What We Really Need Is a 'Domestic Threat Assessment'

What We Really Need Is a 'Domestic Threat Assessment'
Frank Miele, RealClear Politics


One of the more foolish things the government of the United States does is invite senior members of the national intelligence community to testify publicly before Congress in a so-called “unclassified” worldwide threat assessment.

It is foolish for the simple reason that information, like money, is fungible. Once shared it cannot be contained for one purpose only. The idea that the possessors of classified intelligence can disclose unclassified intelligence without reference to that classified material is naive, which not surprisingly is also the word that President Trump used to describe his intelligence chiefs following their appearance before a Senate committee last week.

In their testimony, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, FBI Director Chris Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel went out of their way to undercut the president’s policies on Iran, Russia, China, North Korea and Afghanistan, which are among the most important foreign hotspots. Who exactly does that benefit? Certainly not the president whom they serve.

The takeaway, according to the headline atop a Washington Times report, was that the “Intelligence chiefs’ ‘threat assessment’ refutes Trump assertions.” You would probably get similar headlines from almost every news organization, but as a former copy editor, let me begin with a correction. To “refute” is to prove something wrong. That didn’t happen. What we got was not evidence that President Trump is wrong, but rather opinions that disagreed with his. Of course, it is not surprising that the national media don’t know the difference. Most of the media elites believe that whenever they open their mouth, they have disproven Trump by fiat. Numquam Trumpus.

It is unfortunate that members of the president’s own administration believe the same thing, but it is by their words and actions that we have fortuitously come to realize there is something called the Deep State — an establishmentarian clique of permanent bureaucrats who run the government to promote the interests of themselves and their allies rather than the American people.

Therefore, when Director Coats publicly disagreed with the president he serves, it behooves us to ask hard questions about Coats and whom he benefits by undermining President Trump. When Coats says North Korea won’t give up nuclear weapons, isn’t he giving comfort to the enemy? When he claims that Iran is abiding by the 2015 nuclear deal, isn’t he giving cover to the most dangerous nation in the Middle East? When he worries that ISIS is “intent on resurging,” does he really think the president doesn’t know that? But more importantly, does Coats think that we should give ISIS control of our foreign policy? Are we to remain in Syria forever because we have a sworn enemy there?

These questions are not rhetorical. They raise the serious issue of whether U.S. intelligence agencies owe their loyalty to the U.S. president. You can make the case that they owe their allegiance to the Constitution, but according to the Constitution that is the same thing. As members of the executive branch, they are subordinate to the president and serve his foreign policy. We have one president at a time, and the intelligence chiefs serve him, not the other way around. If they don’t understand that, then they are part of the problem — part of the threat, so to speak, to our Constitution.

Which brings me, in a roundabout manner, to my proposal for a domestic threat assessment. Considering the forces arrayed against the president and the American people, this seems to be much more imperative than a worldwide threat assessment. I won’t try to prioritize the threats, but certainly the intelligence agencies are near the top of the list. Since at least 2005, they have pooh-poohed the Iranian nuclear threat by totally misjudging the evidence. As I wrote in 2007, “If global geopolitics were a television sitcom, then the government of the United States would be Boss Hogg, and Mahmoud and the gang in Tehran would be the Dukes of Hazzard. We may have more money and power, but them Duke boys always seem to get the last laugh.”

Add to their general incompetence (remember the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?) the open war that the intelligence agencies have waged against President Trump in the politically motivated Russia hoax, and you would certainly be justified in thinking that they represent the greatest internal threat to our republic, but there are others that need to be considered, too.

Oh, wait — I’m not done with the “intelligence” agencies yet! I could not move on without talking about the FBI’s outrageous early-morning armed assault against Roger Stone and his wife just over a week ago. As many as 27 armed federal agents, 17 SUVs, two armored vehicles and two amphibious assault vehicles surrounded Stone’s Florida home to arrest the 66-year-old raconteur and political provocateur on charges of — wait for it! — lying to Congress. Heck, why should only Congress get to lie with impunity? To make matters worse, there is every reason to believe the FBI tipped off CNN, so the blatantly anti-Trump news channel could have a camera crew on hand to record the Gestapo-like assault. Probably not what J. Edgar Hoover had in mind when he wrote about “The Enemy Within,” but, yes, I definitely think the FBI deserves its very own spot on the list of domestic threats.

Next up has to be the Opposition Party. No, not the Democrats, but rather the mainstream media, which have set themselves up as defenders of the republic against the dangers of traditional morality, religion and legislation. The recent BuzzFeed debacle and the Covington Catholic fiasco were just the latest examples of the national media working overtime to gin up controversy and throw shade on conservatives. If police were known to be planting evidence and slanting testimony as freely as the mainstream media do, then no one could ever be legitimately convicted of anything north of jaywalking. If Thomas Jefferson could say in 1807, “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” then what would he make of the nonstop spin of 24/7 cable news? Turning moral arbitration over to celebrity journalists may prove to be the single greatest mistake in the history of liberty.

Or maybe not. Perhaps even more foolish was turning over control of our privacy, our information and our society to private companies that are completely unregulated. Yes, I’m talking about the FAANG that is ripping the heart out of not just America, but the world. That’s Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, in case you didn’t know. You can take your pick of which one is most dangerous, but it’s not Russians manipulating these social media and tech giants that should scare you — it’s the progressive billionaires who believe they are qualified to steer us like cattle to our final destination in the slaughterhouse. Whether it’s Google’s “get out the vote” campaign for Hillary Clinton or the shadow banning of conservatives on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, these nearly omniscient entities had better be stopped before they become omnipotent, too.

Of course, we could list the dangers from a variety of policies supported by mainstream politicians that are generally subsumed under the heading “socialism” or “communism,” which by the way was the real “Enemy Within” that FBI Director Hoover singled out for our attention. Those socialistic tendencies are certainly a serious threat to the republic, but oddly enough they pale beside those listed above.

