San Francisco, trip down Market St, 1906

 Just before the devastating 1906 earthquake and fires...

Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad

 

Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad — because they’re losing power

Glenn H. Reynolds, NY Post. 

With Donald Trump out of office and de-platformed, you’d think mainstream media gatekeepers would be happy. You’d think wrong.

Though the media-Big Tech regime is doing its best to silence opponents and seize control of the high ground, the news from within is grim. They aren’t happy with how things are going. 

That’s because they know they’re losing. Some are losing audiences and revenues. But more important, they’re losing control of the narrative.

And since control of the narrative, and the power and self-importance that accompany that control, is the most important thing in their lives, they can’t be happy.

Consider the cri de coeur of Washington Post public editor Hamilton Nolan, inspired by Tesla’s decision to scrap its media-relations department. How could that happen?

Nolan knows how, and that’s what bothers him: Tesla scrapped its media-relations department because the media don’t much matter to it. Tesla has plenty of ways to get its story out without relying on the media, and that makes the media much less important — and much less powerful. And it’s the power part that hurts the most.

Writes Nolan: “We are living through a historic, technology-fueled shift in the balance of power between the media and its subjects. The subjects are winning. . . . As journalists, we all view this as a horrifying assault on the public’s right to know, and on our own status as brave defenders of the public good. And that is all true, for what it’s worth. But this is about power.”

It sure is. And the media have less. Some of that is because of technology, but more of it is because reporters and editors have lost their standing with the people whose “right to know” they allegedly uphold.

The “right to know” claim rings hollow when The Washington Post, along with virtually every other mainstream outlet, did its best to kill the still-undisputed Hunter Biden stories published in these pages ahead of the election. Do the people have a “right to know” things in general? Or just the things Nolan would want them to know? Seems more like the latter, and people have noticed.

Right now, much of the media regurgitate news releases for those they favor — like the stories about President Biden’s firewood or First Lady Jill Biden’s scrunchie that were served up as news this week. And the media shut down stories they don’t want people to know about, like Hunter’s. Why should Tesla or any other news subject go along with that?

Meanwhile, The New York Times ran a hit piece on the “Slate Star Codex” blog, on the basis, apparently, that lots of Silicon Valley people read it and it says un-PC things sometimes. As Matt Yglesias wrote, the coverage boiled down to this: “Scott Alexander’s blog is popular with some influential Silicon Valley people. Scott Alexander has done posts that espouse views on race or gender that progressives disapprove of. Therefore, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of racism and sexism.”

As Reason’s Robby Soave commented, “one starts to get the feeling that the Times simply wants to tarnish every view that exists outside its own narrow purview, perhaps because the Times has appointed itself the gatekeeper of the unsayable and resents having to relinquish this role to newer media ventures.”

One starts to get that feeling because it’s true. The Times has also gone after the Clubhouse app, an audio forum that lets people talk about things in real time, also apparently because the paper doesn’t like the idea of free speech. In a tweet, the Times warned that “unfettered conversations” are taking place on Clubhouse. Quelle horreur! Bring out the fetters posthaste!

Actually, fetters seem to be what the Times wants. In an earlier episode, New York Times hall monitor Taylor Lorenz falsely accused Clubhouse participant Marc Andreessen of using the word “retard” in a conversation, then issued a non-apology apology when cornered. Other journalists complained that because Clubhouse doesn’t keep or allow recordings, there’s no way to hold people “accountable” for saying something controversial.

In all cases, the complaint is that people are bypassing the gatekeepers and saying what they want to say. Given the behavior of the gatekeepers, that doesn’t seem like a bug but a feature. Bypass away!

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.

Will Hard-Left Turn Lead to Pushback?

 

Will Hard-Left Turn Lead to Pushback?

Victor Davis Hanson, Daily Signal  

The corruption of the Renaissance Church prompted the Reformation, which in turn sparked a Counter-Reformation of reformist, and more zealous, Catholics.

The cultural excesses and economic recklessness of the Roaring ’20s were followed by the bleak, dour, and impoverished years of the Great Depression.

The 1960s counterculture led to Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, as “carefree hippies” turned into careerist “yuppies.”

So social, cultural, economic, and political extremism prompt reactions—and sometimes counterreactions.

The Bush-Clinton-Obama continuum of 24 years cemented the bipartisan fusion administrative state. Trump and his “Make America Great Again” agenda were its pushback.

The counterreaction to the populism of the Trump reset—or Trump himself—is as of yet unsure.

President Joe Biden’s tenure may mark a return to business as usual of the Bush-Clinton years. Or, more likely, it will accelerate the current hard-left trajectory.

Either way, it seems that Biden is intent on provoking just such a pushback by his record number of early and often radical executive orders—a tactic candidate Biden condemned.

On almost every issue—open borders, blanket amnesties, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the Green New Deal, and hard-left appointees—Biden is touting positions that likely do not earn 50% public support.

When Biden made a Faustian bargain with his party’s hard-left wing of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to win the election, he took on the commitment to absorb some of their agenda and to appoint their ideologues.

But he also soon became either unwilling or unable to stand up to them.

Now they—and the country—are in a revolutionary frenzy. The San Francisco Board of Education has voted to rename more than 40 schools honoring the nation’s best—Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln—largely on racist grounds that they are dead, mostly white males.

Statues continue to fall. Names change.

The iconic dates, origins, and nature of America itself continue to be attacked to meet leftist demands. And still, it is not enough for the new McCarthyites.

Social media are banning tens of thousands. Silicon Valley and Wall Street monopolies go after smaller upstart opponents.

A wrong word destroys a lifelong career. Formerly sane pundits now call for curtailing the First Amendment. Thousands of federal troops blanket a now-militarized Washington, D.C.

If Trump’s pushback tried to return to traditions ignored during the Obama years, Biden’s reset promises to become far more radical than Obama’s entire eight years.

Trump likely lost his second pushback term for two reasons—neither of which had anything to do with his reset agenda.

First, the sudden 2020 pandemic, quarantine, recession, summer-long demonstrations and riots, and radical changes in voting laws all ensured that 100 million ballots were not cast on Election Day, derailed a booming economy, and finally wore the people out.

Second, Trump underestimated the multitrillion-dollar power and furor of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the media, Hollywood, and the progressive rich. Those forces all coalesced against him and swamped his outspent and outmanned campaign.

With 24/7 blanket ads, news coverage, endorsements, and social media messaging, Trump sometimes was easily caricatured as a twittering disrupter. The inert and mute Biden in his basement was reinvented as the sober and judicious Washington “wise man” antidote to Trump’s unpredictability.

Had Biden continued his moderate campaign veneer, the current left-wing radicalism might not have prompted a counterreaction.

Instead, Biden is now unapologetically leading the most radical left-wing movement in the nation’s history.

