None would call it 'controversial'

None would call it 'controversial'

Joe Sullivan, GAB,  Harbinger Sentinel 

MOST AMERICANS live their lives with general indifference about the “burning world” out beyond our shores…. They have been conditioned to believe that “all of that” is “so far away” and that it will never come here… Our current government and our “mainstream media” conduct their communications dependent upon the general “cluelessness” of most of the American people. The “open border policies” of the United States government under “Slow Joe” Biden are nothing less than a TREASONOUS omission of his sworn duty as President of the United States to protect the American people from potential enemies “foreign and domestic”. And yet, Congress and the Senate FAIL MISERABLY to hold Biden accountable for his OVERT REFUSAL to ENFORCE IMMIGRATION LAW and BORDER SECURITY. Meanwhile, MILLIONS of INVADERS infiltrate our borders and effectively disappear into the country. They are actually transported all over the country by the federal government at taxpayer expense…

AND STILL, CONGRESS FAILS TO ACT…. Instead, they have proven to be officially INDIFFERENT to the BIDEN CRIME FAMILY beyond their endless inconsequential hearings, individual public pronouncements, and TV appearances. They apparently believe that showing up on TV and making allegations will placate the American voters… Months and years are slipping by until now we all find ourselves in another national election cycle.

IN TOO MANY WAYS, American politics has devolved into the equivalent of a modern soap opera - where chatter and drama keep the viewer's interest while nothing ever really changes.

SO EFFECTIVELY (AND IN FACT) our entire federal government is a DYSFUNCTIONAL EXERCISE where the PRESIDENT is a TRAITOR to our people for CRIMES that he will never be held accountable for because our LEGISLATIVE BRANCH (House and Senate) is itself populated by elected officials who themselves FAIL to honor their own Oath of Office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” by providing effective “oversight” of the Executive Branch (POTUS and “Administration”)…

PRESIDENT TRUMP has exposed this GROTESQUE FRAUD of a government for what it is which has made him a pariah within the halls of the “ESTABLISHMENT”. Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the Senate FAILED BY OMISSION to investigate the 2020 STOLEN ELECTION because it removed Trump from power and ended his pressure upon them to actually do their sworn duty on behalf of the American people.

CONGRESS continues to spend irresponsibly and the current battle for the Speakership demonstrates the “civil war” within the Republican Party between the Trump allies (MAGA Insurgents) vs the Establishment (RINO “Deep State”). What we’re seeing play out is the struggle to take back the control of the United States government and secure ACCOUNTABILITY from those elected to the LEGISLATIVE BRANCH. If the “MAGA Insurgents” succeed - or if their influence grows - then this will reflect Trump’s own growing influence. If Trump wins in 2024 - and if the Legislative Branch is made to become RESPONSIVE and ACCOUNTABLE to the American people’s interests once again, then we might be able to SAVE OUR COUNTRY…

And if the DYSFUNCTIONAL STATUS QUO prevails, then the United States is doomed…

AND SO - I remind everyone that while the world beyond our borders burns - our own country is crumbling beneath our feet - and there is a clandestine “civil war” already underway to take back our government and return it to being a CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC. If this process fails between NOW and Election Day in 2024, then the prospect of much more serious conflicts could result.

Does Iran Realize Its Own Growing Danger?

 

Does Iran Realize Its Own Growing Danger?

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, victorhanson.com 

Iran understandably believes it is riding quite high.

It is flush with cash. It hints it almost has the bomb—and might use it soon.

The Iranians are bragging about their new tyrannical allies like Russia and China.

Iran boasts of now being the self-proclaimed leader of jihad on behalf of all Muslims. It gloats that it is feeding the Russian war-machine by exporting its own drones.

Tehran proudly supplied and funded Hamas’s savage murdering of Jewish children in Israel.

It eggs on its other pawn Hezbollah to launch a reputed 100,000-Iranian-supplied missiles into Israel.

It constantly provokes the U.S.—mostly by veiled threats to unleash anti-American terrorists in the Middle East and perhaps inside America itself.

But above all, Iran is giddy over the appeasing Biden administration.

Biden resurrected the unhinged Obama administration plan of empowering a “Shiite crescent”—of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, including Hamas.

This American idea of a radical bloc would supposedly birth “creative tension” and thus on autopilot balance the dominance of our friends in Israel and the Gulf regimes with our new Iranian clients. Yet the logical result of such madness was the massacre we saw in Israel.

Biden put pro-Iranian envoy Robert Malley—now under FBI investigation—in charge of begging Iran to restart the disastrous Iran Deal.

The anemic Biden administration has reportedly replied only four times to some 83 Iranian attacks on Americans.

Biden lifted sanctions allowing Iran to garner tens of billions of dollars in new oil sales—to be routed to all of Israel’s terrorist enemies.

He sought to pay ransom to Iran to get back five American hostages—at a cost of $1.2 billion per captive and a green-light for Tehran to take more.

The Biden administration restored in aggregate $1 billion in aid to the West Bank and Gaza, despite the long history of radical Palestinian terrorism.

This mollification of Iran also led its appendages Hamas and Hezbollah to believe that if any of them started a war against Israel, then Iran would guarantee their victory, the U.S. would do nothing— and likely force Israel to do the same nothing.

Yet a delusional Iran still is not fully aware how its loud bragging about and support for its client Hamas’s barbaric killing of Jewish civilians have put it into an unprecedented dangerous predicament.

For the first time in decades, there is no nation that can restrain Israel from destroying Iran’s pawn Hamas—not after it butchered 1,000 Jewish citizens while radical Palestinians in Gaza keep celebrating the slaughter and promising more such savage mass murdering.

Iran’s other proxy Hezbollah still issues blood-curdling threats to launch missiles. But it privately knows if it hits Israel with them, Beirut will resemble something far worse than its rubble of 2006 during the last Middle East war.

The world despises Iran, and now finally accepts it cannot be appeased. Arab nations neither want Gazan refugees anywhere near them nor their terrorists whom Gazans one-time voted into power.

Even Europe abhors Hamas’s precivilizational butchery of Israeli civilians.

Russia, Iran’s new patron, will be of little help to it—bogged down in Ukraine and hemorrhaging under sanctions and global ostracism. Nor has Moscow forgotten its own long violent history with Islam.

China cares only about the delivery of Middle East oil, calm seas lanes—and injuring the U.S.

Otherwise Beijing has no desire to risk its economy by pushing an Iranian theater war—especially when China has jailed a million Uyghur Muslims in forced labor camps.

If the two huge American carrier groups parked in the Eastern Mediterranean are attacked by either Iranian or Hezbollah missiles, public opinion will force even Biden to retaliate. And the response will not be street-fighting block to block in Tehran or Beirut.