Sen. Chuck Schumer tweeted last week that “[i]t’s past time for U.S. Intelligence Community leaders to stage an intervention with Donald J. Trump.” That’s a sad commentary on the senator’s confidence in the American people who elected President Trump. As for those of us who did so, we are hoping for an intervention as well, but of a different kind entirely. What we pray for is a divine intervention to awaken Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, members of the press, the intelligence community and the tech billionaires to the danger they are putting the nation in by working constantly to undermine the president’s authority and thus weaken the fabric of our fragile republic. To quote an oath that Democrats were said to want to do away with: “So help us God.”

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His "Why We Needed Trump" trilogy is available at Amazon. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to comment on this column or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter @HeartlandDiary.

Escaping Our Ship of Fools

Escaping Our Ship of Fools

Mark Pulliam, Law & Liberty

I generally avoid books written by radio or TV hosts. They are typically slap-dash efforts—often dictated or ghost-written, padded, and calculated to cash in on sales to an uncritical fan base. Accordingly, even though I regularly watch, and enjoy, Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, I did not have high expectations for his recent book, Ship of Fools, which I received as a birthday present. Upon reading the book, however, I was favorably surprised by the high quality of Ship of Fools (subtitled, How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution), which is engagingly written in his distinctive voice and presents a cogent stream of insights into our present predicament. I was impressed enough to recommend it.

Ships of Fools is selling well (debuting as #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list) for a reason: Carlson offers a fresh perspective on the cultural divide—the ruling class versus ordinary Americans—that characterizes the Age of Trump. Unlike most of his inside-the-Beltway media colleagues, Carlson is an unapologetic populist. Even though he grew up in affluent La Jolla, California, attended an elite boarding school followed by Trinity College, and now lives in uber-Establishment Washington, D.C., Carlson relates to the now-beleaguered American middle class in a way that most conservative intellectuals do not—with empathy rather than condescension or contempt.

In contrast to Charles Murray’s 2012 book Coming Apart, which mines a similar theme, Carlson’s Ship of Fools is not a scholarly work; it is, instead, a rollicking polemic, albeit one directed at a well-informed reader. The book has no footnotes, index, appendix, or bibliography. Yet this slim (241 pages of text), well-researched volume explains the election of Donald Trump (“a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class…, a howl of rage”) and the decades of feckless leadership—by “lawmakers, journalists, and business chieftains”—that led up to it. Carlson’s premise is that since the dawn of the 21st century an ad hoc coalition of elites, on both sides of the aisle, have sabotaged America’s middle class through a combination of free trade, mass immigration (legal and illegal), and growing economic stratification in the form of income inequality and corporate concentration.

Carlson is not alone in exploring this dichotomy. Patrick Deneen (whom Carlson quotes in his book), the traditionalist author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018), provoked an extended dialogue concerning whether our post-Enlightenment institutions are succeeding in their mission—and what, exactly, that mission is. Jonah Goldberg, author of the widely-reviewed Suicide of the West (2018), emerged as a spokesman for untempered global capitalism, dismissing its critics as ungrateful tribalists. This binary view of 21st century life, bordering on Manichean, is very polarizing. Carlson explores a middle ground, similar to the one advocated by Frank Buckley (The Republican Workers Party) and Oren Cass (The Once and Future Worker), that focuses on preserving America’s middle class. Only recently did the American dream of upward mobility and the goal of secure blue collar employment become disfavored in conservative circles—a development Carlson laments.

Unlike Buckley and Cass, the non-wonkish Carlson is more descriptive than prescriptive, so Ship of Fools offers few concrete solutions. Call it an emergency flare from a ship in distress. In Carlson’s telling, the Left pushes open borders and “diversity” to promote identity politics and swell the ranks of Democratic voters; Big Business, long the patron of the Republican Party, prizes cheap labor and global markets for financial reasons. The “winners” in this game are largely insulated from the consequences of their policies; they live in exclusive enclaves, have access to private schools, and through caste-like networks and nepotism often manage to place their children in elite colleges and lucrative jobs. Members of the ruling class, Carlson suggests, “view America the way a private equity firm sizes up an aging industrial conglomerate: as something outdated they can profit from. When it fails, they’re gone.”

By 2016, America’s bourgeoisie had grown tired of being ignored—or worse, discarded as useless. Trump campaigned for their votes in the heartland, and got them. Carlson argues that the political struggle today is no longer ideological—left versus right—but “between those who benefit from the status quo, and those who don’t.” He notes that this divide is “rarely acknowledged in public, which is convenient for those who are benefiting.” The book’s overarching metaphor is that our leaders “are fools, unaware that they are captains of a sinking ship.” The out-of-touch elites depicted on Ship of Fool’s cover—haplessly guiding the vessel over a waterfall—include tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the Clintons, Mitch McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi—all equally oblivious to the fate of the passengers.

Carlson has been accused of espousing anti-business or even anti-free market rhetoric, but he views himself as a promoter of the public good—a champion of the national interest. What does it say about our “conservative” media that many pundits support trade and immigration policies that decimate America’s middle class? Critics may accuse Carlson of hyperbole when he claims that our leaders increasingly “fantasize about replacing Americans who live here, with their antiquated attitudes and seemingly intractable problems, with a new population of more pliant immigrants,” but Bill Kristol, founder and long-time editor of the now-defunct The Weekly Standard, made precisely such a proclamation.  Others on the right have made similar disparaging statements about struggling natives (e.g., here, here, and here). Is it possible to love America without loving the Americans who live here? Sneering disdain for the plight of blue-collar workers displaced by the loss of manufacturing jobs reflects class bias, not shared civic fabric.
   
Carlson does not propose to abandon the free market system. Nor does he consider it sacrosanct. Rather, he urges our leaders (especially but not only our elected representatives) to consider more carefully the consequences of their actions, with the interests and well-being of ordinary Americans in mind. This extends to tax laws, trade deals, government regulations, immigration rules, and even economic policies. In his controversial January 2, 2019 monologue (covered on L&L here and here), Carlson declared that “culture and economics are inseparably intertwined.” He further asserted that “not all commerce is good,” citing usurious payday lending. These are fighting words for doctrinaire free market advocates, but Carlson prizes desirable policy outcomes over sterile doctrine. Carlson pulled no punches when he declared that “Market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You have to be a fool to worship it. We do not exist to serve markets; just the opposite.” Carlson’s provocative monologue, which went beyond the scope of his book, raises many questions—which is his goal. He seeks to begin a national conversation not wedded to conventional—and, in his estimation, failed—nostrums.