Pundits thought Biden’s prior hints of a single four-year term would make him a weak lame duck. Instead, the idea of just one term has liberated the 78-year-old Biden. We forget that septuagenarians can be as reckless as 20-year-olds. Some old guys can feel their careers only have a few remaining years and might as well go out with a bang—and a legacy.

For now, Biden enjoys a congressional majority for the next 24 months. He has no plans to run for reelection. He sees both realities as a liberating blank check to accomplish what the much more heralded rock star Barack Obama never could.

Experts assured voters that Biden would work on a bipartisan consensus and bring back “normality.” He would “unite” the country.

That will not happen. How ironic that Biden will not just be pushed and pressured by the radicals whom he brought to power, but he may be leading them forward to cement an even harder-left legacy.

Will there be a reaction to this extremism?

The left is assured that radical changes in voting laws and demography, the fears of COVID-19, the Antifa-Black Lives Matter uprising, and anger at Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have all permanently changed the electorate—and pushed it further leftward.

If they are wrong, they have instead alienated and insulted the American people, and will reap the whirlwind in 2022 of the wind they are now sowing.

(C)2021 The Center for American Greatness.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Can Donald Trump Mount a Comeback?

 Can Donald Trump Mount a Comeback?

Bill O'Reilly, Billoreilly.com  

The “Turtle” snapped.  Powerful Senator Mitch McConnell, aka the Turtle, is not opposing the impeachment trial of President Trump, signaling the two men are no longer “Happy Together.”   If you don’t understand that reference, shame!

There is no doubt that the traditional leaders of the Republican Party want nothing further to do with Donald Trump.  However, they have a problem because so many Americans continue to support him, and believe he is being treated unfairly by the establishment.  

So the Turtle and other GOP power brokers should be very careful if they want to keep power.  President Trump is not a man to be easily dismissed.

The road back to authority for Mr. Trump is paved by just one person: Joe Biden.  And I’m not talking about running for President again which is a long shot, but not impossible, for Donald Trump.

No, I’m talking about political influence and credibility.

The conniving Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer well understand that President Trump will retain “people power,” much the way Barack Obama did when he left office. That’s what is driving this absurd second impeachment which could be worse than the first farce.

Donald Trump did encourage Americans to protest the election results.  Absolutely, he did that.  But he never even contemplated the violence that occurred on January 6. Maybe he should have.  But a misjudgment, even when it’s drastic, is not a removable offense for a president.  If it were, most of our Chief Executives would have been impeached.  Or am I wrong?

Therefore, the latest impeachment is designed for just one thing: to finish Trump forever in the political arena.  

At this point, the betting odds are that Mr. Trump will not be convicted.  Schumer needs sixteen Republican senators to support the democrats.  A few like Mitt Romney are salivating to cancel Trump.  But most are not.

Now back to President Biden.  The smart play would have been for him to discourage impeachment in the name of national unity.  

Instead, Biden did his best impression of Pontius Pilate and stood aside. Are you surprised?  It would have taken courage to go against the howling left wing mob.

Somewhere Barabbas is smiling.

The overreach by Democrats and their media allies is just getting started, and it is here where Donald Trump might benefit.

First, the cancel culture.  This despicable trend is owned exclusively by the left.  The cruelty and unfairness of the effort is obvious to any decent person.  The more traction the cancel thugs get, the more anti-liberal backlash there will be.

Immigration.  Soon the southern border will be under siege again because President Biden is sending open border signals.  The approaching chaos will anger many Americans.

And finally the economy.  Already gas prices are rising because oil companies know Biden will try to hurt them.  So the energy moguls are stockpiling cash.  Higher gas prices will hurt working people.

I could list many other examples but here’s the headline.  If President Biden’s liberal policies fail, and that’s almost a given, Americans will be looking for someone to stop the madness.

And it won’t be the Turtle.

 Good bye Mr. President, Hello Mr. Trump... The best is yet to come, not spelled Biden...

Where Does He Go From Here?

Where Does He Go From Here?

Conrad Black, American Greatness 

President Trump's political funeral has been celebrated often before, and that bell has still not tolled. The idea that Washington, D.C., will return to the status quo ante is nonsense.

There were no objections to President Trump’s address to his followers in Washington on Wednesday until several hours later, when the outrages at the Capitol had occurred. He did not incite violence or go beyond urging his partisans to show “strength.” He and his followers sincerely believe the election was stolen from them, and he explained those reasons, apologizing for doing so in such detail. 

Under the circumstances, there was nothing irrational about the president’s comments, and no excuse for raising the 25th Amendment, which applies to presidents who are physically or mentally incapacitated. Since the president did not break any laws, there is no serious question of impeachment. Congress lacks the time, the grounds, and the votes for it, and the only point of impeachment and removal would be to try to prevent Trump from seeking office again. Arguments that he should resign are fatuous. The invasion of the Capitol was a shocking event but the assault on the president is a confected storm of righteousness that will subside quickly. 

The real principal issue in this immense controversy is whether the presidential election was fairly decided or not. In 44 states, there have been no significant problems at all. As everyone who has followed it knows, there are a number of questions in the voting and counting methods of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—most undertaken in professed response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These measures reduced the verifiability of ballots and increased the dangers of fraud; opposition to these changes was generally described as “voter repression” by the Democrats. 

To those satisfied that the election produced a fair result, everything President Trump and his followers have said and done that alleges otherwise is unfounded. To most of the 48 percent of American voters who supported Trump there are serious doubts about the fairness of the result.

Righteous Anger

The president and his entourage made serious mistakes. After warning accurately of the dangers of mass-mailed ballots, extended voting periods, and the invitation to ballot harvesting, they were inadequately prepared to film and document irregularities and to launch plausible, timely lawsuits. 

In practice, most such litigation claimed remedies that were not justified by the alleged facts. In many cases the actions of the state legislatures, to whom the Constitution grants the authority of organizing elections within their states, were apparently lawful. But the Trump campaign complaint was that the offending states had failed in their constitutional obligation to assure fair elections. Trump and his 74 million voters have a powerful grievance in the refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the complaint of Texas against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, supported by 18 other states. They argued that the four defendant states failed to assure that the election was conducted fairly in those states, denying Americans their constitutional right to fair elections.       

When seven justices, including all three nominated by President Trump, declined even to hear the Texas case, the court abdicated its constitutional duty and the judiciary as a result temporarily ceased to be a coequal branch of the U.S. government with the legislature and the executive. This is in profound contravention of what James Madison and the other authors of the Constitution established. It leaves the selection of the chief of state and head of government of the United States to an unruly, and as we have seen, potentially unlawful contest: a raw struggle for power between contending parties and factions.

For those who profess confidence in the fairness of the presidential election, all of the complaints about it are outrageous. Trump should just accept his defeat as Governor Samuel Tilden did in the disputed 1876 election (where he did extract significant concessions), as Richard Nixon did in 1960 (for which he has received little credit), and as Al Gore did in 2000 (when he received an adverse Supreme Court judgment). 