Instead, it will be a medieval rain of destruction on either or both from the air.

After the Afghanistan humiliation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese flagrant spy balloon mission over the American heartland, eight-million illegal aliens waved in across the southern border, and woke hysterias, Americans may have finally woken up that they dangerously—almost fatally—have squandered prior hard-won deterrence and must reboot.

To play its global jihadist role, Iran must always keep upping its terrorist ante and constantly louder threats.

It assumes the Middle East is business as usual—when it is insidiously becoming just the opposite. An appeasing Biden is not driving events but being driven by them, whether he knows it or not.

The Iranians have little clue that that they and their vassals are one stupid missile volley, or one reckless intervention away from a devastating Western response that would not necessarily be “proportionate.”

And such a retaliation would be welcomed by Iran’s numerous enemies, privately applauded by its small number of supposed “friends,” and largely shrugged off by its even fewer allies.

A 1,000-Day Bidenomics March to Strategic Energy Subservience

A 1,000-Day Bidenomics March to Strategic Energy Subservience

Peter Navarro

In just 1,000 days, Green New Dealer in Chief Joe Biden has turned America’s strategic energy dominance into a strategic energy subservience that now gravely threatens our economic and national security.  We now run the very real risks of a prolonged stagflation and being drawn into hot wars from Ukraine, Israel, and Iran to the Taiwan Strait. 

When I was a doctoral student in economics at Harvard University in the 1970s focused on reducing America’s dangerous oil import dependence, I never dreamed of that day which would come during my service in the Trump White House in which the United States became the world’s largest petroleum producer and a net exporter. 

Once strategic energy dominant, America became the de facto policeman of the OPEC oil cartel and world price setter.  If OPEC tried to gouge us by restricting supply, America could further increase production.  That leverage, coupled with President Trump’s jawboning of the Saudis, kept oil prices substantially below what they have been throughout the Biden regime.

From Day One, Joe Biden declared war on  fossil fuels.  He canceled pipelines, curtailed drilling, discouraged fracking, and turned this nation into the oil supplicant that it is today.

Now, 1,000 days in, it is Saudi Arabia and Russia – the world’s two largest oil producers outside the US –setting world oil prices.  Saudi princes need at least $85 per barrel to fund the government programs it uses to pacify an increasingly restive population.  Putin’s Russia needs at least $100 a barrel oil to fund its Ukrainian adventure. 

The resultant oil price shocks are increasing our inflation rate at a time when the U.S. is already facing significant inflationary pressures.  Higher oil prices also act as a tax on consumers and thereby reduce purchasing power, with collateral negative demand and growth effects.  Higher oil prices likewise increase the cost of production and transportation for businesses and thereby reduce output and growth through negative supply effects.  Together, these negative growth effects represent the “stag” part of the oil price shock stagflation equation.

Normally, the Federal Reserve can treat oil price shocks as transitory, which is to say cyclical, and leave them out of the core inflation metric the Fed relies upon to set short term interest rates.  If, however, higher oil prices represent a secular, long-term trend because of a Bidenomics-driven tectonic shift, sustained oil price hikes have to be factored into the Fed calculus.  That will surely mean higher interest rates for a far more extended period.

These economic risks pale in comparison to the national security risks from America’s increasing oil important dependence and strategic energy subservience. 

Take Russia: Even as American taxpayers are funding the Ukrainian war effort to the tune of tens of billions of dollars (while draining the American arsenal), American consumers and businesses, through a pure wealth transfer, are funding the Russian war machine as more and more Russian oil creeps into world markets and trickles down to American gas pumps.  The more oil revenue Russia captures, the less likely there will be peace, and the more likely the United States will be dragged into a hot war on the European continent.

A Joe Biden desperate for cheaper oil has similarly relaxed sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil.  Iranian oil production has climbed from about 2.7 million barrels a day at the end of the Trump administration to almost 3.5 million today.

With the price of oil now bouncing between $80 to $90, that’s an additional $2 billion a month Iran has to both keep its regime afloat and finance attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia through proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi movement, Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-Mukhtar Brigades.

There is also the new Cuba in our South American midst in Venezuela.  It, too, is now being allowed by the Biden regime to increase its oil production, sell its oil in international markets to keep its toxic regime afloat, and export both its socialism to the rest of Latin America and its illegal aliens to American cities. 

Finally, as a rising Communist China eyes an invasion of Taiwan after successfully taking Hong Kong without a whimper from the West, its dictator Xi Jinping has leveraged the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East to establish a yuan-denominated oil-trading bloc with Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.  Xi now believes he has distanced China enough from the US dollar and any collateral threats of sanctions, making war over Taiwan ever more likely.

The only way out now will be a quick return to strategic energy dominance.  Here, “Green New Deal” Democrats must acknowledge that forcing the American people to reduce their demand for fossil fuels is a form of economic and national security suicide. 

The math is simple: Whatever CO2 reductions the American people might achieve through their sacrifices, massive subsidies, and destruction of our economy will be more than offset by the emissions from the new powerplants and automobiles and factories of Communist China, India, and a whole host of developing nations – and their leaders will laugh at us all the way to the climate change bank.

Peter Navarro served in the Trump White House as the Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.  His White House memoirs include In Trump Time (All Seasons Press) and Taking Back Trump’s America (Post Hill Press).   Follow him at 

Peter Navarro's Taking Back Trump's America The blueprint and battle cry for the modern MAGA movement with a mission to restore MAGA principles to both Congress and the White House. From President Trump's Chief China Hawk and trade czar.

where this article originally appeared.

Thoughts About Our World Before it all Hits The Fan

Thoughts About Our World Before it All Hits The Fan

Joseph Sullivan, Harbinger Sentinel, GAB

 I wrote and posted this on GAB today… preface to my essay.

As the days pass, I feel my toes “crowding the line”…  As I discuss in the essay, I no longer believe that we can solve the problems of our country through “free and fair elections” (now a myth from a by-gone age as far as I’m concerned)…

When I pray these days - I pray that I am wrong about my pessimism…. Now I’m focussed on the future of the next generation.  I simply can’t remain silent as “things” get worse and worse…. If speaking out is dangerous - then so be it…

I also pray that God will awaken the sleeping American people and cause courageous leaders to step-up and take charge of this country which is now in a free-fall toward Armageddon.

Deo Vindici…. May God Bless and Save America From The Traitors Among Us…

My essay: Our World Before it All Hits The Fan

Now is an EXCELLENT TIME to put those hard lessons we’ve learned over the past 20 years to good use…

But first we need to take-stock and define them:

The NEWS MEDIA (“Mainstream” and “Legacy”) is the servant of the “Deep State” government. It no longer fulfills it’s traditional mission to hold our government and our officials accountable to the American people. The manipulation of the American people by the media during the “COVID FRAUD” was crystal-clear and (in my view) it was defining and unforgivable.

