIPBhvgur0airvEJJ0rhiqUSRFmEFqI3Bff1AAKFOpq-3Sd5eaHqsLzKtIB-H0hGkP10rBHeP7fDRa3iyM4wztfeD_EF-UDg/w400-h200/images-2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">“The Hard To Employ”: Do People Ever Change?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Michael Bernick, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelbernick/2024/03/27/the-hard-to-employ-do-people-ever-change/?sh=3953fb837911">Forbes</a> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Do people ever change?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It’s a question professionals in the job training field have been asking over the past five decades, especially in regards to the unemployed workers referred to in the 1970s as the “hard-to-employ”. It’s a question that is being asked today, in Congressional discussions over the reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), and direction of America’s job training system.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In 1979, when I started in job training, the “hard-to-employ” was the term then used by practitioners and employment researchers to describe a set of groups identified with the rising government benefit rolls and crime: welfare recipients, ex-offenders, out of school unemployed youth, and ex-addicts. Within these groups, some workers lacked vocational skills or basic literacy skills that made job placement difficult. Mainly, though, these workers were defined at the time by behaviors: inability to get to work regularly and on time, inability to manage issues in their personal lives that got in the way of the job, inability to follow work protocols. The term became a shorthand for the individuals who, in the words of a blue ribbon committee on the hard-to-employ in 1980, “have become a considerable burden to themselves and the public.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Integrating these workers into jobs is one of the main goals of the WIOA reauthorization. But how to do so? Much of the WIOA discussion is focusing on longer term training and certifications for these workers prior to job placement. Yet in terms of fostering behaviors for job success, a different approach offers greater promise: direct job placement with high-touch supports, and subsequent skills upgrading. Workers are encouraged to build a track record in entry level jobs, and employers encouraged and incentivized to invest in these workers, with skills upgrading and advancement opportunities. Let’s briefly explain.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Behavioral change that enables individuals who have not had success in jobs to find such success is a complex, multifaceted process. Such behavioral change most often comes from influences outside of government training programs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This behavioral change can come from the influence of a new mentor/teacher/friend, or an effective mental health/substance abuse intervention. It can come through joining a religious or spiritual movement.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Beyond these influences, often it comes through the process of aging and greater maturity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">A few weeks ago walking in San Francisco’s Union Square, I ran into a participant in the job training program, the San Francisco Renaissance Center, that I was part of in the 1980s. After not holding a steady job in his twenties, he has been employed steadily for the past thirty years in building set up and security positions with the San Francisco Convention Center and Union Square Business District. What brought change in his work behavior was neither the Renaissance Center nor any other training program. His work behavior changed as he aged and matured. So too other Renaissance Center participants settled into jobs on their own as they aged into their thirties and beyond.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">A well-structured job training program, though, can be an influence for behavioral change and hastening integration into a more steady job world. Experience suggests that the WIOA authorization focus on the following three strategies:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>1. The power of job placement and the “work first” approach:</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> One of the most important insights on behavioral change has come from Peter Cove, who in 1984, with his wife Dr. Lee Bowes, founded America Works. Inspired by President Johnson’s call to end poverty, Cove in 1965 had dropped out of graduate school and taken a job with the War on Poverty oversight agency in New York. Within a few years, though, he began to lose faith in the welfare and social service approaches and the flow of money without any accountability.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Cove turned to the job training field and went to work in the early 1970s at the Manhattan office of Wildcat Services Corporation. He would later recall, “At Wildcat we showed that the best way to get clients off welfare was to get them paid work immediately, rather than enroll them in training and education programs. I saw with my own eyes the value of work—any kind of paid work—in reducing welfare dependency and attacking poverty. I learned that if we helped welfare clients get jobs, even entry level jobs, they would then attend to their other needs. By contrast if the government gave them money and other benefits they were likely to remain dependent.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Cove and his wife Dr. Lee Bowes launched America Works with their own funds, and built on the Wildcat results. They emphasized a “work first” behavioral approach: once people are placed in jobs they often find ways on their own to address other “static” or challenges in their lives. “When some mothers on welfare came to us they often explained that they could not work because they had no day care. We would send them on a job interview, and when the company wanted to hire them, miraculously they found a grandmother or daycare center.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">America Works has grown to a nationwide organization, serving 20,000 clients annually. It accompanies job placements with a range of counseling and case management supports for retention. It encourages skills upgrading and skills certifications for advancement. But its theory of behavioral change is centered on the power of the job placement.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Though America Works is among the largest of the “work first” workforce intermediaries, it is by no means the only one. The strategy is increasingly being adopted by other intermediaries, sometimes with variations through the growing apprenticeship movement and creative uses of transitional jobs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>2. The craft of the job counselor and the high-touch needed:</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> I’ve written from time to time about job counselors who are true craft persons in their roles in assisting the hard-to-employ, including Amy Ruddell, a job counselor in Sacramento, who works in job placement for the homeless. She has been in the field for 34 years, and developed strong ties with local employers, and a willingness and ability to sell her clients to employers. She also has the effective mix of empathy, enthusiasm, and straight talk, to be the cheerleader and coach that her clients need for their transitions into jobs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">When I wrote about Amy in early 2022, she had just completed a project cycle of 30 homeless participants, among whom 19 had been placed in entry level jobs. Since then, Amy has continued to regularly send participant updates. Today around a third of the participants placed in 2022 are back to being unemployed. The others, though, are still employed—though several have changed employers one or two times.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Amy provides the high-touch supports required for placement and re-placement. She checks in regularly with the participant and employer, and seeks to resolve job issues that arise. If there is no resolution, she will assist the participant in finding another job. She is not a nine-to-five counselor, and she does not give up easily on her clients.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The high-touch strategy is also finding greater adoption in the workforce field, as represented by MDRC’s Individual Placement and Support model and its growing Center for Applied Behavioral Science.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>3. Advancement from entry level jobs:</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> In the 1970s and 1980s, the welfare rights groups would argue that welfare recipients and other workers on government benefits should not be expected to take low-wage, entry-level jobs. They were entitled to “quality jobs”. The result in most cases was that the workers obtained no jobs at all.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">One of the first principles of job placement is that it is always easier to get a job if you have a job. Also, it is easier to navigate the job world and advance into a better position if you have a job, even an entry level job. The next job training system should encourage workers, with limited job backgrounds, to build a record in an entry level job, and seek out opportunities to advance. It should find ways to encourage and assist employers to provide such opportunities and invest in their entry level workers who perform well. In the post-pandemic economy, employers are finding just how hard it is to find committed employees in entry level positions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Recent research by Burning Glass Institute points to the advancement opportunities increasingly available for entry level workers at America’s major companies. One challenge for the job training system going forward is how to expand these opportunities in mid-size and smaller firms.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Still, How Little We Know of Behavioral Change and Fitting Into the Job World</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Our understanding of behavioral change is still primitive, in regards to the job world, as in other areas of life. Throughout the past five decades, job training practitioners and researchers have looked to the ascendant behavioral sciences for answers on integrating the “hard to employ” into jobs, but the answers have been scarce. If anything, during this same time, the neurosciences have been showing how much of behavior is linked to brain structure, and not easily subject to the mainstream behavioral interventions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But these past five decades have also shown the power of getting and holding a job in stimulating behavioral change—at least for a portion of the “hard to employ”. This power should be at the center of WIOA reauthorization.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Michael Bernick I served as California Employment Development Department director, and today am Counsel with the international law firm of Duane Morris LLP, a Milken Institute Fellow and Fellow with Burning Glass Institute, and research director with the California Workforce Association. My newest book is The Autism Full Employment Act (2021).2093</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-6036682577171624632024-03-21T14:24:00.000-07:002024-03-21T14:24:30.345-07:00With Guardians Like These<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFyW9YFN6hX_BKMRtRURF1_MOLAGI7jQyU71uKeBZx04DAIZuj9v6OENLe1A2QP46jBoaJUiKtP9-fwIqPcoainOaJ3FFALqXhWsXVSSh8orDhToDtQZk1uz-LvNsyRE5g8ukMt3fQjEeGkQDVNQXX3iuA9cu8P-79MIMy5CjSRjJ6RrBbxj38vg/s282/images-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="178" data-original-width="282" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFyW9YFN6hX_BKMRtRURF1_MOLAGI7jQyU71uKeBZx04DAIZuj9v6OENLe1A2QP46jBoaJUiKtP9-fwIqPcoainOaJ3FFALqXhWsXVSSh8orDhToDtQZk1uz-LvNsyRE5g8ukMt3fQjEeGkQDVNQXX3iuA9cu8P-79MIMy5CjSRjJ6RrBbxj38vg/w400-h252/images-1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A big part of the problems we face...</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">With Guardians Like These</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Chuck Schumer’s recent comments about Israel exhibit arrogance and ignorance.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Joel Zinberg, City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-problem-with-schumers-israel-speech</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has long claimed to be a shomer—Hebrew for guardian or watchman—of Israel and the Jewish people. But his speech last Thursday on the Senate floor, in which he called for new elections in Israel, more readily brings two Yiddish words to mind.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The first word is chutzpah, which connotes arrogance-laced presumption. That perfectly describes Schumer instructing Israel—the only democracy in the entire Middle East—to jettison its elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold new elections, or else. Schumer threatened: “[i]f Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down . . . then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy.” That is election interference, plain and simple.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Israeli people are quite capable of deciding when to hold elections and whom to elect, notwithstanding Schumer’s insinuation to the contrary. No foreign politician—even, or especially, one who prefaces his remarks with “as a Jew” and “a life-long supporter of Israel”—has any business interfering with an ally’s democratic processes. Critics might point to Netanyahu’s 2015 address to Congress opposing the proposed Iran nuclear deal. Democrats were livid at the time. But Netanyahu was arguing against a specific agreement that many Americans, and most Israelis, believed posed an existential threat to Israel and the world. He was not advocating for President Obama’s ouster.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Schumer claimed Netanyahu is “allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” But does anyone doubt Schumer is ditching Israel to save Joe Biden by placating his party’s radical left? Unsurprisingly, Biden praised the speech.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The second word is sechel—common sense or wisdom—something Schumer’s speech clearly lacked. The Senate majority leader claimed that the Israeli people are being “stifled by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” But the only people stuck in the past are those, like Schumer and the foreign policy establishment, who persist in wanting to impose a two-state solution that Palestinians have never favored and that Israelis, brutalized by decades of intifadas and terrorism culminating in October 7, have given up on.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Schumer identified the four obstacles to peace as Hamas and “the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways,” Netanyahu, right-wing Israelis, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. This ignores how Palestinians over the years have rejected multiple opportunities to form their own state. Indeed, polling just prior to October 7 found that nearly three quarters of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution. Reuters reports that 72 percent of Palestinians “support and tolerate” Hamas, believing that its October 7 attack was “correct.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If Israel ends its war to eradicate Hamas, as Schumer urges, the country would be rewarding the atrocities of October 7. Hamas, the Palestinians who support them, and their useful idiot supporters in the West who chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free,” all want a land that, to use the Nazi term, is Judenfrei—cleansed of Jews. Hamas has pledged to repeat the horrors of October 7 and kill as many Jews as possible. If Hamas is not destroyed, peace of any kind will be impossible.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Instead of coercing Israel, Schumer should pressure the international community to withdraw support from the aged and corrupt Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas—now in the 18th year of his four-year term and disliked by 90 percent of Palestinians. Moving on from Hamas and Abbas is the only way moderate Palestinians might come forward as partners for peace. Israelis will reckon with Netanyahu and his failure to protect their country at a time of their choosing. Meantime, the self-styled shomer should bite his tongue.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Joel Zinberg M.D., J.D. Dr. Zinberg was senior economist and general counsel at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, 2017-2019.</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-37858522261662381592024-03-17T11:33:00.000-07:002024-03-17T11:33:56.611-07:00Taking On the College Cartel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUByyK9KKyVwyDQIVbr9Xf0GayrA4ZTpbir-YNKTRjwhzGhRlZwc6ZQR9dNQ822mERZnEfPjJDqA3ioAakbAg1q_FSe4MOY3GFoCdPDQCbP1_MNdkCPeDg5IP2Bq7Dpw5yOtsf28RMxcXM0uKsq2y-gTtdHJxB3OQpGU8hss1JFkIa-6l6U09U5g/s1060/U-of-Tx-Austin_Prof-Shubin_shutterstock_533230642-1060x530.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="1060" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUByyK9KKyVwyDQIVbr9Xf0GayrA4ZTpbir-YNKTRjwhzGhRlZwc6ZQR9dNQ822mERZnEfPjJDqA3ioAakbAg1q_FSe4MOY3GFoCdPDQCbP1_MNdkCPeDg5IP2Bq7Dpw5yOtsf28RMxcXM0uKsq2y-gTtdHJxB3OQpGU8hss1JFkIa-6l6U09U5g/w400-h200/U-of-Tx-Austin_Prof-Shubin_shutterstock_533230642-1060x530.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Taking On the College Cartel</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Frederick M. Hess & Michael Q. McShane, <a href="https://lawliberty.org/taking-on-the-college-cartel/">Law and Liberty </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The venerable economist Milton Friedman once said, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change.” That’s the impulse behind Winston Churchill’s admonition (later famously echoed by Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel): “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Well, welcome to the world of American higher education. Crippling tuition, bloated bureaucracies, huge rates of noncompletion, campus groupthink, DEI loyalty oaths, grade inflation, enrollment cliffs, and stretched institutional budgets have all added up to a crisis of confidence—inside higher education and among the broader public. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trust in the nation’s colleges has been crumbling for the better part of a decade. In 2023, Gallup reported that just 36 percent of American adults said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in higher education. Among Republicans, the share of adults who trust colleges plummeted from 56 percent in 2015 to 19 percent in 2023. But it wasn’t just a right-wing thing. Among independents, the numbers plunged by a third, from 48 percent to 32 percent, and among Democrats, trust declined from 68 percent to 59 percent.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>There is a challenge here—and an opportunity.</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Policymakers who are troubled by this state of affairs but unsure how to respond may be inclined to look to the K–12 playbook, thinking that what’s needed is a strong dose of “school choice for college.” But the truth is that American higher education already features an extraordinary degree of choice. Pell Grants, the GI Bill, and many state scholarships essentially operate as vouchers for low-income students to attend the school, public or private, of their choice. Heavily subsidized federal student loans can also be used at nearly every institution of higher education. And yet, for all this, the higher education landscape is a mess.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It would be a profound mistake to read this as an indictment of educational choice. Rather, the problem is that anti-competitive practices have been allowed to stymie robust, healthy competition and fuel the self-dealings of campus mandarins.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">What’s needed today is a heavy dose of trust-busting, deregulation, and entrepreneurial energy.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Busting the Accreditation Trust</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Federal policymaking over the past half-century has mostly focused on subsidizing higher education. Pell Grants, institutional aid, and the student lending program have provided vast sums to cover or underwrite tuition, plumping college coffers while expanding their consumer base. In order to guard against waste and fraud, these programs have relied on a system of college accreditation that has, ironically, served to further protect incumbent institutions and encourage bureaucratic bloat. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">For an institution of higher education to receive federal funds (including Pell Grants and subsidized loans), it must be accredited. The problem is that accreditors are trade associations operated and funded by the colleges they oversee. This means they’re essentially a legally sanctioned, publicly funded cartel. Mediocre colleges keep their accreditation even as they overcharge and underperform. Meanwhile, new and nontraditional entrants must leap over enormous hurdles just to get started. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The current system isn’t suited to facilitate competition and creation. However, some form of oversight is necessary as a matter of fiduciary responsibility. The obvious solution is to build on the Trump administration’s efforts to create room for new accreditors that are less entwined with the cartel and more hospitable to new providers. This is eminently doable: Under existing law, the US Department of Education can recognize new accreditors not beholden to the same entrenched interest groups.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Postsecondary Commission (PSC) offers one intriguing approach. PSC seeks to adapt the K–12 model of charter authorizing to higher education by focusing more on outcomes than on inputs and compliance. PSC founder, Stig Leschly, says that the goal is to stop counting faculty or campus materials and instead judge colleges based on economic returns, transparency, accountability, and innovation. To be accredited by PSC, institutions need to track and report short-term results like rates of graduation, year-to-year retention, and job placement. Over the longer term, they would need to track student labor market outcomes and calculate graduates’ earnings—as compared to a counterfactual estimate of what they would make had they not attended the institution—minus the cost of attendance. Such a system rewards institutions that build programs and approach staffing with a focus on outcomes and ROI—a development that, in turn, should have the happy effect of squeezing out the ideological stylings that have proliferated at institutions where students or faculty have too much idle time and too little focus. PSC is an example of the type of forward-thinking activity that could allow for the emergence of new accreditors, and thereby new colleges, that are less beholden to the unworkable status quo. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>The College Shakedown Racket</b> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But there is an even more insidious trust lurking just under the surface of American higher education. Employers use college credentials as a hiring requirement—whether they’re demonstrably relevant to the job in question or not. This practice took off after the Civil Rights Act of 1965, when it became increasingly dicey for employers to use other kinds of hiring tests. The Supreme Court warned in the early 1970s that college degrees shouldn’t be treated any differently than any other hiring requirement, but nonetheless, they have been given exactly that kind of carve-out—making them a safe haven for risk-averse HR departments and employment attorneys. The result is that employers who are fearful of screening based on knowledge or skills will casually demand a diploma even for jobs that don’t truly require one. These paper credentials have become admission tickets to the middle class that must be purchased from existing institutions of higher education.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It’s time to level the playing field. Students should enroll in college because they want to or because they need specific training, not because it’s the only way to ensure they’ll get a fair look from potential employers. There are several ways to reduce employers’ reliance on college degrees. First, the courts should subject college credentials to the same kind of scrutiny applied to any other hiring test. Degrees should be required only if they’re demonstrably related to the work at hand. Meanwhile, there’s a need to devise reliable, credible, legally sound hiring tests that can offer an appealing alternative to college credentialing for applicants and employers. Public officials have a unique opportunity to lead on this issue. Indeed, they should take a page from red and blue governors like Larry Hogan in Maryland and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania and eliminate degree requirements for most state government jobs, thereby requiring that positions be filled based on skills and experience rather than paper credentials.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Higher education is ripe for a new era of institution building. Choice works when new, better alternatives force lazy, self-indulgent incumbents to raise their game or risk obsolescence.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The merit of a college education isn’t the point. The issue is that today an arbitrary judicial standard, an excessive regard for employer convenience, and an unwillingness to stand up to the college cartel mean that Americans are required to pay the ransom of a college diploma in order to seek professional success. Compelling Americans to buy an expensive degree of dubious value is behavior more typically associated with protection rackets than engines of opportunity.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Public Scams and Public Subsidies</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Higher education is also rife with dubious practices that reward influence peddling and shower massive public subsidies on unaccountable providers. Some of these practices especially advantage brand-name institutions, while others insulate the broader sector from the consequences of its failings. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Today, wealthy families who make influence-peddling “donations” to help grease the admissions skids for their children are allowed to write off the full amount as charitable contributions. This is nonsensical. After all, the IRS has long held that donors can only deduct the value of their contribution minus the value of any good or service they receive in return. This makes obvious sense: An exchange of goods or services is not a charitable contribution. Yet the IRS currently ignores the quid pro quo when it comes to admissions. Elite schools shake down wealthy families to pad their endowments and insulate themselves from market pressure. They then gift seats to donors’ children at the expense of their more deserving peers. Taxpayers pick up the tab as donors buying access wind up illegally deducting 50 percent or more of these “charitable contributions.” That publicly subsidized institutions engage in such influence peddling is particularly galling given the leaders of those same institutions are prone to go on at great length about the evils of privilege and their commitment to equity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">There is also a general lack of institutional accountability for publicly provided funds. Colleges admit students and, as long as they’re enrolled, keep pocketing taxpayer dollars—directly in the form of Pell Grants or indirectly through federally subsidized loans. If the student never graduates, the college keeps all that money. The student leaves with no degree but all the debt. When students don’t repay their loans, taxpayers are on the hook for the balance. Now we are seeing the frustration over accumulated debt fuel a political push for loan “forgiveness” that sticks taxpayers with the tab for hundreds of billions in borrowed funds, even when those funds simply serve to alleviate financial pressure on colleges whose students have no degrees or earnings to show for all the time and money they spent there.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Institutions that accept public funds should be expected to make taxpayers whole for the tuition and fees they’ve collected from students who don’t repay their loans. This would create intense pressure on colleges to help ensure that students complete their degrees and find gainful employment. It would also likely make colleges more cautious about whom they enroll. That’s a good thing. Admitting students who are unprepared for college and then pocketing tuition from them isn’t good for anyone.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Building New Institutions</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dynamism used to be the norm in higher education. Americans weren’t stuck with the institutions we inherited. Rather, we built new institutions in response to changing needs. Between 1820 and 1899, 672 new colleges were established in the US. Of those, 573 were private. That’s an average of more than a half-dozen new private institutions each year. During the second half of the nineteenth century, private donors founded 11 universities that are today ranked among the nation’s top twenty, including such famous names as Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago. We’ve fallen out of this habit. In recent decades, donors have steered big gifts toward old, inflexible institutions and given short shrift to new entrants.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Much of that nineteenth-century dynamism was born of the millionaires produced by the Industrial Revolution. They saw a need for new institutions attuned to the changing needs of the economy and society. Today, the deep-pocketed donors born of the Information Age have seemingly concluded that it’s foolish to build from scratch when there are already so many prestigious institutions. Instead, they direct their giving to existing schools, ballooning endowments and erecting new buildings while further entrenching familiar brands. Nearly $60 billion was donated to higher education last year, with close to a quarter of that flowing to just 20 institutions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Higher education is ripe for a new era of institution building. Choice works when new, better alternatives force lazy, self-indulgent incumbents to raise their game or risk obsolescence. Long lists of rules, regulations, and subsidies have yielded a higher education landscape that’s neither responsive nor responsible. It’s time to look for institutions that can do better.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Deep-pocketed donors would do well to focus on underwriting new entrants rather than cutting eight-figure checks to erect buildings, stadiums, and new initiatives at institutions busy squatting atop ten-figure endowments. We’re seeing this kind of pioneering spirit play out with the promising new University of Austin. And there’s great value in creating quasi-autonomous new units at universities to provide a home for heterodox scholarship on civic virtue, American history, and the Great Books (as at Arizona State and the University of Florida). It shouldn’t be either-or. We need a wave of such efforts.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In time, of course, these new institutions may themselves lose their way or get captured. But that simply strengthens the case for building a steady supply of new ones. This requires a shift in how we think about the tension between tradition and dynamism in higher education, where the former impulse has usually won out. Big donors troubled by the status quo should refuse to subsidize bad behavior and instead invest in new institutions—whether those are focused on workforce preparedness, the liberal arts, or anything in between. </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Looking Forward</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">There’s much more to be done, of course. In our new book, Getting Education Right, we explain the need for both structural changes in higher education and a renewed commitment to rigor, free inquiry, and the telos of the enterprise. However frustrated we may be with higher education today, it’s a mistake to reduce colleges and universities to social media punching bags. Whatever the manifold failings of performative professors and slacker students, higher education plays a vital role in safeguarding human knowledge, promoting scientific inquiry, and teaching wisdom to the next generation. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We can’t afford to merely lament or critique the woeful state of higher education. We need to pursue changes that will help colleges and universities better fulfill their purpose. As Friedman, Churchill, and Emanuel would remind us, there’s a lot of silver in those clouds. Finding it requires institutions of higher education to honor their mission and serve as beacons of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom for the students they serve today as well as those yet to darken their doors.</span></p><p><br /></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-9167782533334072912024-03-14T11:34:00.000-07:002024-03-14T11:34:31.920-07:00🐝 Millions of British Kids Forced to Live Normal, Happy Lives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkFWP2CwNDW640YX3cKC1e1P2-i6vISFfCUt-pIyIXFNS1Gr9cVhTP0mimGsiUgW-XyhEVwfp-accGUP4xa8glqM9aYKYoBiorpdqFuWBJseqILDbr8XaqfeiAdLy7J97lum_uCSRqvXoVxb91MKkO0orAGBntSnYVLvrKCBkp8rLyPQ6BuS7uKg/s275/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkFWP2CwNDW640YX3cKC1e1P2-i6vISFfCUt-pIyIXFNS1Gr9cVhTP0mimGsiUgW-XyhEVwfp-accGUP4xa8glqM9aYKYoBiorpdqFuWBJseqILDbr8XaqfeiAdLy7J97lum_uCSRqvXoVxb91MKkO0orAGBntSnYVLvrKCBkp8rLyPQ6BuS7uKg/w400-h266/Unknown.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">🐝</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">Millions of British Kids Forced to Live Normal, Happy Lives After UK Bans Puberty Blockers</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Experts warn that without delayed puberty, British kids will grow normally.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Babylon Bee, <a href="https://patriotpost.us/opinion/105179-millions-of-british-kids-forced-to-live-normal-happy-lives-after-uk-bans-puberty-blockers-2024-03-13?mailing_id=8187&subscription_uuid=f5082dc8-104c-4590-b7ac-108751992b77&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.8187&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body">Patriot Post </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">LONDON, UK — The National Health Service of the United Kingdom announced Monday they will no longer permit children to be prescribed puberty blockers, a move many gender-ideology advocates worry will force otherwise depressed and troubled kids to live normal, happy lives.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“This is a travesty and an outrage,” gender activist and purple hair aficionado Clara Domino told reporters. “Without puberty blockers, kids with mental disorders will be forced to receive actual, data-driven treatment that might actually lead them to grow out of their gender dysphoria and become happy, healthy adults. This is the opposite of what the transgender movement stands for.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Experts warn that without delayed puberty, British kids will grow normally and likely spend their days doing delightful British kid things, such as neighborhood games of Conkers, Poohsticks, or Tiddlywinks.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The NHS cited a growing body of research that outlines the harmful side effects of such treatments. Advocates for transing kids and teens rebuked the move and said it might lead to kids growing up, getting married, having a family, and being normal, productive members of society.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“How can we deny kids their right to make permanent, life-changing medical decisions based on one or two short doctor appointments?” Domino said. “If we can’t get them when they’re kids to buy into the idea that they’re ‘born in the wrong body’, how will we be able to do it when they’re older and their cerebral cortexes are fully formed? This is trans genocide!”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As of publishing time, gender-ideology advocates took to the streets in London to protest the decision and announced they plan to look for new, more creative ways to sneak sterilization drugs into the healthy bodies of kids and teens. </span></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-7762032598917398612024-03-10T10:10:00.000-07:002024-03-10T10:10:38.081-07:00An Immigration Crisis Beyond Imagining<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQndPOfuAjrXrVq76k-Q1QkPo446H4iXKnhisVj0CESLTMQ1YexXKlg9rO_SS4bSzPtmGPwjc5-IoLGXSs-5T2Qb4m7BWZQT5OI3EspaKQGTlanqnVqAi-B9xkl-TGnAIaxreTzb2wziovrjILla4CsounUcGf7slJTV2w7xWI2SDi0gTZmfC7Sg/s290/Unknown-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="174" data-original-width="290" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQndPOfuAjrXrVq76k-Q1QkPo446H4iXKnhisVj0CESLTMQ1YexXKlg9rO_SS4bSzPtmGPwjc5-IoLGXSs-5T2Qb4m7BWZQT5OI3EspaKQGTlanqnVqAi-B9xkl-TGnAIaxreTzb2wziovrjILla4CsounUcGf7slJTV2w7xWI2SDi0gTZmfC7Sg/w400-h240/Unknown-1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>An Immigration Crisis Beyond Imagining</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Todd Bensman, <a href="https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/an-immigration-crisis-beyond-imagining/">Imprimis</a> </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Center for Immigration Studies</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 22, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In 1960, the Eisenhower administration began counting the number of foreign nationals “apprehended” or “encountered” by what was then called the U.S. Border Control when crossing into the U.S. over its southern border with Mexico. These figures have been published and closely monitored through the years, and there has never been anything like the numbers we are seeing now. A human tsunami of previously unfathomable size—Border Patrol has had to handle more than 7.6 million border crossers in 36 months—has smashed every record, with each year’s numbers exceeding the previous year’s record in stair-stepping fashion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Of the over 7.6 million illegals encountered by Border Patrol since January 2021, the number allowed to stay inside the U.S. is somewhere north of five million. But with the percentage of those allowed to stay now approaching 100 percent, if current trends hold, the total allowed to remain in the U.S. under the Biden administration will reach ten million by next January.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The U.S. has experienced surges of illegal immigration in the past, but these have been brought quickly under control by implementing policies to deter, block, detain, and deport illegal immigrants. Not this time. To put the current numbers in perspective, consider that Jeh Johnson, President Obama’s Director of Homeland Security, told MSNBC that in his time in office—when the number of illegal crossings was relatively low—he considered it bad if apprehensions exceeded 1,000 a day, because anything more than that “overwhelms the system.” Over the past three years, apprehensions have averaged about 6,940 per day.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Even with a surge in illegal crossings in 2019—this was due to a legal loophole that encouraged illegals to cross with minors—the Trump administration had brought apprehensions down to between 800 and 1,500 a day in his final year in office, the lowest numbers in 45 years. Four months into the Biden administration, apprehensions spiked to about 6,000 per day. There were 2.4 million apprehensions in 2022, a daily average of 6,575. In 2023 there were three million apprehensions, a daily average of 8,219. Entering 2024, apprehensions were up to 12,000 to 15,000 per day.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The reality is even worse, because these numbers do not include the people who entered the U.S. illegally without being apprehended—sometimes referred to as “gotaways”—a number the Border Patrol estimates but does not make public. That estimate over the past three years is two million, bringing the three-year total of illegal immigrants to ten million—a number equivalent to the population of Greater London or Greater Chicago.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But these are just numbers. Who are these people? They are internationally diverse: 45 percent come from 170 countries outside the traditional origin countries of Mexico and Central America. Many are unaccompanied minors: 448,000 to date. More than 330 as of November 2023 are on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. Many are murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and violent criminals. More than a million have been lawfully ordered deported by judges in the U.S. but remain in our country regardless. The dismissal by the executive branch of our government of hundreds of thousands of cases of immigration law violations is unprecedented.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is worth noting some other firsts: Mexico’s crime syndicates and their paramilitary forces have never earned so much money from cross-border smuggling, and it is reported that their proceeds from human smuggling are surpassing those from drug smuggling for the first time. Never before have the Border Patrol’s 19,000 agents been ordered to abandon vast stretches of the border to conduct administrative intake duty. Never have so many immigrants died to take advantage of policies that all but guarantee quick release into the U.S. Never has our government explicitly refused to enforce immigration laws requiring detention and deportation of illegal immigrants on the grounds that those requirements are cruel and inhumane—instead adopting ad hoc policies aimed at providing “safe, orderly, and humane pathways” into the U.S. for illegal border crossers. And never has there been anything like the current conveyor-belt policy to distribute millions of illegals throughout the American interior.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This crisis is not the result of incompetence, but of purposeful policies. What is more, America’s establishment media has largely abdicated its duty to report on the crisis, refusing to acknowledge an event that is having a greater impact than almost any other in the world today. One can only assume that the reason for this is partisan bias: after all, the crisis can easily be traced to an identifiable moment in time—Inauguration Day 2021.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Prior to that day, the Trump administration had brought the southern border largely under control using four key policies.</span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Diplomatic Big Sticks: The U.S. gained Mexico’s cooperation by threatening ruinous trade tariffs of up to 28 percent on Mexican goods. We gained the cooperation of Central American nations by threatening to freeze U.S. foreign aid. The cooperation of these countries consisted of two things: accepting deported illegals from the U.S. and using their military and police to block incoming immigrants at their own borders.</i></span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Remain in Mexico: Border Patrol was required to return apprehended immigrants immediately to Mexico, where they had to wait out the long duration of asylum processing, rather than releasing them to disappear inside the U.S.</i></span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Safe Third Country: Immigrants who had passed through designated “safe third countries” (including Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico) on their way to the U.S. without applying for asylum in one of those countries were automatically deported with no chance to claim asylum in the U.S.</i></span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Title 42: This pandemic-control health order required rapid deportations to Mexico, without the option to claim asylum, of all immigrants caught illegally crossing the U.S. border.</i></span></li></ol><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">During the 2020 campaign, candidate Biden promised to undo Trump policies within the first 100 days, to include ending detention and deportation of illegal immigrants. On January 20, 2021, he began to follow through. Four new U.S. policies and a new Mexican law are the chief drivers of the immigration tsunami we see today.</span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>The tariff threat against Mexico was withdrawn and full foreign aid to all Central American nations was restored, freeing these countries to end cooperation with U.S. efforts to stem illegal immigration. This marked the end of the Remain in Mexico policy.</i></span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>The Title 42 pandemic rapid expulsion policy was waived for most families with children under ten, for all unaccompanied minors, for pregnant women, and for many single adults from nations that would not accept deportees.</i></span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Two days after the 2020 election, the Mexican government passed a law prohibiting the detention of families, pregnant women, and unaccompanied minors. It then released thousands of families from 58 Mexican detention centers ten days before President Biden took office.</i></span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>The Biden administration established an ad hoc Border Patrol turnstile honor system by which Title 42-exempted families and others were released into the U.S. with a promise to report back later; this catch-and-release approach came eventually to incorporate the aforementioned conveyor-belt policy, with Border Patrol delivering illegals to non-governmental organizations that would arrange bus and air travel to cities around the U.S.</i></span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>To give the false impression of fewer illegal crossings, the Biden administration created an ad hoc system that allowed hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to use a cell phone app called CBP One to schedule “pre-approved” entries at border crossings and U.S. airports.</i></span></li></ol><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Those who seek to come to the U.S. illegally are rational actors. They are more willing to pull up stakes and come when they think the effort and expense will pay off. The typical cost for the dangerous journey is $10,000 per person paid to smugglers. Few will take the gamble when the odds are against them. It’s a different matter when the odds move dramatically in favor of success as they did in January 2021.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Toward the end of the Trump administration, Border Patrol used Title 42 to deport nearly 90 percent of apprehended illegals. The Biden administration immediately reduced that number to 60. By 2023, Title 42 deportations were down to 35 percent. And on May 12, 2023, the Biden administration formally ended Title 42, and with it all instant expulsions. U.S. intelligence had predicted that ending Title 42 would lead to between 14,000 and 18,000 crossings a day, and that prediction turned out to be right. As I recently reported, it appears that the Biden administration recently took steps to reduce these numbers—most likely in response to public outrage in an election year—though it remains to be seen how long this will last.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is too early to gauge the full impact of the ongoing settlement of millions of illegal foreign nationals in the U.S. We know that the initial financial cost is high—$400 billion, by one estimate, to feed, house, clothe, and resettle the illegals who have been allowed to stay. Then there is the burden placed on public school districts that have no choice but to take in millions of new children who often speak no English and whose educations are not commensurate with those of their schoolmates. It is probably not coincidental that hospital systems across the nation have fallen deep into the red since the great mass migration crisis began. And large cities across the nation are looking to Washington for help with unfunded and unexpected fiscal burdens reaching into the tens of billions to care for the hundreds of thousands showing up with hands out.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Expense, of course, is only one part of the equation in terms of impact. Public safety, criminal justice, and national security systems face unprecedented new burdens as the personal histories and criminal backgrounds of most of the millions allowed easy entry are unknown and, often, unknowable. Some percentage will commit crimes and—in addition to the often horrendous effects on the victims of their crimes—increase the load on our already over-burdened courts and prisons. One prays not, but some may also commit acts of terrorism. Last but not least, this great influx will increase joblessness and put immense downward pressure on wages for American workers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is not rocket science to figure out how to solve the immigration crisis. Nor is it hard to tell whether a politician is serious when he proposes a solution—one can simply ask whether the proposal will increase or decrease the odds that an aspiring illegal immigrant will decide to make the significant effort and financial sacrifice. For instance, in the ongoing standoff in Texas, placing razor wire at the border as the Texas Governor ordered done will clearly decrease the odds, and removing the razor wire as the Biden administration seeks to do will increase the odds. Similarly, any politician who proposes a solution that begins by granting amnesty to illegals currently in the U.S. is increasing the odds and not serious.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">There are two essential steps we must take to begin to solve the border crisis:</span></p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Enforce current immigration law, specifically the requirements under the Immigration and Nationality Act to detain and deport illegal entrants.</i></span></li><li><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Restore the threat of trade tariffs on Mexican goods to ensure Mexico’s cooperation with reinstituting the Remain in Mexico policy, forcing asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their asylum claims are processed.</i></span></li></ol><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Three additional steps will help to solve the problem:</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">3. </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Withdraw from the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees treaty, which requires the U.S. to meet outdated standards for handling asylum claimants; then institute an asylum law that ends the current catch-and-release system and requires that an asylum claim first be made in a suitable departure or transit country, such as Mexico.</i></p><p><i style="font-family: verdana;">4. Put diplomatic and financial pressure on Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico to implement their own policies of detention and deportation of foreign nationals who are in those countries illegally.</i></p><p><i style="font-family: verdana;">5. Close loopholes in U.S. immigration law such as the Flores Settlement Agreement—which circumvents Immigration and Nationality Act requirements for detention and deportation during asylum claims and forces the release of asylum-seeking families within 21 days—and the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which requires the quick release of immigrant minors if they are from anywhere but Mexico.</i></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Our politicians know these actions are the ones needed. The problem is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of political will. Too many of our elected leaders have selfish reasons to let the border crisis continue, no matter what their constituents demand. Whether they will be able to continue in their inaction is in the hands of the American people.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p><i>Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. He earned a B.A. from Northern Arizona University, an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri, and an M.A. in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School. A former counterterrorism programs specialist with the Texas Department of Public Safety, he worked for 23 years as a journalist, including for The Dallas Morning News, CBS, and Hearst Newspapers, and had assignments as a foreign correspondent in over 30 countries. A recipient of two National Press Club Awards, he writes for numerous publications, including Homeland Security Today, the New York Post, The Federalist, and The National Interest. He is the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-18193475258795352672024-03-04T07:51:00.000-08:002024-03-04T07:51:00.389-08:00Gearing Up for ‘Biden’ Versus Trump<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq13LBvLkslbiDHFeYurfEDufyvd1FAqMmwDHxIh1QNAiyeRZX4u5A7vcYP9QRwEEA7hqCUbJyK5ebiXL6u72JkdzZp9Z22js8kWzoL7h0rT9ntASY4z7zb6ZvDyjMdXdgSOT_OUSsbmbfFvoLAgxhb-btJxKCNBlE1UGBI6TQJhfjrw6ojxddZA/s739/Screen%20Shot%202024-03-04%20at%207.25.38%20AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="739" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq13LBvLkslbiDHFeYurfEDufyvd1FAqMmwDHxIh1QNAiyeRZX4u5A7vcYP9QRwEEA7hqCUbJyK5ebiXL6u72JkdzZp9Z22js8kWzoL7h0rT9ntASY4z7zb6ZvDyjMdXdgSOT_OUSsbmbfFvoLAgxhb-btJxKCNBlE1UGBI6TQJhfjrw6ojxddZA/w400-h223/Screen%20Shot%202024-03-04%20at%207.25.38%20AM.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Gearing Up for ‘Biden’ Versus Trump: Not If, But When and How to Replace Biden</b></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>If Trump can praise those he defeats, call for unity, and campaign in 50 states in non-Republican strongholds, then he can win.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Victor Davis Hanson, <a href="https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/04/gearing-up-for-biden-versus-trump-not-if-but-when-and-how-to-replace-biden/">American Greatness </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">President Joe Biden is declining at a geometric, not an arithmetic, rate. His cognitive challenges are multifaceted.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">His gait is shaky. His daily use of stairs now risks the chance of a tenure-ending fall. Even when he sticks to the teleprompter, he so slurs his speech, mispronounces words, and glides his syntax that at times he becomes as incomprehensible at the podium as he is unsteady in his step.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">He now speaks a strange language foreign and untranslatable to most Americans. White House transcribers leave hiatuses in their written texts of his remarks to reflect that they either have no idea what he said, do not wish to publicize their guesses at what he said, or do not wish the public to know what he was trying to say.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Despite the circling-the-wagons media and the passive-aggressive sycophants like the opportunistic Gov. Gavin Newsom in waiting, the left understands that Biden will be lucky to get to the August convention. This spring and early summer, he will not campaign as a normal presidential candidate, and this time around, there is no pretense of the COVID epidemic to excuse his absence.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The people have already polled numerous times that their president is unfit to serve now and, in the future, should not run. So the 2020 Faustian bargain is in shambles. Remember its quid pro quos: all the major Democratic presidential candidates of 2020 nearly simultaneously pulled out the primaries to coronate Biden—but only on the condition that Biden would play to the hilt his “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” schtick that would offer a veneer to the otherwise unpopular hard left agenda of the new Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/the Obamas/Squad Democratic Party.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The people voted for a “return to normalcy,” all while the left destroyed the southern border, unleashed a critical legal theory/George-Soros crime wave, dismantled hard-won deterrence abroad, and printed money to spur hyperinflation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Moreover, it is increasingly clear that the entire Biden family consortium is compromised and corrupt. Neither Hunter nor Jim nor Frank Biden had any consulting skills, business expertise, or corporate experience to warrant leveraging over $25 million from foreign interests. Their only commodity was to sell corrupt parties the appearance that Joe Biden would be quite willing to help their various causes if they enriched his family. Everyone knows that to be true, and only now, as Biden sinks into incoherence, are his protectors shrugging about the obvious money-making schemes that revolved around a corrupt senator, vice president, and private citizen, Joe Biden.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">None of Biden’s record is popular. His policies on the border, economy, energy, foreign policy, and crime poll below 50 percent. And this trifecta of Biden’s mental deterioration, family corruption, and failed presidential record will only grow worse.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then there is the Kamala Harris issue—the Spiro Agnew insurance policy of our age that so far has protected Biden from overt efforts to replace him. She is as unpopular as Biden and often as incomprehensible, but without the excuse of age or mental diminishment. Of all the major Beltway elected officials, only Sen. Mitch McConnell polls worse.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">By August, Democratic donors and politicos may well conclude that the only way to rid the party of both is to release Biden’s delegates, open up the convention, and let candidates fight over the now-free delegates. Harris then will not be nominated, but not through a backroom, Machiavellian removal of a black woman. Instead, she will “fairly” lose an “open” and “transparent” free-for-all of various Democratic want-to-be replacements and recede into a sober and judicious Mike Pence-like retirement.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The problem with this scenario, of course, is that late-season convention or post-convention machinations in the modern era don’t work out too well. In 1976, Ronald Reagan, after losing a series of early primaries and being declared nearly inert, suddenly caught fire and entered the August 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City within striking distance of incumbent Gerald Ford. President Ford, remember, had never been elected either president or vice president.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the end, in one of the most acrimonious Republican conventions in memory, a wounded Ford won the nomination by only 117 delegate votes out of some 2,257 cast. In some sense, Ford never recovered and lost the election to Jimmy Carter, even as the tumult gave Reagan the exposure and his team the experience needed to win the nomination in 1980.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">About two weeks after the 1972 Democratic convention, a desperate George McGovern and the Democratic hierarchy removed Vice President running mate Sen. Thomas Eagleton from the ticket due to revelations of little-known past electric shock treatments given to combat depression. After futile efforts, the Democrats settled on the Kennedy clan’s Sargent Shriver, who had never run for office. McGovern would have lost anyway to an incumbent Nixon. But the margin of defeat in one of the greatest landslides in presidential history was often attributable to the sheer chaos of changing a vice presidential candidate so late in the campaign.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In sum, the Democrats can—and may have to—replace Joe Biden, and they can ensure that Kamala Harris is not the nominee, but the means of doing so will be chaotic and messy and will wound the winner for the rest of the campaign.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trump’s Circuitous Path to Victory</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Donald Trump challenges have now been discussed ad nauseam, and they are threefold: he must either beat or postpone campaign-season court trials—and find perhaps $800 million to $1 billion to post bonds, pay interests on them, and meet gargantuan legal fees—without turning off donors and supporters and by avoiding the diversion of Republican National Committee and various campaign funds to his own personal defense.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As in the past, Trump will be vastly outspent, perhaps by 3-1 or 4-1. Molly Ball’s infamous Time 2022 essay outlined the left-wing scheming that ensured a mail-in/early balloting election by aggregating the deep state, the corporate boardroom, the social media monopolies, and the 2020 riotous street thugs of Antifa and BLM. What she called a “cabal” and “conspiracy” was designed not so much as a one-off to defeat Trump as to create a permanent system by which a Trump-like candidate could never win a presidential election, both in 2020 and afterward.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Given changes in the 2020 state voting laws that saw 60-70 percent of the ballots in many swing states not cast on Election Day, while the rejection rate of faulty ballots counter-intuitively plunged despite such an influx, Trump will have to win by 3–4 points. Otherwise, in the swing states, we will again stare at the late-evening televised wizardry in which his huge leads mysteriously melt on the screen as drop boxes and mail sacks are tallied.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">To achieve a 51-plus majority in the popular vote—no Republican has achieved such a national ballot margin in 36 years since George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis in 1988—Trump will have to win, or win back, more Independents, apostate Democrats, and RINO Never-Trumpers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">He can do that in only two ways:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">One, he must hammer away at Joe Biden’s disastrous record on the border, energy, race, foreign affairs, the economy, and social issues that scare moderates and fence-sitters, especially when comparisons are made to the achievements of 2017-2020. Inner-city residents are being tag-teamed by both the influx of thousands of illegal aliens who apparently have first claims on stretched social services and street criminals who loot, assault, and carjack mostly their law-abiding neighbors with impunity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Two, Trump needs to model his remarks after his Iowa Primary victory speech or his recent Fox Townhall event with Fox’s Laura Ingram. Translated, that means there is no reason to reference Nikki Hayley’s deployed husband, to refer to her as a “birdbrain,” or to say much of anything other than she will lose, and in the process, she is needlessly hurting more than half of America by draining resources away from the only real chance to repeal the current socialist agenda.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hayley is imploding without any need for a Trump push. Magnanimity, rather than salt in her self-inflicted wounds, is the better strategy to unite the party. Trump has cemented his base. He will increase his share of minority voters who have been hurt the worst by the Biden socialist agenda. But to ensure victory and a Republican Congress, he cannot give swing voters a reason not to vote for policies and initiatives that they overwhelmingly prefer over those of the now hard-left Democratic Party.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In sum, after Super Tuesday, when Hayley will either quit the race or become inert, Trump needs to call her, politely remind her of her promise to support the nominee, and welcome her back into the fold. If she is wise, she will likely agree to disagree, let bygones be bygones, and thus pledge to support the assured nominee, Trump.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Two of her three choices are in her own interest: 1) She endorses him, and Trump wins, and she is vibrant in 2028; 2) she endorses him, and Trump loses, and she is still viable; 3) she opposes him, and Trump either wins—and she is persona non grata—or he loses, and she is blamed for splitting the party and his defeat. Breaking her public promise to support the nominee will bleed what support she retains, and would prove a suicidal blunder.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trump has achieved the greatest political comeback since Richard Nixon arose from the ashes of defeat in California in 1962 to win the nomination and presidency in 1968. Trump’s Phoenix-like rebirth from January 2021 to the present was achieved by Biden’s failure, the natural empathy accruing from the weaponization of the law by partisan or corrupt prosecutors against him, and Trump’s greater success in giving independents fewer reasons to vote against him. If he can praise those he defeats, call for unity, and campaign in 50 states in non-Republican strongholds, then he can win—even despite the hatred of the left, the corruption of the media, the weaponization of the bureaucracy, and the eroding trust in the way we vote.