This election’s result is a far more contestable one than those. But the president has not helped his case by absurd claims of a landslide victory if the results had not been tampered with, and even less by his unconstitutional request that the vice president unto himself should have declared the election to be invalid.

Almost half the voters are in a state of righteous anger. Trump almost won, despite being sandbagged by 95 percent of the political media and outspent by his opponent two-to-one, and his enemies had to engage in unprecedented chicanery and rely on the unforeseeable cowardice of the Supreme Court to win. It is hard to line up conscientiously behind the Democratic establishment, the totalitarian Trump-hating media, Big Tech and the information dictators of social media, and the vast and generally nauseating mass of half-wits and pundits in the entertainment and celebrity communities, and say that the argument that the elections were tainted has been completely disproved.

President Trump had to choose between accepting defeat and splitting national opinion profoundly. There is no reason why someone who has real reason to believe that the world’s highest and most influential office has been taken from him unjustly should just roll over. 

Gradations of Integrity

Those who claim that it was a fair election are now claiming that the attack on the Capitol was racist, a complete fiction for which there is no evidence, and that the Capitol police were themselves racists. This was Biden’s theory as he compared Trump to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and then incongruously called for national unity. It should be clear in the trials of the perpetrators whether the thugs in the vanguard at the Capitol were mainly professional hooligans who happened to be Trump supporters or serious Trump enthusiasts who happen to be hooligans.

There were gradations of integrity in the responses to last week’s events. U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) implicitly blamed the president for inciting the hope that the election could still be won, but acknowledged that the election result was questionable. Veteran Fox News commentator Brit Hume dismissed Trump’s allegations against the fairness of the election as “nonsense,” a disappointing capitulation to the iron grip of the anti-Trump media that he must know to be false. 

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and a large number of other Republicans who continued to express qualified support for the president departed on this issue with comparative civility; they are not unpardonable wafflers but they have been exposed as slippery ingrates. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-N.Y.) apparent belief that shooting the female Air Force veteran Trump supporter dead in the Capitol was more or less of a positive development, was disgraceful. The righteous weaseling of the Trump hating RINOs—Senators Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)—should at least be sufficient to ensure that they are not reelected. 

Words do not come easily to describe the hypocrisy and betrayal of former apparent cabinet loyalists: Elaine Chao, Betsy DeVos, and Mick Mulvaney. The Civil War was an “insurrection”; this was not. It was scores of millions of voters upset at what they think was a stolen election. Many will consider the spectacle of congressmen hiding under their desks in what look like tinfoil hats a representative posture of an institution only 11 percent of Americans think is doing its job well, as reported by a media that 85 percent of Americans don’t believe.

The Largest Faction-Head in Politics

Trump set out five years ago to cleanse the political establishment. In policy terms, he has been a very successful president who was effectively ratified in congressional and state elections, and he has reoriented the Republican Party. He made great inroads on traditional sources of Democratic support among minorities, too. 

Trump’s own status is to be determined; those who have not deserted him and can bring in robust traditional Republicans will be the winners if Trump supports them. These are Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Governors Ron DeSantis (Florida) and Greg Abbott (Texas), and most conspicuously, Vice President Mike Pence, if he quietly passes on attending the inauguration. There are others. 

Trump remains by far the largest faction-head in American politics. He has done himself serious damage but it is not necessarily irreparable, and he has smoked out his pretended supporters and has forced the political establishment to the last extremities of electoral misconduct to defeat him. Where it goes from here depends largely on how Trump plays his cards; he is going to have an easy target in the new administration and his supporters are certainly the majority among the Republicans.

Trump’s political funeral has been celebrated often before, and that bell has still not tolled. If he learns anything from all this (and learning from his own mistakes hasn’t been his strong suit), he may be around for awhile yet. The idea that Washington will just go back to where it was before he arrived really is nonsense. 

Why Is Media Stoking Disinformation Campaigns

 

Why Is Media Stoking Disinformation Campaigns

Yuri Vanetik, American Greatness 

Americans need to insist that legacy media be held to account as a treacherous culprit in the mass deception campaigns attributed to politicians, shady public relations operatives, and foreign powers.

Disinformation media campaigns operated by the Russians and the Chinese may also have a domestic origin. It is not what one would think. They don’t come from sleeper cells. Instead, the American legacy media, by way of its greed and lack of accountability, is responsible for the deception. 

Stealth public relations operatives drive conspiracy theories and smear campaigns using the complicit media of record as their echo chamber. Whether you are a supporter of President Trump or you consider him to be a lawless authoritarian is irrelevant because all Americans should be concerned that what is presented as news may actually be part of a paid public relations campaign or a sensation-oriented spin that is not newsworthy at all. 

Often the media is doing the dirty bidding of fringe groups and paid reputation assassins solely to maximize profits, knowing that their malfeasance is relegated to that of a protected class of free speech and free press. Media today is like the clergy in the middle ages—their profession considered sacred and their actions above the law.

Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law professor, led a team of researchers that dissected the way information is amplified. Benkler’s team just published its study, which examines President Trump’s alleged “disinformation” campaign against mail-in voting and details the techniques the Trump world used to share Trump’s opinions on the election. Benkler and his team began from the biased position that a difference of opinion on policy questions qualifies as disinformation, nevertheless, the findings inadvertently run contrary to the popular idea on the Left that it is the Russian and Chinese foreign troll factories that are interfering with our elections with “disinformation.”

The research examined 55,000 media stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 Facebook posts. The researchers mapped the campaign out, showing a clear origin: Trump—whether on TV or Twitter or by close proxy. Yet, the legacy media insists that the Russians manipulated Trump’s election, that Trump is working for the Russians, and that now—again the Russians—foreign influencers are pushing misinformation to keep Trump in control or return him to the White House.

The American press magnifies this dramatically because news platforms cannot resist giving attention to the Trump White House. Calling his actions a disinformation campaign would be challenging for journalists who are desperate to project balance as if it is the same thing as fairness. More importantly, it is easier to get readers (and advertising dollars) if you advance a monolithic notion that foreign villains are sabotaging our elections. 

Media disinformation has real consequences and calling it “fake news” does not deter dishonest journalists or capture the depth of their betrayal of the trust our republic has bestowed upon them.

But whether the president tweets or goes on TV, the study says, it is media coverage of the tweets that amplifies the message—often uncritically—far beyond what the account accomplishes alone. Yet the American legacy media clings desperately to the distortions it publishes—like the theory that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians.

Whatever happened was most likely not much more than intelligence jousting between competing countries. To claim otherwise gives President Trump too much credit. The media, undaunted, amplifies the narrative even more, fulfilling Einstein’s definition of insanity. We see this everywhere. The New York Post recently had a compelling scoop on how Joe Biden, when he was vice president, met with a top executive of a shady Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, at the request of his son, Hunter. Burisma was paying Biden’s son $80,000 a month for his connections. Hunter’s emails show that he told people he was handing 10 percent to 50 percent of the foreign windfall to “the big guy”—President-elect Joe Biden himself.