Our TWO PARTY SYSTEM of American politics has essentially merged (“UNIPARTY”) into a charade which conducts it’s public business with pointless hearings while it’s leaders make back-room deals that benefit multi-national interests paid for by constantly rising taxes levied upon American taxpayers. The World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Israeli lobby control the American government thru their control of our Congress and Senate. Our elected leaders enrich themselves through life-long positions as elected politicians.

Our federal government is in-fact the “Deep State” - where it’s workers are all “unionized drones” led by life-time, career non-elected bureaucrats…. ALL of these “employees” are committed to job and self-preservation, growth of government and lack of transparency. They know that elected politicians come and go but that they can outlast anyone who comes to Washington through elections. Strong, principled politicians do rise up but never get support from their peers - and are treated as “crack-pots” by the media.

Our national borders are WIDE OPEN…. BIDEN has violated his Oath of Office by removing physical and legal obstructions that SHOULD prevent ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION and DRUG SMUGGLING. If we had a functioning Congress and Senate - the safety of the American people would have forced Biden to close the border to illegals and drugs. For all of Biden’s apparent crimes, his MISCONDUCT ON REFUSAL TO ENFORCE IMMIGRATION AND CONTROL OUR BORDER is reason enough for him to be IMPEACHED. It is TREASONOUS!

THE 2020 ELECTION WAS STOLEN… PRESIDENT TRUMP WAS REMOVED FROM OFFICE BY FRAUD AND MANIPULATION…. But this was actually a crime against the AMERICAN PEOPLE! Trump has been PERSECUTED and PROSECUTED by prosecutors, judges and Deep State operatives and all of this goes on to this day - even as Trump is the strongest candidate running for POTUS in 2024! (Think about THAT and then tell me that our government isn’t TOTALLY CORRUPTED!). And yet our Congress and our Courts allow this to go on because IF they did their duty - it would reveal the extent of the TREASON that has taken place but none of our so-called “leaders” have the stomach to HANG THE TRAITORS involved.

So… We live in a bitterly divided country - and yet we go about our daily business believing that “all is well”…. ALL IN NOT WELL! The “divisions” are not only ideological - but they are also defined by “the informed and aware” vs. “the uninformed and unconcerned”. The “illusions of normalcy” around us keep our people from seeking the truth about the full extent of the treachery that is really going on. For those of us who DO WANT TO AWAKEN OUR PEERS - it is frustrating to try to get them to FOCUS because the AMERICAN MEDIA conspires to keep them UNINFORMED. “FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS” are a MYTH. Many of us believe that we cannot recover our government through elections alone.

Meanwhile, the world teeters and the GLOBALISTS pull the strings…. They drain the hard-earned resources of the middle class to support the growing population of poverty stricken minorities…. But the super-rich just get richer…

CONCLUSIONS: We are in a serious “BAD SMELL SITUATION” and we (as “Average Americans”) cannot trust our MEDIA or the BIDEN ADMINISTRATION to suddenly reverse course and start to “DO THE RIGHT THING” on behalf of our own American people… We’ve seen “Biden et al” for the gangsters that they really are. They “DON’T WORK FOR YOU”! They serve EVIL MASTERS… 

And it breaks my heart to have to question our government’s motives and capabilities… AFTER ALL, THE UNITED STATES USED TO STAND UP FOR WHAT IS “RIGHT” AND “JUST” IN OUR WORLD…

Please REPOST (because we MUST AWAKEN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!)

AND… Please Pray For Our Country and Our World…. 

DEO VINDICI… GOD BLESS AMERICA! 

California, the Great Destroyer

 

California, the Great Destroyer

Victor Davis Hanson, victorhanson.com 

In 1996, the California legislature created the high speed rail authority.

In 2008, voters passed a $33 billion bond to build an envisioned 800 mile project eventually to link Sacramento with San Diego.

Fifteen years later, a scaled-down plan from Bakersfield to Merced remains not even half finished. Yet the envisioned costs will exceed that of the original estimate for the entire project.

The rail authority now estimates that just the modest 178 mile route—only about a fifth of the authorized distance—will not be completed at least until 2030. Past high speed estimates of both time and cost targets have been widely wrong and perhaps deliberately misleading.

Total costs for the entire project are now estimated at nearly $130 billion. Many expect that figure to double in the next quarter-century. Planners also concede there will likely not be much high speed rider demand from San Joaquin Valley residents willing to pay $86 to travel at a supposed 200 mph from Bakersfield to Merced.

Nine years ago voters amid drought and water shortages also passed a state water bond, authorizing $7.5 billion in new water projects and initiatives.

Some $2.7 billion was targeted for new dams and reservoirs. The current water storage system had not been enlarged since the early 1980s, when the state population was 15 million fewer residents.

So far not a single dam or new reservoir has been built. And Californians expect more water rationing statewide anytime the state experiences a modest drought.

In 2017, a $15 billion bond authorized a complete remodeling of Los Angeles International Airport—recognized as one of the more congested, disorganized, and unpleasant airports in America.

Now the cost to complete the project has grown to an estimated $30 billion, with a proposed finish date of 2028—11 years after the project was authorized.

And the ongoing LAX remake is considered one of California’s more successful public construction projects.

In 2002, California began construction on the eastern span replacement of the iconic San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge—less than half of the bridge’s total length.

It was scheduled to be finished in five years at a cost of $250 million.

The job in fact took 11 years. And it cost $6.5 billion—a 2,500 percent increase over the estimate.

In contrast, original construction of the entire Bay Bridge began in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. Yet the job was completed in a little  more than three years.

The list of such delayed, canceled, or prolonged projects could be expanded, from the proposed widening of the state’s overcrowded, antiquated, and dangerous north-to-south “freeways” to the now inert Peripheral Canal project that would have allowed the California aqueduct to transfer needed water southward by precluding the present inefficient pumping into and out of the San Francisco delta.

So what happened to the can-do California of former governors Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson? They had bequeathed to the Baby Boomer generation a well-run state, renowned for its state-of-the-art infrastructure.

All four governors, a Democrat and Republicans, had ensured the nation’s most sophisticated higher education system, iconic freeways, and model water transference systems.

The current disaster has many parents.

A coastal culture of globally rich elites began passing some of the most stringent environmental and zoning regulations in the nation. Such Byzantine roadblocks deliberately stalled construction and skyrocketed costs—all of little concern to the “not-in-my-backyard” wealthy in their secluded coastal enclaves who had ensured the virtual end of infrastructure investments.