In the seven substantive chapters of Ship of Fools, Carlson skewers a host of deserving targets, including Silicon Valley plutocrats, “gig economy” groupies, the Clinton Dynasty, open borders apologists, neoconservatives (Max Boot and Bill Kristol in particular), the censors and intolerant authoritarians running our elite institutions (e.g., Google, higher education, cable media), the diversity bureaucracy and its postmodern religion of identity politics, Ta-Nehisi Coates, new wave feminists, the transgender movement, faux environmentalists who fly to climate change summits on private jets, and many more. Carlson’s take-downs are bracing and often wickedly funny. I have to admit that I read many passages in Ship of Fools with a smile on my face.

But Carlson has a serious point: How should the nation’s various maladies be addressed by our political system? Whose interests should the ruling class promote? Carlson believes in democracy, and contends that the public is entitled to be dissatisfied at the way the country is being run, including economic policies that disfavor family formation. Carlson is a champion of populism. The epilogue to Ship of Fools contains this pungent passage: 

A relatively small number of people make the overwhelming majority of significant cultural and economic decisions. Wars are fought, populations shift, the rules of commerce change, all without reference to what the bulk of the population thinks or wants.

The election of 2016 was a sign of discontent—even mutiny—aboard the ship of fools. Carlson proposes to navigate in a different direction, but provides few specific details. How the voyage, now underway, will end remains uncertain.

Mark Pulliam is a contributing editor of Law and Liberty.

Washington DC congressional representation

Washington DC congressional representation

Col Mike Walker, USMC (ret)

So there is another round of silly and inane baloney about poor Washington DC residents not getting full representation in Congress.

The solution already exists.

Washington DC began as a square (10 miles by 10 miles) that was turned into the federal District of Columbia by nature of being the capital of the United States.

If was formed from little pieces of Virginia and Maryland.

As a federal district representing the entire nation, anyone who chose to live there would not be part of a state and therefore gave up the right reserved for state residents to be represented in Congress.

After the Civil War, Virginia took back its piece and all the former resident of the district were again citizens of Virginia and regained their right to vote for representation in the House and Senate.

So now the Maryland section of the district apparently wants representation in Congress.

Fine! wonderful!

Follow the precedent. Follow the procedure the Virginia slice of the district adhered to.

What now exists as the rump of the federal District of Columbia was formed from minor pieces of Montgomery and Prince George's counties in Maryland.

If the people who live in the district want representation then do what the former district citizens from the Virginia section did:

Rejoin your home state!

Rejoin Maryland just like the other folks rejoined Virginia.

Let the two little pieces of land go back to Montgomery and Prince George's counties.

Incorporate Washington as the newest grand city of the state of Maryland.

Problem solved!

Yes, Venezuela Is a Socialist Catastrophe

Yes, Venezuela Is a Socialist Catastrophe
Bret Stephans, New York Times

Conspicuous by its relative absence in much of the mainstream news coverage of Venezuela’s political crisis is the word “socialism.” Yes, every sensible observer agrees that Latin America’s once-richest country, sitting atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, is an economic basket case, a humanitarian disaster, and a dictatorship whose demise cannot come soon enough.

But … socialist? Perish the thought.

Or so goes a line of argument that insists socialism’s good name shouldn’t be tarred by the results of experience. On Venezuela, what you’re likelier to read is that the crisis is the product of corruption, cronyism, populism, authoritarianism, resource-dependency, U.S. sanctions and trickery, even the residues of capitalism itself. Just don’t mention the S-word because, you know, it’s working really well in Denmark.

Curiously, that’s not how the Venezuelan regime’s admirers used to speak of “21st century socialism,” as it was dubbed by Hugo Chávez. The late Venezuelan president, said Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, “showed us there is a different and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism, it’s called social justice, and it’s something that Venezuela has made a big step toward.” Noam Chomsky was similarly enthusiastic when he praised Chávez in 2009. “What’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela,” the linguist said, is that “I can see how a better world is being created and can speak to the person who’s inspired it.”

Nor were many of the Chávez’s admirers overly worried about his regime’s darker sides. Chomsky walked back some of his praise as Venezuela became more overtly dictatorial, but others on the left weren’t as squeamish. In a lengthy obituary in The Nation, New York University professor Greg Grandin opined, “the biggest problem Venezuela faced during his rule was not that Chávez was authoritarian but that he wasn’t authoritarian enough.”

At least Grandin could implicitly concede that socialism ultimately requires coercion to achieve its political aims; otherwise, it’s human nature for people to find loopholes and workarounds to keep as much of their property as they can.

That’s more than can be said for some of Chávez’s erstwhile defenders, who would prefer to forget just how closely Venezuela followed the orthodox socialist script. Government spending on social programs? Check: From 2000 to 2013, spending rose to 40 percent of G.D.P., from 28 percent. Raising the minimum wage? Check. Nicolás Maduro, the current president, raised it no fewer than six times last year (though it makes no difference in the face of hyperinflation). An economy based on co-ops, not corporations? Check again. As Naomi Klein wrote in her fawning 2007 book, “The Shock Doctrine,” “Chávez has made the co-ops a top political priority … By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 cooperatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers.”

And, lest we forget, all of this was done as Chávez won one election after another during the oil-boom years. Indeed, one of the chief selling points of the Chavismo to its Western fans wasn’t just that it was an example of socialism, but of democratic socialism, too.

If the policy prescriptions were familiar, the consequences were predictable.

Government overspending created catastrophic deficits when oil prices plummeted. Worker co-ops wound up in the hands of incompetent and corrupt political cronies. The government responded to its budgetary problems by printing money, leading to inflation. Inflation led to price controls, leading to shortages. Shortages led to protests, leading to repression and the destruction of democracy. Thence to widespread starvation, critical medical shortages, an explosion in crime, and a refugee crisis to rival Syria’s.