The rest of the media ignored it—and focused, instead, on the possibility that this latest scoop somehow was the work of Russian operatives. Never mind whether the emails were authentic—they were. The media did this even after Twitter and Facebook brazenly muzzled the New York Post and blocked users from being able to retweet or open the online link to read the story.

The media continues this behavior despite a stunning revelation in late September: the CIA knew in July 2016 that Russian intelligence believed—or was pretending to believe—the Hillary Clinton campaign was plotting to smear candidate Donald Trump. This news came not from an anonymous and illegal leak, as did so many headlines in the Russiagate investigation. This news came on the record from the U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who declassified secret information and released it to Congress.

It follows, therefore, that the FBI and the CIA waged a full-scale investigation of the newly elected Trump Administration based on allegations they knew to be questionable, and possibly fabricated by the Clinton campaign or Russian spies. Then, the Mueller team investigated this farce: 675 days, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 500 witnesses, 19 lawyers and 40 FBI agents. Cost: $25 million for a 488-page report that cited “no evidence” that “any American” had colluded with the Russians. The mainstream media outlets that spread this scandal have never explained how they got it so wrong. Nor did they explain why they became useful idiots for Russian spies. Unfazed by the knowledge of the lies they were spinning, some journalists and their editors continued to pursue a false, but politically useful, narrative.

I take media disinformation personally. In early 2018, I was collateral damage in this Russiagate smear, a part of the media-driven disinformation campaign (see my Wall Street Journal op-ed explaining this from last year). An absurd four-part series speculated that I might be a Russiagate co-conspirator. No one alleged this outright—because there was no basis whatsoever to tie me to anything nefarious. It was all insinuation and innuendo rife with ad hominem comments about me and my family, outright lies from anonymous, paid sources. Followed by the waffle: “It isn’t known what, if any, connections Mr. Vanetik may have to” so and so.

Various newspapers and websites picked up the bogus reporting. None of them gave me any chance to refute or even respond to the lies and bizarre insinuations. Nor did the three McClatchy reporters who started it all: Kevin G. Hall and Ben Wieder in the McClatchy Washington Bureau, and Angela Hart, then at the Sacramento Bee (and now at a Kaiser health policy website, healthline.com).

A well-known journalist and television personality who became a friend, told me after reading the stories that “it was a drive-by shooting into an empty window.” And now, in the same vein, Hall, Wieder, and Hart can’t be bothered to respond to my phone calls and emails. Whatever happened to the standards of journalistic fairness and professionalism?

The corporate media, unrepentant and blind to its own sins, should agree to strict standards: that no negative story can be based solely on anonymous sources; that news stories must disclose the motives and agenda of the identified sources they quote; that all targets must be given early notice that they are being investigated so that they could prepare their defense, which should include the right to be quoted fully and prominently.

The media will do this when pigs fly, to use a cliché that journalists favor. Perhaps the Supreme Court will revisit New York Times vs. Sullivan. That ruling in 1964 said any public figure, to win a libel case against the media, must prove reporters acted with malice or utter disregard for the truth. That is an impractically high hurdle. As soon as they cover you, you now are a public figure who cannot fight them in court and have a real chance of winning. Amy Coney Barrett, now a Supreme Court Justice, has come under attack from Trump haters and the Democrats boosted by media campaigns aiming to discredit her. Justice Brett Kavanaugh endured even worse vitriol in his confirmation hearings two years ago. Perhaps the high court, with these two newest members, will set in motion the measured change in law that puts victims of smear campaigns at a virtually insurmountable disadvantage. 

More importantly, perhaps, Americans will insist that legacy media be held to account as a treacherous culprit in the mass deception campaigns attributed to politicians, shady public relations operatives, and foreign powers. Keeping in mind First Amendment guarantees, something must be done to ensure that Americans can be confident that what is reported to them is factually correct and newsworthy. The stakes for our country are much too high to demand anything less.

If There Is a President Biden, Don’t Expect to See Him Around for Long

If There Is a President Biden, Don’t Expect to See Him Around for Long

Roger Kimball, The Epoch Times 

Several times during the election season, I noted that no matter who was said to have won the presidential contest, there never would be a President Biden, not really.

There were basically two reasons there would not be a President Biden, except, very briefly, in some strictly nominal sense.

The first reason is that Joe Biden is an empty cipher. He is a drowsy Howdy-Doody puppet, manipulated by a committee of woke ventriloquists.

They picked Biden out of the primary line-up because he seemed the least threatening and most pliable. Biden promised “normality” after the brashness of Donald Trump.

Biden’s painfully obvious flirtation with senility was as much an asset as a liability, because, though it made for some cringe-worthy displays of incompetence, it conspired with COVID to allow his handlers to keep him tucked safely away in his basement for most of the campaign.

Writing for The Epoch Times in August, I compared Joe Biden to the aged Achon, a character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Black Mischief.”

Achon, the legitimate emperor of the fictional kingdom of Azania, had been safely confined to a cave for 50 years.

After some elaborate negotiations among the real powers of state, Achon is set free and is carried to the capital to be invested as emperor. Alas, his long captivity left him bent and senile. He dies upon coronation.

Waugh did not record whether his last words were “Come on, man.”

Who knows whether Joe and Jill will actually move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue come Jan. 20. Maybe they will.

It would be interesting to sit in on his first meeting with Jake Sullivan, the man Biden wants to be his National Security Advisor.

Sullivan recently disclosed that the “Big Guy” asked him to “reimagine national security” to include “the pandemic, the economic crisis, the climate crisis, technological disruptions, threats to democracy, racial injustice and inequality in all forms.”

I’m sure that will amuse the Chinese, as much for the fact that they didn’t make the list of concerns as for the many fatuous items that did.

I hate to introduce a discordant note into this green dream of perfect wokeness, racial inclusivity, and mandatory readings of Harrison Bergeron. But the current Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, has a different list of national security threats.

“It is that the People’s Republic of China,” he wrote, that “poses the greatest threat to … democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II.”

It appears that when Joe Biden thinks about China, he thinks about that Chinese office mate that his son Hunter lined up for him.

Mention of Hunter Biden brings me to the second reason that Joe Biden’s tenure as President, if it happens at all, is likely to be merely nominal.

Many people wonder why Biden picked, or agreed to, Kamala Harris as his running mate.

With the possible exception of Elizabeth Watch-Me-Drink-a-Beer-With-My-Hubby Warren, Harris was the least popular of all the Democrat candidates for President. She was from a state that anyone with a “D” after his name would carry. She had no national following.

So why pick her? Sex and race were part of it, of course, but there are plenty other half-black females parading around.

I think Kamala Harris was chosen because she was an eager disciple of the left flank of the Obama-Clinton coalition.

It is they who have defined the Biden profile. And it is they who would staff his administration, assuming he has one.

But have you noticed the sudden flurry of attention to Hunter Biden and his travails?

