Disney's "Proud Family" Shame

Disney's "Proud Family" Shame

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

There is a show on Disney+ that is a disgrace. It is called "Proud Family: Louder and Prouder."

I have no qualms about TV shows not being fair, of pushing a biased agenda. That is free speech.

But telling children outright lies about our history is another matter. Pick and choose your facts as you wish but do not fake it. Do not lie to children about what really happened.

And do not normalize telling historical falsehoods. If lying for personal gain becomes accepted then chaos and anarchy are the only possible outcomes. Being "loud and proud" about lying, deceiving, and misleading is unacceptable in a civil and just society.

Here is what I mean: 

Proud Family claims Lincoln did NOT move to end slavery. Here are facts to thoroughly refute that falsehood: 

On 16 April 1862, Abraham Lincoln began his great acts to end enslavement by issuing the District of Columbia Emancipation Act that freed the slaves in the Federal district of Washington and that was followed by the Emancipation Proclamation which ended slavery in the rebelling South on 1 January 1863. 

The next year witnessed Lincoln and the Congress repealing the Fugitive Slave Act leading a Northern newspaper to boast, “The blood-red stain that has blotted the statutes-book of the Republic is wiped out forever.” 

Tremendous changes were at hand but the war had yet to be won.

The Confederate States has rejected the Union in 1860 and until defeated their 

laws ruled their lands. The Emancipation Proclamation and repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act held no sway there.

Slavery would not end until the US Army forced it on the Confederacy – enforcement to be paid for in Northern blood -- not by some inanely "louder and prouder" song and dance displayed in “Proud Family.” 

After hundreds of thousands of casualties, emancipation became reality in 1865 with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on 9 April. 

 And slavery again took the stage as the anti-slavery North fought the war in 1865 with some 179,000 free “Colored” men under arms giving it a significant boost in strength (as much as 10% of the US Army in a North that was 99% White).

But even in victory, getting Union troops to every corner of the fallen Confederacy in 1865 was difficult by today’s standards – many had to march hundreds of miles to restore order. It took months for the Union to get soldiers in place to enforce the proclamation. 

The most significant event occurred in Texas on 19 June 1865 when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order no. 3 that declared all slaves freed. 

That date, which traditionally is called Juneteenth, is now a national holiday and with the passing of the 13th Amendment in December, slavery was abolished fully in the United States.  

And telling that history highlights Disney's failure: When “Proud Family” advocates confront facts that refute its narrative, the facts are either removed or twisted. 

The result is a dishonest and unacceptable discourse. “Proud Family” may be propaganda, it may be an attempt at proselytizing, it may be one-sided political activism but what it does not present is history. 

What a tragic and ruinous process.

Shame on Disney.

Arms Control Insanity

Arms Control Insanity

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

We all should thank Vladimir Putin for pulling back the curtain to reveal today's insane world of nuclear arms control.

Since Xi took office, China unilaterally entered into nuclear arms race the likes of which we have not seen in half a century.

China does this because it never signed key nuclear arms limitation treaties.

While the United States tied its hands, China violated every word of every clause of every major nuclear arms limitation treaty with impunity.

Now, thanks to Putin, the United States is free to let Xi know that we will not allow China to continue its nuclear arms race unimpeded.

Xi and Putin ended the safety provided by old Cold War bilateral nuclear arms treaties.

Now is the time to enter the 21st century and into serious TRILATERAL nuclear arms limitation negotiations.

The big question is: Does Washington have both the wisdom to seize the moment and the will to go on offense to push for REAL nuclear arms control?

And never forget Ronald Reagan's immortal words: TRUST BUT VERIFY!

China’s Future Ain’t What It Used to Be

 

China’s Future Ain’t What It Used to Be

20 years after the Goldman report, the BRICS are floundering

Josef Joffe, Tablet 

In January, China’s National Bureau of Statistics made it official: After decades of fabulous GDP growth, the rate is now down to 3%. The culprit is Xi Jinping’s “zero-COVID” policy, plus ruptured supply chains and soaring energy prices. In the post-lockdown recovery, growth will of course bounce back, but not into the enduring double-digit rates prevailing since the 1980s, when China became the envy of the world

To unearth the longer-term trends, look at the whole film, not just at single frames—and then beyond China at all those nations touted as winners in the global sweepstakes. A good starting point is Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into space. The shock reverberated around the world, never mind that the orbiter would burn up three months later. America was sinking and the USSR was soaring. Such projections have filled a small library by now. The theme is “the decline of the West and the rise of the rest.” But just as regularly, the doomsters have proven as reliable as weather forecasters.