All of this used to be obvious enough, but in the age of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez it has to be explained all over again. Why does socialism never work? Because, as Margaret Thatcher explained, “eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

What now? The Trump administration took exactly the right step in recognizing National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s constitutionally legitimate president. It can bolster his personal security by warning Venezuela’s generals that harm will come to them if harm comes to him. It can enhance his political standing by providing access to funds that can help him establish an alternative government and entice wavering figures in the Maduro camp to switch sides. It can put Venezuela on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and warn Cuba that it will be returned to the list if it continues to aid Caracas’s intelligence apparatus.

And it can help arrange legal immunity and a plane for Maduro, his family, and other leading members of the regime if they will agree to resign now. Surely there’s a compound in Havana where that gang can live out their days without tyrannizing a nation.

In the meantime, the larger lesson of Venezuela’s catastrophe should be learned. Twenty years of socialism, cheered by Corbyn, Klein, Chomsky and Co., led to the ruin of a nation. They may not be much embarrassed, much less personally harmed, by what they helped do. It’s for the rest of us to take care that it never be done to us.

The Ayatollah Empire Is Rotting Away

The Ayatollah Empire Is Rotting Away

Edward N. Luttwak, The Tablet 

Regime clerics steal everything, including the pistachio nuts

Ronald Reagan, who outraged the Washington elite and frightened European leaders by flatly refusing coexistence with the Soviet Union, lived to see its sudden decline and fall. There is a fair chance that Donald Trump, who contradicts Barack Obama and Europe’s leaders by refusing coexistence with Iran’s ayatollah empire, will also have the satisfaction of seeing the dissolution of a regime that Obama among many others preferred to accommodate.

Whether or not this past weekend’s mass demonstrations in Iran will spread, whether a second revolution is imminent or not, the numbers for the ayatollah empire just don’t add up. A breakdown is materially inevitable.

With some 80 million people, and with oil accounting for 80 percent of its exports, Iran would need to export some 25 million barrels a day to make a go of it, but it can barely export 2.5 million. That would be luxuriously ample for the likes of Abu Dhabi with fewer than 800,000 citizens, but it is a miserable pittance for Iran, with a population more than 100 times as large.

Iran cannot even match the $6,000 income per capita of Botswana. That most fashionable of safari destinations is a fine and well-governed country to be sure, and far from poor by African standards—but then its citizens are not required to pay for extensive nuclear installations, which are very costly to maintain even in their current semi-frozen state, or for the manufacture of a very broad range of weapons—from small arms to ballistic missiles—for which much expensive tooling is imported daily from the likes of our own dear ally South Korea. Neither is Botswana mounting large-scale military expeditions in support of a foreign dictator at war with 80 percent of his own population or providing generous funding for the world’s largest terrorist organization, Hezbollah, whose cocaine-smuggling networks and local extortion rackets cannot possibly cover tens of thousands of salaries. The ayatollah empire is doing all those things, which means that average Iranians are actually much poorer than their Botswanian counterparts.

You would never know it looking at photographs of Tehran, one more bombastic capital city fattened on intercepted oil revenues and graft, but Iran is dirt poor. I recently saw Iran’s general poverty at first-hand driving through one of Iran’s supposedly more prosperous rural districts. In an improvised small market next to a truck stop, several grown men were selling livestock side by side, namely ducks. Each had a stock of three or four ducks, which looked like their total inventory for the day.

That is what happens in an economy whose gross domestic product computes at under $6,000 per capita: very low productivity, very low incomes. The 500,000 or so Iranians employed in the country’s supposedly modern automobile industry are not productive enough to make exportable cars: Pistachio nuts are the country’s leading export, after oil and petroleum products.

The pistachios bring us directly to Iran’s second problem after not-enough-oil, namely too much thieving by the powerful, including pistachio-orchard-grabbing Akbar Hashemi “Rafsanjani,” former president and a top regime figure for decades.

Akbar Hashemi was not being immodest when he claimed the name of his native Rafsanjan province for himself. He became the owner of much of it as huge tracts of pistachio-growing orchards came into his possession.

His son Mehdi Hashemi is very prominent among the aghazadeh (“noble born”), the sons and daughters of the rulers. He preferred industrial wealth to pistachios, and his name kept coming up in other people’s corruption trials (one in France), until he finally had his own trial, for a mere $100 million or so. But the Rafsanjani clan as a whole took a couple of billion dollars at least.

The Supreme Leader Khamenei himself is not known to have personally stolen anything—he has his official palaces, after all. But his second son, Mojtaba, may have taken as much as $2 billion from the till, while his third son, Massoud, is making do with a mere 400- or 500-hundred million. His youngest son, Maitham, is not living in poverty either, with a couple of hundred million. The ayatollah’s two daughters, Bushra and Huda, each received de-facto dowries in the $100 million range.

This shows that the regime is headed by devoted family men who lovingly look after their many children, for whom only the best will do. It also cuts into the theoretical $6,000 income per Iranian head, because some “heads” are taking a thousand times as much and more.

That is one motive for today’s riots—bitter anger provoked by the regime’s impoverishing and very visible corruption, which extends far, far beyond the children of the top rulers: thousands of clerics are very affluent, starting with their flapping Loro Piana “Tasmania” robes—that’s 3,000 euros of fancy cloth right there.

Much of the economy is owned by bonyads, Islamic foundations that pay modest pensions to war widows and such, and very large amounts to those who run them, mostly clerics and their kin. The largest, the Mostazafan Bonyad, with more than 200,000 employees in some 350 separate companies in everything from farming to tourism, is a very generous employer for its crowds of clerical managers.

That is why the crowds have been shouting insults at the clerics—not all are corrupt, but high-living clerics are common enough to take a big bite out of that theoretical $6,000 per capita.

But the largest cause of popular anger is undoubtedly the pasdaran, a.k.a the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), an altogether more costly lot than the several hundred aghazadeh or tens of thousands of high-living clerics. The IRGC’s tab starts with the trillion dollars or more that the pasdaran-provoked nuclear sanctions cost before the Obama team agreed to lift them and continues with the billions that Iran still loses annually because of the ballistic-missile sanctions that Trump will never lift. Then there are the variable costs of the pasdaran’s imperial adventures, as well as the fixed cost of pasdaran military industries that spend plenty on common weapons as well as on “stealth” fighters and supposedly advanced submarines that exist only in the fantasies of regime propagandists. Pasdaran militarism and imperial adventures are unaffordable luxuries that the demonstrators very clearly want to do without—hence their shouts of “no-Gaza, no-Syria.”