There’s the $400,000 from Burisma he forgot to declare. There’s that “laptop from hell.”

There’s all that money—millions and millions—that had been shoveled to him and his family for … for what? For meetings with “the Big Guy,” i.e., dear old dad.

We knew all this before the election. But the media dismissed it when they didn’t actively censor it. “Just drag Biden over the finish line. Then we’ll talk.”

Well, he is almost over the finish line now. Maybe he’ll have a chance to put his hand on the Bible and recite the oath of office.

But it will not be long, I predict, that a reason will be found to cut him loose.

Maybe people will start noticing all the things he doesn’t notice and sound the alarm: “Hey, he’s President of the United States! He can’t remember what day it is!”

Or maybe “grave concerns” will be raised about all the nefarious revelations that are lurking on Hunter’s hard drive.

One way or another, it will be President Harris before you can say “Paris Climate Accord” or “Let’s Not Be Beastly to the Chinese.”

I thought the Dems were pretty cynical when they nominated Biden in the first place. I suspect I didn’t know the half of it.

Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent book is “Who Rules? Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in the 21st Century.”

WALTER WILLIAMS’ LAST COLUMN

 

WALTER WILLIAMS’ LAST COLUMN

John Hinderaker, Powerline

Walter Williams, economist, teacher and columnist, died yesterday. His long-time friend Thomas Sowell writes movingly about Williams here. Williams’ last column appeared the day before his death. The information it contains is so remarkable and so timely that I want to highlight it. The subject is education, specifically the education of urban blacks:

Several years ago, Project Baltimore began an investigation of Baltimore’s school system. What it found was an utter disgrace.

In 19 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, out of 3,804 students, only 14 of them, or less than 1%, were proficient in math.

In 13 of Baltimore’s high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math.

In five Baltimore City high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math or reading.

These schools nevertheless have a 70% graduation rate. They are, as Williams writes, a fraud that is perpetrated on parents and taxpayers.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District scored the lowest in the nation compared to 26 other urban districts for reading and mathematics at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels.

A recent video captures some of this miseducation in Milwaukee high schools: In two city high schools, only one student tested proficient in math and none are proficient in English.

Is there any exception to the disgrace of urban public schools? Not that I know of. What many have forgotten is that it hasn’t always been this way:

Should we blame this education tragedy on racial discrimination or claim that it is a legacy of slavery? Thomas Sowell’s research in “Education: Assumptions Versus History” documents academic excellence at Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School and others. This academic excellence occurred during the late 1800s to mid-1900s, an era when blacks were much poorer than today and faced gross racial discrimination.

Also in Sowell’s “Education: Assumptions Versus History” is the story of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, a black public school in Washington, D.C. As early as 1899, its students scored higher on citywide tests than any of the city’s white schools. From its founding in 1870 to 1955, most of its graduates went off to college.

Dunbar’s distinguished alumni include U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke, physician Charles Drew, and, during World War II, nearly a score of majors, nine colonels and lieutenant colonels, and a brigadier general.

Today’s Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frederick Douglass high schools have material resources that would have been unimaginable to their predecessors. However, having those resources has meant absolutely nothing in terms of academic achievement.

Why do we put up with it? I don’t know. No doubt part of the answer is that the people who wield most authority in our society, of all races, have left the urban public schools far behind. They are content to pay taxes to support those schools, which far from being underfunded consume large amounts of money. But money, as Williams said, has nothing to do with it.

For those left behind in the public schools, the school environment has deteriorated alarmingly:

The school climate, seldom discussed, plays a very important role in education. During the 2017-18 school year, there were an estimated 962,300 violent incidents and 476,100 nonviolent incidents in U.S. public schools nationwide. Schools with 1,000 or more students had at least one sworn law enforcement officer. About 90% of those law enforcement officers carry firearms.

Aside from violence, there are many instances of outright disrespect for teachers. First- and second-graders telling teachers to “Shut the f— up” and calling teachers “b—h.”

Williams was a man of my era. His description of the role of the vice principal is exactly what we had in my youth in a South Dakota town:

Years ago, much of the behavior of young people that we see today would have never been tolerated. There was the vice principal’s office where corporal punishment would be administered for gross infractions. If the kid was unwise enough to tell his parents what happened, he might get more punishment at home.

The rot in our urban public schools is a disgrace, but it largely reflects, in concentrated form, the larger rot in our society. The incoming Biden administration will undoubtedly restore the Obama-era guidance that imposed racial quotas in school discipline, meaning that the urban public schools will become even more lawless and dangerous. For reasons that I assume have to do with the money and clout of the teachers’ unions, not a single Democrat seems to care.

Green New Deal = Betrayal

 

Green New Deal = Betrayal

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

The Green New Deal betrays America and Americans as there is only one clear winner if that insane policy is enacted: socialist communist China.

 

 Harsh words, yes, but here is why: 

 

If the New Green New Deal were enacted then in its wake the world will have MORE greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than today. After the Green New Deal, the ill effects of climate change on the planet will be WORSE – not better.

 

To explain that, here is a short history lesson:

 

Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States have been declining since their peak in 2007 at 7.3 billion metric tons (CO2 equiv.). In 2018 US emissions fell to 6.2 billion metric tons and already is predicted to fall to 5 billion metric tons by 2030 without the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal only adds to that decline. But with or without the New Green Deal, in the end it all achieves nothing. Again, why?

 

Because of China. China is the world’s most polluted land, has the most polluted waters and most polluted skies, and the number one nation in the world when it comes to dumping plastic trash into the ocean. 

 

Most of all, China is the far and away the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases.

China’s uncontrolled growth in CO2 emissions undoes everything we do – to include everything the New Green Deal claims to do. 

 

In 1990, China produced 3.2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2004, China surpassed the United States at largest greenhouse gas polluter in the world. By 2018, China generated 13.5 billion metric tons (more than double US emissions). China is projected reach the level of 15.3 billion metric tons by 2030 and continue to increase its rate of pollution afterwards.

 

(BTW, India also is becoming a major greenhouse gas polluter and by 2030 will only rank behind China as the world’s greatest polluter)

 

China’s actions mean the Green New Deal will utterly fail to make the global environment better in the future and what do we in America get?

 

-- the addition of $ Trillions in new debt that hastens the collapses of the Federal budget (and “hurray!” say small-government advocates) 

-- the creation of the biggest waste-fraud-and-abuse Washington pork barrel in American history (with              much of it having nothing to do with reducing greenhouse gas emissions)

-- the crippling of local economies from coast to coast 

-- ignorant and power-hungry Washington DC politicians picking economic winners and losers

-- power outages worse than those in third world countries (see: California)

-- millions of innocent Americans thrown into the unemployment ranks and poverty…

 

…and all that pain and suffering to pursue a fool’s errand. Good Grief!

 

So that gets us back to the beginning: Who most benefits from the Green New Deal? 

 

Socialist communist China! China will not go into debt or destroy millions of jobs or suffer power outages or have its economy ripped apart. No! China just keeps on keeping on. All the pain is endured by Americans and for no gain.