The state’s public unions and bloated bureaucracies guaranteed Soviet-style overhead, incompetence, and unaccountability. The more California raised its income taxes—currently the nation’s highest topping out at 13.3 percent—the more it borrowed, spent, and ran up huge annual budget deficits.

The nation’s highest gasoline taxes along with steep sales and property taxes—coupled with unaffordable fuel and housing, a homeless epidemic, dismal public schools, out-of-control crime, and mass, illegal immigration—soon all led to a bifurcated state of rich and poor.

The middle class either became poor or fled.

Indeed, businesses and millions of the middle class hightailed it out of California over the last three decades in one of the greatest state population exoduses in our nation’s history. But they also took with them the very prior experience, expertise, and capital that had once made California the nation’s envy.

In contrast, millions of impoverished illegal immigrants arrived over the last 30 years without legality, English, or high school diplomas.

And thus millions were immediately in dire need of costly state-supplied health, education, housing, and food subsidies. Currently well over half of all California births are paid for by Medi-Cal. Well over a third of the resident population depends on the state to provide all their health care needs.

Twenty-seven percent of California’s resident population was not born in the United States. That reality created a vast challenge of civic education to ensure assimilation and integration. Unfortunately, millions entered California at precisely the time of a new tribalism and racial essentialism that has taken hold of the state’s government, media, schools, and universities. Tribalism, not the melting-pot, is California’s paradigm.

California is a one-party state. There are no statewide Republican elected officeholders. Progressive Democrats also enjoy a supermajority in both houses of the legislature. Only 12 of 52 congressional seats are held by Republicans. And almost all of California leftwing politicians are funded or influenced by Silicon Valley—the richest corridor in civilizational history, with $9 trillion in market capitalization.

In sum, a now broke California became a medieval society of Leftwing ultra-rich and Leftwing ultra-poor. On one end, there was no longer the skill or expertise to modernize the state. And on the other, an elite became more interested in dreaming of heaven on earth for itself as it ensured a veritable hell for others.

There is one thing, however, that California does quite well: demolition.

Currently it is destroying four dams on the Klamath River that had provided clean hydroelectrical power, water storage, flood control, and recreation. The media, the bureaucracy, and the politicians acted with unaccustomed dispatch to obliterate the dams and thus supposedly to liberate salmon to swim better upstream.

And the state is blowing up these dams partly by directing hundreds of millions of dollars voters had allotted for reservoir construction—adding insult to the injury of state voters.

A haughty green California also regulated timber companies out of business. It ceased traditional selective logging and clearing of brush from its forests.

It also limited cattle grazing of grasses and shrubs. And it embraced  new “natural” forestry initiatives that postulated that rotting dead trees, dense brush, and tall summer grasses—dry kindling for devastating forest fires—created a rich “sustainable” ecosystem for wildlife. Letting nature be would prompt occasional “natural” corrective fires as in the nineteenth-century past.

The predictable results were massive, destructive—and once preventable—forest fires in the Sierra Nevada mountains and foothills. During California summers, their vast plumes of soot and smoke have polluted the skies for months and sickened residents, destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, and wiped out billions of dollars in valuable timber even as lumber prices soared.

And California’s lesson for the nation?

If you want to topple a statue, re-label an historically named street, burn up millions of pine and fir trees, blow up a dam, turn parks and the public square into dangerous and toxic squatter cities, then the state can do all of that and in record time.

But try building something to ensure Californians can travel quickly and in safety, or have affordable power, homes, and fuel, and assured water?

All that is simply beyond the current state’s comprehension, ability, and desire. So like modern Vandals or Goths, contemporary Californians are far better destroying the work of others than creating anything of their own.

And what is next? We await the 2024 national elections, when a few California politicians may run for our highest offices, no doubt with the campaign promise, “I can do to America what I did to California.”

 

Mexico Vows to Deport Illegal Immigrants

 

Mexico Vows to Deport Illegal Immigrants From Border Cities,

Stop Deadly Hitchhiking on Trains

Mexico said it hopes to 'depressure' its northern border cites by sending migrants back to their home countries.

Bill Pan, The Epoch Times 

Mexico will deport illegal immigrants from cities on its border with the United States and take measures to deter people from risking their lives trying to hitch a ride on cargo trains traveling to the northern border, the country's immigration authority said.

The Mexican National Migration Institute (INM) made the announcement following a Sept. 23 meeting with representatives of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Ferromex, the operator of Mexico's largest freight rail network.

The agency said it expects that the move will help "depressurize" the Mexican border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Piedras Negras, and Tijuana, and the border state of Tamaulipas, which have been overwhelmed by the recent surge of people seeking to illegally enter the United States.

As part of an agreement made during the meeting, CBP will hand over to the INM the illegal immigrants who have been expelled from the United States through the Ciudad Juárez International Bridge, and the Mexican government will "carry out negotiations with the governments of Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Cuba so that they receive their compatriots."

"In September alone, 189,000 migrants have been rescued, with an average of 9,000 per day," the INM said in a statement. "People from 191 different nationalities are passing through Mexico, primarily from Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Haiti and El Salvador."

The Mexican agency didn't specify when the deportations will start or how long they would last.

"We are continuing to work closely with our partners in Mexico to increase security and address irregular migration along our shared border," CBP Acting Commissioner Troy A. Miller, who attended the meeting, said in a statement. "The United States and Mexico remain committed to stemming the flow of irregular migration driven by unscrupulous smugglers, while maintaining access to lawful pathways."

Train-Hoppers Paralyze Rail Network

The Sept. 23 meeting comes after Ferromex was forced to suspend 60 of its freight trains running in the northern part of Mexico because of an "unprecedented" surge in deadly attempts by illegal migrants to hitch rides on those units.

Grupo México, the parent company of Ferromex, said last week that there had been "nearly half a dozen cases of injuries or deaths" in recent days among groups of people who boarded freight trains en route to the U.S.–Mexico border, "in spite of the grave danger this implies."

The cargo trains, including one infamously referred to by migrants as "The Beast" or "The Train of Death," for years have been used by illegal immigrants to speed up the nearly 2,000-mile trek from Mexico's southern border to its northern border.

In a video that has been widely circulated on social media, a Ferromex cargo train packed with the illegal migrants was spotted heading toward the U.S.–Mexico border. The hitchhikers can been seen cheering, clapping, and whistling while riding on top of the cargo, with some even hanging from the sides of the cars and waving at the camera.