Whatever happens next—and at least this time the White House will not be complicit if it ends in brutal repression—the ayatollah empire cannot last. Even despite Obama’s generous courtship gifts, the Iranian regime cannot just keep going, any more than the USSR could keep going by living off its oil.

So what can be done to accelerate the collapse? Broad economic sanctions are out of the question because they would allow the rulers to blame the Americans for the hardships inflicted by their own imperial adventures. But there is plenty of room for targeted measures against regime figures and their associates—the State Department list of sanctioned individuals is far from long enough, with many more names deserving of the honor. (Iran is not North Korea; it is not hard to find names and assets and to make them public.)

Above all, very much more could be done to impede the pasdaran and their military industries. Many European and Japanese big-name companies are staying away from Iran because the missile and terrorism sanctions persist—and to avoid displeasing the United States. They should. But the South Koreans whom we defend with our own troops totally ignore U.S. interests in regard to Iran and have therefore emerged as the lead suppliers of machinery and tooling for the pasdaran weapon factories. Nor do they hesitate to sell equipment that can be adapted to military use in a minute or less, as in the case of the airfield instrument landing system and portable ILS/VOR signal analyzer that the Korea Airports Corp. has just agreed to supply to Iran’s Tolid Malzomat Bargh.

There is no need to laboriously negotiate a new set of sanctions against Iran—strict, swift, and public enforcement of the restrictions that are already on the books is enough. Every time a South Korean regime-related deal is detected, the offenders need a quick reminder they will be excluded from the United States if they persist. In this, as in everything else, it is just a matter of getting serious in our focus on Iran.

Obama was serious in his courtship of the ayatollahs’ regime. Trump should do the same to bring the regime to an end, faster.

TUCKER CARLSON'S MONOLOGUE.... must read!

TUCKER CARLSON'S MONOLOGUE

Tucker Carlson, Fox Nation  

Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it's infuriating

Newly-elected Utah senator Mitt Romney kicked off 2019 with an op-ed in the Washington Post that savaged Donald Trump’s character and leadership. Romney’s attack and Trump’s response Wednesday morning on Twitter are the latest salvos in a longstanding personal feud between the two men. It’s even possible that Romney is planning to challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020. We’ll see.

But for now, Romney’s piece is fascinating on its own terms. It’s well-worth reading. It’s a window into how the people in charge, in both parties, see our country.

Romney’s main complaint in the piece is that Donald Trump is a mercurial and divisive leader. That’s true, of course. But beneath the personal slights, Romney has a policy critique of Trump. He seems genuinely angry that Trump might pull American troops out of the Syrian civil war. Romney doesn’t explain how staying in Syria would benefit America. He doesn’t appear to consider that a relevant question. More policing in the Middle East is always better. We know that. Virtually everyone in Washington agrees.

Corporate tax cuts are also popular in Washington, and Romney is strongly on board with those, too. His piece throws a rare compliment to Trump for cutting the corporate rate a year ago.

That’s not surprising. Romney spent the bulk of his business career at a firm called Bain Capital. Bain Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: Take over an existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt, extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions. Romney became fantastically rich doing this.

Meanwhile, a remarkable number of the companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the private equity model. Our ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It’s how they run the country.

Mitt Romney refers to unwavering support for a finance-based economy and an internationalist foreign policy as the “mainstream Republican” view. And he’s right about that. For generations, Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars. Modern Democrats generally support those goals enthusiastically.

There are signs, however, that most people do not support this, and not just in America. In countries around the world — France, Brazil, Sweden, the Philippines, Germany, and many others — voters are suddenly backing candidates and ideas that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. These are not isolated events. What you’re watching is entire populations revolting against leaders who refuse to improve their lives.

Something like this has been in happening in our country for three years. Donald Trump rode a surge of popular discontent all the way to the White House. Does he understand the political revolution that he harnessed? Can he reverse the economic and cultural trends that are destroying America? Those are open questions.

But they’re less relevant than we think. At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone, too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter.

The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.

The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared.

But our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.

One of the biggest lies our leaders tell us that you can separate economics from everything else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. Family and faith and culture, meanwhile, those are personal matters. Both parties believe this.

Members of our educated upper-middle-classes are now the backbone of the Democratic Party who usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible and socially moderate. In other words, functionally libertarian. They don’t care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the markets function. Somehow, they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy, or for that matter, the country’s ability to pay its bills. As far as they’re concerned, these are two totally separate categories. 

Social conservatives, meanwhile, come to the debate from the opposite perspective, and yet reach a strikingly similar conclusion. The real problem, you’ll hear them say, is that the American family is collapsing. Nothing can be fixed before we fix that. Yet, like the libertarians they claim to oppose, many social conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct. The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy.

Both sides miss the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined. Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible. You can’t separate the two. It used to be possible to deny this. Not anymore. The evidence is now overwhelming. How do we know? Consider the inner cities.

Thirty years ago, conservatives looked at Detroit or Newark and many other places and were horrified by what they saw. Conventional families had all but disappeared in poor neighborhoods. The majority of children were born out of wedlock. Single mothers were the rule. Crime and drugs and disorder became universal.

What caused this nightmare? Liberals didn’t even want to acknowledge the question. They were benefiting from the disaster, in the form of reliable votes. Conservatives, though, had a ready explanation for inner-city dysfunction and it made sense: big government. Decades of badly-designed social programs had driven fathers from the home and created what conservatives called a “culture of poverty” that trapped people in generational decline.
There was truth in this. But it wasn’t the whole story. How do we know? Because virtually the same thing has happened decades later to an entirely different population. In many ways, rural America now looks a lot like Detroit.

This is striking because rural Americans wouldn’t seem to have much in common with anyone from the inner city. These groups have different cultures, different traditions and political beliefs. Usually they have different skin colors. Rural people are white conservatives, mostly.