</span></p><p><i>Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the recently released The Dying Citizen, and the forthcoming The End of Everything (May 7, 2024)..</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-88113588748623406222024-02-28T11:13:00.000-08:002024-02-28T11:13:29.324-08:00Media Brags About Deep State Plot To Stop Trump<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTMH3HHxJcsE6t3s0PTc2Bl5_3XwufT0A9mqJ2DYjwLEMVyG7Cyn6HIe3OR4RUckqf34CZpJwAwk-huShU8Yl_wHSlVuN2WOrtlQ2rzq2bFtrXcrN52-jEWHHz2UogR5I-3CiF8yoy5zsU3mZ_9LmbI0n5L10VNkFsz9lZI9akAeiCvro-ypdxlA/s1200/Donald-and-Melania-Trump.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="804" data-original-width="1200" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTMH3HHxJcsE6t3s0PTc2Bl5_3XwufT0A9mqJ2DYjwLEMVyG7Cyn6HIe3OR4RUckqf34CZpJwAwk-huShU8Yl_wHSlVuN2WOrtlQ2rzq2bFtrXcrN52-jEWHHz2UogR5I-3CiF8yoy5zsU3mZ_9LmbI0n5L10VNkFsz9lZI9akAeiCvro-ypdxlA/w400-h268/Donald-and-Melania-Trump.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Media Brags About Deep State Plot To Stop Trump</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Shane Harris, <a href="https://amac.us/newsline/society/media-brags-about-deep-state-plot-to-stop-trump/?utm_objective=website_traffic&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=amac&utm_medium=daily_news_am&utm_content=mba022824&dderh=6dbe9411c3337c6aab85cea00c9b3768">AMAC Newsline </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">After alleging for years that former President Donald Trump and his supporters are “conspiracy theorists” for warning about the Deep State’s attempts to undermine American democracy, the corporate media is now openly detailing the left’s plans to use the federal bureaucracy to undercut Trump should he win a second term this November.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">On February 16, the Associated Press ran an article entitled, “Trump wants to fire thousands of government workers. Liberals are preparing to fight back if he wins.” The piece details how “liberal organizations in Washington” are “quietly trying to install roadblocks” to thwart Trump’s agenda if he returns to the White House.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“A collection of activists, advocates, and legal experts is promoting new federal rules to limit presidential power while urging Biden’s White House to do more to protect his accomplishments and limit Trump in a possible second term,” the AP reports. Some of those rules include efforts to make it more difficult for the president to fire career bureaucrats and place limits on the president’s authority over the military (something which would seem to be a flagrant violation of the Constitution).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">At least part of this plan already appears to be taking effect. As the AP reports, Biden’s Office of Personnel Management is on track to finalize a new rule in April that would prohibit future administrations from reclassifying tens of thousands of federal workers in order to make it easier to fire them. If Trump or any future president wanted to reverse the rule, he “would likely have to spend months — or even years — unwinding it.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In other words, a major media outlet is now plainly acknowledging that there is an effort underway to ensure that, no matter the outcome of the election this fall, the federal bureaucracy will continue to implement Biden’s agenda. Not only that, but the AP is giving the scheme favorable coverage.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">For conservatives, the idea that a cadre of liberal activists and bureaucrats are conspiring to stymie Trump’s policy priorities is hardly shocking. What is alarming, however, is the openness with which the media is now reporting on that effort – something which could signal the start of a campaign to legitimize an all-out mutiny by the federal bureaucracy should Trump win this November.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As far back as Trump’s 2016 campaign, conservatives have been sounding the alarm about schemes by career bureaucrats to influence election outcomes and otherwise undermine a duly elected president. In each case, Democrats and the liberal media have decried those warnings as “conspiracy theories” – only for those theories to be proven correct.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">During the 2016 race, it was the “Russiagate” hoax, where the Obama administration, Clinton campaign, and corporate media conspired with top officials in the intelligence community to push the narrative that Trump was a “Russian asset.” Anyone who opposed or even questioned this narrative was slandered as a “Putin apologist,” while Trump and his top campaign operatives were also mocked by the media for claims that the FBI spied on his campaign.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It was only years later that the public learned definitively through Congressional investigations, the DOJ Inspector General’s report, and ultimately the Durham Report that, as the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board put it, “Trump really was spied on.” The “Trump-Russia collusion” narrative was completely fabricated in order to launch a bogus investigation into Trump.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">While Trump ultimately overcame that plot, the Deep State continued its attempts to thwart and undermine Trump at every turn during his four years in office.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">From intelligence officials feeding false reports to the media about a supposed “Russian bounties” program on U.S. troops, to bureaucrats throughout the government continuing to infuse left-wing climate change talking points into Trump administration documents, liberal-minded government workers attempted to use their offices to hamstring Trump’s agenda and ultimately his re-election bid. As Bloomberg reported in 2017, “Across the government, career staffers are finding ways to continue old policies, sometimes just by renaming a project.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">For the left, of course, these endeavors are heroic efforts to protect the country from Trump’s supposedly evil policies. As liberal commentator David Rothkopf, who wrote an entire book lauding the Deep State’s efforts to undermine Trump, argued in an interview with NPR, “Veteran government officials served as guardrails, preventing initiatives that were illegal, unworkable, immoral or against the country’s interests.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">What doesn’t appear to have occurred to Rothkopf – or anyone in the liberal establishment – is that it is voters, not bureaucrats, who are empowered by the Constitution to decide what is “immoral” and “against the country’s interests.” The American people make that decision at the ballot box, where they choose a leader to enact a specific agenda that taxpayer-funded government agencies exist to facilitate. The idea that unelected career bureaucrats should have the power to veto any policy they disagree with is completely antithetical to the Constitution and to the very idea of representative government.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">However, the left has for the better part of a decade now been insisting that Trump is an existential threat to democracy who must be stopped at any cost. The idea of wielding the federal bureaucracy as a weapon against Trump and undermining the will of the voters in the process has now become so normalized that the AP can write about it and the story generates virtually no buzz in the wider media landscape.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If Trump wins re-election this November, reversing this plot to sabotage his second term may prove to be a necessary first step before pursuing any other policy priorities.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Ohio. You can follow him on X @ShaneHarris513.</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-89319348341335782492024-02-20T12:03:00.000-08:002024-02-20T12:03:32.612-08:00Putin's next victim<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgURBKsOpz6F9d01gD5TgYoyefu0JpqLhe__neGERQoIxkhbrezqfkcMIa9CL4FNuR4JSy3p3jziiNKVgBwn6mRlOhaSD7UZRLMAXF9GYQcGolC0hioII7CQPihLXILhCX3HqbDytxtQeRhNrxZ3eaym5hZjiWB0-95hi-zQrhjacyILGFwX7IF-A/s720/vladimir-kara-murza.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="720" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgURBKsOpz6F9d01gD5TgYoyefu0JpqLhe__neGERQoIxkhbrezqfkcMIa9CL4FNuR4JSy3p3jziiNKVgBwn6mRlOhaSD7UZRLMAXF9GYQcGolC0hioII7CQPihLXILhCX3HqbDytxtQeRhNrxZ3eaym5hZjiWB0-95hi-zQrhjacyILGFwX7IF-A/w400-h225/vladimir-kara-murza.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div style="text-align: center;">Vladimir Kara-Murza</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Morning Glory: Putin's next victim</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hugh Hewitt, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/morning-glory-putin-next-victim">Fox News</a></span></p><p><span style="color: #0b5394; font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Having murdered Navalny, Putin may do the same with another dissident unless our leaders speak up now...</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Russian pro-democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza is the name you need to know right now, the name that President Joe Biden, House Speaker Michael Johnson and both Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell need to be saying out loud and often this week and month and on a regular basis thereafter. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Kara-Murza is the highest profile Russian dissident left after the murder of Aleksei Navalny last week, and Americans need to know his name, make his cause their own. (Though perhaps with President Biden, the less said by the fading Commander-in-Chief, the better. Not only might Biden’s intended words go sideways, any warning from Biden to Putin becomes an invitation to Putin to act and humiliate Biden, again.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ben Domenech, editor-at-large for the Spectator, called me about Kara-Murza on Friday. Kara-Murza is a man of extraordinary courage, who chose, like Navalny, to return to Russia after getting to the West, and chose to do so having already been marked as an enemy of Putin. Kara-Murza has survived two poisoning attempts and is now imprisoned in one of the Russian dictator’s Gulag 2.0 camps.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">"For my part," Ben emailed after we spoke, "my concern is for my friend Vladimir Kara-Murza, currently in isolation. "He was a pallbearer for John McCain with me—and on Putin’s enemies list, he is in all likelihood the next target."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">"Unlike Navalny," Ben continued, Kara-Murza "is a permanent resident of the United States — and his wife and three children are American citizens. If the Biden administration is to have any moral authority, any at all, they must use every tool at their disposal to get such prisoners out, and make Alexei Navalny the last dissident Vladimir Putin murders."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Unlike the Soviet Union, which as late as 1989 few people saw dissolving into ruin, most everyone who pays attention now knows Putin’s empire, like the power of any mob boss in any country at any time, will not survive a month after his demise. Until his demise—which won’t come from anyone like Kara-Murza, but from inside the Kremlin or his palace in Sochi—Putin can order any opponent killed and does so with complete indifference to, indeed disdain for Western reaction, largely because the reactions, however intense are always brief, and usually just rhetorical.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Putin doesn’t worry much, if at all, about Biden because Biden, like President Barack Obama before him, talks a tough game but does nothing when his bluff is called. Navalny, murdered last Friday, was Biden’s "red line" with Putin, and like Obama’s "red line" about Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, dictators ignoring both presidents have paid no price. At all.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Under President Trump, Ukraine got the lethal aid that President Obama denied it. Assad got not one but two fusillades of cruise missiles from Trump when the Syrian war criminal used chemical weapons. When Russian mercenaries attacked U.S. troops in Syria in 2018, then Secretary of Defense Mattis, acting on standing orders from Trump, directed that the Russians be wiped out and they were.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trump talked like a man who wanted an understanding with his countries’ enemies, but slammed them hard when they broke the rules. Biden, like Obama, has made plenty of sweeping pronouncements about what countries should not and will not be allowed to do, but has never acted in the resolute fashion required to make Putin, or China’s and Iran’s dictators Xi Jinping and Ayatollah Khamenei pause. The opposite actually.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">What did Biden warn Putin about Nalvany? "When Joe Biden met Vladimir Putin in 2021," The Guardian reminds us, "the leaders staring at each other across the library of a Geneva lakeside villa, the US president warned there would be ‘devastating consequences’ for Moscow if Alexei Navalny died in Russian custody."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In his new book about Team Biden, "The Internationalists: The Fight To Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump," Politico’s Alexander Ward, quotes his sources as saying after the Summit in June of 2021 that "Biden left the meetings telling his aides he got his message through to Putin." The book published Monday, three days after Putin had Navalny killed. Another great Biden assessment of the world around him that was exactly opposite of the realities of the world.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">When Navalny died in Russian custody, Biden made another statement. The aging-before-our-eyes president expressed "outrage" but, incredibly, admitted he was "not surprised." Not even Joe Biden expects America’s enemies to take Joe Biden seriously. "Under President Biden America has been seen continuously as being in retreat from the rest of the world," British journalist Douglas Murray wrote in The Telegraph Monday. Murray is right of course.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This downward spiral in the ability of America to deter its enemies from the grossest displays of absolute and arbitrary power by evil men began with Obama and Syria, but accelerated with Biden ordering the scamper from Afghanistan in 2021 and the fiasco that followed which concluded with the deaths of U.S.troops at Abbey Gate and the abandonment of thousands of American citizens, green card holders, and allies eligible for SIV visas.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then came Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine. Biden had talked a tough game then too, but hadn’t delivered what Ukraine needed to deter Putin from invading. Since that invasion, which Team Biden repeatedly telegraphed Ukraine could not endure and would not survive, the aid the U.S. has sent has been "too little, too late and too long," leaving a World War I-like stalemate and an exhausted American public Biden should be out rallying the country to stand with Ukraine still, but the president simply doesn’t have the physical stamina much less the brainpower to make such a series of speeches and sit for interviews to argue the case for keeping the aid flowing to Ukraine. He hasn’t even tried.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Instead, the often-confused president is "leading" a walk-back of America’s previously unequivocal support for Israel in the aftermath of the 10/7 massacre there. The entire Israeli Cabinet and almost every serious political actor in Israel has rejected Biden’s attempt to impose a Palestinian state on the Middle East, a imposition which any sane person would recognize as a reward for barbarism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Don’t underestimate Biden’s ability to make a terrible situation worse, which is why I’m ambivalent about Biden saying anything about Kara-Murza. Former Secretary of Defense Gates, the equal of any figure in America when it comes to bipartisan respect, warned us all that Biden’s instincts and decisions are always—repeat, always—wrong on national security. The consequences for Navalny, like those for Ukraine and Afghanistan, have been the worst possible outcomes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It used to be that the U.S. could at least keep a dissident alive, and perhaps we still can with focus and with "better-late-than-never" reprisals aimed squarely at disintermediating Putin’s and his cronies’ vast and stolen wealth. But public pressure to protect people like Kara-Murza has to be bipartisan and sustained, as it was for then dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and Vladimir Bukovsky in the closing decades of the Soviet era.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The United States doesn’t have the staying power it did when it took up its position opposing the Soviets in 1946. The Greatest Generation not only destroyed the Nazis and Imperial Japan, it educated its children—the Boomers—on the evils of totalitarians generally and communists specifically. If dictators were called out, their crimes publicized, their dissenters made known to the West, at least the Soviet Politburo was hesitant to kill its high-profile dissidents. The Boomers have failed to impress this duty of protection on younger generations. Putin, China’s dictator Xi Jinping and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei care not at all about Biden’s mumblings, just as they ignored Obama’s word salad announcements on history’s inevitable direction.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">That indifference can be changed if the U.S. makes its case against the tyrants rather than spending time undermining our allies like Israel. Watch this week for any follow up on Biden’s threat about Navalny. I hope I’m wrong in expecting less than nothing. Given the empty office at the top, others can and should step up to at least speak out for other imprisoned dissidents.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Keep Vladimir Kara-Murza on your lips and in your prayers.</span></p><p><i>Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his forty years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-70646938561441967032024-02-18T07:44:00.000-08:002024-02-18T07:44:43.556-08:00Spineless Joe Biden = a full betrayal of Israel<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwzUN3k36ytrIzL2GoejbbKb4OXoxgPClhNECwYWTNuO5tMs_6CeK1nBCv9VY6tJDafLc3GlxYeki6dcx9wtseFmk7uxS8snoZoz19yXHOz8h2LXl5rmjnQfftkOh-6qHVv5KGVLJ6nOKozCyESX0PwVlmcO_h9ENcBaKkPRDRgzQuoCIc5bPzvw/s744/JBISMC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="496" data-original-width="744" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwzUN3k36ytrIzL2GoejbbKb4OXoxgPClhNECwYWTNuO5tMs_6CeK1nBCv9VY6tJDafLc3GlxYeki6dcx9wtseFmk7uxS8snoZoz19yXHOz8h2LXl5rmjnQfftkOh-6qHVv5KGVLJ6nOKozCyESX0PwVlmcO_h9ENcBaKkPRDRgzQuoCIc5bPzvw/w400-h266/JBISMC.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">Spineless Joe Biden is inching toward a full betrayal of Israel</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Michael Goodwin, <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/02/17/opinion/spineless-joe-biden-is-inching-toward-a-full-betrayal-of-israel/">New York Post</a> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Is there a Margaret Thatcher in the house who can help stiffen Joe Biden’s spine?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The late British prime minister, in a 1990 phone call during the early days of the first Gulf war, famously told a hesitant President George H. W. Bush that it “was no time to go wobbly.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As Thatcher recounts in her first memoir, “The Downing Street Years,” Bush appeared reluctant to act decisively following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Although the United Nations Security Council approved a trade embargo of Iraq, it was left largely to the US and UK to enforce it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Fortunately, Bush adopted the Iron Lady’s resolve and soon unleashed Operation Desert Storm, leading to a retreat of Iraq’s forces and a smashing allied triumph.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Biden needs a Thatcher now to set him straight during the current Mideast conflict.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Faced with Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and a shaky re-election campaign, the president isn’t just going wobbly in his support for our embattled ally — he’s inching toward a full betrayal of Israel to appease American radicals.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">His actions and statements are more troubling than those of the officials Thatcher ridiculed as “faint hearts” or “drifting with the tide.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is dishonest to defend Biden’s undercutting of Israel as part of some strategic view of how to bring a just and lasting peace to the region.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">His words and actions increasingly have little to do with peace and everything to do with pandering to domestic political critics.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">A timeline of the president’s shifting attitude shows his position, which began as forceful backing of Israel after the Oct. 7 invasion by Hamas, changed as large parts of the Democrats’ base made it clear they would not vote for him because of his support for Israel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Some of those people, who include Muslim Americans and leftist students at elite colleges, can be charitably described as ignorant of both history and current events, especially their absurd accusations that Israel is committing “genocide.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">They claim to be concerned about the suffering of Palestinian civilians, but voiced no concern that Hamas uses those civilians as human shields and turned Gaza into a terrorist launching pad while stealing billions of foreign aid.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nor are they moved by the horrific events of Oct. 7, including the slaughter of Israeli children and the raping and torture of women.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Many other Biden objectors are classic antisemites who oppose Israel’s very existence.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">These so-called protesters, some of them violent, don’t try to hide their support for Hamas’ plan to control all land “from the river to the sea.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Antisemitism at home</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Biden makes no distinction about the critics’ motivations and is disgracefully mute about the shocking explosion of antisemitism in America.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Instead, in a recent meeting with Muslim voters in Michigan, an administration aide — not a campaign aide — arrived full of apologies and said the White House knows it made mistakes in its approach.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“We are very well aware that we have misstepped in the course of responding to this crisis,” said deputy national security adviser Jon Finer, according to a recording obtained by CBS News.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Days earlier, the White House slapped sanctions on four Israelis in the West Bank, accusing them of violence toward Palestinians.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then aides announced last week they were investigating whether Israel misused American munitions in Gaza.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">To put further distance between the two governments, Biden flunkies leak that he intensely dislikes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and disparages him as an “asshole.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">He tells donors Israeli bombing was “indiscriminate” and mumbles at a press conference that Israel’s reaction to Oct. 7 is “over the top.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">His words sting, but his policies are far more dangerous.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">They include a demand for an immediate cease-fire before Hamas has been eliminated or releases its hostages, some of them American citizens.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If the war stopped now, the terror group would retain control of Gaza.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It would also siphon off much of the billions of dollars likely to be contributed to rebuilding, just as it now seizes much of the daily humanitarian aid.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Similarly, Biden’s push for the creation of a Palestinian state rewards Hamas’ brutality and would result in perpetual war that could become a global conflict.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hamas’ open hatred</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is also astonishing that Biden ignores how Hamas leaders in Qatar and Lebanon say publicly they will not accept any “two-state solution” because it implies acceptance of a Jewish state.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“I would like to say two things about the two-state solution. First, we have nothing to do with the two-state solution,” Hamas official Khaled Mashal said in a TV interview.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“We reject this notion, because it means you would get a promise for a [Palestinian] state, yet you are required to recognize the legitimacy of the other state, which is the Zionist entity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">He added: “This is unacceptable.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">That’s not an unusual view.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Polling shows up to 80% of all Palestinians support Hamas’ invasion, including a big majority in the West Bank.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Some historians compare the challenge of Palestinian state-building to the denazification of Germany after World War II.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Does Biden see that?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Most appalling, his policies skirt around Iran’s role. It is the head of the snake and directs and finances every terror group calling for Israel’s destruction, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Every one of the president’s criticisms of Israel and his effort to micromanage and curtail its military strategy must come as welcome news to Iran and those proxies.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As such, Biden gives them no reason to change their ways.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The job of selling his pre-election snake oil falls to Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who is spewing nonsense in his ’round-the-region shuttles.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Lately he’s been marketing a Palestinian state to Israel as the key to unlock normalization agreements with Arab states.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Virtually every Arab country now genuinely wants to integrate Israel into the region to normalize relations . . . to provide security commitments and assurances so that Israel can feel more safe,” Blinken said Saturday at the annual Munich Security Conference.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“And there’s also, I think the imperative, that’s more urgent than ever, to proceed to a Palestinian state that also ensures the security of Israel.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Blinken, like his boss, conveniently ignores two enormous facts: First, the Trump administration secured the Abraham Accords with four Muslim nations without endangering Israel’s survival.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">And Saudi Arabia was moving toward normalization last year without a Palestinian state, which Hamas cited as a reason for its attack on Israel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Second, there is no credible vision for a Palestinian state that ensures the security of Israel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It’s an oxymoron, as has been proven repeatedly for 75 years.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hamas’ invasion was different only in the scale of its fiendish success.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It brought about the largest single-day loss of Jewish life since the end of the Holocaust.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">And it is committed to doing the same thing again and again.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Is Biden so addled that he doesn’t understand that?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Or is he so fixated on a second term that he doesn’t care?</span></p><div><br /></div>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-89955604311316181752024-02-10T09:47:00.000-08:002024-02-10T09:47:37.820-08:00Toyota Resisted EV Mania<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmfy0XDY15AbvJasJDuwLMfqH4wwggP5XhFEMEqVORLuces7nPl0JXrUso2edPUvJu8JiKzOpTiFCo2wxgmohFkH1Aqqa5RAa_Z3jYHbcXoowllzcO1iqWxSZ0zOa3N0znWDpyc-N9FcvUTaJGZjfw3Xa5KpCiZ56iqiGhLSM-XoWf5Vs_nPdZFQ/s669/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-10%20at%209.36.27%20AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="323" data-original-width="669" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmfy0XDY15AbvJasJDuwLMfqH4wwggP5XhFEMEqVORLuces7nPl0JXrUso2edPUvJu8JiKzOpTiFCo2wxgmohFkH1Aqqa5RAa_Z3jYHbcXoowllzcO1iqWxSZ0zOa3N0znWDpyc-N9FcvUTaJGZjfw3Xa5KpCiZ56iqiGhLSM-XoWf5Vs_nPdZFQ/w400-h193/Screen%20Shot%202024-02-10%20at%209.36.27%20AM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><b>Toyota Resisted EV Mania.</b></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Now, It’s Raking In The Cash While Competitors Take Losses</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nick Pope, <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2024/02/09/toyota-electric-vehicles-competitors-losses/">The Daily Caller</a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Toyota drew activist criticism when it did not quickly embrace electric vehicles (EVs) like many of its major competitors, but the Japanese auto giant now appears to be in better financial shape than its American adversaries.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Toyota is riding a windfall of hybrid vehicle sales on its way to posting projected net profits of more than $30 billion for the fiscal year ending in March, more than a year after then-CEO Akio Toyoda cautioned that the EV transition will “take longer than the media would like us to believe,” according to Fortune. While the company drew the ire of environmentalists and activists for its hesitance on EVs, the company’s measured approach has been vindicated given the major losses that Toyota’s competitors are taking on their EV product lines, market experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Toyota, including its subsidiaries, has posted impressive 2023 numbers. The company complemented its profit projections with a 6.6% increase in sales relative to 2022, thanks in part to its hybrid sales: Toyota sold nearly 15,000 pure EVs, 40,000 plug-in hybrids and more than 600,000 non-rechargeable hybrids in the U.S. in 2023, according to InsideEVs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Biden administration is regulating and spending big to push EVs on American consumers, with a stated goal of having EVs make up 50% of all new vehicle sales by 2030. Proposed tailpipe emissions standards from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would go even further if finalized, effectively requiring two-thirds of all new light-duty vehicles sold after model year 2032 to be EVs. Despite these efforts, the EV market is struggling, evidenced by slower-than-anticipated growth in consumer demand and reports of EVs piling up on dealers’ lots.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“In the automotive world, as with almost everything else, there’s no one-size-fits-all option for consumers,” Mark Mills, a distinguished senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and an expert on the automobile market, told the DCNF.