The video was reportedly taken in Zacatecas, which is in the north-central part of Mexico. It was shared widely after Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins posted it on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Sept. 17, saying that the passengers were "clearly not heeding" advice from Vice President Kamala Harris, who said, in a statement directed at the would-be illegal immigrants, "Do not come."

US Border Towns Pushed to Breaking Point

The announcement also comes as the Texas cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso struggle to address the surge of illegal border crossings.

Eagle Pass Mayor Rolando Salinas Jr., a Democrat, said that more than 6,000 illegal immigrants have crossed into his city in just two days and thousands more are expected to pass through in the coming days. The city itself has a population of only about 28,000.

"Nothing that we've seen ever really—to have so many people crossing in without consequence and congregating at the international bridge," the mayor told Texas Public Radio, after signing a seven-day emergency declaration to "request financial resources to provide the additional services" required by the influx.

Meanwhile, in El Paso, where another wave of illegal border crossing brought more than 2,000 people per day, shelter capacity and other resources are being strained to "a breaking point," city officials said. Just six weeks ago, the city was seeing about 350 to 400 people coming in per day.

"The city of El Paso only has so many resources and we have come to ... a breaking point right now," Mayor Oscar Leeser, a Democrat, said at a news conference on Sept. 23.

According to Mr. Leeser, about two-thirds of those new arrivals are single men. An estimated 32 percent are families, and just 2 percent are unaccompanied children.

"I think it's really important to note that we have a broken immigration system," he said. "It's the same thing over and over again."

Biden poll freakout

 

Biden poll freakout

Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent, Washington Examiner 

The political and media world fell into a mini-frenzy over the weekend with the release of not one but two polls showing President Joe Biden in dire political shape.

The most newsworthy of the polls came from the Washington Post and ABC News. Biden's job approval rating in the new survey is 37%, with disapproval at 56%. Approval of his handling of the economy is 30%. Approval of his handling of the border crisis is 23%. The survey found deep unhappiness about the state of the economy in general, energy prices, food prices, and the income of average workers. Only 33% of Democrats said they want Biden to run for a second term, versus 62% who don't.

Those are terrible numbers for a sitting president, but truth be told, they're not all that different from the results we've seen in many polls in recent months. So why the frenzy? Because of this question from the pollsters: "If the 2024 presidential election were being held today and the candidates were Donald Trump and Joe Biden, for whom would you vote? Would you lean toward Trump or Biden?" The result was decisive: Trump held a 10-point lead, 52% to 42%, among registered voters.

What? Trump with a 10-point lead? The prospect was too awful for the Washington Post and many others in the media. It must be wrong! An outlier! Indeed, in the headline and again in the article, the Washington Post declared its own finding an "outlier." "The sizable margin of Trump's lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead head," the Washington Post reported. "The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump's and Biden's coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier."

Other observers went slightly bonkers over the result. As Mollie Hemingway noted: "Democrat analyst Larry Sabato, who confidently predicted Hillary Clinton would win 352 electoral votes in 2016 (she received 227 in her loss to Donald Trump), asked the Washington Post, 'How could you even publish a poll so absurd on its face? Will be a lingering embarrassment for you.'" A number of other voices said similar things.

One odd note was that the Washington Post did not cast doubt on the other results from this poll, so the paper must not believe that the survey was fundamentally flawed from start to finish. It was just the Trump-beats-Biden figure. It should be said that polls are never a predictor of what is going to happen more than a year from now. Instead, they are a snapshot of how people feel today, which might change significantly in the coming months. Also, this poll could be completely wrong. But the selective outrage over one of the poll's findings was striking.

It was particularly striking given the finding of the other poll released over the weekend, this one from NBC News. It, too, asked the Biden vs. Trump question, but it found the race to be tied at 46% to 46%. So obviously that was a big difference from the Washington Post poll. It doesn't say which one is right or whether either one is right.

But here is the news in the NBC poll. In addition to asking about a Biden versus Trump scenario, it also asked about Biden versus some other Republican candidates. And when the pollsters asked voters about a contest between Biden and Republican Nikki Haley, Haley came out ahead by 5 points, 46% to 41%. (In the other match polled, Biden vs. Ron DeSantis, Biden edged the Florida governor, 46% to 45%.)

Haley beating Biden by 5 points? That's news. Maybe even bigger news than Biden trailing Trump by 10 points. It's news because it suggests Biden's vulnerability not just to Trump but to at least one other Republican, Haley, whom voters see as a plausible alternative to the current president.

Both polls show Biden in bad political shape. There's really no dispute about that. But these new polls from the Washington Post-ABC and NBC News take Biden's problem to a new level of concern among Democrats. For the moment at least — and remember, the poll is a snapshot of just this moment — the president is losing ground not just to Trump but to at least one other Republican challenger as well.

For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on Radio America and the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found.

Please share there were 4,859 visitors last week.

John Fetterman a US Senator, Really?

 

Does John Fetterman Really Want to Be a Senator?

Jim Geraghty, National Review 

On the menu today: Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman thinks everyone is being ridiculous for getting hung up on the Senate dress code — revoked for senators only; staffers, pages, and visitors must continue to “dress appropriately” — and that people shouldn’t focus on that. Fine, let’s take a look at Fetterman’s record since he was sworn in, including an absence rate that is only exceeded by California senator Dianne Feinstein’s. Even beyond his stroke recovery and mental-health struggles, Fetterman has said he finds the Senate to be fixated on dumb things, and he’s understandably pained by the long stretches of separation from his family. Obviously, Fetterman doesn’t think the job is worth the aggravation of putting on a suit. In light of all this . . . is Fetterman being a senator really the right choice for anyone? Most notably, even for himself?

Why Do You Run for Senate If You Think the Institution Is Dumb?

If you’re a man who really hates wearing a suit, then perhaps being a U.S. Senator isn’t the job for you. I assume that before he made the choice to run for Senate, John Fetterman had seen the Senate. C-SPAN is on just about every cable system. The notion that male senators wear suits up on Capitol Hill, and in particular when they’re on the floor of the chamber, cannot possibly have been a surprise to him.

In fact, back in October 2022, when a Pittsburgh radio-show host asked Fetterman, “Will you wear your hoodie on the Senate floor?” the candidate responded, “I’m going to only wear what you’re supposed to wear and whatever dress code.” Eh, never mind, I suppose.

You probably noticed that the U.S. Senate has dropped its dress code for senators, and the reason is pretty much that Fetterman doesn’t want to wear a suit anymore. You may not have seen a July interview with the New York Times, in which Fetterman told the paper, “It was a eureka moment when I figured out I don’t have to be in a suit to stand at the threshold of the Senate chamber, going ‘yea’ or ‘nay,’ and it was amazing. I’ve been able to reduce my suit time by about 75 percent.”