Yet, the pathologies of modern rural America are familiar to anyone who visited downtown Baltimore in the 1980s: Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A terrifying drug epidemic. Two different worlds. Similar outcomes. How did this happen? You’d think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. But mostly they’re not. They don’t have to be interested. It’s easier to import foreign labor to take the place of native-born Americans who are slipping behind.

But Republicans now represent rural voters. They ought to be interested. Here’s a big part of the answer: male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry, all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools and the hospitals, both traditional employers of women. In many places, women suddenly made more than men.

Now, before you applaud this as a victory for feminism, consider the effects. Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t. Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births, and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow -- more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.

This isn’t speculation. This is not propaganda from the evangelicals. It’s social science. We know it’s true. Rich people know it best of all. That’s why they get married before they have kids. That model works. But increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in America can afford.

And yet, and here’s the bewildering and infuriating part, those very same affluent married people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the people below them get and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight malaria in Congo. But working to raise men’s wages in Dayton or Detroit? That’s crazy.
This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the crisis in marriage. Our mindless cultural leaders act like it’s still 1961, and the biggest problem American families face is that sexism is preventing millions of housewives from becoming investment bankers or Facebook executives.

For our ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer. They teach us it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook wrote an entire book about this. Sandberg explained that our first duty is to shareholders, above our own children. No surprise there. Sandberg herself is one of America’s biggest shareholders. Propaganda like this has made her rich.

What’s remarkable is how the rest of us responded to it. We didn’t question why Sandberg was saying this. We didn’t laugh in her face at the pure absurdity of it. Our corporate media celebrated Sandberg as the leader of a liberation movement. Her book became a bestseller: "Lean In." As if putting a corporation first is empowerment. It is not. It is bondage. Republicans should say so. 

They should also speak out against the ugliest parts of our financial system. Not all commerce is good. Why is it defensible to loan people money they can’t possibly repay? Or charge them interest that impoverishes them? Payday loan outlets in poor neighborhoods collect 400 percent annual interest.

We’re OK with that? We shouldn’t be. Libertarians tell us that’s how markets work -- consenting adults making voluntary decisions about how to live their lives. OK. But it’s also disgusting. If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s happening in the inner city or on Wall Street.

And by the way, if you really loved your fellow Americans, as our leaders should, if it would break your heart to see them high all the time. Which they are. A huge number of our kids, especially our boys, are smoking weed constantly. You may not realize that, because new technology has made it odorless. But it’s everywhere.

And that’s not an accident. Once our leaders understood they could get rich from marijuana, marijuana became ubiquitous. In many places, tax-hungry politicians have legalized or decriminalized it. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner now lobbies for the marijuana industry. His fellow Republicans seem fine with that. “Oh, but it’s better for you than alcohol,” they tell us.

Maybe. Who cares? Talk about missing the point. Try having dinner with a 19-year-old who’s been smoking weed. The life is gone. Passive, flat, trapped in their own heads. Do you want that for your kids? Of course not. Then why are our leaders pushing it on us? You know the reason. Because they don’t care about us.

When you care about people, you do your best to treat them fairly. Our leaders don’t even try. They hand out jobs and contracts and scholarships and slots at prestigious universities based purely on how we look. There’s nothing less fair than that, though our tax code comes close.

Under our current system, an American who works for a salary pays about twice the tax rate as someone who’s living off inherited money and doesn’t work at all. We tax capital at half of what we tax labor. It’s a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of our rich people do.
In 2010, for example, Mitt Romney made about $22 million dollars in investment income. He paid an effective federal tax rate of 14 percent. For normal upper-middle-class wage earners, the federal tax rate is nearly 40 percent. No wonder Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it’s infuriating.

Our leaders rarely mention any of this. They tell us our multi-tiered tax code is based on the principles of the free market. Please. It’s based on laws that the Congress passed, laws that companies lobbied for in order to increase their economic advantage. It worked well for those people. They did increase their economic advantage. But for everyone else, it came at a big cost. Unfairness is profoundly divisive. When you favor one child over another, your kids don’t hate you. They hate each other.

That happens in countries,  too. It’s happening in ours, probably by design. Divided countries are easier to rule. And nothing divides us like the perception that some people are getting special treatment. In our country, some people definitely are getting special treatment. Republicans should oppose that with everything they have. 

What kind of country do you want to live in? A fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement. A country you might recognize when you’re old.

A country that listens to young people who don’t live in Brooklyn. A country where you can make a solid living outside of the big cities. A country where Lewiston, Maine seems almost as important as the west side of Los Angeles. A country where environmentalism means getting outside and picking up the trash. A clean, orderly, stable country that respects itself. And above all, a country where normal people with an average education who grew up in no place special can get married, and have happy kids, and repeat unto the generations. A country that actually cares about families, the building block of everything.

What will it take a get a country like that? Leaders who want it. For now, those leaders will have to be Republicans. There’s no option at this point.

But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society. 

Internalizing all this will not be easy for Republican leaders. They’ll have to unlearn decades of bumper sticker-talking points and corporate propaganda. They’ll likely lose donors in the process. They’ll be criticized. Libertarians are sure to call any deviation from market fundamentalism a form of socialism.

That’s a lie. Socialism is a disaster. It doesn’t work. It’s what we should be working desperately to avoid. But socialism is exactly what we’re going to get, and very soon unless a group of responsible people in our political system reforms the American economy in a way that protects normal people. 

If you want to put America first, you’ve got to put its families first.

Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on January 2, 2019.

The Globalist Mindset: They Hate You

Here, here!

The Globalist Mindset: They Hate You
 Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness


Against what or whom is the contemporary Western public pushing back?
The French non-Parisians against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline? Broke southern European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers? The Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates?

The British masses against both the EU and their own government that either cannot or will not follow the will of the people and implement Brexit? The American populists against outsourcing, offshoring, and illegal immigration?

The common target of all these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.

In a word, the Ivy League, Oxbridge, and the Sorbonne masters of the universe assume that the world is on a predetermined trajectory. We are to follow an arc of history bending toward state-managed social justice if you will—to end up as a sort of global Menlo Park, Malibu, Upper West Side, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Schwabing, or Kensington. No wonder, it is their ethical duty of transnationals to goad the fated, but sometimes stalled, process along.