The USSR never managed to outrace the U.S. Instead, it fell apart on Christmas Day 1991. But 20 years ago, its Russian heir was anointed, this time with a much-hyped scenario authored by a team of economists at Goldman Sachs. Like Sputnik, “Dreaming with the BRICS: The Path to 2050,” published in 2003, made waves around the world. As a paradigmatic example of predictions of Western decline, the report deserves rereading. It should sober up all clairvoyants, past and present.

Goldman’s futurologists spun out a mesmerizing tale. The BRICs—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—were on a roll. By 2040, they would outstrip the advanced economies of North America, Japan and the EU. So, onward and upward—if things go right. But they never do.

Like all such prophecies, “Dreaming” has not fared well. Today Russia’s GDP ranks just a shade above that of Italy, which has one-third of Russia’s population. Twelve years after releasing its report, Goldman closed its BRICS Fund after a loss of $700 million in assets. This marked the “end of an era,” according to the Financial Times, “in which the four developing economies appeared to be shaping a new world order.” Jim O’Neill, the Goldman team leader, recanted in 2021. “Brazil and Russia [are now] back to where they were 20 years ago. If it weren’t for China—and India, to some degree—there wouldn’t be much of a BRIC story to tell.”

Indeed. Retrace real historical GDP (with inflation and exchange rates factored out) from 2003 to the present. The G-7’s share of the global take dropped from 67% to 58%. The BRICS scored nicely by nearly doubling theirs from 13% to 24%. But look again. Today, Brazil (below zero growth) and Russia (ditto) are economic basket cases. India added 1 percentage point to its share, which is being eaten up in per capita terms because of explosive population growth. India’s per-person GDP ranks just above Zimbabwe’s. Only China leaped from 7% to 17% of the global economy.

China’s growth, though, has been dissipating as well, and the problem runs deeper than the damage done by “zero-COVID.” The causes are not fleeting. They grow out of an economic model of copying yesteryear’s fast risers, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Herbert Stein, economic adviser to Nixon and Ford, formulated this law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” China’s growth dropped from 14% in 2007 to single-digits in the 2010s—long before COVID.

Why can’t double-digit growth last? Behold the downward trajectory of East Asia’s Wunderkinder. Japan’s breathtaking growth ended in 1970, falling to 3% at the end of the decade and segueing into 20 years of stagnation. South Korea used to shine with double-digit gains; in the aughts it averaged around 3%. Taiwan excelled with nearly 10%—down to 4% by the 2010s. What is the lesson for all would-be prophets?

This trio had set the model for China’s “catch-up capitalism.” It comes in five parts: an export-first growth model, artificially depressed currencies, underconsumption, and overinvestment. Plus, a state on top pouring streams of cheap money into favored industries, which bred collusion and helped to keep out foreign competition. The strategy of the “Little Dragons” yielded phenomenal growth during their takeoff from humble beginnings. These always yield spectacular percentages. As an economy grows into maturity, the rate peters out—the richer, the slower. Germany, using a similar recipe, also grew by leaps and bounds when climbing out from the ashes of World War II. Its “economic miracle” is past history.

By midcentury, China will be the oldest big economy in the world, with an army of 350 million pensioners.

China ran with the model of East Asia’s early risers while ignoring its already visible flaws. Overinvestment, the brother of cheap money and underconsumption, comes with two curses. One is overcapacity. As one estimate has it, there are 65 million unsold apartments in China. Multiply that by an average of three persons per household, and you could house 200 million people with all the empty apartments in China—the combined total population of Germany, France and Britain. This misdirected capital could have been put to more productive use.