 

Now, I am not arguing to raise your hands in despair and do nothing. To the contrary. If we are serious then America need to do two things to reduce global greenhouse gases:

 

(1) Do everything in our power to compel China to reduce its polluting and make Beijing truly become a good citizen of the world.

 

(2) Continue to take prudent, reasoned and effective measures to reduce our greenhouse emissions that do not harm innocent Americans or damage our economy.

 

Sadly, that reckless and senseless harm and damage is the exact outcome we will get if the Green New Deal becomes law. 

 

For American socialist politicians to lie to the American people about what will come from their New Green Deal is unforgivable.

 

For American socialist politicians to put the interests of socialist communist China ahead of the United States and its people is both unforgivable and a betrayal of our nation.

JUSTICE ALITO TELLS IT LIKE IT IS

JUSTICE ALITO TELLS IT LIKE IT IS

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

I’m a huge fan of Justice Samuel Alito. His speech to the Federalist Society this week, delivered virtually, is a good example of why.

Alito’s message was that key American rights are in jeopardy. He noted, for example, that the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic has resulted in previously “unimaginable” restrictions on individual liberty. “We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020,” he stated.

Alito was careful to emphasize that he wasn’t diminishing the “severity of the virus’ threat to public health” or even taking a position on whether the restrictions are good public policy. However, he argued that the restrictions on public gatherings and worship services highlighted “trends that were already present before the virus struck,” including a “dominance of lawmaking by executive fiat” rather than by legislators and the relegation of certain rights to second class status.

Religious rights, for example. Alito homed in on the decision of Nevada to limit church attendance to 50 people, while reopening large casinos to 50 percent capacity. “It pains me to say to it, but in certain quarters religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right,” he concluded.

Take a quick look at the Constitution,” Alito urged. “You will see the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, which protects religious liberty. You will not find a craps clause, or a blackjack clause, or a slot machine clause.”

When it comes to same sex marriage, both religious and free speech rights are in jeopardy. As Alito noted:

[These days] you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman without fear of reprisal from schools, government and employers. Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.

Alito delivered a well-deserved shot at the execrable Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. He pointed to a recent brief filed by the Senator and four colleagues in a case regarding a New York City firearms transportation ordinance. Whitehouse and his colleagues said that a pro-gun ruling would further incite the growing movement to “restructure” the Court. Alito accurately described the brief as “extraordinary,” and added “I could say something about standards of professional conduct, but the brief involved something even more important — it was an affront to the Constitution and the rule of law.”

As the Washington Post acknowledges, the Whitehouse brief was criticized even by some Democrats as too threatening. And the late Justice Ginsburg denounced the idea of court packing — the threat through which Whitehouse was trying to intimidate the Court.

Alito’s address has drawn howls from the left, as the Justice anticipated it would. For example, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern condemned the speech as “bitter[ly] partisan” and as “[f]louting [Alito’s] ethical obligations.” However, the speech raises no problems of judicial ethics.

As Ed Whelan painstakingly shows, on all the matters that Stern finds controversial, the speech broadly reiterates what Alito has already spelled out in his written opinions. By contrast, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s speeches, the ones that used to draw gushing praise from the left, addressed open issues on which the justice hadn’t yet ruled — e.g., same sex marriage and President Trump’s tax returns.

Elizabeth Warren also slammed Justice Alito’s speech. She tweeted:

Supreme Court Justices aren’t supposed to be political hacks. This right-wing speech is nakedly partisan. My bill to #EndCorruptionNow restores some integrity to our Court by forcing Justices to follow the ethics rules other federal judges follow.

This is an admission by Warren that Alito’s speech did not violate existing ethical rules for Supreme Court Justices. Hence, the mindless, empty name-calling.

Along with Justice Thomas, Justice Alito has fought valiantly on behalf of our constitutional rights. And starting this term, I expect that they will be ably aided in the struggle by Justice Barrett.

Trumpism: Then, Now—and in the Future?

 

Trumpism: Then, Now—and in the Future?

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

Like it or not, Trump hit on a great truth that no country can write off its vast industrial interior, destroy its borders, or prefer managed decline over renewal, and meanwhile call itself moral.

What was, is, and will be the Trump agenda? 

Against all odds, what elected Trump in 2016 was a recalibration of American foreign and domestic policy—and the art of politicking itself.

Doctrine and Policy

In foreign affairs, the United States would no longer adhere to every aspect of the 75-year-old postwar order it created—given the world now bore little resemblance to the world of 1945. 

Prior bipartisan foreign policy had often ossified to the point of enhancing the power of our enemies, weakening our complacent friends, and terribly damaging our own power. When Trump entered office, ISIS was proving that it was hardly a “JV” organization. North Korea was recklessly testing missiles and bragging of its nuclear-tipped rockets pointed at our West Coast. 

Israel and the moderate Arab regimes were ostracized as part of the insane Obama empowerment of theocratic Iran and its quest for a radical crescent encompassing Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

Russian reset was an utter failure. Unhinged, we were hectoring Vladimir Putin on human rights while agreeing to dismantle missile defense in Europe, if he would just please behave for a bit, and give Obama space during his 2012 reelection bid. The Asian pivot was laughable. Our friendly and hostile trading partners praised the Obama Administration in direct proportion to their manipulation of it.

In the 1950s, it was understandable that the United States would spend blood and treasure abroad to resurrect the destroyed economies after World War II and contain Soviet Communism. Its policy of allowing recovering allies to run up huge trade deficits to reenter the world community was seen both as desirable and affordable, as was putting down Communist insurrections the world over to contain the Soviet Union. 

Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea became powerhouses, often with wide open, one-sided access to U.S. markets. China would never have achieved its 40-year stunning ascendence had America applied to Chinese trade the same mercantilism that China applied to the United States. 

By 2016, it was clear that a host of world and international trade and development organizations took for granted U.S. moral and financial support, while assuming wide open entrance for all into the U.S. market. 

The result of the globalist project was the destruction of much of the American interior’s manufacturing and assembly industries. Those whose labor could not be so easily xeroxed—Silicon Valley, Wall Street, banking and insurance, big law, the media, entertainment, professional sports, and large research universities—saw their markets expand to 7 billion consumers. Coastal elites got rich. Interior deplorables and clingers were said to have deserved their fate by not going to college or failing to learn how to code.  

They were lectured that not even a magic wand could save their jobs, or, in the words of Lawrence Summers, former Harvard president and the architect of President Obama’s team of economic advisers, they deserved their unfortunate fates, which in our meritocracy matched their meager abilities. “One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is a kind of disequalizer,”  Summers reportedly once said. “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”. 

Into that comfortable matrix of easing into decline, Trump stormed in. He damned globalists as elites who cared more about abstractions abroad than unfairness and the poor at home right under their noses. 