Our Jeff Blehar writes today, “The relaxation of the code applies only to the senators, not their pages, staffers, or to visitors. That is telling as to Majority Leader Schumer’s concern about maintaining some semblance of standards (he himself felt the need to stipulate in his announcement that he would continue to wear a suit, which is a shame; I think we’d all prefer to see what Schumer looks like in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals).” Eh, speak for yourself, Jeff.

The website for the U.S. Capitol visitor center still states, “The Capitol is a working office building. Please dress appropriately and behave in a respectful manner.”

Fetterman, unsurprisingly, thinks everyone is overreacting to his choice of attire:

“Oh my god!” Mr. Fetterman said sarcastically on Tuesday of the hand-wringing about what would become of the nation’s Capitol if he were to preside over the Senate in a hoodie. “I think it will be OK. The Republicans think I’m going to burst through the doors and start break dancing on the floor in shorts. I don’t think it’s going to be a big issue.”

Fetterman doesn’t want to be judged by his wardrobe. Okay. Let’s look at his record since joining the Senate.

So far in his Senate career, Fetterman has missed 33.4 percent of the Senate votes. He is the chamber’s second-most absent member, behind Dianne Feinstein of California, who has missed 46.3 percent of the votes this session. Much of Fetterman’s absence was during his six-week stay at Walter Reed Medical Center in treatment for clinical depression — he missed 85 percent of the votes in February and March. But not all of it was from that time period; Fetterman also missed 13 percent of the votes from July to September.

On July 19, he missed a vote to require the president to consult Congress before withdrawing from NATO. On July 11, he missed a confirmation vote on Xochitl Torres Small to be deputy secretary of Agriculture. And two days later, he missed confirmation votes for Kalpana Kotagal to be a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and David M. Uhlmann to be assistant administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Confirmation votes like those are not the most exciting, dramatic, or consequential tasks of a senator, but they are part of the job. I would have figured that a guy who missed so many votes out of the gate would have tried to avoid missing many more for the rest of the session. The U.S. Senate has a lot of “state work periods” in which lawmakers aren’t in session, and the chamber rarely holds floor votes before Monday night or after Thursday evening. It’s not like Fetterman has the commuting challenges of senators from Hawaii, Alaska, or the West Coast.

In that New York Times interview in July, Fetterman did not sound like he was enjoying his new life as a senator. He told the paper that he thinks the Senate has “a fixation on a lot of dumb s***. Bad performance art is really what it gets down to.”

Mind you, this is not the fuming of a minority-party backbencher with no real influence. Schumer’s running the Senate, and Fetterman was assigned to the Agriculture, Banking, and Environment committees, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Special Committee on Aging, a pretty good selection for a freshman senator.

Understandably, the time away from family is weighing heavily on Fetterman. “When you become a senator, you’re going to be spending 50 percent less time with the people that you love. That breaks my heart. I get emotional thinking about it. FaceTime is much better than just a phone call, but that’s the worst part of the job.”

In a cover-story profile for Time, Fetterman said that when he checked himself into Walter Reed, he was “gaunt, listless, barely able to function.” He told the magazine, “He didn’t actively contemplate suicide . . . but he would have welcomed death if it came.”

I’m very glad Fetterman is in a much better mental space now; everyone should be.

But I read all of that and think . . . should John Fetterman be a senator? For his own sake? By his own admission, he thinks the institution is “fixated” on dumb things and hates being away from his family. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was struck by crippling depression that required hospitalization. And he’s also attempting to recover from a life-threatening stroke. The state of Pennsylvania has roughly 12 million people. Are we absolutely sure there’s nobody else in the state who could do this job?

Allow me to offer a completely different theory on Fetterman’s insistence that he keep wearing his old clothes when at work in the Senate. Pretend you must describe John Fetterman to someone who’s never seen or heard of him, without referring to his appearance.

He’s not known for his soaring oratory. In fact, it’s not likely that you remember anything in particular he’s ever said. He’s not known for being a bipartisan dealmaker; as lieutenant governor, he rarely ingratiated himself with members of the Pennsylvania legislature. He was mayor of Braddock, a small town where the mayoral-vote totals don’t exceed three digits, a place so devastated by decades of economic decline that it was used as a filming location for the post-apocalyptic movie The Road. Fetterman meant well as mayor, but it’s hard to say the town experienced a remarkable renaissance during his tenure. And as lieutenant governor, Fetterman worked the lightest of schedules; his “daily schedule was blank during roughly one-third of workdays from January 2019, when he first took office, to May of this year, when he suffered a serious stroke,” the AP reported.

What is John Fetterman known for? The way he looks and the way he dresses.

Back in October of last year, I went through all the profiles of Fetterman written over the years, and almost all of them were fixated on Fetterman’s unusual appearance:

Way back in 2009, Ed Pilkington of the Guardian called him, “America’s coolest mayor” and gushed, “Everything about him stands out from the crowd. . . . He is 6ft 8in tall and weighs 300lbs. With a shaven head, big ears and a goatee, he looks like a James Bond baddie rather than the political leader of a community in the north-eastern US. He walks around town dressed in black workers’ overalls and steelworkers’ boots.” Around that same time, a Rolling Stone profile of “The Mayor of Hell,” written by Janet Reitman began, “John Fetterman looks a lot like a convict. For starters, he’s 6-feet-8, weighs 320 pounds, and has a shaved head and a bushy chin beard. He dresses most of the time in modified prison garb: Dickies work shirt, baggy jeans, black steel-toe Dr. Martens. His arms are the size of small trees. He also sports some impressively large tattoos.”

In a 2011 New York Times magazine profile calling him “the Mayor of Rust,” Sue Halpern described him as “a 6-foot-8 white man with a shaved head, a fibrous black beard and tattoos up one arm and down the other . . . a guy in biker boots bringing the Park Slope (Aspen, Marin, Portland, Santa Fe) ethos — organic produce, art installations, an outdoor bread oven — to the disenfranchised.”

A bit more recently, James Bennet, the brother of Colorado Democratic senator Michael Bennet, wrote in The Economist that, “Fetterman defies all political convention. Well over two metres tall, bald and goateed, he sports a hoodie and baggy shorts regardless of weather or occasion. At rallies he extends his long arms, taking the crowd in a virtual hug and revealing the tattoos lining his forearms.” Most recently, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine called him, “an enormous white man who had played offensive tackle in college and appeared to be built of all the XXL parts at the Guy Factory.”