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The overt and subtle pressures of the administrative state are primarily responsible for the American manufacturers’ continued commitment to massively increasing EV production, Mills said, adding that mandates that seem far away today are not too distant for automakers because design cycles, capital investments and supply chain plans must be made several years in advance of the eventual manufacture and sale of a line of vehicles.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ford, for example, much more readily embraced the EV transition under the Biden administration. The company previously planned to be able to produce 300,000 EVs per year by 2023, and 2 million annually by 2026, but it delayed or missed both targets, according to NPR.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Moreover, Ford lost approximately $65,000 on every EV that it did sell in 2023, posting a $4.7 billion loss on its EV product line, according to a summary of the company’s 2023 financial performance. This year, the company is expecting to lose somewhere between $5 billion and $5.5 billion on its EV products. The company had a net profit of $4.3 billion in 2023.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ford plans to mimic Toyota and more significantly lean into its hybrid models in the near future, according to Electrek. The company is also “slowing down” about $12 billion of investment into its EV business, as CFO John Lawler put it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Toyota appears to be in better shape than competitors like Ford “because Toyota chooses to be less guided by central planners and political correctness and more by consumers, who want affordable, fuel-efficient vehicles that are not battery range-limited, do not take hours to recharge, and have convenient access to widespread refueling infrastructure,” Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “The EV production cutbacks, Ford’s multi-billion-dollar EV losses, and the bloated inventories of unsold EVs on dealer lots amply vindicate Toyota’s initial skepticism. That skepticism has paid off in both sales and profits, big time.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Notably, Toyota was late to arrive to the EV market in the first place, deciding against widely marketing any all-electric products until 2020, trailing many competing companies that had been manufacturing and selling EVs for years before Toyota established an EV-focused office, according to Slate.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ford is not the only major American manufacturer that has struggled with the relatively rapid embrace of EVs. General Motors, the largest automaker in the U.S., has backed off of its goal to manufacture 400,000 EVs by the middle of this year. The company missed its 2023 EV production target by about 50%, but it said in December 2023 that it anticipates EVs will begin to generate profits at some point in 2025.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ford is different from General Motors in that it separates most of the financial information about its EV product lines from the other segments of its operation, whereas the other companies do not. Thus, it is difficult to gauge exactly how General Motors’ EV products are performing relative to those of Ford, but the fact that General Motors is revisiting previously-stated EV production commitments suggests that the firm may not have extreme confidence in EVs’ ability to generate considerable profits in the near-term. Stellantis, the third major American manufacturer, is bringing its first EVs into the U.S. market during the first quarter of 2024.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Toyota most definitely has been vindicated,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF about Toyota’s measured approach to the EV transition. “We have seen numerous pieces of evidence that Americans don’t want to take up this technology at the rate that the government wants to see … Inexpensive transportation is an American birthright and iconic — it is celebrated in American movies and American songs. Trying to interfere with something that is a birthright for Americans is a complete anathema to the diverse majority of people who live in America.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">About half of all Americans have little or no interest in purchasing an EV the next time they go to buy a car, while 13% do not plan to purchase a vehicle of any variety, according to a July 2023 Pew Research poll. About 38% of respondents indicated that they are at least somewhat interested in purchasing an EV as their next automobile.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The administration’s policies are principally to blame for the fact that legacy American manufacturers are losing vast sums of money on EVs, as major corporations typically do not voluntarily continue to engage in practices that lose them billions of dollars, Furchtgott-Roth told the DCNF.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Toyota declined to comment for this story. Ford and General Motors did not respond immediately to requests for comment.</span></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-20453469304184324362024-02-04T07:33:00.000-08:002024-02-04T07:33:17.206-08:00A Border Crisis By Design<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFcNG0Gmo-8oXpTRh0X5lVh16-W7CPhVzShMhyXz7pj8yXHFIIHhaKXd52PhveY8a0naryZW7ILBtZexReJ8oLSN7ekKJlRN3AP53HGCdwMkzlgyAi5WO6jrMVNopWzL1wgHPC4KYfi9KEnllxcQmrqnPJmNW3N7pO5KbwWBHwJ0yNjJloN-hKjw/s318/images-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="159" data-original-width="318" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFcNG0Gmo-8oXpTRh0X5lVh16-W7CPhVzShMhyXz7pj8yXHFIIHhaKXd52PhveY8a0naryZW7ILBtZexReJ8oLSN7ekKJlRN3AP53HGCdwMkzlgyAi5WO6jrMVNopWzL1wgHPC4KYfi9KEnllxcQmrqnPJmNW3N7pO5KbwWBHwJ0yNjJloN-hKjw/w400-h200/images-1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">A Border Crisis By Design</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>It is unequivocally the intended result of Biden administration policy.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Jeffrey H. Anderson, <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-border-crisis-by-design">City Journal </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Three years into the border crisis, most Americans still don’t understand what’s actually happening at the border. This lack of understanding extends to the mainstream press and to most Republicans, who have struggled to communicate effectively on the issue.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The cause of the current crisis is President Joe Biden’s unprecedented refusal to enforce federal immigration law, which requires that all asylum-seekers be detained rather than released into the United States. The solution, therefore, is for Biden to start enforcing federal law as he is constitutionally required to do—or for Congress to deny the president something else he wants until he does.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Many observers, however, seem unclear about the cause of the crisis. Praising a not-yet-released Senate immigration bill, which a trio of senators is currently negotiating with the White House behind closed doors, the Wall Street Journal editorial board writes that “the President needs Congress to fix the underlying incentives at the border.” But the president, not Congress, has created the incentives that have attracted so many illegal aliens, by offering a near guarantee that asylum-seekers will get released into the U.S. rather than detained as their claims are adjudicated.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Under presidents of both parties before 2021, those trying to enter the U.S. illegally at least had to evade the authorities. This hasn’t been true under Biden. U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell writes that U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) Chief Raul Ortiz “testified that the current surge differs from prior surges that he [has] seen over his lengthy career in that most of the aliens now being encountered at the Southwest Border are turning themselves in to USBP officers rather than trying to escape the officers.” Ortiz, whom the Biden administration selected as chief, said that aliens are likely “turning themselves in because they think they’re going to be released.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The difference in the number of releases under Biden and under his immediate predecessor is like the contrast between the Himalayas and a pitcher’s mound. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics, in December 2020, the last full month under President Donald Trump, the USBP released 17 aliens into the U.S. In December 2023, the most recent month for which statistics are available under Biden, the USBP released 191,142 aliens into the U.S. In other words, the USBP released 0.009 percent as many aliens into the U.S. during the final month under Trump as it did during the most-recent month under Biden—for every one alien released under Trump, 11,244 were released under Biden. That’s not a normal increase; it’s a flash flood.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In all, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the Biden administration released 2 million aliens into the U.S. in fiscal year (FY) 2023. In addition, the CBO estimates that there were 750,000 “got-aways”—those detected crossing the border but not apprehended. This gives a rough sense of what’s driving this crisis: for every three people who were detected crossing the border but got away, there were eight people—nearly three times as many—who were apprehended between the ports of entry, or deemed inadmissible at a port of entry, yet were released into the U.S. in defiance of federal law.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The prospective Senate bill would reportedly let the president “shut down the border” if the average number of migrant crossings were to surpass 4,000 a day over the span of a week, and it would mandate such action if there were 8,500 illegal crossings on a given day. Oklahoma senator James Lankford, the sole Republican playing a lead role in the negotiations, appeared on Face the Nation on January 28 and suggested that he believes the Biden administration’s line that it is releasing so many aliens into the country because there are simply too many to detain them.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In truth, the reason why there are so many aliens to detain is because word has gotten out that if you come and request asylum, you’ll be released into the U.S.—and this has been the case since Biden took office. As Judge Wetherell put it in a 2023 immigration case, the Biden administration’s actions have been “akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign on the southern border.” As word has spread, the numbers at the border have massively increased, with the most recent month on record (December 2023) being the worst month to date.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">For his part, Biden claims that if the prospective Senate bill “were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly”—thereby implying that Congress is at fault. This flips the truth on its head. What’s more, even if the bill were to pass and Biden were to “shut down the border,” it’s not as if the flow would stop: people cross the border illegally on a daily basis already.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Such a “shutdown” would reportedly “suspend asylum [claims] in between official ports of entry” but apparently wouldn’t stop people from claiming asylum at the ports. According to CBS News, during a so-called shutdown of the border, the bill “would preserve asylum at official ports of entry”—indeed, it “would require U.S. border officials to continue processing more than 1,400 asylum-seekers daily at these official border crossings.” So, this means that another half-a-million illegal aliens would be released into the U.S. annually, even if the border were “shut down” all year.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In reality, having a “Come In, We’re Open” sign at each port of entry, while discouraging rampant crossings of the border between the ports, reflects the Biden administration’s goals. In a 2022 interview, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas whether “it is the objective of the Biden administration to reduce—sharply reduce—the total number of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border.” Strikingly, Mayorkas refused to answer yes, instead immediately replying, “It is the objective of the Biden administration to make sure that we have safe, legal, and orderly pathways for individuals to be able to access our legal system.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">What Mayorkas meant by this is that the administration wants illegal aliens to come not to random places along the border but to the ports of entry—from whence they will be released into the interior of the country. The Biden administration and the mainstream media insist on calling this “lawful” entry. The law, however, requires that those who enter the U.S. without proper documentation be continuously detained until their claim can be adjudicated, since they lack the documents to enter lawfully.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) states that if “an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted, the alien shall be detained for a [removal] proceeding.” It also declares that “if an alien asserts a credible fear of persecution, he or she shall be detained for further consideration of the application for asylum.” Justice Samuel Alito writes that these detention “requirements, as we have held, are mandatory.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Biden administration asserts that it can use “parole” or “prosecutorial discretion” to release illegal aliens into the U.S. as it sees fit, but this policy plainly violates federal law. Quoting the INA, Chief Justice John Roberts writes for the Supreme Court, “DHS may exercise its discretion to parole applicants ‘only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.’” In the past, DHS has construed this language to mean that those who would qualify might include, for example, someone who needs emergency medical care (for urgent humanitarian reasons) or an alien scheduled to be a witness in a trial (providing significant public benefit). The Biden administration is construing it to mean essentially anyone.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The administration’s primary justification for releasing massive numbers of aliens into the U.S. is that it doesn’t have the space or personnel to detain them as the law requires. But as a 2023 DHS Inspector General report notes, “Since FY 2019, Congress has authorized most of the law enforcement personnel that CBP and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] requested.” Judge Wetherell observes that DHS had the capacity to detain an average daily population (ADP) of 55,000 just five years ago, but under the Biden administration “DHS requested a reduction to 32,500 ADP for fiscal year 2022” and for FY 2023 “requested a further reduction to 25,000 ADP.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Congress nevertheless approved funding for 34,000 ADP for FY 2023. This year, in its 119-page FY 2024 Budget in Brief—under the heading of “Major Decreases”—DHS requested that detention space be reduced to 25,000 ADP for FY 2024, touting that this would save $555 million versus 2023 outlays. In short, the Biden administration is claiming that there isn’t enough detention space, while simultaneously proposing further reductions in detention space.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Biden administration’s catch-and-release—or welcome-and-release—policy has also had the effect of making it easier for others to evade capture along the open border. Andrew Arthur, a former federal immigration judge currently at the Center for Immigration Studies, explains that “many if not most” border patrol agents are now “stuck transporting and processing migrants before they are released,” rather than policing the open border.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Why would anyone feel the need to cross the open border when the Biden administration would willingly let them in at a port of entry if they utter the password “asylum”? Well, if one is a drug-smuggler, a terrorist, or someone with a criminal record in the U.S., one might rather cross the open border than risk an encounter at a port of entry. We don’t know how many potential terrorists have crossed the southwest border under Biden without getting caught, but we do have strong evidence of a huge increase in the number who have tried. According to CBP statistics, from FY 2018 through FY 2020—the three full fiscal years under Trump—USBP had only nine encounters along the southwest border with noncitizens on the terrorist watch list. In just the first two-and-one-quarter fiscal years entirely under Biden (FY 2022 through the first quarter of FY 2024), USBP had 316 such encounters—a 35-fold increase overall, and a 47-fold increase per month.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Even apart from aiding terrorists, drug-smugglers, and the like, the effects of Biden’s refusal to enforce federal law have been profound. According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in less than three years under Biden, the United States’s foreign-born population over the age of 16 rose by 5 million (from 43,086,000 in January 2021 (Table A-7) to 48,049,000 in December 2023). That’s enough to populate a new Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, D.C. combined.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Why is Biden releasing millions of illegal aliens into the U.S.? Because he thinks that his notion of “equity”—which he extends to non-U.S. citizens—requires it. On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order declaring that his administration would pursue a policy of “advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” In a subsequent document, DHS quoted that passage from Biden and made clear that it was applying it “[i]n the immigration and enforcement context.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In other words, the situation at the border is by design. What most Americans think of as a “crisis,” the Biden administration regards as a success.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Jeffrey H. Anderson is president of the American Main Street Initiative and served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021.</i></p><p><br /></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-58341691846711311872024-01-30T14:57:00.000-08:002024-01-30T14:57:01.697-08:00Is Campus Rage Fueled by Middle Eastern Money?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimSLU0BtCMAHWUBaRa5DxprF8ELoxfFeEAIOwkxOWA3eCsGuMKAe12V_sCBvjAgYZu6eyRoBNHiIZTiTQiVOcsugqwUpvgJmpf6vFTLTy7oaV6uFS5Wx83vFDxmUSd0uoIvmo2kd8hrCjVIYhlv7SOnpzLZoUaK4LNOy2gRHIF4-77aDlyJaGT-g/s427/b43f39ef-eee8-43d8-83bc-3c754f070a2b-large3x4_PKGPAIDTOPROTEST.transfer_frame_1380.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="320" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimSLU0BtCMAHWUBaRa5DxprF8ELoxfFeEAIOwkxOWA3eCsGuMKAe12V_sCBvjAgYZu6eyRoBNHiIZTiTQiVOcsugqwUpvgJmpf6vFTLTy7oaV6uFS5Wx83vFDxmUSd0uoIvmo2kd8hrCjVIYhlv7SOnpzLZoUaK4LNOy2gRHIF4-77aDlyJaGT-g/w300-h400/b43f39ef-eee8-43d8-83bc-3c754f070a2b-large3x4_PKGPAIDTOPROTEST.transfer_frame_1380.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">Is Campus Rage Fueled by Middle Eastern Money?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>According to a new report, at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Bari Weiss, <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/campus-rage-middle-eastern-roots-qatar">The Free Press </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it has been hard to miss the explosion of antisemitic hate that has gripped college campuses across the country. At Cornell, a student posted a call “to follow [Jews] home and slit their throats,” and a professor said the terror attack “energized” and “exhilarated” him. At Harvard, a mob of students besieged an Israeli student, surrounding him as they bellowed “shame, shame, shame.” At dozens of other campuses, students gathered to celebrate Hamas. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The response from school administrations has been alarming. With few exceptions, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, university presidents issued equivocal statements about the initial attack. Some professors even celebrated it. And the focus on the part of administration bureaucrats has been on protecting the students tearing down posters and being shamed for doing so.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Where did all of this hatred come from is a question worth pondering. As Rachel Fish and others have documented, for several decades a toxic worldview—morally relativist, anti-Israel, and anti-American—has been incubating in “area studies” departments and social theory programs at elite universities. Whole narratives have been constructed to dehumanize Israelis and brand Israel as a “white, colonial project” to be “resisted.” The students you see in the videos circulating online have been marinating in this ideology, which can be defined best by what it’s against: everything Western.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Many are rightly questioning how it got this bad. How did university leaders come to eulogize, rather than put a stop to, campus hate rallies and antisemitic intimidation? Why are campus leaders now papering over antisemitism? How could institutions supposedly committed to liberal values be such hotbeds of antisemitism and anti-Israel activism?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In large part, it is a story of the power of ideas—in this case, terrible ones—and how rapidly they can spread. But it is also a story of an influence campaign by actors far outside of the university campus aimed at pouring fuel on a fire already raging inside.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We’ve known for some time about the links between anti-Israel campus agitators, like Students for Justice in Palestine, and shady off-campus anti-Israel activist networks. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But thanks to the work of the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonprofit research center, we now have a clearer picture of the financial forces at play at a higher, institutional level.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Today, after months of research, the NCRI released a report (comprising four separate studies) following the money. The report finds that at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Moreover, while correlation is not causation, they found that the number of reported antisemitic incidents on a given campus has a meaningful relationship to whether that university has received funding (disclosed and undisclosed) from regimes, or entities tied to regimes, in the Middle East. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Overall, authors of the report write, “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The NCRI report found that:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">From 2015–2020, institutions that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">From 2015–2020, institutions that accepted undisclosed funds from authoritarian donors had, on average, 250 percent more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">At least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undocumented contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Campuses that accept undisclosed money are on average ~85 percent more likely to see campaigns “targeting academic scholars for sanction, including campaigns to investigate, censor, demote, suspend, or terminate.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This chart from NCRI captures the relationship between concealed foreign donations and antisemitism on campus:</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2FcrlbFuTzlooTpQR_ztMKQ21ir_EiBjLlt1L_-2xDk1Zfd7uD3gaWI2gd7Kvib2EQcrzdc0ayBONDnoL4L13Zv2bs5cwkKmEFZzc1mkWd-FEXGSp9d3dGTGGI-8PAg5xA5wTOqyiW3loca34qoRVyQq6rpbGjGRWXQSSeommjG8g7Lve-bIRdA/s1456/dfcf247e-1c45-4c77-a333-1f72782f5481_1600x888.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="808" data-original-width="1456" height="357" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2FcrlbFuTzlooTpQR_ztMKQ21ir_EiBjLlt1L_-2xDk1Zfd7uD3gaWI2gd7Kvib2EQcrzdc0ayBONDnoL4L13Zv2bs5cwkKmEFZzc1mkWd-FEXGSp9d3dGTGGI-8PAg5xA5wTOqyiW3loca34qoRVyQq6rpbGjGRWXQSSeommjG8g7Lve-bIRdA/w640-h357/dfcf247e-1c45-4c77-a333-1f72782f5481_1600x888.png" width="640" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">So who’s doing this concealed funding? Qatar, the country where Hamas’s leadership currently resides, is far and away the largest foreign donor to American universities, as Eli Lake recently documented in these pages:</span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgPEhHolmG_yltNAp_7pbGDx8P2ynT1idsMAfhAV4g58gEzwPTK4SPv2gQlbGiUlW1JYF_RMI5yqnVHzeC1spEDlWkvI4AvOw5xYgXGNhVK7Ul-sSllEiK5SOuIks1Z_kUD9oSt_CYNet-91UBqy0c9GbqolJeYzTNqjqg7KVoQ7c0FssngXSw7A/s1456/f865695e-0ba8-4486-811e-e5ba8da1abfc_1600x779.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="709" data-original-width="1456" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgPEhHolmG_yltNAp_7pbGDx8P2ynT1idsMAfhAV4g58gEzwPTK4SPv2gQlbGiUlW1JYF_RMI5yqnVHzeC1spEDlWkvI4AvOw5xYgXGNhVK7Ul-sSllEiK5SOuIks1Z_kUD9oSt_CYNet-91UBqy0c9GbqolJeYzTNqjqg7KVoQ7c0FssngXSw7A/w640-h312/f865695e-0ba8-4486-811e-e5ba8da1abfc_1600x779.jpg" width="640" /></a></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Of course, correlation is not causation. Still, the NCRI report found that a reliable predictor of the intensity of campus antisemitism was the amount of undisclosed money a given university received from Middle Eastern regimes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Former Harvard University president Larry Summers told me that he believes “donors and certainly authoritarian leaders who donate to universities may be looking to bolster their image or perception of legitimacy.” But he also said he doubts that “they are looking to or could succeed in changing attitudes or specific policies on campuses.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“I’m cynical. I usually think things are about money. But I don’t think this is about money. Or at least not primarily,” a former president of a prominent liberal arts college told me. “If you look at the college professors signing on to these various statements, I don’t think it’s because those people got money in any significant way from a country like Qatar. It’s people who are ideologically part of a movement—whether you call it postcolonial or anticolonial—that is deeply opposed to Israel.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">There are other possibilities that may explain the NCRI’s findings. A fairly obvious one could be that Middle Eastern regimes are sponsoring professorships held by, or programs run by, professors or administrators who hold anti-Israel views and use their platform to spread them. This fact, itself, wouldn’t be news.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Another possibility is that universities, eager to attract and retain Middle Eastern funding, promote positions that they think will please the sensibilities of Middle Eastern regimes. Or maybe it is that universities that are indifferent to the atrocities committed or condoned by some of their largest funders are also indifferent to rising antisemitism on campus, allowing it to thrive. The same would hold true for freedom of expression and academic freedom. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">At the very least, the NCRI’s findings may explain why university presidents, whose main job is fundraising, may have been so slow to respond in the wake of the October 7 massacre, and when they did, they for the most part released weak statements. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">One thing I have a hard time believing is that these countries give nine- and ten-figure gifts to universities expecting nothing in return.</span></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-68844759845769318332024-01-29T08:23:00.000-08:002024-01-29T08:23:20.962-08:00 Greg Abbott Schools the Biden Administration<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGpBkytK_5fB2i6SN2R-tD2ZsThyphenhyphenWp2VkJmU-svh-JT0cImVE-1uN-KR61JKqP-s1IiaUaE1l3l9786qdoogbJECMSs0PK-x0Zd1ctiDUp4fjsyPM7MAj4gRjm9DHRt73blHnT2EQMaBAFV6w2lkv3_pe2xBAMj5ryx2LNPhqFvsRuMItyNYoRLg/s789/abbott.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="789" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGpBkytK_5fB2i6SN2R-tD2ZsThyphenhyphenWp2VkJmU-svh-JT0cImVE-1uN-KR61JKqP-s1IiaUaE1l3l9786qdoogbJECMSs0PK-x0Zd1ctiDUp4fjsyPM7MAj4gRjm9DHRt73blHnT2EQMaBAFV6w2lkv3_pe2xBAMj5ryx2LNPhqFvsRuMItyNYoRLg/w400-h234/abbott.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Greg Abbott Schools the Biden Administration</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Rich Lowery, <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/greg-abbott-schools-the-biden-administration/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second">National Review</a> </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">He’s the MVP of border hawks.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Texas governor Greg Abbott will never be mistaken for Vladimir I. Lenin, but his role during the border crisis recalls the revolutionary’s famous line about “heightening the contradictions.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is, of course, beyond Abbott’s power to secure the border in the teeth of a determined federal policy of nonenforcement. Still, he’s used the instruments available to him to force sanctuary-city mayors to confront the consequences of their own professed beliefs on immigration and to bait the Biden administration into making its perverse priorities at the border unmistakable.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Abbott has done this with relatively small-scale initiatives that have packed a big PR and political punch.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">First, as we all know, he’s been busing migrants to sanctuary cities. In the scheme of things, this has been a very minimal operation. Axios reported that, as of October, Texas had bused more than 50,000 migrants to various cities — out of the millions that have entered the country under President Biden.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Texas is touting a higher number, 100,000. Even that number is just a third of the overall Border Patrol encounters in one month alone, the record 300,000 in December.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Despite what you might believe listening to the debate, not all migrants are coming to the United States through Texas. And those migrants who do arrive in Texas aren’t all intending to stay there.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Many of them have friends and family elsewhere, including in places like New York and Chicago that were already major hubs for illegal immigrants prior to this crisis. They would head there even without a ride from Greg Abbott, and, in fact, they do.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The New York Times noted in a report a few months ago that New York City had 100,000 migrants arrive in the last year, only 13,000 of whom had been sent by Abbott.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Many of those who get the free transportation, by the way, consider themselves lucky. As the Times notes:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> <i> Many migrants have been grateful for the free transportation, because they often have little money left by the time they complete a monthslong trek to the U.S.-Mexico border.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i> Lever Alejos, a Venezuelan delivered to Washington, D.C., last July, said, ‘I feel fortunate the governor put me on a bus to Washington.’ He has found work and started sending money and gifts to his young son back home. He recently bought a car.</i></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Regardless, by sending a small proportion of migrants where they’d probably go anyway, Abbott has achieved a couple of things.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">He’s made it easier for sanctuary-city mayors to complain about the migrants, by making himself the scapegoat. They’d presumably be much more inclined to bite their tongues if they had to point the finger at the president rather than the Texas governor. That the mayors are bemoaning the situation at all adds bipartisan credibility to the idea that this is a crisis, and they obviously undermine the concept of a sanctuary city itself by begging for fewer illegal immigrants to come to their jurisdictions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The growing confrontation with the federal government over border security features a similar dynamic of a minor action bringing an outsized political benefit. The dispute centers on a 47-acre park in Eagle Pass, Texas. Whether Texas is allowed to string barbed wire along this land or whether the federal government takes it down is not of great moment one way or another in the broader border crisis.