A second curse of overinvestment is an old acquaintance known as the law of diminishing returns. It states that each new unit of a production factor produces less. In everyday terms: Buy one tractor, and you double the yield; get two or three, and each adds less grain per acre. Five will run into each other and bring the harvest to a standstill.

Nor does the story end here, given China’s disastrous demographics. Beijing’s worst enemy is the steady decline of its working-age population, driven by plummeting birth rates. Also in January, China went past the tipping point, reporting negative population growth for the first time in 60 years—a loss of 850,000 inhabitants. By midcentury, China will be the oldest big economy in the world, with an army of 350 million pensioners who don’t produce but soak up ever more social support resources.

Welfare leaves less for warfare while Beijing keeps arming itself furiously to topple the U.S. from its geopolitical perch, starting in the western Pacific. Among the world’s large industrial nations, the U.S. will be the second-youngest after India. “Young” translates into “productive.”

A shrinking labor pool raises wages, which eats into China’s competitive advantage as the “factory of the world.” Nor is this startling news. As early as 2012, a Boston Consulting Group study did the math. “In 2000, factory wages in China averaged just 52 cents an hour, a mere 3 percent of what U.S. factory workers earned. Since then, Chinese wages and benefits have been rising by double-digits each year, averaging increases of 19 percent from 2005 to 2010. The fully loaded costs of U.S. production workers rose by less than 4 percent annually.” To boot, productivity is lagging behind labor costs, dropping from a 10% increase in 2010 to 6% just before the pandemic. It is expected to fall for the rest of this decade, according to S&P Global Ratings. So, offshore manufacturing comes home or wanders off to low-wage economies, presently in Asia and tomorrow in Africa.

Let’s shift from statistics to the politics of Xi Jinping, leader for life. In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping had invented “Sinocapitalism,” triggering stunning growth. The party loosened its heavy grip in favor of cultural freedom and entrepreneurial autonomy, the unwritten motto being, “enrich yourselves, but leave the driving to us!”

Deng thought that growing wealth would keep the masses in line. Under Xi, hogging the wheel ever more tightly beats the national weal. Unleashed capitalism is yielding to a perfect surveillance state that demands obedience and denies initiative. The private sector is shrinking in favor of lavishly funded state-owned enterprises (SOE), which add less value than private firms, stifling efficiency and innovation. So, the puzzle: Why would Xi strangle the golden goose?

Since Lenin, Western sages—think George Bernard Shaw or Jean-Paul Sartre—have fallen for what I call “modernitarianism” as the fastest path to development. The state, they believed, was better than the market, delivering both wealth and equality. They kept missing the point. In the clash between power and profit, power wins. Even assuming that Xi’s henchmen had told him the truth about “zero-COVID” as an economy killer, why would a despot care? When reality knocks, control comes first, suppressing real-time feedback. Until very recently, Beijing methodically suppressed the horrifying COVID data.

Vladimir Putin keeps pillaging Ukraine, and never mind his sinking economy. His underlings will not risk their careers by confronting him with the bad news on and off the battlefield. In the sloppy, anarchic West, corrective feedback is built-in, and free markets don’t lie—they are the best information systems governments have. It is an iron law: The more concentrated the power, the less nations can adapt to economic ruptures. Five-year plans don’t allow for speedy revision.

Democracies cannot squelch dissent; that is their enduring advantage over the authoritarians. In crisis, strongmen invariably resort to suppression, which is good for them but bad for the economy. Repression does not increase returns, as the experience of all autocrats shows, most recently in Venezuela, Iran, and Russia. Xi’s China is looking at a similar fate. When power rules, growth falters.

The prophets who keep announcing the decline of the West and rise of the rest should recall Yogi Berra, who once quipped: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” As to China, a slightly amended Yogism would be right on target: Its “future ain’t what it used to be.” Diviners beware. Leave prophecy to the Isaiahs and Jeremiahs.

Josef Joffe, a fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and former editor of Die Zeit, teaches international politics and security at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

The Toxic Racialist Obsessions of Joe Biden

 

The Toxic Racialist Obsessions of Joe Biden

Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Joe Biden ran on “unity,” which is critical in a multiracial America. He vowed to heal the divisions supposedly sown by Donald Trump. Instead, he is proving to be the most polarizing president in modern memory. Often his racialist rhetoric and condescension have proven demeaning to both blacks and whites. In a volatile multiracial democracy that demands tolerance and restraint, a highly unpopular Biden, for cheap political advantage, continually proves incendiary and reckless. 