To restore U.S. primacy, he greenlighted gas and oil production. When the United States became the largest producer of both, much of the world changed. The Middle East no longer had a political stranglehold over U.S. foreign policy. Russia, and illiberal regimes like Iran, lost hundreds of billions in carbon income. American consumers and industry enjoyed the cheapest energy prices in the Westernized world. And the elite dismissed all that as too damaging to the planet.

Tax reform and deregulation lured back to U.S. shores offshored money and opened up trillions of dollars for investment that had been inert—the owners of which had been understandably worried by the redistributionist rhetoric and policies of the increasingly leftwing second-term Obama Administration and its recalibration of the Democratic Party.

Closing the border with Mexico slowly tapered off the once-endless supplies of cheap imported labor. For the first time in a half-century, the American worker was courted by needy employers who paid record entry-level wages, as unemployment fell to near historic peacetime lows. 

Minority youth were no longer begging employers for a chance of a job, but rather were being begged by them to come to work. Ancient fights over unions and minimum wages faded as an increasingly wealthy America saw middle-class income soar for the first time in years as employers paid whatever was necessary to land American workers. 

Trump stopped most optional military interventions that did not pencil out in a cost-benefit advantage for the United States—or for regional stability. Instead, don’t-tread-on-me realism bombed ISIS out of existence and took out the terrorist Iranian mastermind Qasem Soleimani, or threatened Kim Jong-un with massive retaliation if he dared launch a missile toward the United States. 

At no time did Trump think he should remove Bashar al-Assad and try to create a Western democracy in Syria, or invade and overthrow the Iranian regime—as opposed to slowly strangle them with sanctions, new alliances, and military deterrence. There was no desire to return to spend money or lives in Libya or Iraq to establish or reboot democratic institutions.

There were two final pillars of the new Trump foreign policy. One was to talk honestly to allies about investing in their own defense as promised. Most not only counted on U.S. protection but often loudly seemed to resent their ensuing dependence by opportunistically ankle-biting the United States for its global policeman role. 

Western Europe and Asia, and especially Germany and Japan, were told that if Russia and China really were existential threats, then such front-line states had to commensurately invest in their own defense first—at least if they to expected 19-year-olds from rural Michigan or northern Florida to fly over to their defense.

Unpredictability was seen as safer deterrence in a dangerous world than predictable and ossified policy. 

So, against all advice, Trump called China to account for its commercial cheating and insidious infiltration into Western banking, corporate, media, entertainment, and academic institutions. He cut off aid to Palestinians who refused to recognize Israel, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, reminded the Assad regime that it would never recover the Golan Heights to launch another war on Israel, encouraged the moderate Arab world to ally with Israel to protect against revolutionary Shiite Iran, and reminded Canada and Mexico that one reason why they had small militaries, and growing economies, was their proximity to the United States—and thus such magnanimity should be reciprocated with symmetry rather than seen as naïveté that explained its continuance.

Class, Not Race

The second pillar of Trumpism was a shift in Republican orthodoxy to reemphasize class differences and in radically different ways. 

No longer was there talk of privatizing Social Security, institutionalizing free (but not fair) trade, or following international commercial accords against the interest of an increasingly hollowed out American middle class. Deregulation and cuts in corporate taxes galvanized the economy and indeed profits “trickled down” to the hoi polloi. But such necessary free-market reforms were not the be-all and end-all of Republican orthodoxy, which was now readjusted to be more in the interest of the factory worker, not just the Wall Street investor. 

Closing the border cut off the easy supply of cheap labor for corporations. Only that way would wages of entry-level and largely minority workers rise. More radially, Trumpism did not see the middle classes as spent, addicted, eroding and doomed, much less as deplorables, clingers, irredeemables, dregs, and chumps as the coastal elites increasingly liked to smear them. And Trump certainly did not see poor whites, without much influence, as privileged, and thus in need of making atonement for supposed sins of the past or the present. 

One reason why Trump is libeled as a racist is that he saw through the white elite con of blaming those without advantage for bias and prejudice, in order to win psychological exemption for the elite’s own near-monopoly on blue-chip university admissions, corporate, media and academic old-boy access and cultural influence. 

Bull-in-the-China-Shopism

Aside from fundamental changes in foreign and democratic policy, and renewed emphasis on class instead of race, Trumpism changed the political dialectic. 

Of course, Trump could be crude, even at times bullying and profane. But much of his braggadocio and vulgarity were designed as chemotherapy to kill the cancer of the administrative state and the lock-hold on permanent government by the revolving-door, bipartisan coastal elite. 

The reasons why Trump just days after his inauguration faced a failed impeachment, or calls for his removal by the 25th Amendment, or even talk of a military coup, or the Steele dossier hoax that led to a $40 million, 22-month effort by progressives to destroy his presidency, his person and his family, were manifold. But one cause surely was that Trump was orphaned from the hard-Left Democratic Party and the Republican establishment and seemed either to welcome the ostracism or not be fully cognizant of the cost that it entailed.  

True, Trump may have defined presidential comportment down with his “sleepy,” “crooked,” “lying,” and “low-energy” epithets and with his crowds cheering to “lock her up.” But then again, what was so moral in the past about mellifluously assuring Americans they would lose neither their doctor nor their health plan—to the amusement of the likes of Jonathan Gruber who knew all along that they would? Or ramming through the Iran Deal by bypassing the treaty duties of the U.S. Senate, while deluding the country with a “know-nothing” media echo chamber? If we learned anything from the Obama years, supposedly “scandal-free” presidents might do anything from weaponizing the IRS and siccing the FBI on opponents to dismantling viable allied missile defense to leverage foreign leaders to aid their reelection campaigns—and then call all that moral, with a chorus of media assent.

When a man takes on the role of the gunslinger arriving in the town to clean up the mess, one must expect that his methods and comportment will offend his supporters as much as they terrified his adversaries, all the more so as he succeeds and thus the beneficiaries see an end on the horizon to their embarrassing need to have called in the unorthodox to do what their own polite conventionality should have done, but choose not (or did not have the courage) to do. 

The Fate of Trumpism 

We can sense the viability of Trumpism by the current lack of coherent attacks on its principles and achievements. Would a President Mitt Romney demand that the U.S. embassy now leave Jerusalem? Would a President Nikki Haley cease the new containment of China? Would a President Marco Rubio return to the Bush-Obama coaxing of NATO partners to please, pretty please pay up what they had promised?

Or alternatively, would a President Joe Biden warn the Arab countries to cease their “destabilizing” new partnership with Israel? 

Would he jawbone them to return the autocratic Palestinians to front and center of the Middle East “peace” plan? Would a President Biden begin dismantling 400 miles of border wall and return to open borders?

At home, Biden most certainly would raise taxes, restore cumbersome regulations, strangle the fossil fuel industry, and return to identity politics pandering. But after the 2017-20 Trump boom, he would do so without any expectation that the economy would grow or the country would heal or the world would suddenly cool down and the seas cease to rise. 