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Yet, Abbott has managed to get the federal government in the position of actually removing physical barriers to illegal immigration at the border and insisting that it is imperative that it be permitted to continue doing so. This alone is a PR debacle for the administration, but it comes in a controversy — with its fraught legal and constitutional implications — that will garner massive attention out of proportion to its practical importance.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This is impressive by any measure.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The support of Republican states for Abbott elevates the matter further, but this also is a relatively small thing. The backing for Abbott is entirely rhetorical at this point and perhaps not very serious on the part of some Republican governors. It nonetheless serves to elevate a conflict over security on a small part of the border into what feels like a larger confrontation between all of Red America and the federal government.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">None of this is to slight Abbott or the importance of the clashing visions between Texas and the feds. Rather, it is to say that Abbott has been the MVP of the border hawks over the last couple of years, and if Donald Trump rides this issue back to the White House, he should be especially grateful to Texas and its tough-minded governor.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review. @richlowry</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-65800496733426396232024-01-22T18:10:00.000-08:002024-01-22T18:24:48.838-08:00California: where freedom goes to die<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKJiFZqkDNvWkXO7LJl45nmdYiw6ib-AhtXIxe1niWkf_uQ8O_RduFoP9kQdAKWuk_EhU5tHKt49IAttG_GRQBp1sLNXRoTXAHmZiLo5aVbzxaGkxmxVGYi3MmAFMCf-MwxjU_xneEQhCo1X1cME9ski84hVHLLaWSgVOBSGDt4nDGlqcB4kfSLQ/s888/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-22%20at%206.00.09%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="482" data-original-width="888" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKJiFZqkDNvWkXO7LJl45nmdYiw6ib-AhtXIxe1niWkf_uQ8O_RduFoP9kQdAKWuk_EhU5tHKt49IAttG_GRQBp1sLNXRoTXAHmZiLo5aVbzxaGkxmxVGYi3MmAFMCf-MwxjU_xneEQhCo1X1cME9ski84hVHLLaWSgVOBSGDt4nDGlqcB4kfSLQ/w400-h217/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-22%20at%206.00.09%20PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div style="text-align: center;"><b>California: where freedom goes to die</b></div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Gavin Newsom has turned the Golden State into a woke dystopia.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Joel Kotkin, <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/22/california-where-freedom-goes-to-die/">Spiked-Online</a> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">California was once a byword for liberty and opportunity. The so-called Golden State was home first to the Gold Rush, then to Hollywood and then to the tech revolution in Silicon Valley. Californians have long been proud of that legacy – indeed, during a 2022 debate against Florida governor Ron DeSantis, California governor Gavin Newsom boasted that his state epitomised ‘freedom’. While this might once have been true, under Newsom’s direction, and that of the state’s essentially one-party legislature, California has been transformed into something unrecognisable.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">However much one might dislike DeSantis’ sometimes heavy-handed approach to fighting wokeness in Florida, California is unlikely to meet most people’s definitions of freedom. The state government of California now forces shops to have a gender-neutral toy section. It seeks to extract billions as reparations for slavery. It aims to control speech and indoctrinate the young. It is attempting to regulate virtually every aspect of life in the name of ‘saving the planet’.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Maybe it depends on how you define ‘freedom’. California certainly offers freedoms to those on the margins. The homeless, undocumented migrants and petty criminals now have the freedom to commit crimes without much worry of prosecution. Back when Newsom was campaigning to be mayor of San Francisco 20 years ago, he pledged to eliminate homelessness in 10 years. Now California’s homeless numbers are growing not just in San Francisco, but also across the whole state. Overall, California has 30 per cent of the US’s homeless population. The state is hardly a ‘model for the nation’, as Newsom proudly proclaims.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Left out in this freedom equation are the basic rights of ordinary citizens – the people who pay taxes, raise families and rent or buy houses. For them, Newsom’s version of freedom is the ‘freedom’ to suffer the highest crime rate in a decade. For the pleasure of lackadaisical law enforcement, and a deteriorating infrastructure, California’s middle and working classes get the right to pay among the country’s highest state taxes. At the same time, businesses suffer a regulatory tsunami, with over 400,000 rules to adhere to, a number unparalleled in any other state.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This is a far cry from the ‘Californian ideology’ of old. The term was coined by two British academics in 1995 who wrote of ‘a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley’. They saw this mélange as a critical driver of the state’s innovative culture and economy. California had an essentially libertarian approach to economic growth, wide-open social freedoms and relentless entrepreneurialism. It was an open society back then – the opposite of what California is now becoming.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">California may have once been liberal, or even libertarian, but now its politics are defined by the increasingly illiberal ‘progressive’ agenda. Newsom, even as San Francisco mayor in the 2000s, has long shown an authoritarian streak. In 2009, he demanded that the city’s farmers’ markets, food suppliers and vending machines offer only ‘healthy and sustainable food’. He also forced city workers to cut bagels into halves or quarters, and to replace crisps with vegetables, in a bid to reduce obesity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As governor, Newsom and his legislature have been able to extend this kind of nanny-state authoritarianism to the whole state. California’s legislators have passed laws that restrict what doctors can tell their patients about Covid-19. These rules also prevented experts at Stanford University from testifying in court on the educational impact of lockdowns. This is part of what venerable Sacramento reporter Dan Walters describes as ‘a recent trend in California’s state government toward secrecy’. Increasingly, it operates effectively as a one-party state.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Newsom’s government has displayed the kind of authoritarianism that his buddy, President Xi of China, might appreciate. While supposedly ‘repressive’ Republican states like Texas and Florida work to prevent online censorship, Newsom’s California attempts to control social-media content from Sacramento. It has also severely diminished the rights of families, staunchly supporting schools to allow gender-confused children to transition behind their parents’ backs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Newsom and Co have waged war on tobacco and banned flavoured vapes. They have even considered banning cigarettes for anyone born after 2007, in perpetuity. Bear in mind, this is in a state where marijuana is essentially legal and state-sanctioned. There’s even a new proposal in Sacramento to ban children under 12 from playing American football, a policy likely to be unwelcome among working- and middle-class people, particularly in the state’s interior.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is in education, though, where Newsom’s authoritarian vision shines through the most. In California’s community-college system, with 116 colleges and 1.8million students, refusing to sign on to the ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ agenda can lead to your firing. This increasingly repressive ‘diversity-friendly’ campus culture has done nothing, however, to stem the toxic spread of anti-Semitism. Even the left-leaning dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, admitted that ‘nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism I see on college campuses now’.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Worse still, California’s school system is totally failing to educate children. Less than half of pupils meet national standards for literacy and barely one in five meets them for mathematics. And yet the Californian government still manages to find the time to pursue indoctrination on a massive scale. The state has now mandated lesson programmes on climate change, as well as new social-studies curricula that promote a critical race theory view of history. Taught by well-organised activist teachers, Californian children are more familiar with decolonisation and green issues than their times tables or the basics of grammar.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The proliferation of racial identity politics, in particular, has led to demands for the state’s small African American population to receive reparations. Already, a state task force has backed the idea of handing out $1.2million to every descendant of slaves. All this in a state where slavery was never legal, at least when under American control. Of course, California also has no means to pay for this reparations programme, particularly given its massive budget deficit. Debt has ballooned thanks to public spending having tripled on a per-capita basis over the past 50 years.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The next big thing on the identity-politics agenda is a proposed bill to revive affirmative-action quotas, which were resoundingly voted down in a referendum in 2020. California’s left is desperate to resurrect the ‘freedom’ to divvy up Californians by race and to discriminate against better-performing prospective university students, many of whom are themselves Asian ‘people of colour’.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nothing has accelerated California’s decline quite like the state’s climate-change fetish. Under Newsom, California has passed a series of laws that make it almost impossible to build affordable housing. The state has essentially banned single-family zoning as a part of its ‘war against suburbia’, which is precisely where most Californians reside. Instead, in a bid to slash CO2 emissions, it seeks to increase housing density and restrict development to places where public transport is widely used. Outside of San Francisco and inner-city LA, this is essentially nowhere. Local control of zoning has been all but eliminated in favour of the state’s climate-oriented policies.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ultimately, California’s climate policies erode the lives of middle- and particularly working-class Californians. Environmental attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls such policies ‘the green Jim Crow’. The industries that have traditionally helped nurture upward mobility – manufacturing, construction and energy – are all being systematically undermined by climate regulation, not least as they have led to some of the highest energy prices in the US. Adjusted for cost of living, California now has the highest percentage of people living in poverty in the nation. Newsom’s idea of ‘freedom’ means that millions of Californians have the liberty to be poor.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The state’s headlong drive to achieve ‘Net Zero’ emissions has even made cooking harder. Newsom intends to force new restaurants to use electric stoves and ovens rather than gas cookers – an energy source that simply doesn’t work for cooking most Asian foods or for searing meats. Unsurprisingly, both the California Restaurant Association and ethnic business organisations oppose the policy.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Not content with destroying restaurants, Newsom has his sights set on other Californian businesses, too. More recently, the state has decided to impose minimum wages of roughly $20 an hour or more on industries like fast food and medical care. That means franchisees, many of them minorities, are being forced to lay off workers. They are now looking to either abandon their businesses or replace workers with automation. It’s true that those still working may benefit from the higher wages. But many more will indulge their ‘freedom’ to stay at home and enjoy the benefits of the expanding welfare state. Pizza Hut in California has already announced the furloughing of 1,200 delivery workers before the minimum-wage hike takes effect in April.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In California, our masters value not hard work or paying taxes, but dependency. Undocumented immigrants, hardworking or not, will get free healthcare. Working people, meanwhile, are paying ever-higher health-insurance premiums. Shop owners who want to protect their shelves from marauding criminals are given short shrift by lawmakers. It should be no surprise that California, once an irresistible lure to ambitious migrants, now ranks among the worst states in attracting newcomers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Companies are also leaving the state in ever-greater numbers. Thanks to a bill passed last year, large companies – from oil firms to retailers – will soon have to report their ‘carbon footprint’, including travel by employees. The state harassment of businesses doesn’t stop at climate issues, either. Under a new law signed by Newsom late last year, venture capitalists now have to report the racial and gender breakdown of the companies they fund. California has a particular vendetta against Activision-Blizzard, a major videogame company. The state has forced the firm to spend a small fortune fighting off accusations it is ‘fostering a sexist culture’ and subjecting female employees to ‘constant sexual harassment’ – claims the state now admits had no evidence behind them. Meanwhile, entrepreneurship, the key to California’s past prosperity, is fading in the wake of regulatory and tax burdens. It now has a start-up rate less than half that of Florida.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Could things get less deranged in future? Newsom may be a woke tyrant, but he is also an opportunist of the first order who is desperate to hold on to power. Aware of his fading poll numbers and with an eye on the White House, he has vetoed several of the progressive left’s more lunatic bills recently, including an attempt to allow for supervised ‘drug injection’ sites. Newsom has even fought off the environmental lobby by refusing to shut down one of the state’s last nuclear power plants. His spokesman lambasted the greens’ demands as ‘fantasy and fairy dust’.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Newsom might also be wary of alienating the oligarchs and his family connections, notably the Gettys. They may have financed his campaigns and would likely want to see him in the White House. But they do not want their wealth to be expropriated. Perhaps this is why Newsom has expressed opposition to a proposed wealth tax. Many fear this could further accelerate the already devastating flow of affluent people out of the state – one of the leading causes of California’s fiscal crisis.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In California, we see the fulfilment of George Orwell’s vision that ‘freedom is slavery’ and ‘ignorance is strength’. But perhaps Californians, already distressed about the state of our state, will finally say ‘basta ya’ – enough already. Then we might see a return to the older version of freedom that the Golden State was once known for.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><i>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 </i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-4975967660058605472024-01-18T08:19:00.000-08:002024-01-18T08:19:30.993-08:00The Hysterical Style in American Politics<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQE_jrY2a_xPWDLS2D1D72-QNUDbSiuiRWg9wX3UdrHjGi2BAsCCXBfSRO6KJ_3Zv_Erh_2SOMaYvwQ-xEXbFYOqePHa6BaOr3uNJj2k4Zr98CMovZf0pHG8bz_NuD-3o1xfBtBijOkhd5UXODxhpMCooJr5gSAgAk0QOFHaD3RwV44afoxNc0qg/s1024/20240118_vdh_hysterical_style_american_politics-1024x682.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="1024" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQE_jrY2a_xPWDLS2D1D72-QNUDbSiuiRWg9wX3UdrHjGi2BAsCCXBfSRO6KJ_3Zv_Erh_2SOMaYvwQ-xEXbFYOqePHa6BaOr3uNJj2k4Zr98CMovZf0pHG8bz_NuD-3o1xfBtBijOkhd5UXODxhpMCooJr5gSAgAk0QOFHaD3RwV44afoxNc0qg/w400-h266/20240118_vdh_hysterical_style_american_politics-1024x682.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The Hysterical Style in American Politics</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Victor Davis Hanson, <a href="https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/18/the-hysterical-style-in-american-politics/">American Greatness</a>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing “paranoid style” of conspiracy-fed extremism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Or, in the immortal words of Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The 2008 economic emergency crested on September 7, with the near collapse of the home mortgage industry.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Obama took office on January 20, 2009, more than four months after the meltdown. In that interim, the officials had finally restored financial confidence and plotted a course of economic recovery.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">No matter. The Obama administration never stopped hyping the financial meltdown as if it had just occurred. That way, it rammed through Obamacare, massive deficit spending, and the vast expansion of the federal government. All that stymied economic growth and recovery for years.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In 2016, Donald Trump was declared Hitler-like and an existential threat to democracy.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Amid this derangement syndrome, any means necessary to stop him were justified: the Russian collusion hoax, impeachment over a phone call, or the Hunter laptop disinformation farce.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Eventually, the left sought to normalize the once unthinkable: removing the leading presidential candidate from state ballots and indicting him in state and local courts.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nothing was off limits—not forging a federal court document, calling for a military coup, rioting on Inauguration Day, or radically changing the way Americans voted in presidential elections.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In October 2017, allegations surfaced about serial sexual predation by liberal cinema icon Harvey Weinstein.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The #MeToo furor immediately followed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">At first, accusers properly outed dozens of mostly liberal celebrities, actors, authors, and CEOs for their prior and mostly covered-up sexual harassment and often assault.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But soon, the once legitimate movement had morphed into general hysteria. Thousands of men (and women) were persecuted for alleged offenses, often sexual banter or rude repartee, committed decades prior.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">#MeToo jumped the shark with the left-wing effort to take down conservative Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Would-be accusers surfaced from his high school days, 35 years earlier, but without any supporting evidence or witnesses for their wild, lurid charges.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">#MeToo hysteria ended when too many liberal grandees were endangered. Most dramatically, former Joe Biden senatorial aide Tara Reade came forward during the 2020 campaign cycle with charges that front-runner Joe Biden had once sexually assaulted her—and was trashed by the liberal media.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States during the winter of 2020 prompted an even greater hysteria.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Without scientific evidence, federal health czars Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were able to convince the Trump administration to shut down the economy in the country’s first national quarantine.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Suddenly, it became a thought crime to question the wisdom of six-foot social distancing, of mandatory mask wearing, of the Wuhan virology lab’s origin of the COVID virus, or of off-label use of prescription drugs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Left-wing politicians and celebrities, from Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom to Jane Fonda, all blurted out the political advantages that the lockdowns offered—from recalibrating capitalism and health care to ensuring the 2020 defeat of Donald Trump.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The COVID hysteria magically ended when Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Suddenly, the lies about the bat or pangolin origins of the virus faded. The damage from the quarantines could no longer be repressed. And herd immunity gradually mitigated the epidemic.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The lockdown caused untold economic chaos, suicides, and health crises.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">One result was the 120 days of looting, arson, death, destruction, and violence spawned by Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of the tragic death of George Floyd while in police custody in May 2020.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Suddenly, a hysterical lie took hold: American police were waging war against black males.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The details around Floyd’s sudden death—he was in the act of committing a felony, resisting arrest, suffering from coronary artery disease and the after-effects of COVID, and being high on dangerous drugs—were off limits.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The riot toll reached $2 billion in property damage, over 35 deaths, and 1,500 injured law enforcement officers. A federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic church were torched.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Police forces were defunded. Emboldened left-wing prosecutors nullified existing laws.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Diversity, equity, and inclusion commissars spread throughout American higher education as meritocracy came under assault.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Racial essentialism triumphed. Racially segregated dorms, campus spaces, and graduations were normalized.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Everything from destroying the southern border to dropping SAT requirements for college admission followed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Sometimes real, sometimes hyped crises lead to these contrived left-wing hysterias—like the January 6 violent “armed insurrection” or the “fascist” “ultra-MAGA” threat.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Otherwise, the progressive movement cannot enact its unpopular agendas. So it must scare the people silly and gin up chaos to destroy its perceived enemies—any crisis it can.</span></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-65190285202809979922024-01-14T09:57:00.000-08:002024-01-14T09:57:36.750-08:002024 is an election about 10/7, not 1/6<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir4G683jiCV4twhfWvVOjZVOlhCY8sMPwhoyhwmFglEAVkpjTdRqtbOHeRwyiyfUYriMfYvXBRDQl6CfOmZEf1thmlPvWlzjTyMaquTvyd0tuncp21QgKorgfgqSwj20hxIP954yEAzLb6tqhsYRq3Cckq4qR5Gexbsnas3RIJiLgRt4RR6PO6vw/s931/nj2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="931" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir4G683jiCV4twhfWvVOjZVOlhCY8sMPwhoyhwmFglEAVkpjTdRqtbOHeRwyiyfUYriMfYvXBRDQl6CfOmZEf1thmlPvWlzjTyMaquTvyd0tuncp21QgKorgfgqSwj20hxIP954yEAzLb6tqhsYRq3Cckq4qR5Gexbsnas3RIJiLgRt4RR6PO6vw/w400-h225/nj2.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Long Read: 2024 is an election about 10/7, not 1/6</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The 'Never Trump' Band Is on a reunion tour, but crowds are dwindling</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> Hugh Hewitt, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2024-election-about-10-7-not-1-6">Fox News</a> </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>"Tyranny approaches! Despotism is just off stage! Guillotines are being sharpened!"</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Well, no one actually said or wrote that guillotines are being sharpened, but that specific red light warning may have simply not made it past the editors of the river of op-eds warnings about the return of Donald Trump appearing in recent weeks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Hill or The Atlantic. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">All of these platforms have published alarmist cri de coeurs about the return of Trump since December. Nostradamuses of doom are overflowing the Acela corridor as frightened residents of the Beltway contemplate a second term of President Trump. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Indeed, The Atlantic devoted almost all of its most recent year-end double issue to ringing the bells of the virtual city to sound the alarm about the advance towards the Capitol of the Dred Pirate Robert, aka, former President Donald Trump. [Note: I offered this reply essay to the editors of The Atlantic in December for their March issue and they offered to publish it on their website but not in the next issue of the magazine, so I declined the offer.]</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The hysteria among the folks on whom Donald Trump casts a full spell of despair would be amusing — indeed it is already amusing to some — if it wasn’t both predictable and boring. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is also not believable. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If anyone genuinely believes that Donald Trump is a "threat to democracy" they have either drunk the Kool-Aid or spilled it on their copies of the Constitution. It is a silly alarm, one that should be laughed at, not indulged. But it isn’t news that the Never Trump band has gotten back together, because it never broke up. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Playing yet another encore set doesn’t, however, amuse people who have an abiding faith in the strength of the Constitution, because these cries of havoc and "Trump is coming, hide the children" are all based on the idea, always implicit and sometimes explicit, that a second Trump term would be lawless and Trump in a position to govern outside the law. That is, in a word, absurd. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Constitution is very strong, or at least has been since the Supreme Court’s 1954’s Brown v. Board decision which began to enforce the intent of the 14th Amendment. Prior to that time, we did indeed have presidents who would act lawlessly — FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans comes to mind, or Woodrow Wilson’s deep hostility to the Constitution and to the very idea of racial equality. But since the election of Ike and the arrival of the Warren Court, the Constitution, as amended by the people and interpreted by the Supreme Court, governs this country and lawless presidents are simply not a threat. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As Richard Nixon demonstrated in 1974, when the Court orders a president to comply with the Court’s declaration of its understanding of the law —in Nixon’s case, that he turn over the tapes — the president complies. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Rebukes of presidents by the Supreme Court that have been acquiesced in quickly by presidents have happened under President Biden (the student loan forgiveness fiasco), President Trump (the census questionnaire affair), President Obama (his illegal appointments to the National Labor Relations Board) and President Bush (decisions concerning the due process rights of prisoners at Gitmo.) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In a second Trump term, the Roberts Court will still be there at 1 First Street and, along with the D.C. Circuit and every other federal court in the land, would be poised to rebuke any unlawful or unconstitutional actions by the executive should any overreaches occur. The modern Supreme Court and its counterparts at the circuit and district court levels have never failed in this duty and there is no serious argument that they would fail in the future. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">"But what if Trump does ‘X’ and the Court doesn’t stop him?" This is the political and constitutional equivalent of fantasy football, and a vigorous league for such speculations does indeed exist inside editorial pages and Beltway and New York City "think tanks," but that is not what happens in the real world. People sue to stop presidents who exceed their powers. The courts restrain presidents when they have indeed exceeded their powers. There is no reasonable argument that Trump would refuse to comply with any ruling against him. Not is there any way for a president to decline to obey a Court order. Neither is there any prospect of a Trump dictatorship. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Every bit of conjecture to the contrary is pure pulp fiction, fiction that is never specific as to what Trump would do that is lawless and why courts would allow such lawlessness if it actually happened. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">What most of these writers really fear is that, 1. Trump is going to thrash President Biden and 2. A second Trump term will be more effective than the first in advancing the former president’s avowed and legitimate political objectives, such as ridding the administrative state of career employees who act contrary to the direction of their political appointee masters. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">They are concerned that Trump will finish his wall on the border (and that it will in fact prove to be very effective in greatly curbing illegal immigration).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">They are afraid he will extend the tax cuts he pushed through and that, empowered by GOP majorities in the House and Senate, will use the reconciliation process to take big swings at the sprawling and dysfunctional federal government. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">They are afraid, in short, of Trump not being buffaloed a second time by the permanent administrative state and its heels-dug-in-bureaucrats. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trump won’t be setting up a secret police, but he will be dismissing Christopher Wray and everyone else at the top of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Why? Because he’s not going to repeat the enormous mistake of the first term in trusting that the director in place —James Comey in 2017, Christopher Wray now – will be a fair-minded political appointee just investigating real crimes, not a sham Steele dossier update and expanded in 2025. Fool him once, shame on you. Fool him twice, shame on Trump. He won’t get fooled again. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">"But he will appoint extremists!" is the corollary alarm to "Trump as dictator." Another absurd charge. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I expect many of the most accomplished veterans of Trump’s first term to be back for a second, and I expect many more Mike Pompeos and Robert O’Briens (Secretary of State and National Security Advisor at the end of Trump’s term) to have rallied to the former president’s re-election campaign. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I think the former president learned quite a lot about whom to appoint and whom to trust in his first term. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Would you see Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee in senior positions such as attorney general? It wouldn’t surprise me. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Members of Congress like Elise Stefanik, Michael Waltz, and Mike Gallagher in senior Cabinet positions? I would hope so, and expect as much. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If and when Trump secures the GOP nomination, I hope he will immediately name a running mate from the list I’ve already posted earlier this week in Fox News Opinion: Sen. Tom Cotton, Gallagher, Sen. Joni Ernst, Pompeo, O’Brien or Sen. Dan Sullivan. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I expect Trump will pay much closer attention to appointees everywhere in the executive branch, and will also blanket the town with pardons for the extraordinary prosecutions we have seen from a deeply politicized Department of Justice. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trump will, of course, fire Jack Smith on day one of his second term (and no loss there as Smith should have been fired after the McDonnell prosecution, but is instead back for an encore presentation of ridiculous theories of criminal activity that isn’t criminal activity). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trump will again turn to the Federalist Society for suggestions of excellent appointees to the federal bench. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Senate isn’t dissolving though. "Advice and consent" will still be needed for every senior member of the cabinet and their top lieutenants, as well as for heads of agencies and members of boards, and the same process is needed for every new federal justice or judge. The Constitution will still rule the land. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Most of the Never Trump rump that never went away are still here, banging their old pots and pans at my old network MSNBC or on their usual print platforms. And their alarm about Trump refusing to leave after one more term is simply idiotic. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">There is a XXII Amendment. It’s the supreme law of the land and it isn’t going to be repealed. There is no army in the field to seize control of the government. It’s a joke to argue that there is, that any member of the uniformed services would countenance such an order, even if one were given and it wouldn’t be. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It remains an insult unique to the Beltway and New York City to suggest the American people are stupid or tired of self-government. We aren’t. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is an inchoate slur on every future appointee that they would accept an illegal order. Tell us again which first term Trump appointees did that? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Before you say Mark Meadows, understand that accepting immunity isn’t a plea deal. The list is short because it is non-existent. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Indeed, the list of senior Trump officials convicted of malfeasance is very short, and Trump’s first National Security Advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn was, to most minds, targeted and entrapped. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The general’s entrapment is, like Scooter Libby’s conviction, in the Bush era, a monument to overzealous prosecution and not to 21st century executive branch wrongdoing. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">By contrast, lots of people quit when they disagreed with Trump. It would happen again if new appointees disagreed with means or ends. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hysteria is never pretty. And the folks indulging it now in their faux frenzies over a hypothetical nomination and subsequent election of Donald Trump are simply caught up in make-believe dramas that have as much to do with reality as "The Hunger Games."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Just stop it. They have been singing the same song since 2015 and it’s driving them (and us) crazy. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Not one of these people are acting like French nobility during the Revolution and trying to head for the border. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">IF Trump gets the nomination and IF he wins the election, he will take office on Monday, January 20, 2025. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Count on the Never Trumpers staying at their posts pumping out another deluge of alarm for the foreseeable future, unmolested by the president save for his posts on X or Truth Social. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I think Trump’s thousands of critics are brave enough to weather those online storms. There will probably be another march of the disappointed on the day after his second Inaugural just as there was after his first. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trump would yield that office four years hence, but the Never Trump won’t give up theirs, no matter how foolish they appear in the rear-view mirror. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">"We can’t risk it!" is what I expect to read in comments or replies. Honest to goodness do you folks ever look up from your sweat lodge circle of panic? Ours is a republic with problems and deep divisions, but we are indeed going to continue to rise to Ben Franklin’s challenge "to keep it" because we have grown rather accustomed to doing what is legal and especially to criticizing those in power. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It’s not a revolutionary moment, not even close (although the Democrats’ Chicago convention might be an interesting bit of deja vu for those old enough to recall that melt-down.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The doom-criers are actually not concerned about Trump winning and setting up some sort of Gestapo. They are really alarmed that an infirm Joe Biden won’t get out of the way for a nominee not named Kamala Harris and that this duo is going to get tossed out of office — peacefully — rather handily. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The panic merchants are concerned that Trump will govern constitutionally and effectively pursuant to his objectives as he lays them out in the months ahead. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">They are really worried that there will be a whole lot more of Pompeos and many fewer Navarros, as Trump now knows who gets stuff done. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">A self-governing people may indeed decide they will put up with what we used to call "mean Tweets" and often brazen speech from the occupant of the Oval Office rather than four more years of President Biden and Vice President Harris and more Abbey Gates, Ukrainian invasions and massacres in Israel. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">They may have deep aesthetic objections to Trump, but on the whole, they would like the country to survive and their children and grandchildren to live in freedom and prosperity. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">They might very well prefer Trumponomics to Bidenomics. And if they do, it will be through the exercise of the franchise and the assembling of a Constitutional majority through the Electoral College. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The "people" may indeed be wholly sick and tired not of Trump but of Manhattan-Beltway media elites telling them that what they think and their sincerely held views are illegitimate. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The "people" overwhelmingly condemned the rioters of 1/6 and they never, ever bought into the idea that the riot that day presaged something bigger or enduring. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It seems like Jack Smith has concluded Trump didn’t cause the riot and the vast majority of Americans seem to agree with that. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The GOP has at least overwhelmingly rejected the idea that Trump is culpable for the riot. The frustration of 1/6 junkies at their own inability to expand what has become a cult of attachment to the direst view of those events then, now and in the future is huge, but their remedy is not to keep repeating the same unpersuasive arguments at a higher pitch and a louder volume. Study up on sunk costs. Cut the chord that has bound you – but not Trump, the GOP or the country — to 1/6. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">A second political earthquake even bigger than that delivered on election night 2016 may come in November. If it does, it will be in large part because media elites have again ignored issues like the collapse of control at the border or the disaster in Afghanistan for endless replays of 1/6 porn. If enough people say, "What is wrong with you people, did you not see 10/7, Putin in Ukraine, Abbey Gate?" the clap back at elites could be thunderous.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If that happens —if all those "ifs" become facts — what then? Will the alarmists concede or go the full route of those Congressional supporters of Al Gore in 2001, John Kerry in 2005 and Hillary Clinton in 2017 and file objections during the counting of the votes of the Electoral College or have Democrats now decided that is bad form and a "threat to democracy?"</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">My request: Will those who will refuse to agree to the peaceful transfer of power back to Trump if he wins, please stand up right now and tell us what they plan on doing? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The folks who rioted in the Capitol have been prosecuted and many are serving long sentences. Are these writers of these various alarms and their heirs and assigns intent on inciting their readers to a frenzy which could result in violence? That’s not illegal under the Brandenburg test because they lack the ability to move public opinion to immediate violence, of course, but will they agree to at least stipulate that, if Trump wins wholly, they failed to persuade? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I doubt the alarmists will do any of these things. But I hope they do. The alarmists have been willing to suggest for three years now that Trump should have been tried for inciting the riot. (Not even the prosecutor with no limits Jack Smith or his fellow Javerts in Manhattan or Atlanta have laid that absurdity before a Grand Jury). Trump did not do that. He is not Sulla marching north or Caesar marching south. Trump is a political actor. The hyperventilation? Nonsense. Foolishness. All of it. And a chasing after wind. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If you believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, stop peddling imaginary threats to either. It is unseemly. And it betrays a slippery grasp on American history and an even less secure grip on how the Republic operates. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We need to focus on the real threats to this country —the alliance of China, Russia and Iran — and the collapse of the border, much of public secondary education and almost all of elite institutions of higher Ed. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">There’s serious work to be done, but the endless wringing of hands over mean Tweets doesn’t do a thing to tackle our real problems and our very real enemies. </span></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-28081458973597278212024-01-11T11:52:00.000-08:002024-01-11T11:52:06.795-08:00Biden ‘Saves’ Democracy by Destroying it<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEPHtFPivOae6gdpMFEVCBWSyMr75KX0bjaXM18fTfF473CI9YJ8MN4_NYTeoAu2bT9EcQ0mRNxhvPP6IqYSRx2ne1e8jVjPbi-5qd-WzsT_u601N8pbzX3EFmNqfuoplby2Sa9nR9RYbcG5lTDQVY59P_Csljo5_560Xa4JQRBf-03NtlTPMkow/s1024/20240111_vdh_biden_saves_democracy_destroying_it-1024x682.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="1024" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEPHtFPivOae6gdpMFEVCBWSyMr75KX0bjaXM18fTfF473CI9YJ8MN4_NYTeoAu2bT9EcQ0mRNxhvPP6IqYSRx2ne1e8jVjPbi-5qd-WzsT_u601N8pbzX3EFmNqfuoplby2Sa9nR9RYbcG5lTDQVY59P_Csljo5_560Xa4JQRBf-03NtlTPMkow/w400-h266/20240111_vdh_biden_saves_democracy_destroying_it-1024x682.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><header class="entry-header " style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 2em; text-align: justify; word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large; font-style: inherit; text-align: left;">Biden ‘Saves’ Democracy by Destroying it</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large; font-style: inherit; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="entry-meta" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.45;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span class="posted-on" style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.45;">Victor Davis Hanson, <a href="https://victorhanson.com/biden-saves-democracy-by-destroying-it/ ">victorhanson.com</a> </span></span></div></header><div class="entry-content clear" itemprop="text" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; text-align: justify; word-wrap: break-word;"><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">When faced with the possible return of President Donald Trump, the current agenda of the Democratic Party is summed up simply as “We had to destroy democracy to save it.”</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The effort shares a common theme: any means necessary are justified to prevent the people from choosing their own president, given the fear that a majority might vote to elect Donald Trump.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Sometimes the anti-democratic paranoia has been outsourced to state and local officials and prosecutors to erase Trump from the primary and likely general election ballots as well.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">One unelected official in Maine, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, is a Democrat, an official never elected by the people, and a non-lawyer rendering a legal edict. Yet she has judged Trump guilty of “insurrection.”</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And presto, she erased his name from the state’s ballot.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Yet Trump was never charged, much less convicted, of “insurrection.”</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The statute Bellows cites is a post-Civil War clause of the 14th Amendment. It was passed over a century and a half ago. It was never intended to be used in an election year by an opposition party to disbar a rival presidential candidate.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the earlier case of Colorado, the all-Democrat Supreme Court, in a 4-3 vote, took Trump off the ballot.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In sum, just five officials in two states have taken away the rights of some 7 million Americans to vote for the president of their choice.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Note that Trump continues to lead incumbent Joe Biden in the polls.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Sometimes, indictments are preferred to prevent Americans from voting for or against Trump.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Currently, four leftist prosecutors—three state and one federal—have indicted Trump.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">They are petitioning courts to accelerate the usually lethargic legal process to ensure Trump is tied up in Atlanta, Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C., courtrooms nonstop during the 2024 election cycle.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Their aim is to keep Trump from campaigning, as he faces four left-wing prosecutors, four liberal judges, and four or five overwhelmingly Democratic jury pools.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Yet all the indictments are increasingly clouded in controversy, if not outright scandal.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis campaigned on promises to get Trump. She now faces allegations that she outsourced the prosecution to an unqualified personal injury lawyer—her current stealth boyfriend who was paid handsomely by Willis’s office and traveled on pricey junkets with her.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">New York partisan attorney general Letitia James likewise sought office on promises to destroy Trump.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">She preposterously claims Trump overvalued his real estate collateral to a bank. Yet it eagerly made the loan, profited from it, and had no complaints given that Trump paid off the principle and interest as required.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg is even more desperate. He is now prosecuting Trump for campaign finance violations from nearly a decade ago, claiming a nondisclosure agreement with a purported sexual liaison somehow counts as a campaign violation.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Federal special prosecutor Jack Smith claims Trump should be convicted of improperly removing classified documents after leaving office. In the past, such disagreements over presidential papers were resolved bureaucratically.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Joe Biden, for example, improperly took out classified files after leaving the Senate and vice presidency and stored them in unsecure locations for over a decade.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">All of these prosecutors are unapologetic anti-Trump progressives.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Some have communicated with the White House legal eagles, even though Joe Biden is likely to face Trump in the November election.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Some prosecutors are themselves facing controversies, if not scandals. Some wish to synchronize their drawn-out investigations and indictments to hinder the Trump reelection effort.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">At other times, the effort to neuter Trump is waged by his rival Biden himself.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">He has hammered Trump as an insurrectionist and guilty of a number of egregious crimes against democracy—even as Biden’s own Attorney General has appointed a special counsel to try Trump on just those federal charges concerning the January 6 demonstrations, a dead horse that Biden periodically still beats to death to scare voters.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Biden periodically smears half of America who supported or voted for Trump as “ultra-Maga” extremists and “semi-fascists” who would destroy democracy.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Yet the more Biden and the Left weaponize the judicial system to prevent Trump from running, and the more Biden screams and yells that Trump supporters are anti-American and anti-democratic, the more Trump soars in the polls while Biden sinks.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The left privately knows that its historically unprecedented strangulation of democracy is increasing Trump’s popularity. But like an addict, it cannot quit its Trump fix.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In sum, the Left is creating historic, anti-democratic precedents that will someday boomerang on Democrats should Republicans win the November election and follow the new Democrat model of extra-legal politics.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Democrats are tearing apart the country in a manner not seen since the Civil War era—apparently convinced democracy cannot be trusted and so itself must be sacrificed as the price of destroying Donald Trump.</span></p></div>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-55410714322002936292024-01-08T07:35:00.000-08:002024-01-08T07:35:56.948-08:00A Culture in Collapse<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggFwxSa6nhL-QP2MGsNM3sRY8D3_qqkx6XeMagOKz5H0pc2bERttjFRCjMr-iTsYem96C7mqeu4_TvT3F-e8bAVRe9ekNqK0RB6zfFlAca-A21LlBAyXjIDc6T716H4OAESoprgPuXxg6kijgYwk__Js6bnux04KfAsBtzB2lXFvStUynLdtBhFQ/s1024/20240108_vdh_a_culture_in_collapse-1024x682.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="1024" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggFwxSa6nhL-QP2MGsNM3sRY8D3_qqkx6XeMagOKz5H0pc2bERttjFRCjMr-iTsYem96C7mqeu4_TvT3F-e8bAVRe9ekNqK0RB6zfFlAca-A21LlBAyXjIDc6T716H4OAESoprgPuXxg6kijgYwk__Js6bnux04KfAsBtzB2lXFvStUynLdtBhFQ/w400-h266/20240108_vdh_a_culture_in_collapse-1024x682.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">A Culture in Collapse</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Victor Davis Hanson, <a href="https://victorhanson.com/americas-culture-in-collapse/">Blade of Perseus </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/08/a-culture-in-collapse/">American Greatness </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not suffering from existential crises of famine, plague, or the collapse of our grid and fuel sources. Prior, far poorer, and war-torn generations now seem far better off than what we are becoming.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">What is happening to us is not due to an adherence to a too strict conservative tradition but is almost exclusively the wage of the progressive project.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In short, we are seeing fissures that America has not experienced in our cultural history since the Civil War. The radical Left apparently feels such chaos, anarchy, and nihilism are necessary to topple past norms and customs and thereby adhere to a socialist, equity agenda that no one in normal times would stomach.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Some of the decay is existential and fundamental; some anecdotal and illustrative. But either way, while decline came about gradually over decades, its sudden and abrupt chaos during the three years of Biden’s presidency has shocked Americans.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Financial Implosion</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As long as interest rates were de facto zero, both parties ran up gargantuan debt. Now the national debt has hit $34 trillion. But two odd things have also happened under the Biden administration that are beginning to undermine the very existence of the U.S. financial system:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">1) Interest rates have soared from de facto zero and are on a trajectory to 5.5%—meaning that the interest on the debt, in theory, in the not too distant future will require 20 percent of the annual budget, squeezing out both entitlements and defense.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">2) Yet the upcoming rendezvous with economic Armageddon has not slowed a Biden administration intent on borrowing nearly $2 trillion in the current fiscal year.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The public is baffled: is the Left playing chicken with us? Is the strategy to “gorge the beast,” thereby demanding even higher federal taxes, which, combined with many state taxes, now exceed 50 percent of one’s income?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Is the goal massive “redistribution” by ensuring “equity” by gouging the middle class and rich? Or is the left’s goal more nihilistic: to force a remedy for insolvency by ensuring high inflation, renouncing government debt, or government appropriation of private capital?</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Military Crises</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Americans have lost deterrence abroad.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Confusion reigns among the public over why the Biden administration fled from Afghanistan, leaving behind billions of dollars of munitions and equipment in the hands of Taliban terrorists. Why did it allow a Chinese spy balloon to traverse the continental U.S. with impunity?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">And why did Biden signal to Russia when preparing an invasion of Ukraine that our reaction would depend on the magnitude of Putin’s offensive? Why has military recruitment cratered, shorting the Pentagon of thousands of soldiers?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Why do Iranian proxies attack almost daily U.S. installations abroad and ships in the Red Sea, apparently without fear of reprisal? Why did Hamas slaughter Israelis on October 7? What explains our indifference or ennui?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Is the answer a deliberate effort to curb supposed American “arrogance” by once more leading from behind? Are we rebooting the Obama Administration’s bankrupt idea of empowering an Iranian crescent from Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza to ensure “creative tension” between Israel and the moderate Arabs and Persian-led theocratic Shiites?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Why do our officer classes rotate in and out of lucrative military consultantships, lobbying billets, and board membership on corporate defense contractors—as if their innate talents rather than their lifelong contacts with current serving procurement officers earned their exorbitant fees?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Why did our retired four stars with disdain violate the uniform code of military justice by serially and publicly trashing the commander in chief? Why has the Pentagon revolutionized the entire system of recruitment, promotions, and tenure in the armed forces by predicating them in large part on race, gender, and sexual orientation rather than merit or battlefield efficacy? Did we learn anything from the old Soviet commissariat system? Would we prefer to lose a war by promoting equity than win one by ensuring liberty?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Why did the top brass go after supposedly “insurrectionist” white males (who died at twice their demographics during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan) in the military, only to discover from their own internal investigations that no such cabal of “domestic terrorists” existed, and only to drive out thousands more of the maligned by stupidly requiring COVID vaccinations from those with naturally acquired immunity?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In sum, the U.S. will either undergo a post-Vietnam-like revolution in the military or, in late Roman imperial fashion, our armed forces will be unable to defend the interests or indeed, the very safety, of the U.S.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Race</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Why, when so-called non-white ethnicities and races were achieving parity with or exceeding the majority population in per capita income and when racial intermarriage was commonplace, did we blow up the values of the civil rights movement and revert to precivilizational tribalism? Who were the sophists who convinced us that racially segregated dorms, safe spaces, and graduations, or using race as an arbiter of admissions and hiring, was not racist?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">When did we lump together an entire cadre of diverse ancestries, ethnicities, religions, politics, classes, and values and dub them all “white,” and then smear them collectively in stereotypical fashion? When did we calibrate race as the chief determinative factor in our identities? Have we become premodern tribal people—feuding clans right out of the Norse sagas, ghosts of the Balkans nursing ancient grievances and hatreds? Since when in history has a nation’s “diversity” ever been preferable to its “unity”?</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Sexes</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Did anyone in, say, 2004 believe that in just twenty years, the Left would try to mainstream the previously rare medical malady of gender dysphoria into a transgendered civil rights issue by insisting on three rather than two sexes?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Would anyone have believed that leftists, gays, and feminists would have done their best to destroy a half-century of female athletic achievement by allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports and thereby erase the record performances of three generations of women?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Would anyone have believed that a feminist and accomplished swimmer like Riley Gaines would be cornered, swarmed, threatened, and barricaded in at a university for the crime of daring to state the obvious: that transgendered women are still, in terms of their musculoskeletal physiques and frames, males and thereby have no business competing in women’s sports?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Would anyone have believed that a gay senate aide would have engaged in passive, unprotected sex in a public and hallowed Senate chamber, filmed in graphic detail his act of sodomy, had it circulated among friends and social media, and then, when outrage followed, claimed victimhood by accusing those offended of being homophobic toward him and his active homosexual partner?</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Lawlessness</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We are witnessing the steady erasure of jurisprudence, both civil and criminal. Does the law as we knew it a mere decade ago still exist? Massive looting with impunity is now largely exempt from justice in our major blue-state cities. In Compton, a van slams into a Mexican bakery as waiting crowds swarm, loot, and destroy the business. And for what? Some free pies and cakes? Or the nihilist delight in ruining the livelihood of a hardworking family business?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Such smash-and-grabs rob stores of billions of dollars in revenue each year. Can we even comprehend that employees and security guards are now ordered to stand down, as if the apprehension of such thieves might in some way seem illiberal or racist?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Does anyone even care that pro-Hamas protestors—many in America as guests on green cards and student visas—shouted support for the October 7 massacre of Jews, screamed for the destruction of Israel and the Jews in it, shut down the Manhattan and Golden Gate Bridges, defiled the Lincoln Memorial and White House gates, and disrupted Christmas celebrations in our major cities with complete exemption? Is storming the California legislature, and disrupting it in session, now a felony in the manner of those convicted after January 6, or do we have two sets of laws, dependent on ideology, race, and party affiliation?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In one of the most chilling videos in memory, Las Vegas Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus was recently violently attacked by an unshackled career felon defendant (with three prior violent felony convictions and facing additional new felony counts). The assailant, Deobra Redden, leaped over the justice’s bench with ease and began beating her and pulling her hair before two bailiffs, with great difficulty, managed to restrain him. Why was Redden out on parole given his violent record, and why was he not shackled given his toxic past? His self-admitted effort to kill the judge, his ability nearly to pull it off, and the record of past leniency accorded him are a commentary on a sick society.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But then again, in our major cities, George-Soros-subsidized prosecutors have all but destroyed civil society. They have been systematically releasing felons with violent criminal records on the same day they are arrested, freeing convicted felons early from prisons and jails, and sabotaging the law by arbitrary enforcement on the grounds that it is inherently either unfair or racist.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The post civilization civil bookend to that precivilizational subterfuge was a systematic legal effort, for the first time in American history, to remove in an election year the leading primary and general election candidate Donald Trump from various state ballots. The Soviet-like charge was that he was guilty of “insurrection,” a crime he has never been charged with, much less convicted of. Meanwhile, three state prosecutors and one special federal counsel—all leftists and some previously bragging in their own election campaigns of their intention to destroy Trump—have charged candidate Trump with an array of felonies. The vast majority of Americans agree Trump would never have been so charged had he just not sought to seek reelection—or had been a liberal Democrat.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Education</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In ancient times, the President of the Harvard Corporation was a signature scholar and intellectual, befitting Harvard’s own self-regard as the world’s most preeminent university. No longer.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Now-resigned president Coleen Gay’s meteoric career was based on a flimsy record of a mere 11 articles—the majority of them plagiarized. Her entire career was fueled by the tired pretext that the privileged Gay was somehow deserving of special deference given her race and gender.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Confronted with such corruption, the Harvard Corporation, its legal team, and 700 faculty sought to downplay Gay’s intellectual theft. Indeed, they smeared her critics as racist—only then to deal with her new billet as a professor of Political Science with a long record of plagiarism that was exempt from the sort of punishments dealt out to students and faculty for less egregious defenses.