Last week Joe Biden snarked after watching a White House screening of Till:

Lynched for simply being black, nothing more. With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards. Hard to believe, but that’s what was done. And some people still want to do that. 

Exactly who are these “some people”? Who fits Biden’s innuendos of contemporary “some people” who, he alleges in 2023, still wish, as “white crowds, white families” of the past, to mail celebratory postcards after they lynch black people? The Ultra-MAGA villains of his recent Phantom of the Opera speech? Have his current targets ever echoed anything like Biden’s own racist past warning that busing would force people to “grow up in a racial jungle”?

What current data might support Biden’s absurd charges? Is Biden referring to federal interracial crime and hate crime statistics charting violent white propensities against blacks? None exist. In fact, they continually reveal that so-called whites are underrepresented as perpetrators in both categories, while overrepresented as victims in interracial crimes—dramatically so in the case of black-on-white violent crime.

In our sensationalist YouTube world, are we suffering an epidemic of Internet-fed, white-on-black incendiary crimes that might have prompted the president’s demagogic accusations? Not at all. Most of the most recent publicized interracial violence—a woman in a gym fighting off a would-be rapist, a bicyclist doctor stabbed to death in an intersection as his attacker spewed racial hatred, a 26-year-old mother lethally shot in the back in front of her children in a parking lot over a minor argument, a young boy violently choked on a bus, a small girl on a bus beaten repeatedly by two teenage boys—have involved black perpetrators and apparent white victims. So, what contemporary evidence or widely publicized anecdotes prompt Biden’s recent charges of “white rage”-fueled violence?

Yet simultaneously with his blanket and unsupported charges of racism, no president since Woodrow Wilson has offloaded more racialist verbiage than Joe Biden himself. In an eerie example of psychological projection, never has a president accused others of racism more, while freely revealing himself either to be a racist or non compos mentis, or both.

Stranger still, Biden’s latest accusation comes from a president who once eulogized the former racist, Exalted Cyclops, and segregationist Senator. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) as “one of my mentors” and lamented that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” That was no isolated fluke.

During his campaign for the presidency, Biden in 2019 praised segregationist Senator James O. Eastland for not labeling a younger Biden with the derogatory term “boy”: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’” 

How odd, then, that Biden, as president no less, has used just that derogatory insult “boy” for distinguished blacks. Indeed, the very day before Biden leveled his “some people” slur, he was back at it with his racist “boy” reference to the black governor of Maryland: “You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell ya,” Biden told an audience of union workers on Wednesday. “He’s the real deal, and the boy looked like he could still play. He got some guns on him.” 

Such condescension was consistent with Biden’s past usage of “Negro” and his earlier August 2021 similar “boy” trope of referring to one of own top aides: “I’m here with my senior adviser and boy who knows Louisiana very, very well and New Orleans, Cedric Richmond.” 

In Biden world, blacks seem to be a collective to whom he can pander in stereotypical terms, as opposed to Latinos, whom Biden feels can think for themselves. Or so he said on the campaign trail in 2020, “Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

These were “gaffes” only if one believes Biden’s frequent racialist smears and slurs are more the symptoms of senility than bias. Again, as a 2020 candidate, Biden gave us his absurd racist “Corn Pop” fables. In these concocted, He-Man sagas, Biden stood down purported ghetto gangster with his own custom-cut chain, while often showing his tanned legs’ golden hairs to curious inner-city black youth.

Biden also smeared two black journalists who had the temerity to ask him a few tough questions, one with the now infamous slang ad hominem, “You ain’t black” and the other with the personal dismissal “junkie.”

A consistent trope in these insults is his lifelong condescension of accomplished black Americans, such as his long-ago infamous talk-down to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during Biden’s travesty of conducting his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. In that context we also remember Biden’s idiotic warning, replete with his accustomed affected black patois, to black professionals in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

Like Bill Clinton, who reportedly uttered of supposed 2008 upstart Barack Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Biden was especially bewildered by Barack Obama. He apparently seemed, in Biden’s racialist view, an aberration from Biden’s own usual stereotyped views of blacks of limited ability: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That assessment came from a candidate, who, even predementia, could never string together more than a few coherent sentences. 