Biden knows that under Obama a natural recovery stagnated, a uniter president ignited the country with his team of racial arsonists, and the government wasted billions of dollars in green boondoggles even as a hamstrung private sector did far more than Washington to expand the use of solar energy and electric cars. 

And what about the NeverTrumper—always wrong that Trump would not be nominated or not be elected or be destroyed by “Russian collusion”? At the end of Trump, whether in 2020 and 2024, would they resurrect the Weekly Standard or return to the Sunday talk shows? Would the legions of handlers, operatives and advisors return to recalibrate all the party Senate and House races along the lines of a Mitt Romney or John McCain orthodoxy? Would the NeverTrump Phoenix arise to save the Republican Party from the ashes of Trumpism—on the principle that deplorables would always support RINO candidates, but RINOS would bolt the minute a deplorable candidate appeared. Could a Jeff Flake or a Ben Sasse or a John Kasich candidacy shatter the Blue Wall?

Probably not at all. Elite Republicanism would fail because the white working classes would return either to political hibernation in the swing states or rejoin the Democratic Party. Growing minority support would vanish because blacks and Latinos would see platitudinous and pandering Republicans as far more injurious to their futures than was a crudely talking, Queens-accented populist Trump.

Trumpism did not dismantle Republican conservatism. It simply enhanced conservative appeal by closing the border, confronting China, demanding fair trade, avoiding optional military expeditions, emphasizing the concerns of the working class, and redefining presidential behavior as boisterously honoring promises rather than mellifluously reneging on them. 

Whatever Trump’s fate, the NeverTrump faction will not succeed in rebuilding a new-old Republican Party under the Bush-McCain-Romney paradigm. Biden and his leftist masters would not be able to lower minority unemployment to Trump levels. Neither would they declare an end to containing China and claim such past confrontation was an unnecessary provocation. 

Like it or not, Trump hit on a great truth that no leader can write off his country’s vast industrial interior, destroy his nation’s borders, willingly cede global leadership to a Communist dictatorship, manipulate intelligence agencies to destroy political opponents, prefer to manage decline rather than to seek renewal, and meanwhile, as he did all that, call himself moral and presidential.

Fear and loathing in the Biden Crime Family

Starting to feel sorry for slow Joe... some legacy! Not a bad guy

in a creepy, sleazy kind of way...

Fear and loathing in the Biden Crime Family

Howie Carr, Boston Herald

“I have no response.”

That was Dementia Joe Biden’s response Friday when he was finally asked about the devastating expose of his son Hunter’s emails and so much more.

Those revelations included the crack-addled Hunter whining to one of his daughters that he has to pay 50% of all the cash he collects to “Pop,” and that as part of a shady Chinese deal, the so-called “remuneration package” would include “10 held by H for the Big Guy.”

“I have no response,” the Big Guy told a CBS reporter. “It’s another smear campaign, right up your alley.”

But he didn’t deny it. Biden — or more precisely, his keepers — haven’t disputed the veracity of the Biden Crime Family documents, or that they are from Hunter’s laptop. They were obtained legally, after an “inebriated” Hunter abandoned the computer at a repair shop, according to the New York Post.

The usual alt-left suspects — the AP, NBC “News,” Rep. Adam Schiff — went through the tired motions of trying to blame it all on, who else, the Russians. But seriously, how many times can these hacks cry wolf, even to Wolf Blitzer?

Dementia Joe’s keepers have always understood that Hunter was capable of getting Pop into this kind of a jam. That’s how far gone Hunter Biden is.

Which is why last year they commissioned one of their Democrat stenographers with a press pass to try to inoculate the campaign. The Bidens ordered up a sob story about Hunter in one of their party organs called The New Yorker.

At the beginning, the obsequious scribe engaged in that Democrat tradition of projection, accusing the Republicans of everything he was up to, “promoting, without evidence, the dubious narrative that Biden used the office of the Vice-President to advance and protect hisson’s interests.”

Dubious? Again, Biden hasn’t denied anything. Without evidence? Ditto. And as we know now, it’s not just his son’s interests “Pop” is protecting — Hunter told his own kid he’s kicking up half to the old man.

In mob parlance, Hunter’s an “earner.”

Actually, in the context of the modern-day Ministry of Truth that the alt-left media has become, the Hunter Biden Agonistes are somewhat amusing.

Consider that he shares a first name with Hunter S. Thompson, the so-called gonzo journalist who was, like Hunter Biden, an alcoholic and a drug addict.

In one of his more famous books, Thompson recounts driving a rented car through the Nevada desert while on drugs.

“And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooning and screeching and diving around the car.”

Forty years later, Hunter Biden was in a rented car (in which he would later leave a crack pipe) out on the same desert at night, stoned out of his own mind.

“A large barn owl flew over the hood of the car and seemed to follow him … He said that he has no idea whether the owl was real or a hallucination.”

What is Hunter’s background, you ask? How could he get himself into such a situation, with his father’s political opponents in possession of damning evidence of corruption, not to mention apparent pornography. (The subpoena for Hunter’s hard drive was signed by an FBI agent who has been described in the press as a specialist in crimes involving child pornography.)

Hunter seems to have spent time in half the high-end rehab centers in the U.S. Here’s a selection, from last year’s puff piece in The New Yorker:

“(He) soon admitted himself to Crossroads Centre Antigua for a month … he returned to Crossroads Centre … In July 2014, he went to a clinic in Tijuana that provided a treatment using ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid … which is illegal in America.”

Ibogaine — another link to Hunter S. Thompson. In 1972, Thompson introduced the drug to America by falsely accusing another Democrat presidential candidate, Ed Muskie, a colleague of Joe Biden’s, of going berserk on the campaign trail after overdosing on ibogaine.

“He looked out at the crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people.”

Back to Hunter Biden’s curriculum vitae: “He enrolled as an outpatient at the Charles O’Brien Center for Addiction Treatment at the University of Pennsylvania.”

That’s where his father falsely claims to be a professor, you may recall.

“He then enrolled in an inpatient program for executives at Caron Treatment Centers, where he used the pseudonym Hunter Smith. … In February 2016 he enrolled in yet another addiction-treatment program, run by the Kolmac Outpatient Recovery Center. … That fall Hunter made plans to go to the Grace Grove Lifestyle Center in Sedona, AZ.”

You can see why all these foreign oligarchs would be falling all over themselves to offer such an extinguished, I mean distinguished, person such outlandish sums — $1 million a year from Burisma, $10 million a year from a Chinese company “just for introductions,” another “850” for Hunter, not to mention, of course, the 10 for “the Big Guy.”

In The New Yorker piece last year, Hunter tells his adoring hagiographer, “I’ve pretty much always lived paycheck to paycheck.”

Of course he has. In her divorce petition, his first wife said Hunter was “spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.”

There’s more, so much more, and it’ll be all coming out this week, with many more references to “Pop.” And what can Pop say beyond, “I have no response.”

Somebody pass the ibogaine.