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">How did Ivy League degrees so quickly become mostly certifications of ideological and woke orthodoxy? Or is it worse than that? Does a Stanford history major or Yale literature graduate know anything, respectively, about the Civil War or Shakespeare’s plays? Do they even know that we, the public, know that they don’t know?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Was Elizabeth Warren really Harvard’s first law professor of color? Was Claudine Gay truly an impressive and respected scholar of political science? Are the governing members of the Harvard Corporation the nation’s best and brightest?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">How in less than five years did our elite universities destroy meritocracy, abolish SAT requirements, require DEI oaths and pledges, and mirror the worst commissariat institutions of the old Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet Union? How and why these elite universities blew themselves up in a mere decade will baffle historians for decades to come.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The End of Sovereignty</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Biden administration has shattered federal immigration law, as some 10 million illegal entries will have crossed unlawfully and with impunity in the first Biden term—all by intent. The southern border is not merely porous; it no longer even exists.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Did the Left want new constituents? New entitlement recipients to grow government and raise taxes on the clingers and deplorables?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Did it want a larger DEI base to replace the steady exodus of non-whites from left-wing agendas? Does it shun sovereignty, preferring a global village without arbitrary borders? Do these utopians in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard similarly feel their own yards and grounds need no walls, no barriers, and no boundaries to deny the underprivileged their rights to enjoy what the predatory classes possess?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In this new America of ours, Joe Biden is hale and savvy, while Hunter did nothing wrong. Our heroes are Dylan Mulvaney, Gen. Rachel Levine, and the two Sams, Bankman-Fried and Brinton.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In today’s America, Karin Jean-Pierre is truthful, while Alejandro Mayorkas is honest. An innocent and saintly George Floyd was randomly murdered; his death proof of systemic police racism. And defunding the police brought calm and quiet, in the way our border is secure and the homeless are mere victims.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dr. Jill is an impressive academic. Oprah and LeBron are the downtrodden and victimized. Gen. Mark Milley is a brave maverick, and so is Adam Schiff. The flight from Afghanistan marked a brilliantly organized retreat.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Chinese balloon really did not take too many pictures of sensitive areas. January 6 was an armed insurrection, preplanned by fiery conspirators and revolutionaries. Ashli Babbitt deserved to be blasted in the neck for entering a broken window.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Kamala Harris is a wordsmith. Russian collusion really happened. So did Russian laptop disinformation. Christopher Steele’s dossier was mostly true, in the fashion of Claudine Gay’s dissertation and Barack Obama’s memoir. And 51 former intelligence authorities bravely came forward to offer their expertise in certifying that Hunter’s laptop was cooked up in Moscow.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">With all this, what do we think the Iranians, Putin’s Russians, the communist Chinese, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas now think of the United States?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">That we are the nation that won World War II or fled from Afghanistan? Did the eight million who broke our laws and simply walked across our border respect us, fear us, admire us, or come here to manipulate and use us? Did Hamas appreciate the hundreds of millions of dollars we gave them, in the same way Iran was friendlier after we lifted the sanctions?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In sum, American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-25979959860509742782024-01-04T09:43:00.000-08:002024-01-04T09:43:40.834-08:00It’s not just Trump<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjztbr4WBvuB4lOtMWXFfc1SjJ4O_soG2lJGJsmWdd-5JImQ-u0-X1vEZtM4agbj3FpwPqKhU2wP-ew6WsKHQIMGAvTQhRgK3K7-WZDxxOthZJSVEFH_gWU9H_rkdA6kqPepY3apWAw895Yg-F0DZdW05IiLejYMIAb4q_i6uIf_eAiPUhjiFXBgg/s300/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjztbr4WBvuB4lOtMWXFfc1SjJ4O_soG2lJGJsmWdd-5JImQ-u0-X1vEZtM4agbj3FpwPqKhU2wP-ew6WsKHQIMGAvTQhRgK3K7-WZDxxOthZJSVEFH_gWU9H_rkdA6kqPepY3apWAw895Yg-F0DZdW05IiLejYMIAb4q_i6uIf_eAiPUhjiFXBgg/w400-h224/images.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">It’s not just Trump: </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">Democrats are moving to bar Republicans from ballots nationwide</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Jonathan Turley, <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/01/03/opinion/its-not-just-trump-democrats-are-moving-to-bar-republicans-from-ballots-nationwide/">New York Post</a> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As the decisions disqualifying former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election work their way through the courts, a new filing in Pennsylvania seeks the same “ballot cleansing” by barring Republican Rep. Scott Perry.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It’s only the latest effort targeting congressional candidates as Democrats seek to bar opponents as “insurrectionists” for questioning the election of President Biden.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We have become a nation of Madame Defarges — eagerly knitting names of those to be subject to arbitrary justice.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Former congressional candidate Gene Stilp, who’s made headlines by burning MAGA flags with swastikas outside courthouses, filed the challenge.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Using the 14th Amendment to disqualify candidates like Perry is consistent with Stilp’s signature flag-burning stunts.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">But what’s chilling is how many support such efforts, including Democratic officeholders from Maine’s secretary of state to dozens of members of Congress.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) sought to bar 126 members of Congress under the same theory for challenging the election before Jan. 6, 2021.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Similar legislation from Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats, including New York Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman and Ritchie Torres and “Squad” members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">When Maine’s secretary of state disqualified Trump, three in the state’s congressional delegation — Sens. Angus King (I) and Susan Collins (R) and Rep. Jared Golden (D) — condemned the decision. But others supported the antidemocratic action.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The grounds were virtually identical to those of Stilp. He accuses Perry of supporting challenges to Biden’s election and opposing its certification.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Of course, he ignores Democratic members who sought to block certification of Republican presidents under the very same law with no factual or legal basis.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) praised the effort then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) organized to challenge the certification of President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Jan. 6 committee head Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) voted to challenge it in the House.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sought to block certification of the 2016 election result — particularly ironic since he’s a leading voice calling for Trump to be disqualified.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">He insisted last week on CNN that the effort to prevent citizens from voting for Trump is the very embodiment of democracy: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">That is akin to treating every criminal charge as a consensual act of incarceration because the accused chose his path in life.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This is also being played out in state races.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The filing against Perry came the same day Pennsylvania Democratic state Sen. Art Haywood made public a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee against his Republican colleague Doug Mastriano accusing him of playing a role in the plot to overturn the election.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Notably, in his effort to “hold insurrectionists accountable,” Haywood admitted he relied on the same evidence from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that was used in the Colorado case.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Insurrectionist” is the newest label to excuse any abuse.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">During the McCarthy period, individuals were accused of being Communists or “fellow travelers.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Now you have Stilp accusing Perry of being “supportive of insurrectionists.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Democrats and pundits have claimed civil libertarians and journalists who have testified against the government’s growing censorship efforts are enablers of insurrectionists and even “Putin lovers.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">These Democratic members and activists vividly demonstrated this unfounded theory’s dangerous implications.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Figures like Stilp are wrong on the law but right about one thing: There are few real limits once you embrace this theory.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If the challenges work, there is no reason they can’t be used unilaterally against any candidate (and without any criminal charges, let alone convictions).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is instantly both self-executing and self-satisfying. It would put the world’s most successful democracy on a slippery slope to political chaos.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">That is why the Supreme Court needs to take up this issue and put this pernicious theory to bed once and for all.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Until the court rejects this antidemocratic ploy, activists eager to win elections through the courts will keep using it, and it will metastasize throughout our body politic.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">With the support of elected officials across the country, they can then join Stilp in moving from burning flags to torching the Constitution in a fit of exhilarating rage.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-38106253256008787002023-12-28T09:29:00.000-08:002023-12-28T09:29:05.094-08:00Congress fix welfare, one state proves it can be done<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhij5Gc8GRS81W-K84TMnLLbD4p58dkypshXMZYRvd9bjGQmn1NJT0vZJZE72UzxAOxbTm4QrpV0lmyT5IBZtptoxRGM9npouCS5ikOQfFeXKKFoeHEEFDaAaykhohL4P_533p-a9RxkyTEMaACJopQ2IQAhtoQky_S-kA_Lb_9qYfbfcpQKOZ4eg/s672/GettyImages-144070629.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="378" data-original-width="672" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhij5Gc8GRS81W-K84TMnLLbD4p58dkypshXMZYRvd9bjGQmn1NJT0vZJZE72UzxAOxbTm4QrpV0lmyT5IBZtptoxRGM9npouCS5ikOQfFeXKKFoeHEEFDaAaykhohL4P_533p-a9RxkyTEMaACJopQ2IQAhtoQky_S-kA_Lb_9qYfbfcpQKOZ4eg/w400-h225/GettyImages-144070629.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Congress should free states to fix welfare.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">One state proves it can be done</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">If Congress frees states to fix welfare and workforce development, it will save taxpayers money and transform our economies</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Greg Sindelar - Daniel Erspamer, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/congress-should-free-states-fix-welfare-one-state-proves-can-be-done">Fox News </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Our home states of Texas and Louisiana have a simple request of Congress: Let us follow Utah’s lead.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">For nearly 25 years, Utah has integrated federal workforce development and safety net programs, with an innovative model that quickly moves people from welfare to work. Yet Congress bans other states from taking this road, leading to more people on welfare and workforce programs that don’t help people get better jobs. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the next month, Congress should free our states to fix welfare and workforce development – saving taxpayers money while transforming our economies.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We’re calling on Congress to reform the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which governs federal workforce development programs and is currently up for reauthorization. Since 1998, this law has forced states into a one-size-fits-all workforce development system that’s a synonym for failure.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">People who participate in federal programs often get worse-paying jobs, as a Louisiana state audit proved this fall. The programs also regularly misrepresent their effectiveness, saying people got jobs when they didn’t actually seek help. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This failed system, which cost nearly $4 billion in 2022, is meant to serve the same work-capable people who use the safety net. But it’s largely disconnected from welfare programs, which cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Utah shows a better way. Since 1997, the Beehive State created a novel system using federal workforce development funding. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">To this day, if you’re a Utah resident applying for unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid or cash welfare, you have to go through the state’s Department of Workforce Services. Your case worker helps you access the safety net while simultaneously developing a personalized plan of action to help you get back into a good-paying job as quickly as possible.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The system is purpose-built to help people move from government dependence to individual success.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Utah’s model is a key part of its booming economy, which is the strongest in the country, according to everyone from U.S. News and World Report to the American Legislative Exchange Council. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Utah has the lowest rate of residents on food stamps and the second-lowest for Medicaid. It also has the highest state labor force participation rate in the country and a poverty rate of 8.6%, compared to 12.8% nationally. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">And Utah recovered from the pandemic faster than any other state, replacing nearly two jobs for every one that was lost – the best record in the nation. While Utah’s success also reflects smart policies and cultural values, its unique system of connecting welfare and workforce development is a major factor.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Congress grandfathered Utah’s model in 1998, yet blocking state innovation clearly hasn’t worked, as our states can attest. The Texas legislature called on Congress to give it the same authority as Utah earlier this year, while Louisiana conducted its recent workforce development audit to prove the need for reform.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Last month, Utah Rep. Burgess Owens introduced the "One Door To Work Act," which would free up to eight states from federal handcuffs, while the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has voted to let four small states innovate as they see fit.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">While that’s progress over the status quo, the best bet is to empower every state to use federal workforce funding as they see fit. Some would create a truly integrated one-stop shop like Utah’s. Others could design their own innovative system. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As Utah shows, when state officials – not federal bureaucrats – are in the driver’s seat, they can tailor their approach to their citizens’ unique needs. It helps to know the people you’re serving.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The nationwide opportunity is immense. More than 40 million Americans are on food stamps and 80 million are on Medicaid, yet hardly any are purposely connected with workforce development. Such separation ensures that millions of people stay on welfare, when they could and should be guided toward work.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If Congress grants states the freedom to innovate, they’ll save money for taxpayers by shrinking welfare rolls while expanding opportunity and creating booming economies. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Utah proves what’s possible. Louisiana and Texas are ready to prove they can do even better.</span></p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p><i>Daniel J. Erspamer is CEO of the Pelican Institute for Public Policy. Their organizations are part of the Alliance for Opportunity.</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-48870803665161952023-12-21T11:17:00.000-08:002023-12-24T06:25:16.926-08:00Lessons From the Great Covid Cover-Up<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdQr62lKGNlEkG4IxZyGFRGnhuqY7QrRIGkZV9d-u9OqnbWraWXQ4B8nSi58AAXySN0scVRsPxIR3EloNqIvnQu8I6p9yJxsND75ctNZn4WIfd_fAxfRxWJR3cT9zJV97aZ-qs4qpjVBAxQdRzQ2Xz8DXRyawgsmYTefly0hSvZDZCJtxAv7YVQ/s720/Rand.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="720" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdQr62lKGNlEkG4IxZyGFRGnhuqY7QrRIGkZV9d-u9OqnbWraWXQ4B8nSi58AAXySN0scVRsPxIR3EloNqIvnQu8I6p9yJxsND75ctNZn4WIfd_fAxfRxWJR3cT9zJV97aZ-qs4qpjVBAxQdRzQ2Xz8DXRyawgsmYTefly0hSvZDZCJtxAv7YVQ/w400-h225/Rand.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lessons From the Great Covid Cover-Up</span></div></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Rand Paul, <a href="https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/lessons-from-the-great-covid-cover-up/?utm_campaign=imprimis&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=287366435&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--AZGd2e_IHoASu9P7evxWDmWj1pOFQctJC5opyIv-OvPuIOg58aKx9OF-fBI0jLHqhH8tfDs_Ku6bf5pRsynZF1dVQ-g&utm_content=dec23&utm_source=housefile">Imprimis</a> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">U.S. Senator from Kentucky </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Author, Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The following is adapted from a talk delivered on November 1, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Covid cover-up began in China. But in a way we make too big a deal of that. No one should be surprised that a totalitarian government run by the Chinese Communist Party would seek to cover up its responsibility for a worldwide pandemic. What was mind-jarring—and what we should focus our attention on—is the cover-up in our own country spearheaded by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his fellow public health bureaucrats. And they might have gotten away with their deception if a federal judge hadn’t ordered their emails released.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In brief, these emails reveal that at the same time Dr. Fauci and other public health “experts” were publicly disavowing the idea that the Covid virus originated with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, they were in general agreement among themselves that that was likely what had happened. So why hide the fact? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In January 2020, Fauci was told that the Covid virus appeared “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” He and his fellow scientists were worried that it may have originated in the Wuhan lab because they knew that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under Fauci’s direction, had been funding work at the lab for years. They also knew of a paper by Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli describing gain-of-function research—which involves taking two viruses and combining their genetics to create something more dangerous, more lethal, or more contagious—on various coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">On February 1, just before 3:00 a.m., Fauci sent an email to Robert Kadlec, then-Secretary for Preparedness and Response at Health and Human Services. It read: “This just came out today. Gives a balanced view.” He attached an article published in Science arguing that Covid had jumped from bats to humans and seeking to discredit the lab-leak theory. When this email came to light, I was initially puzzled about its timing and urgency. But then I learned that one of Kadlec’s duties was to chair the committee responsible for screening gain-of-function proposals for safety purposes—and that the Wuhan coronavirus research proposal never came before his committee!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">For a long time, even we in the U.S. Senate didn’t know that Kadlec headed the gain-of-function screening committee because of the pervasive secrecy throughout our government. The makeup of the committee is a secret, its deliberations are secret, and those on the committee do not like answering questions asked by the American people’s elected leaders in Congress. To this day, it is an open question how gain-of-function research was funded in Wuhan without committee review. It is not a stretch to think that someone with authority skirted the safety review process. If so, that person would have had a good reason to be very worried, even to the point of dishonesty, when the pandemic broke out.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Jeremy Farrar, the Anthony Fauci of the UK, told his brother that in the early stages of the pandemic, “a few scientists, including me, were beginning to suspect this might be a lab accident.” Farrar writes in his book Spike: “During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets.” Indeed, many Western bureaucrats, especially in the U.S., began using various forms of communication to shield their messages from future records requests. We have an email from one of Fauci’s assistants instructing other government employees to avoid using government email addresses. Which, by the way, is a crime.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Kristian G. Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, headed up a group of virologists who, by his own account, were “prompted by Jeremy Farrar, Tony Fauci, and [National Institutes of Health Director] Francis Collins” to research and publish a paper that would “provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypotheses around the origins of the virus.” Andersen had written to Farrar a week earlier, alarmed by the fact that the virus appeared to be manmade. But now, under pressure, he and others were circling the wagons and changing their tune.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">By mid-February, British zoologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a Fauci ally, organized a letter that was published in The Lancet stating that the authors stood together “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” What the letter failed to mention is the fact that Daszak’s organization received many millions of taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the State Department—before and during the pandemic—and that millions were funneled through EcoHealth to the Wuhan lab, some of which went to coronavirus research.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In March, the Andersen group’s paper, arguing that Covid didn’t come from a lab, was published in Nature Medicine. By that time, corporate media and Big Tech had taken to labeling anyone who supported the lab-leak theory as a purveyor of misinformation and disinformation. An ABC News article that cited the Andersen paper is a case in point: “Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes COVID-19 ‘is not a laboratory construct.’”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As we now know—thanks to the release of the Twitter Files following Elon Musk’s purchase of the company—the mainstream media and Big Tech did not act alone. In fact, many of their efforts to censor speech about the lab-leak theory, lockdowns, masks, vaccines, school closures, and a host of pandemic-related topics were directed by the FBI and other intelligence agencies. In other words, the First Amendment was thrown out the window.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">***</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The moral debate over gain-of-function research has been going on for a long time. It came to prominence with the debate over avian flu research in the early 2010s. Avian flu is a very bad disease, but like most animal viruses, it is adapted for its host—in this case chickens or other birds. It does not often infect humans, but when it does, certain strains kill up to 50 percent of those infected.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">During an outbreak in 2010, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier wondered if it would be possible to make the avian flu contagious through the air to mammals, and his research became highly controversial. Proponents argued that it could provide valuable data for scientists to predict or combat future pandemics. Opponents argued that it could cause pandemics either through lab leaks or terrorism. Fauci was intimately familiar with this debate, because Fouchier’s research was funded by Fauci’s agency, and he argued at the time that the potential benefits outweighed the risks.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">A growing number of virologists and other scientists worry that a lab leak will happen again, and with even more serious consequences. With Covid, the mortality rate was far less than one percent. Experiments are now being carried out with viruses that have the potential for mortality rates between 15 and 50 percent. In 2021, MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt wrote:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Once we consider the possibility of misuse [of gain-of-function research], let alone creative misuse, such research looks like a gamble that civilization can’t afford to risk. . . . I implore every scientist, funder, and nation working in this field: Please stop. No more trying to discover or make pandemic-capable viruses, enhance their virulence, or assemble them more easily. No more attempting to learn which components allow viruses to efficiently infect or replicate within human cells, or to devise inheritable ways to evade immunity. No more experiments likely to disseminate blueprints for plagues.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The potential for disaster cannot be overstated. Right now, people can order synthetic DNA on the internet, and if they know what they’re doing, they can make the polio virus, among many others. And there are increasing numbers of individuals who have the knowhow: according to Esvelt, “The U.S. grants 125 doctoral degrees in virology each year, accounting for one-third of the total worldwide. At least four times as many individuals with degrees in related fields . . . possess similar skills.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The required information is publicly available due to taxpayer-funded initiatives to identify all the viruses in the world. With the support of people like Peter Daszak and Bill Gates, the U.S. has been the top international funder of pandemic virus identification for decades. This should give us pause: these programs involve digging rare viruses out of caves where humans might never encounter them and transporting them to major metropolitan areas, manipulating viruses to make them more dangerous and transmissible, and publishing the resulting knowledge to the world.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Even if the goal is preventing future pandemics, the risk-benefit ratio doesn’t add up. While advocates for identifying the world’s viruses argue that the knowledge gained will aid in developing vaccines, decades of virus identification have been fruitless, as no human vaccine has been developed in advance of a human epidemic. If we continue down this path, Esvelt believes that “deliberate pandemics” will kill “many more people than identification could save.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">To think that we can prevent future pandemics, even as we continue to seek, catalog, and manipulate dangerous viruses, is the height of hubris. Over the last few years, public health “experts” were wrong about almost everything. If we are to avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future, we must reform government and rein in out-of-control scientists and their enablers.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">***</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In December 2022, Congress passed a 4,155-page spending bill. It had a price tag of $1.7 trillion, including over a trillion dollars that had to be borrowed. It was appropriately called an “omni,” since everything but the kitchen sink was thrown in. On page 3,354, the Secretary of Health and Human Services was directed “not [to] fund research conducted by a foreign entity at a facility located in a country of concern . . . involving pathogens of pandemic potential or biological agents or toxins.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This was a welcome attempt to stop the funding of dangerous research around the world, but Americans and their representatives must watch carefully to see whether our public health agencies attempt to sidestep it. The recent behavior of NIAID and NIH bureaucrats, as exemplified by their attempts to deceive Congress and the American people during the Covid pandemic, does not instill confidence.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">A group of 34 prominent scientists recently presented a series of reforms to “strengthen the US government’s enhanced potential pandemic pathogen framework.” This Gain-of-Function Reform Group (GoF Group) recommended that gain-of-function experiments that confer “efficient human transmissibility” on a pathogen should be regulated. Adopting this standard would explicitly stop bureaucrats like Fauci from dancing around the gain-of-function definition and looking the other way as researchers create viruses that spread more easily in humans.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Current regulations allow gain-of-function research to occur if the research is said to be concerned with “developing and producing” vaccines. However, dangerous research should not be permitted or funded on the basis of a potential product. Rather, we should ban clearly dangerous research and highly scrutinize anything else that “could enhance the virulence or transmissibility of any pathogen,” as the GoF Group recommends.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We should treat this research as we do nuclear weapons—as the potential threat to human life is even greater. Ideally, as Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright recommends, “responsibility for US oversight of gain-of-function research of concern should be assigned to a single, independent federal agency that does not perform research and does not fund research. The oversight of research on fissionable materials by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides a precedent and a model.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Another pervasive problem is conflict of interest. Under our current lax guidelines, researchers can essentially approve their own grants if they toe the official bureaucratic line. Consider the particularly egregious example of Kristian Andersen receiving a million-dollar grant mere months after abruptly switching his scientific opinion on Covid’s origin from a likely lab leak to “natural spillover.” We have always known that recipients of federal dollars might try to game the system. Conflict of interest regulations are littered throughout the federal code. One would think recusal for a conflict of interest would be the standard fallback procedure for all federal science funding. Yet when I questioned Fauci about whether any of the scientists on the vaccine-approval boards also received royalties from the drug companies that make vaccines, he responded that he did not have to inform Congress about royalty payments. In addition to the fact that he was the highest paid employee of the federal government, his own net worth is estimated to have doubled to more than $12.5 million during the pandemic. This is an insult to the American taxpayer and the American ideal. We should not allow this kind of obvious corruption.