In Politico, Holly Otterbein acknowledged the obvious: that Fetterman’s distinctive size and appearance are a big reason why he became one of the most frequently profiled small-town mayors in American history. “Fetterman is one of the most photographed rising stars in the Democratic Party. As gargantuan as Lurch Addams, with a bald head, goatee and closet full of Dickies shirts — and tattoos running down his arm marking every date a life was taken while he was mayor of his hard-knock steel town — Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor is a cartoon image of a working guy from the Rust Belt. Which is catnip for glossy magazine spreads.”

The way Fetterman dresses is his brand, his signature, the key to his appeal. He looks like a really big blue-collar guy, even if his life experience is quite different from what people assume.

Put Fetterman in a suit, where he can’t show off the arm tattoos, and he’s just a really tall, really big, bald senator.

Finally, lest we forget, part of Fetterman’s election depended upon a lengthy effort to mislead voters into believing his recovery was progressing well ahead of schedule.

A little less than a year ago, John Fetterman’s doctor, Dr. Clifford Chen, wrote a letter, released by his campaign, declaring, “Overall, Lt. Gov. Fetterman is well and shows strong commitment to maintaining good fitness and health practices, He has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office.” Fetterman declined to release in-depth medical records.

And then, about a week later, Fetterman went out onto a debate stage and struggled to communicate. As Joe Scarborough summarized afterwards, “John Fetterman’s ability to communicate is seriously impaired. Pennsylvania voters will be talking about this obvious fact even if many in the media will not.”

Post-Postmodern America

 

San Francisco city council meeting...

Post-Postmodern America

Victor Davis Hanson, Victorhanson.com 

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.

Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing into the United States anyone who could walk across the southern border.

Over seven million did just that. Meanwhile, Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 ANNUAL American fentanyl deaths.

Then border states finally wised up.

They grasped that the entire open-borders, “new Democratic majority” leftwing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.

So cash strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once magnanimous liberals, whether in Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, or Manhattan, stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon they went berserk over the influx.

So now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming but to stay far away from their advocates—by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the US. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

Precivilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.

They couldn’t care less that their targeted reservoirs help store water in drought, prevent flooding, enhance irrigation, offer recreation, and generate clean hydroelectric power.

Now an absurd green California is currently destroying four dams on the Klamath River. In adding insult to injury, it is paying the half-billion dollar demolition cost in part through a water bond that state voters once thought would build new—not explode existing—dams.

The Biden administration is mandating new dates when electric vehicles will be all but mandatory.

To prove their current viability, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm led a performance art EV caravan on a long road trip.

When she found insufficient charging stations to continue her media stunt, she sent a gas-powered car ahead to block open charging stations and deny them to other EVs ahead in line.

Only that way could Granholm ensure that her arriving energy-starved motorcade might find rare empty charger stalls.

In some California charging stations, diesel generators are needed to produce enough “clean” electricity to power the stalls.

The state has steadily dismantled many of its nuclear, oil, and coal power plants. It refuses to build new natural gas generation plants.

Naturally, California’s heavily subsidized solar and wind plants now produce too much energy during the day and almost nothing at night.

So the state now begs residents to charge their EVs only during the day. Then at night, Californians may soon be asked to plug them in again to transfer what is left in their batteries into the state grid.

Apparently only that way will there be enough expropriated “green” electricity for 41 million state residents after dark.

One of the loudest leftist voices to defund the police, and decriminalize violent crimes in the post-George Floyd era, was Shivanthi Sathanandan, the 2nd Vice Chairwoman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

She was recently not shy about defunding: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE.”

But recently the loud Sathanandan was a victim of the very crime wave she helped to spawn.

Four armed thugs carjacked her automobile. They beat her up in front of her children at her own home, and sped off without fear of arrest.

The reaction of the arch police dismantler and decriminalizer on her road to Damascus?

The now bruised and bleeding activist for the first time became livid that criminals had taken over her Minneapolis: “Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.”

Andrea Smith was an ethnic studies professor  at the University of California, Riverside. But now she has been forced out after getting caught lying that she was Native American.

Prior to her outing, she was well known for damning “white women” (like herself) who opted to “become Indians” out of guilt, and (like her) for careerist advantage.

The common theme of these absurdities is how contrary to human nature, impractical, and destructive is utopian wokism, whether in matters of energy, race, crime, or illegal immigration.

There are two other characteristics of the Woke Revolution.

One, it depends solely on its advocates never having to experience firsthand any of the nonsense they inflict on others.

And two, dangerous zealots with titles before, and letters after, their names prove to be quite stupid—and dangerous.

The 'Climate Emergency' Is a Hoax

 

The 'Climate Emergency' Is a Hoax

Robert Williams, Gatestone Institute

• More than 1,600 scientists, including two Nobel laureates, have signed a declaration saying that "There is no climate emergency." The declaration is unlikely to get any attention from the mainstream media, unfortunately, but it is important for people to know about: the mass climate hysteria and the destruction of the US economy in the name of climate change need to stop.

• "Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific," states the declaration signed by the 1,609 scientists, including Nobel laureates John F. Clauser from the US and Ivar Giaever from Norway/US.

• "Climate policy relies on inadequate models

Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They... ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial... There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent." — 1,609 scientists, There is no Climate Emergency, clintel.org.

• "I was taught that you tell the whole truth [as a scientist]...." Koonin said. He noted as well the immorality of asking the developing world to cut down emissions, when so many do not even have access to electricity and the immorality of scaring the younger generations.... — Steven E. Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy; current professor at New York University, fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters. — Hoover Institution, August 15, 2023.

• Of course it would be helpful to research what can be done to relieve the problems brought about by man, such as the "hole in the ozone layer," which is now closing, but climate change is not an apocalyptic emergency and needs to be attended to without bringing devastation to the hundreds of millions of people already in extreme poverty.

• The Biden administration, however, appears not to be concerned about the widespread poverty and massive starvation that will be caused by the unavailability of cheap and reliable energy in underdeveloped countries, or the inflation caused by the skyrocketing prices that are crushing Americans "barely able to afford one meal a day".

• These are man-made problems, created by importing expensive (nearing $100 a barrel again) -- often dirtier -- oil from adversaries of the United States, such as Russia and Venezuela, instead of extracting it far less expensively at home.

• The Biden administration also does not seem concerned that it is killing wildlife, sea life and the fishing industry by installing offshore wind turbines along the Atlantic seaboard, or that mandating electric vehicles will throw virtually the entire auto maintenance industry out of work (EVs do not need routine maintenance), or that lithium batteries not only explode but cost thousands of dollars to replace. The administration even wants military equipment, such as tanks, to be electric, as if there were charging stations in the middle of foreign deserts in the event of a conflict. Moreover, according to NBC News, volcanoes, unimpressed with executive orders, "Dwarf Humans for CO2 Emissions."