Biden, remember, explained top-performing states in education as attributable to fewer minorities: “There’s less than 1 percent of the population in Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So, look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”

In a world of law schools turning out record numbers of black lawyers, and billionaire entrepreneurs like Bob Johnson, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, or Michael Jordan, Biden opines, “The data shows young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding given the chance as white entrepreneurs are. But they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have, they don’t have accountants, but they have great ideas.”   

The reason we do not associate Biden with characteristic racist stereotyping and tropes, other than with raw political demagoguery, is the same reason we give passes to liberals who say overtly racist things, which might otherwise suggest that their loud progressive rhetoric serves as some sort of psychological mechanism to square the circle of their own discomfort with the proverbial other.

Do we remember the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s quickly hushed up and contextualized confession that abortion was targeting the proper people. (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)? 

Do we recall liberal icon and former Senate Majority Harry Reid, who eerily dovetailed Biden with similarly racist assessment of Obama (“a ‘light-skinned’ African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”)? 

Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class. Fact checkers assure us that when Joe Biden libeled Trump supporters as “chumps” and “dregs” he really meant the Ku Klux Klan or white nationalists who gravitate to Trump. But most took his blanket smears as they were intended. And they fit the larger patterns of his more recent “semi-fascism” smears, and indeed, the genre of tired leftwing demagoguery that earlier gave us Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or the smelly who stink up Walmart in the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page joint text trove: “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”

In occasional opportunistic moments, Biden transforms into “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” to accentuate his middle-class roots. But he has a repugnant propensity for using racial terms of condescension and disparagement and for projecting his own unease onto a supposedly racist white middle class and poor even as he seeks to win support from the very minority communities he has so often crudely characterized. 

What is the concrete result of this now common Bidenesque schizophrenia?

Reflect for a moment. Consider the toxic plume that has polluted the skies over East Palestine, Ohio, a working-class small town that is 98 percent white, with a median income of $26,000, sits amid the Pennsylvania borderland. That very region once rejected in its 2008 primary Barack Obama—and in turn was blasted in stereotyped fashion by him: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” 

Ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton resonates that same contempt for the convenient target of the white poor and lower middle class. Rather than send in FEMA on day one of the toxic release with tents, mobile kitchens, and supplies and medical personnel to care for the evacuated, the federal government waited two weeks and then acted only when even the liberal media was confused by Biden’s deliberate neglect. 

Amid the disaster, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in his now tired boilerplate, was on record instead railing against supposed white hardhats who supposedly do not look like the communities in which they work. For a Biden or Buttigieg, the fish and animals dying from toxic air or water were insignificant artifacts, as were the complaints of burning lungs and allergic reactions to the black chemical cloud.

One wonders what would have been the immediate reaction of Biden and the federal government had a corporation decided to vent the contents of wrecked rail cars full of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate and then to light up the escaping gas, birthing a toxic black plume over Martha’s Vineyard or Malibu, as opposed to East Palestine or, say,  South-Central L.A. or Ferguson, Missouri. 

Biden would have sent legions of aid workers in to ensure social justice for the marginalized and performance-art reassurance to his donor class.

Whether Biden spouts racial bombast to curry favor with his Democratic base or to project onto others his own habitual racist put downs is not quite clear. But Biden’s utter contempt for white poor and lower middle classes, who are were deemed not worthy of the prompt federal attention customarily accorded to others in times of disaster, is self-evident.

Otherwise, Biden would have sent help immediately rather than smear “some people” as 21st-century lynchers.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.

If AT&T Can Silence Newsmax, Who Is Next?

If AT&T Can Silence Newsmax, Who Is Next?

Alan Dershowitz, Newsweek 

AT&T's recent deplatforming of Newsmax, one of America's most influential cable news channels, should alarm everyone, including liberals. We are all at risk when censorship occurs—when one is silenced based on his or her point of view.