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The GoF Group calls for regulators to “recuse any individual whose agency is funding or participating in the proposed [gain-of-function research] from decision making in the [pandemic] review process.” Reviewers “should be subject to conflict of interest rules.” They also recommended including “representatives of civil society” in the review of potential pandemic pathogens.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">For several years, I have proposed something similar for all grants funded by the federal government. Even before I became aware of the extent of Fauci’s abusive reign, I introduced the BASIC Research Act, which would add at least one scientist to each funding committee from a major field of research that has unanimity of support, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. The goal is to create more debate on the best use of limited government research funds. I would also add a taxpayer advocate to all funding committees. Perhaps then we would start to question absurd “scientific” research grants, such as the $2.3 million the NIH spent injecting beagle puppies with cocaine, or the $3 million NIH grant to put hamsters on steroids and watch them fight.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In addition, my legislation would prohibit grant applicants from requesting their own friends for funding review. We should also make all federal grant applications public.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">To prevent what happened during the Covid pandemic from happening again, Congress must address the concentration of power over long periods of time in the hands of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. In particular, it should divide the power of the NIAID into three separate institutes overseeing allergic diseases, infectious diseases, and immunologic diseases. Each institute should be led by a director who is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for a limited term of five years.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Anthony Fauci—who wielded tremendous power over many decades—funded dangerous research, lied to Congress and the American people, flip-flopped on many of his prognostications, issued edicts that defied science, and attacked and smeared his scientific critics. His reprehensible behavior reminded me of nothing so much as C.S. Lewis’s description of the moral busybody: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. . . . [T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We the American people must not allow bureaucratic “experts” to endanger our lives, lie to us, or curtail our constitutional rights. Never again. </span></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Rand Paul was elected to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky in 2010, following a successful career as a physician. He studied at Baylor University and earned his M.D. from Duke Medical School. A former president of Lions Clubs International, he is the founder of the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic, and he performs pro bono eye surgeries for patients across Kentucky and around the world. He is the author of numerous books, including The Case Against Socialism and Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up.</i></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-84697833351787398682023-12-19T12:13:00.000-08:002023-12-19T12:27:36.541-08:00No one wants an EV...<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjz3X_XMZUtSFvl7QyrHjYmow1ATPSSt3H45zdR1uoYWSugr1Igw2P_rQWG1ihUQ-fcpWhEf-fMUlikE5JKYxjbtKXbAx1SotjeSBAQDlXal7wRktrdLNAGlRvsArzgGq7u4Zc7tauIrJ6AK4ODprEXZxfqDYMwuSEDSOsFIoAL_brmuR5iDvHWgg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjz3X_XMZUtSFvl7QyrHjYmow1ATPSSt3H45zdR1uoYWSugr1Igw2P_rQWG1ihUQ-fcpWhEf-fMUlikE5JKYxjbtKXbAx1SotjeSBAQDlXal7wRktrdLNAGlRvsArzgGq7u4Zc7tauIrJ6AK4ODprEXZxfqDYMwuSEDSOsFIoAL_brmuR5iDvHWgg=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"> No one wants an EV...</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Electric vehicles are a bad bargain for everyone</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/electric-vehicles-are-a-bad-bargain-for-everyone">Washington Examiner </a></div><div style="text-align: left;">If electric vehicles are as good as the Biden administration would have us believe, why are they so unpopular?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Two new reports this week show the folly of the government trying to force EVs onto unreceptive drivers. The cars are hideously expensive to produce and don't sell even after they are subsidized.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Consider the Oct. 25 study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It analyzed “how regulatory credits, hidden costs, and subsidies disguise the real cost” of EVs. In 2021, $22 billion of government subsidies paid for by American taxpayers hid nearly $49,000 of the cost of producing each EV. To repeat: $49,000 of hidden costs per vehicle. “These costs are borne by gasoline vehicle owners, taxpayers, and utility ratepayers, who are all paying a hefty price for someone else’s EV,” said Jason Isaac, the foundation’s energy policy specialist.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Even massively subsidized, average electric cars cost $22,000 more than ordinary cars with gasoline engines. These expensive and unwanted vehicles don't make up for their extra costs by being cheaper to operate. Back-end operating subsidies, which are different from manufacturing subsidies, reduce the direct cost of electricity to drivers to make it like buying gas at $1.21 per gallon, but the hidden costs of charging equipment and charging losses make the real cost $1.38 per gallon.</div><div style="text-align: left;">It's also not even clear if the nation has the electricity capacity to handle the shift to a market only selling electric vehicles, as President Joe Biden is trying to mandate by 2035. This is especially so with Biden’s restrictions on the development and distribution of coal and natural gas. Volatility of, and strain on, regional and national electric grids could become a serious problem if all cars need to be regularly recharged.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The Texas study does not even include costs for battery replacements and disposal. Nor does it venture to suggest that the mining of lithium for batteries can keep up with demand. It doesn't look at the environmental costs of lithium mining, which can pollute air and water with heavy metals, massively erode soil, use copious water and energy in mining, and disrupt wildlife habitats.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Even with all the subsidies and mandates, consumers aren’t buying the EV fairy story. On Oct. 24, General Motors CEO Mary Barra published a letter to shareholders in which, amid a lot of happy talk about the company’s profitability, she admitted that the electric vehicle business was lagging.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">“We are also moderating the acceleration of EV production in North America,” she wrote, “to protect our pricing, adjust to slower near-term growth in demand, and implement engineering efficiency and other improvements that will make our vehicles less expensive to produce, and more profitable.”</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In other words, aside from the prestige Tesla brand, the public isn’t buying electric vehicles. In late September, Ford Motors announced it was halting work on a battery plant in Michigan, and no wonder: In the first six months of 2023, Tesla outsold its next 19 EV competitors, combined, by a nearly 10-1 margin.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Left-wing insistence that the government subsidize and mandate EVs ignores the significant advantages of hybrid vehicles. Even with all the government subsidies for EVs, unsubsidized hybrids command a larger share of the market. Hybrids use batteries so much smaller that Toyota says 90 hybrid batteries use no more raw materials (lithium, cobalt, graphite, and nickel) than a single EV battery. The Japanese automaker writes, “the overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetime is 37 times as much as a single battery-electric vehicle.”</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Hybrids are far easier to operate because their tanks can be filled at the pump in just minutes, compared to up to an hour to recharge most EVs.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The left-wing fetish for EVs is wrongheaded, especially when it involves government command and expensive subsidies. The government should get out of the way and let the market for hybrids work. Both American wallets and the environment would surely benefit.</div></span></div><p></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-5602235439252057682023-12-18T15:42:00.000-08:002023-12-18T15:42:07.605-08:00Fractures in the Regime<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguvVq4fcAPVLwQP1wV-BX_JjcEFaSilBgbBezF3KTVfafkWybsXRfjU6GqiFzdWVWY8Mreyvf3RUB_cBlVJhMEcgvG5Kgs9YWN3v5oPfJ2ssXHNK5Y2ctW1PdyV_TJa42vuKfMfosSr0sn_W7SxvIxCcNzAlGYDNi_6_lT6g_ld7xmfHtm1BR_aA/s1536/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1097" data-original-width="1536" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguvVq4fcAPVLwQP1wV-BX_JjcEFaSilBgbBezF3KTVfafkWybsXRfjU6GqiFzdWVWY8Mreyvf3RUB_cBlVJhMEcgvG5Kgs9YWN3v5oPfJ2ssXHNK5Y2ctW1PdyV_TJa42vuKfMfosSr0sn_W7SxvIxCcNzAlGYDNi_6_lT6g_ld7xmfHtm1BR_aA/w400-h286/1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Fractures in the Regime</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Cleomenes, <a href="https://americanmind.org/salvo/fractures-in-the-regime/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Daily%20Test&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=287029669&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8LNRd-y6ywfoUvD4Sw6JmGU6ldX38DoZP8GuioBcuuZpDnu1TcjKUQfKByZjQbSHBGxZ-V7TCgSH4mRxEkVQM5mvwzpQ&utm_content=287029669&utm_source=hs_email">American Mind </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The fringes are fraying.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The late Angelo Codevilla identified the American ruling class as a wealthy oligarchy whose power depends upon its “intersectional” clients. For most of the oligarchy, the ends of rule are wealth and affirmation of superiority over the people, but the intersectionals—inspired by resentment and identity politics—are driven by hatred and fevered dreams of revenge. The oligarchs—wealthier, whiter, and older—have created a monster which they cannot, in the end, control; without their clients, however, the oligarchs’ own rule would be vulnerable to a republican counteroffensive. The waxing hate and boldness of the intersectionals threaten to push the oligarchical revolution in directions unpalatable to its Directory. “Most ruling class notables,” explained Codevilla in these pages, “would prefer to suppress the deplorables while minimizing disruption of the economy and avoiding violence…but for the intersectionals…vengeance is electoral victory’s foremost prerogative. Determined as the chiefs may be that the intersectional tail must not wag the revolutionary dog, the fact is that each and every part of the intersectional coalition sees itself as the dog.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Codevilla, following Thucydides, was certain about the overall logic of our oligarchical revolution from above, even if he could not foresee which event would precipitate a clash between the oligarchs and their clients on the Left, on the one hand, and republicans and the Right on the other. While accurately noting the vulnerability of the oligarchs to their clients’ passions, he perhaps underestimated the potential cracks within the oligarchy itself.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is now clear that the intersectionals have turned upon a subset of the oligarchy, and that the oligarchy is fragmenting in the face of an ancient passion—hatred of the Jewish people. This development presents an opportunity for the Right which it should not squander. While certainly not fatal to the oligarchy, rampant antisemitism on the Left—or even indifference to it—will partially delegitimize the intersectionals, disorient and unbalance the regime, and open up hitherto inaccessible resources and talented recruits for what is currently the weaker party: the republican, patriotic Right.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Since Hamas’s atrocities, the masks, such as they were, have dropped. Something new and monstrous has grown within America and now fully revealed itself. Never before, in all our foreign wars, domestic strife, and political conflicts, have Americans ever celebrated and applauded such depravity. Twentieth century American war propaganda as promulgated by the intellectual elite certainly never went to such lengths as suggesting that mutilating children, raping young girls, and kidnapping the elderly was something to applaud or take pleasure in. It is now clear that a not insignificant portion of elite American youth is thoroughly depraved, corrupted by teachers, and supported by politicians and bureaucrats of equal depravity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">And this is just the beginning. There is no logical end point to the intersectionals’ depravity and viciousness, and Jewish Americans are not their final or even primary target. Lincoln and the Republicans understood that once the principle of slavery was admitted as justifiable on any basis, then no person—of any color—could ever be safe. The same logic applies to the intersectionals and their theory of “decolonization.” If it is acceptable to rape, mutilate, kidnap, and murder women, children, and the helpless elderly because of the sins of their ancestors, then no one, anywhere in this country, will ever be safe again (including the intersectionals themselves).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">By not only celebrating Hamas’s depravity in Israel but also treating American Jews as enemies, the intersectionals have clarified, despite their semantics and half-hearted dissimulations, their intentions toward their Jewish allies in both the Democratic Party and the broader Left. This was a strategic error, but unavoidable given the logic of intersectional vengeance. Any Jewish Democrat or leftist who denies the justice of the annihilation of the Jewish people in Israel will be treated by the intersectionals as an enemy and subject, depending upon the extent of intersectional power, to the same treatment. And, given how these matters invariably progress, the intersectionals won’t be satisfied with their Jewish allies’ mere silence, or apprehensive acceptance of the Left’s plans to solve the Jewish problem in Israel. To remain allies, Jewish Democrats and leftists will be coerced into positively affirming the destruction of the Jewish Israelis as a positive good. Anything less will be treated as evidence of bad faith and a lingering objection to the methods and goals of decolonization, and such Jews will be treated as enemies and traitors.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Indeed, while many liberal Jewish Americans, and particularly Jewish progressives, are shocked at the Left’s joining with the Islamists, they should not be so surprised. The totalitarian Left has a long history of this. Stalin, of course, purged his Jewish fellow party members and removed most Jews from public office—the purges were, in part but certainly not exclusively, a pogrom. After the war, the Polish and Czechoslovakian Communist parties purged high-ranking Jewish members, and also dismissed Jewish army officers and other officials, despite decades of “friendship” and ideological alliance. The reasons for these purges were complex, but no demonstration of loyalty, no prior service in peace or war, no renunciation of any identity or faith separate from the party was sufficient to save them from betrayal and expulsion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Unaware of this history, or deluded about its implications, some Jewish intersectionals will cling ever more tightly, and commit themselves ever more fervently, to the feverish dreams of their party. Their (futile) hope is that by breaking all remaining ties, internally as well as externally, with their burdensome heritage, they will be fully accepted and safe amongst their intersectional comrades. Some Jewish Democrats, so long as they are able, will remain silent and hope that the storm clouds pass, or magically fade away. But others, in the Democratic Party and even among the intersectionals, will face the facts of life and draw the obvious conclusion: the party and the dominant intersectional factions are turning against Jewish Americans, this hostility by its very logic will intensify, and self-renunciation would be both ignoble and fail to provide any guarantee of safety. They will consider the new Democratic Party and its clients as an increasingly dangerous enemy, and act accordingly.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">What of the Jewish members of the political ruling class? Aware of the hostility of their clients, some will hope for the best and continue to support the policies of the oligarchy as a whole, even as it brings them into greater danger. But others are already taking action against the intersectionals, and therefore, by definition, are beginning to oppose the logic of the ruling regime. As Curtis Yarvin, Michael Anton, and others have deduced, the oligarchical ruling class is an alliance between plutocrats and multinational corporations on the one hand, and the intellectual and bureaucratic elite in the universities, government, media, and foundations on the other. So far, the plutocrats and corporations have proven resistant to the siren call of “decolonization.” However, there is clearly a significant faction within the bureaucratic and intellectual elite which supports the decolonization of Israel (and logically, therefore, decolonization at home), and another faction which is indifferent, so long as their own interests are untouched. Just as Jewish intersectionals will come under increasing pressure, so will Jewish members of the ruling class- particularly, and increasingly, within the universities, media, and “cathedral” as a whole. And as the universities are the gateway to ruling class membership, those Jewish children of the economic and corporate elite will also come under pressure. Again, some will renounce their heritage, and others will try to adapt themselves to the new dispensation of power. But many Jewish members of the current oligarchy, and their children, will begin to see it as an enemy, and seek out new allies and new ways of thinking.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Following Gramsci, the Left has been marching through the institutions for the past 60 years. Many have been fully captured. Tactically, though, the Left’s actions are increasingly Maoist. Mao asserted that insurgents must utilize violence at every stage of the insurgency, but the violence must be carefully calibrated and appropriate to each stage. Violence and politics together open up opportunities for resource mobilization and the formation of a “counter-state,” which could eventually challenge and absorb the heretofore hostile or neutral state. Of the two, Mao believed that politics was more important than violence. Above all, the insurgency would succeed or fail depending upon the appeal of “the cause.” In fact, most insurgencies fail because their cause is not broad enough, and the insurgents begin to indulge in violence for its own sake.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">What of the Right? It too has its factions. Some are the mirror image of their intersectional enemies. Not all are patriotic, and, for understandable reasons, many have lost faith in the republic. Codevilla himself—who clearly loved the republic—argued that it has been irretrievably lost, and that we must soberly consider what will come after its demise. Michael Anton has considered, without applauding, the rise of a Caesar to reimpose order on a corrupt oligarchy. The “Catholic integralists” hope for a state-imposed rebirth of virtue, such that the people might be lifted out of their corrupt lassitude. The future is opaque, but perhaps more complex, unstable, and dynamic than expected. The cracks within the oligarchy and amongst its clients portend further strife and a weaker regime, sooner than many had supposed. One point is clear: in order to exploit these weaknesses, the Right’s nationalist cause must appeal to and offer something to all Americans, rather than merely reflect the hatreds of the intersectional Left. What that cause might look like in reality is currently unclear. But once it is properly developed, it will find new opportunities for mobilizing recruits and resources against the prevailing regime.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Cleomenes is a writer in the United States.</i></span></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-42573977216265839412023-12-16T06:52:00.000-08:002023-12-16T06:52:26.238-08:00ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiinqBe2pNOlltrgRGqyEqX8IZCifLfMuaHkKXpKcsox5coi6lCRAUYRHC4bxW6yIlbEPrTmfuMqp5QFZSxXYGeEnT3cs6cr5O1UwiaeuGmklusFYGlMmv8si6wuMNUU9SFqBVF9Np0B7xpHB3HXUPTMzwxKylXEbrhD56tnqT41-hCyuwrNJYQSw/s500/getting-personal-with-on-device-ai.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="294" data-original-width="500" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiinqBe2pNOlltrgRGqyEqX8IZCifLfMuaHkKXpKcsox5coi6lCRAUYRHC4bxW6yIlbEPrTmfuMqp5QFZSxXYGeEnT3cs6cr5O1UwiaeuGmklusFYGlMmv8si6wuMNUU9SFqBVF9Np0B7xpHB3HXUPTMzwxKylXEbrhD56tnqT41-hCyuwrNJYQSw/w400-h235/getting-personal-with-on-device-ai.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Joseph Sullivan, Harbinger Sentinel</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Think about it.... "Artificial Intelligence".... We're not talking about human intelligence in a non-oxymoronic way.... "Human Intelligence" can be defined as the end-product of all human life-experience - running the gamut from the pursuit of basic-survival to the conquest of space itself. Human Intelligence can come from the basic instincts we possess and beyond to observation, analysis and acceptance of what we perceive to be "REAL". Ultimately, our "perceptions" may be faulty at times, but our application of "logic" brings us to a "reasonable conclusion" about those observations, analyses and our acceptance of them - right or wrong...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Human evolution has essentially followed this process of "Human Intelligence" which allows us (among MANY other things) to differentiate between "apples and oranges"...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">BUT THAT'S ALL ABOUT TO CHANGE...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Humanity is now poised to cede the processes that manage "data" (information) and reach conclusions about it through filters that vary with each application. The human "data processor" can tip-the-scale to produce the result they want-like-prefer... simply by adjusting the parameters...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We now have cameras that can use "artificial intelligence" to add or remove images from a photograph.... If you want to make yourself look better (or make someone look worse) you can do that with a couple of clicks...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">We are now about to start living in a world where photographs will show us things that simply did not take place.... We will soon be presented with "studies" and "reports" that tell us things that are simply not true...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The "Information Age" in which none of us can gather and absorb enough "truthful information" to form solid, reliable conclusions will soon be overtaken by "new realities" of "altered states of information"...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">"ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE" is MADNESS! It is the GENIE that should NEVER be released.... It cannot be CONTAINED.... It WILL NOT be "governable" through legislation. It will be like the worst of the "internet" on steroids!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">If you believe that concepts like "fake news"; "stolen elections"; "lying governments"; "lying politicians"; "currency collapses"; "star-wars from space", etc., are fundamentally "BAD" for humanity - then imagine ANY or ALL of these managed by "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE".</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">PS.... If I sound like a "cranky old bastard" who rejects what he cannot control - that's because I am one...</span></p>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17979872.post-17970754914521724632023-12-15T12:35:00.000-08:002023-12-15T13:40:33.635-08:00The Mexican Border: Disaster Of “911” Proportions<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_tZb7Ok_oAL6wkl96yH6iQXjGNi9axOM8ixX8oSv-AL6Qlav8ndm8mZwh4ZZYvlGihCZr8dYIOKS8HeutE0DccIzmlZdH6UTIvZhsI90Kuh4_kXUe5UVw08BFKwv92DvQmTU0bEv6knIv2y-WhR3Mua8RS7AI1EALuVUMJap3xHXLmvao3Q2iZg/s1280/20231111_IRP001.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_tZb7Ok_oAL6wkl96yH6iQXjGNi9axOM8ixX8oSv-AL6Qlav8ndm8mZwh4ZZYvlGihCZr8dYIOKS8HeutE0DccIzmlZdH6UTIvZhsI90Kuh4_kXUe5UVw08BFKwv92DvQmTU0bEv6knIv2y-WhR3Mua8RS7AI1EALuVUMJap3xHXLmvao3Q2iZg/w400-h225/20231111_IRP001.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">The Mexican Border: Experts Call It A Disaster Of “911” Proportions</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Please read added piece at the bottom...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">John Grimaldi, <a href="https://amac.us/newsline/press-release/the-mexican-border-experts-call-it-a-disaster-of-911-proportions/?utm_objective=website_traffic&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=amac&utm_medium=daily_news_pm&utm_content=tmb121523&dderh=6dbe9411c3337c6aab85cea00c9b3768">Association of Mature American Citizens </a></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tom Homan, former Acting Director of ICE, and Jaeson Jones, former Captain with the Texas Department of Public Safety, are veterans when it comes to the Mexican border and the dangers of the Biden administration’s lackadaisical approach to border security that has created what they call a humanitarian crisis. They played important roles under President Donald Trump’s successful efforts to secure America’s back door; they created the website Border 911 after President Biden opened that door to the world’s most desperate illegal migrants. As they put it in a recent interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens and host of AMAC’s Better For America podcast, “We’re witnessing the largest U.S. intelligence failure since 911.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">As Jones revealed, “the Biden administration opened our borders not only to Mexico but to the world and the cartels saw a massive gap and said to themselves, we can truly treat people as a commodity. Back in the day, it was about $100 to cross the river. Today, if you are a Mexican citizen, it costs about $2,500. And, if you’re Central Americans, it’ll cost you $3,000, if you are Chinese, it’s $5,000 and if you’re Russian or Middle Eastern, it is $9,000 to cross the river in south Texas.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Homan noted that he “worked for six presidents. Every president I worked for took steps to help secure the border because every president understood you can’t have national security unless you’ve got border security. Every president, even Clinton Obama took steps to secure the border. But, of course, no one did more than President Trump. But Joe Biden is the first president in United States history who unsecured the border. Since he took the White House we’ve had over 360,000 children come across that border. This administration released them to so-called sponsors that they supposedly vetted. They can’t find nearly 100,000 of those children. They released them to sponsors. Now they lost track, and they can’t find them. Based on my 34 years of experience in numerous child trafficking investigations that I have conducted, many of those children right now are living with pedophiles, they’re in pornographic movies. These children are living a life of hell because this administration refused to secure the border. We gave them a game plan for how to do it. They have the Trump policy. All they have to do is to put the Mexico program back in place. But because they have this open border, they refuse to do anything to slow the flow. In the last two months, ICE has opened up three different investigations where they found children in forced labor. These children live a life of hell. And while you and I and Jaeson are talking here right now, while we’re talking, women are being raped by the criminal cartels, they are being sexually assaulted numerous times. And a child is going to die on the border. So, this isn’t just talking points. People need to understand what’s happening right now. Children are going to die, children are being sexually assaulted. So, this is the biggest humanitarian crisis this country has ever seen.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">So, who is orchestrating this bloody drama? Homan says it’s criminal entities such as the Los Zetas cartel. “It’s one of the most hyper-violent cartels in Mexico. I worked the 72 migrants massacre in San Fernando [Mexico] in which 300 men, women, and children were cut into pieces by Los Zetas. They had gone far beyond organized crime and the terrorist acts that they were committing were going to come here because we began seeing it with beheadings in the United States. Our national incident based reporting system and the Uniform Crime Report, under the FBI, did not capture transnational crime at the time. until it was already impacting our citizens. The United States government, Mexico, and a global coalition of partners leveraging what we call the unified command, can collaborate, we can absolutely crush them. We know what we have to do. But I will tell you right now, if we continue to use a 60-year-old, failed model of a law enforcement investigative model, we will never fix this problem.” </span></p><p><br /></p><p><i>John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.</i></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">YouTube video... <a href="https://youtu.be/waFCLRIZ5k8?feature=shared">https://youtu.be/waFCLRIZ5k8?feature=shared</a></span></p><div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>This next section was written today from a friend who is in Chiapas, MX... he is responding to my email, he is there to help mainly the children that are caught up in this disaster.</i></div><div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>"It is truly a disaster. </i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>Breaks my heart. </i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>Another caravan left today of about 300 people. </i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>Some guy gave a speech. An organizer. At one point the crowd cheered like an invading army.</i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>It is an opportunity for the church to win souls. It is a catastrophe for the country. It has also created opportunities for crimes of violence and robbery by those that prey on the weak. </i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>Our current administration is guilty of crimes against humanity. That is not hyperbole. They should be stripped from office and hung by the neck until dead. </i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>I recorded several minutes from yesterday’s preparation and today’s going forth. </i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>I cannot express it enough. </i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>I suspect that the organizers are communists. Their goal is to populate the USA with worker-bees who look to the government for handouts. The masses will be happy serving the collective. </i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>*rage!*</i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>PARTY ICE BREAKER</i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>Tell us one thing that people don’t know about you. </i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>Ok</i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>“I abhor communists. I despise them. The CCP should be outlawed. Leftists should be driven from office. Their property should be seized and they should be expelled from the country.”</i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px;"><i>But other than that I’m sure they’re nice people. 🤦♂️ "</i></div>Desertmoonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07527668064478565191noreply@blogger.com