• The Biden administration does not even bother to act on its own climate findings: In March, the White House released a report about the impact of climate change on the US economy. "Its findings undermine any claims of an ongoing climate crisis or imminent catastrophe" Koonin wrote in July. "The report's authors should be commended for honestly delivering likely unwelcome messages.... Exaggerating the magnitude, urgency and certainty of the climate threat encourages ill-considered policies that could be more disruptive and expensive than any change in the climate itself." — Steven E. Koonin, Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2023.

• Never mind that much of climate change is apparently caused by sun flares, about which we can do nothing, and which, unlike commercial industries, do not offer grants; or that major wildfires are, ironically, exacerbated by "environmentalists" for refusing to let tinderbox brush be cleared lest the creatures there be disturbed other than by a wildfire.

• Climate expert Bjørn Lomborg suggests that the trillions of dollars needed to address climate change might be put to better use:

• "This isn't an argument to do nothing but just to be smarter. To ensure we can transition from fossil fuels, we need to ramp up research and development to innovate down the price of green energy. We should invest across all options including fusion, fission, storage, biofuel and other sources."

• "Only when green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels will the world be able and willing to make the transition. Otherwise, today's energy prices are just a taste of things to come."

Soros Foundation Worries Trump Will Win in 2024

 

Soros Foundation Worries Trump Will Win in 2024

and undermine 'Imperil' Globalism (Communism)

Tom Ozimek, The Epoch Times

George Soros's foundation is worried that former President Donald Trump will win the 2024 election and undermine globalist "unity," while warning of supposed harms coming from a potential "MAGA-style Republican victory" more generally.

The Open Society Foundations (OSF), which Mr. Soros' 37-year-old son, Alex Soros now leads, is "adapting" so that it's able to respond to whatever political scenario emerges after the dust settles from next year's presidential election in America.

"We are adapting OSF to be able to respond to whatever scenarios might emerge, on both sides of the Atlantic," George Soros' son wrote in a recent op-ed for Politico headlined "No Soros retreat from Europe."

The op-ed came in response to news headlines claiming that the Soros foundation was "retreating" from Europe as part of a new "strategic direction" under new leadership.

In it, Mr. Alex Soros (self-avowedly "more political" than his father) clarified that the rumored exit is nothing of the sort—or not exactly. He characterized the change as a shift in priorities towards Eastern Europe that would involve a retrenchment of some operations, including "significantly" reducing headcount.

However, the younger Mr. Soros also used the opportunity of the op-ed to express his views on American politics—and fret about the prospect of a Trump victory.

Trump Win to Endanger 'Unity'?

Mr. Soros worries that a victory by President Trump—or another "MAGA-style" candidate—would endanger European unity and deliver a blow to the globalist agenda.

"Former United States President Donald Trump—or at least someone with his isolationist and anti-European policies—will be the Republican nominee," he predicted, adding that he believes that "a MAGA-style Republican victory in next year’s U.S. presidential election could, in the end, be worse for the EU than for the U.S."

Mr. Soros described the threat of a Trump or a "MAGA-style" Republican win in 2024 as an outcome that "will imperil European unity and undermine the progress achieved on so many fronts in response to the war in Ukraine."

While he didn't elaborate further on how a Trump win would endanger European unity or lead to undesirable outcomes in regards to Ukraine, there has been speculation that President Trump would push for a peace deal that would force Ukraine to accept some territorial concessions.

President Trump has pledged that he can end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office, while refusing to say which side he wants to win.

“When I’m president, I will have that war settled in one day, 24 hours,” President Trump said during a CNN town hall in mid May, adding that he would meet with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin and pressure them to make a deal.

“They both have weaknesses and they both have strengths, and within 24 hours that war will be settled, it’ll be over,” President Trump said at the town hall.

In an interview on Fox News around the same time, President Trump provided more details on how he would persuade both sides to lay down arms and accept a peace settlement.

“I would tell Zelensky, no more. You got to make a deal. I would tell Putin, if you don't make a deal, we're going to give him a lot. We're going to [give Ukraine] more than they ever got if we have to,” President Trump said, adding that “he will have the deal done in one day.”

Polls show that support for the Ukraine war among the American public has waned, with a recent CNN-SSRS poll (pdf) released on Aug. 4 showing that a majority (51 percent) said the United States has done enough.

The United States has been a leading provider of security assistance to Ukraine, with the U.S. State Department saying on Aug. 22 that U.S. military aid and training to Ukraine amounts to nearly $46 billion since 2014, with $43.1 billion of that since Russia launched its invasion in February 2022.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story from The Epoch Times.

'This Isn't Any Kind of a Retreat'

Mr. Soros' op-ed came amid a spate of news headlines that said OSF was pulling the plug on its European operations.

Quoting from an internal OSF email to staff in July, The Guardian reported that the new directional shift for the organization "provides for withdrawal and termination of large parts of our current work within the European Union, shifting our focus and allocation of resources to other parts of the world."

The Guardian report framed the strategic shift as a "retreat from Europe" that could "turn off the lights for human rights," while Bloomberg ran a headline that said "Soros Retreats as Right Wing Gains In Europe."

But Mr. Soros explained that, as OSF "retools how it works globally," the foundation is shifting its priorities in Europe but "this isn't any kind of a retreat."

"Yes, this means we will be exiting some areas of work as we focus on today’s challenges, as well as those we will face tomorrow. And yes, we will also be reducing our headcount significantly, seeking to ensure more money goes out to where it’s most needed," Mr. Soros wrote.

However, despite cutting jobs and rejigging money flows, Mr. Soros said that OSF would continue to support its affiliates in Moldova and the Western Balkans, and that "there should be absolutely no doubt that we will continue to support our foundation in Ukraine."

He also said that OSF would "dramatically" increase its support for some 12 million Roma, most of whom live in Eastern Europe, in their efforts to "secure equal treatment."

Around 40 percent of OSF's global staff will be cut as part of the strategic shift, per the July email cited by The Guardian.

The Democrat megadonor told the Wall Street Journal at the time that he initially didn't want to cede control of the foundation to any member of his family "as a matter of principle."

However, he said that he and his son "think alike" and that he's taking over at the helm of the foundation because "he's earned it."

At the time, Alex Soros told the outlet that he's "more political" than his father and that he's worried about the prospect of a Trump win in 2024.

“As much as I would love to get money out of politics, as long as the other side is doing it, we will have to do it, too,” he told the Journal, suggesting that the deep pockets of the Soros organization will be deployed to support presidential campaigns opposing President Trump.

Alex Soros was elected to the OSF board as its chairman in December 2022.

Tom Ozimek is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times. He has a broad background in journalism, deposit insurance, marketing and communications, and adult education.