Like Aristocrats of Old

Voters in consensual societies are often assumed too ignorant of the world beyond their borders, too encumbered with traditional racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and nationalist prejudices, and too ill-informed to know what is good for them. No wonder that sometimes hoi polloi must either vote repeatedly until they get it right, or follow executive and judicial fiats issued from their betters on high. In the globalist mindset, Brexit passed not because it was felt to be good by a majority or even advantageous for the United Kingdom, but because racists, xenophobes, nativists, protectionists, and chauvinists deluded the clueless public into thinking a pre-EU, and more racist and sexist Britain was somehow superior.

A postelection depressed Hillary Clinton had to travel all the way to Mumbai, India to find a more enlightened audience that would appreciate her insight that the ogre Trump had beat her because:

If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that own two-thirds of America’s Gross Domestic Product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.

The globalist elite is certainly transnational and is sickened by localism, traditionalism, and autonomy. Monsieur Macron shares much more in common with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Justin Trudeau than he does with rural Frenchmen. It is almost as if in 2019 our elites are emulating the interlocking aristocratic families of late 19th-century Europe, but instead of being common descendants of Queen Victoria they are the godchildren of Menlo Park, Brussels, Strasburg, Davos, and Wall Street.

Donald Trump’s efforts to deregulate the U.S. economy, demand reciprocal trade with China, Mexico, or Germany, rout ISIS, open up federal lands for natural gas and oil exploration, build pipelines, lower taxes, and grow the economy at best are seen as misguided parochial boosterism and at worse the sort of selfish nationalism that ignores expert global and world-is-flat consensus. In either case, the common denominator is that the world community can ill afford another U.S. president who has not been stamped, vetted, or audited by an Ivy League law or business school, a prior Washington D.C. federal office, or Wall Street firm.

Angela Merkel—who recently pronounced that nations must be “prepared to give up their sovereignty”—and her ilk are representations of the same sort of values as those of Hillary Clinton’s circle. Elites do not see their fellow citizens in exceptional terms of the affinities of a common language, shared history, or sovereign geography. Instead, they envision themselves as Socratic citizens of the world. They are an international siblinghood with common blue-chip educations, wealth, and long service in the administrative state. The anointed alone “see” and “grasp” what is really going on with the world, and therefore what really needs to be done right now, at all costs, regardless of the opposition from what Hillary wrote off as “all that red in the middle.”

International Crusading

Globalism is both an ideology and a culture of behavior. The creed is that the Western world, given its colonial and imperialist past, has a duty both to make amends to the former third world through magnanimously lending the global community elite Western expertise—whether through Kyoto- or Paris-like climate accords, foreign interventions guided by Western humanitarian principles, asymmetrical trade agreements, open borders, or U.N. mandates.

The globalist alone knows how global warming threatens us and how the ignorant masses must sacrifice to cool things down, how nationalism supposedly causes world wars, how sexism, racism, and homophobia have warped Western, but non-necessarily non-Western, society, and how human nature can be modified to avoid these pathologies through greater coercion, more relevant social education, improved material conditions, and greater secular ecumenicalism—a far better religion than calcified Christendom. The Western consumer—fat, “lazy,” played out—surely does not need any more affluence or income. His nation, therefore, can afford to subsidize, through his superfluous lifestyle, far nobler international crusades for mankind.

The nation-state then is passé. Transnational organizations, the larger and more powerful the better, tame mindless Western chauvinism, while enhancing and making invaluable alternative post-Western paradigms. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, the chief executive officer of the World Bank, the Secretary-General of NATO, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the President of the Council of Foreign Relations, the president of CNN Worldwide, all these are certainly to be listened to in a way an elected senator from Kansas, the nuts who stirred up the gilets jaunes, the unhinged Poles and Bulgarians who wanted to build fences on their borders, or renegade British MPs pushing for Brexit should not be.

Globalist penance for past sins is accomplished in a variety of ways. Non-Westerns are not to be held to symmetrical value systems. Islamic countries can destroy churches, Western nations consider mosques sacrosanct. Illegal immigration force feeds diversity onto a tired and exhausted Western public in dire need of having its horizons expanded by the other. Dumping, patent and copyright theft, and technological appropriation are sins only for wayward Westerners.

The elite must never be subject to the sometimes unfortunate ramifications of their own ideologies—any more than a laboratory scientist need be singed when he recklessly puts the wrong volatile ingredients into his beaker mix. Open-borders architects in the U.S. need not put their children in schools overwhelmed by illegal immigrants. Walls are useless on borders but effective around Malibu and Napa estates. The elite need not live in neighborhoods where European languages are rarely spoken; others less liberal need such exposure and enlightenment. French citizens must pay high gas taxes for their huge carbon footprints, French elites fly private jets to conduct profitable business in the carbon-rich Gulf, India, and China.

“Noble” Ends, Unethical Means

Globalists generally assume that their own privileged material conditions are pitiful wages for the greater good they do and so justify their material hypocrisies, as if they were wounded wild fawns forced to rely on rich artificial shrubbery of suburban gardens. They often share the greatest disdain for the rural and muscular classes of their own countries who lack the sophistication of the elite and the romanticism of the distant poor. If worse comes to worst, such impediments can simply die off and be replaced by more fertile, more energetic immigrants from the former Third World happy to have a shot at Western material conditions and the general welfare state, and who are at least thankful and appreciative of their benefactors and so more than willing to be receptive to globalist, transnational, and redistributive bromides.

Globalism ultimately is an offspring of elite progressive universities, think tanks, foundations, government institutions, and borderless corporatism. All the old progressive boilerplate—anti-trust legislation, prohibitions on monopolies, product liability—ceases when vast multibillion-dollar tech fortunes put their money into progressive causes, and thereby remind us that sometimes noble ends justify unethical means of obtaining them.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter have a perfect right to monopolize, to warp political expression, and to censor free speech if they devote their billions to enacting global climate, political, or social justice change, in the manner that here at home the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and NSA—at times in conjunction with their foreign counterparts—justifiably had to monitor, use informants, and spread libelous smears on reckless Cro-Magnons like Donald J. Trump, who would harken us back to an embarrassing nationalist and sovereign past. Illegality has its uses.