The facts strongly suggest that partisan and ideological motives played a sizable role in AT&T and DirecTV's decision to remove Newsmax on January 24, when some 13 million homes were deprived of the channel—including my own. After the recent State of the Union address, I turned to Newsmax for their coverage, but was surprised to find it suddenly missing from my channel guide.

Newsmax has been quite familiar to me: For several years now, I have been a legal analyst for the network. While the channel is center-right in its political orientation, my liberal positions are welcomed without any hesitation.

In my book The Case Against the New Censorship, I studied the growing movement to silence dissenting views, of which Newsmax now appears to be a victim.

Publicly, DirecTV and AT&T (DirecTV's 70% owner, with financial firm TPG owning the remaining 30%) say the move to deplatform Newsmax was about "cutting costs" and saving customers money. But when one notes that Newsmax was the fourth-highest-rated cable news network and that its license fee requests are modest (about a $1 per subscriber per year), the DirecTV decision doesn't make much business sense. Indeed, there are dozens of channels that DirecTV carries that cost much more than Newsmax, but have much lower ratings.

While DirecTV's decision may have been legally permissible, it was wrong and frankly un-American to deny Newsmax access to its platform, making it impossible for viewers to see the channel and exercise their civic right to take part in the marketplace of ideas.

Over a year ago, DirecTV carried three conservative-leaning channels, including One America News Network (OANN), a hard-right network. Meanwhile, DirecTV has continued to offer a panoply of left-leaning channels. In the past year, then DirecTV and AT&T have deplatformed two of their only three conservative news channels.

As one of America's largest companies, AT&T has a duty to abide by "good corporate citizenship," and thus to provide ideological balance in its choice of platformed TV networks. It clearly has not done so.

While private censorship is often legal, there are potential constitutional concerns if the government encouraged AT&T to shut down Newsmax.

As the case may be, in 2021, Democrats on the House Commerce Committee held hearings to investigate pay-TV systems for carrying conservative channels that were allegedly spreading "misinformation." On February 22, 2021, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jerry McNerney (D-CA) wrote to AT&T CEO John Stankey demanding to know if he was "planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and ATT TV, both now and beyond any contract renewal date."

A year later, in February 2022, as its contract with OANN neared its end, AT&T announced it was deplatforming the channel. It cited—surprise!—"cost-cutting" as the basis for its decision. OANN never had Newsmax's ratings, but it's not clear why AT&T eliminated it from its lineup while keeping many other low-rated channels.

Newsmax says that when it was up for renewal with AT&T/DirecTV last month, DirecTV's position was, and continues to be, that Newsmax is not eligible for any license fees. Meanwhile, all U.S. cable news channels get fees, and nearly all top cable channels do as well. Newsmax asserts that DirecTV's demand it take zero fees would impact all its other cable broadcaster agreements, essentially demonetizing and censoring the network.

So why doesn't DirecTV cut costs by reducing fees for the many lower-rated networks it carries? Why, again, has DirecTV decided everyone in cable news gets license fees except for Newsmax?

This is not just a "business dispute"; it is a prima facie case of discrimination against Newsmax.

After Elon Musk's release of the "Twitter Files," we know the FBI worked to censor private parties—a serious potential breach of constitutionally protected free speech rights. Did something similar happen when AT&T shut off OANN and Newsmax?

The relatively small amount of money DirecTV saved by removing Newsmax—with the ensuing loss of customers and brand reputation—makes one wonder if a larger hand was at play that forced its deplatforming decision.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) says Congress will hold hearings on AT&T's targeting of Newsmax and OANN. These hearings must be bipartisan: The rights of all Americans are at stake.

Recently, I signed a letter along with 22 major Jewish leaders calling on AT&T and DirecTV to return Newsmax to its platform. (Disclosure: Newsweek Opinion Editor Josh Hammer was another signee of the same letter.)

This letter was remarkable in its support from major Jewish leaders spanning the political spectrum. At a time of rising antisemitism at home and abroad, Newsmax has consistently offered fair and invaluable coverage on issues of concern to American Jews.