Whom do the globalists despise?

The carbon spewing Winnebago owners, the snowmobilers, the jet skiers, the Glock packers, the Elks Clubbers, the lathe workers, the 101st Airborners with molôn labé tattooed on their arms, the 7-11 owners, the nutty Brit who speaks reverentially of Churchill, the dumb grubby French guy on a tractor who has no clue that his diesel engine must soon be replaced by three-hour batteries, the wacko Greek who cannot appreciate a boatload of noble Libyans landing on the beach below his ancestral olive grove in Crete, the limited Czech who clings to the hokey belief that residents in the Czech Republic should still speak Czech—in other words, all the autonomous cranks, and odd ballers who did not get the message, are not yet on board, and should have been by now long past woke.


About the Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes 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 (Basic Books).

California's State-Sponsored Voter Fraud

Shades of Venezuelas' Maduro... send this along to every one you know!

California's State-Sponsored Voter Fraud

Paul Ryan Is Right: California’s Election Laws Are Vulnerable To Fraud

Watching every single contested congressional race flip from Republican to Democrat days after the election is, as Paul Ryan put it, weird. Here are six reasons California's election laws are deeply flawed.

Bre Payton, The Federalist

Outgoing House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) made headlines Thursday morning when he said GOP losses in the state of California were suspicious at a Washington Post Live event.

“California just defies logic to me,” Ryan said about the Golden State’s election results. “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election, and three weeks later, we lost basically every California contested race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is."

California’s Wacky Election Laws, Explained

Watching every single contested congressional race flip from Republican to Democrat days after the election is, as Ryan put it, weird. While Here are six reasons California’s electoral system is deeply flawed.

1. The DMV automatically registers people to vote, even illegal immigrants.
Virtually everyone who interacts with the state’s DMV gets automatically registered to vote under California’s Motor Voter program, but this program is riddled with errors and has even registered illegal immigrants. In September, the Los Angeles Times reported that 23,000 voters were registered incorrectly by the DMV. Less than a month before the election, DMV officials revealed that an additional 1,500 people were registered to vote when they should not have been, including some illegal residents, minors too young to vote, and felons who were supposed to be ineligible.

2. ‘Ballot Harvesting’ allows political operatives to drop off other people’s ballots.
A new state law allows third parties to pick up ballots and drop them off at polling locations on behalf of that person, a practice known as “ballot harvesting.”

In video footage that surfaced last month, a woman who identifies herself to a California resident as Lulu is seen knocking on someone’s door and offering to deliver their absentee ballot, but “only to, like, people who are supporting the Democratic Party.”


In an e-mail to supporters, Orange County GOP chair Fred Whitaker attributed the party’s losses in longtime Republican districts to ballot harvesting, the San Fransisco Chronicle reported.

‘The number of election day vote-by-mail drop-offs was unprecedented — over 250,000. This is a direct result of ballot harvesting,’ Whitaker wrote. ‘That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later. … We have to develop a response to this new law that allows us to remain competitive while recognizing the realities of Republican voter attitudes towards handing over their ballot.’

In his remarks Thursday, Ryan singled out this practice as a contributing factor to the GOP losses, saying they were confusing and bizarre. Watching the woman in the aforementioned video say she’s collecting ballots but only for Democratic voters is definitely odd and emphasizes how those picking up the ballots have an incentive to mess with them.

What would a ballot collector working on behalf of a liberal group do to a ballot cast by someone who answered the door wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat? Would that ballot actually get taken to the polls, or tossed in the trash?

And what about low-information voters who hadn’t been planning to cast a ballot? If someone showed up at their door asking for their ballot, would they feel obligated to quickly fill it out and give it to them? There seems to be very little benefit for the actual voter (I mean, how hard is it to drop a filled-out ballot in one’s mailbox on election day?) and a huge incentive for the “harvester” to act shady.

3. California allows voters to register to vote and cast a ballot on Election Day.
That’s right. On Election Day, one can show up to a polling location and register to vote and cast a ballot all on the same day by taking advantage of the Conditional Voter Registration process, which is explained in this YouTube video featuring millennials with pastel-colored hair who could not get it together and register to vote on time like the rest of us.

4. Voters can cast a ballot at the “wrong” polling place. 
California allows provisional ballots, which are essentially regular ballots that get put into a special envelope before they’re stuffed into the box. These are for people who show up at the “wrong” polling location or who changed their mind about voting by mail but want to vote anyway, according to California’s Secretary of State website. These ballots are then supposed to be checked against other rolls to make sure the person did not vote twice, but there are reasons to doubt the state’s ability to properly execute this.

5. Counties are allowed to mail absentee ballots to every voter in the county.
“This election, every voter in Madera, Napa, Nevada, Sacramento and San Mateo counties received an absentee ballot — whether they requested one or not,” Shawn Steel writes for The Washington Times. “Beginning in 2020, every county in California except one will be allowed to follow suit.”

6. Absentee ballots that arrive a week later will still be counted.  
Unlike most other states, absentee ballots cast in California do not need to be delivered by Election Day, but merely postmarked on that day. This means absentee ballots can come pouring in up to a week later and alter the outcome of the election.

While a number of these programs and laws certainly make it more convenient for voters, they also create a nightmare scenario for quick election results tallying and a number of vulnerabilities in the integrity of the electoral system. Mailing a ballot to every voter in the county, allowing these ballots to arrive up to a week after Election Day, and allowing individuals to register to vote and cast a ballot on the day of an election give ample opportunity for an individual intent on committing voter fraud to do so.

California needs to rethink its program that has enabled an unknown number of illegal immigrants and minors to be improperly registered to vote. It needs to tighten deadlines on voters in order to get a quicker count that doesn’t take weeks to tabulate.

Fortunately, there haven’t been reports of widespread fraud that would necessitate drastic measures to ensure the results were legitimate. But after the debacle in Florida, watching every single contested congressional race flip from red to blue weeks later is not a good look. California’s legislature and secretary of state need to take Republican concerns about election integrity seriously.