As a liberal, I am truly troubled that a major conservative cable news channel—and one that is reliably pro-Israel, like Newsmax—was silenced by AT&T. If AT&T and DirecTV can get away with silencing Newsmax, who will be next?

Follow Alan Dershowitz on

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New podcast: "The Dershow," on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube

Dersh.Substack.com

 

The Question Even I Haven't Dared To Ask

The Question Even I Haven't Dared To Ask

Tom Woods, Lew Rockwell.com 

From the Tom Woods Letter:

If you can forgive a little crudeness, dear reader, I’d like to summarize in a few words what the Covid fiasco made me fully come to terms with over the past few years:

The amount of b.s. in the world is truly off the charts.

You and I are accused of “misinformation” by people who couldn’t stop lying if their lives depended on it.

The “public health” establishment was so far from the truth over the past few years that the general public, according to polling data, succumbed to irrational fears that bore no resemblance to reality.

How many wars, just in the past century alone, were based on lies so transparent they would insult a fourth grader?

The “climate change” hysteria is in a class of its own. When William Nordhaus, an economist who has published widely on the issue, was awarded the Nobel Prize, not one major figure — including Nordhaus himself — bothered to point out that according to his own research, the world would suffer less damage if it did nothing at all to fight climate change than if it tried to reach the ballyhooed goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

For that matter, thousands upon thousands of people have made careers for themselves that involve spreading preposterous economic theories. The world’s governments and central banks base their policymaking on ludicrous and inane economic premises — premises which, by what I am sure is entirely a coincidence, just happen to enrich the ruling classes and the constituencies that keep them entrenched.

So I think you and I can be forgiven for becoming skeptical of orthodoxies, and willing to give dissident voices a fair hearing.

And now we reach our subject for today.

For the past few years, we’ve heard certain scientists speak out against lockdowns, masks, and even the Covid shots.

But other dissident scientists have gone much farther than this. They argue against virology itself, which they describe as a pseudoscience resting on a series of unproven assumptions, and against which no dissident voices are allowed to be heard or receive research money.

I can already hear the objection: I don’t have the scientific background necessary to evaluate these arguments.

And that’s true.

But you know what I do have? Curiosity.

I have another thing, too: zero patience for being told what I can and cannot investigate, and whom I can and cannot talk to.

So I went ahead and interviewed Dr. Mark Bailey, a representative of this position, on the Tom Woods Show. Naturally, I withheld this episode from YouTube, where dissident perspectives are not allowed to be heard. But you can hear our conversation here, and I hope you’ll give it a shot:

https://tomwoods.com/ep-2282-do-viruses-exist/

Tom Woods [send him mail; visit his website] is the New York Times bestselling author of 12 books and host of the Tom Woods Show, which libertarians listen to every weekday. Get a free copy of National Divorce: The Peaceful Solution to Irreconcilable Differences...

Copyright © Tom Woods

Why I Am Against Saving the Planet

Why I Am Against Saving the Planet

Michael Lind, Tablet Magazine 

We are constantly being exhorted to “save the planet.” Indeed, saving the planet has become the de facto religion of politicians, business elites, and intellectuals in the West, replacing Christianity’s earlier mission of saving individual souls. But what does the environmentalist slogan actually mean? On examination, the phrase means saving the planet from us—that is, from human beings and our works.

What is more, the very concept of “the planet” turns out to be incoherent. The use of “the planet” as a synonym for “the environment,” instead of as a description of the Earth as one of the planets in the solar system, appears to be only a generation or two old. The term “environment” itself is a recent coinage: In 1828 the British writer Thomas Carlyle, a well-known critic of democracy, coined the term “environment” to translate the German word umgebung in an essay on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was only in 1956—six years before I was born—that the English word “environment” was used for the first time in print to refer to the ecosystem. And the term “ecosystem” itself was coined as recently as 1935 by the British natural scientist A.G. Tansley.

The term “ecology” was invented in 1873 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel, and his work owed much to his own environment of 19th-century Romanticism, typified by a bias against society and civilization and a pantheistic awe before an idealized Nature. German romantic culture is the native soil from which our own modern environmentalism has grown, and many pseudoscientific elements of popular environmentalism that are unthinkingly assumed to be rational and progressive are in fact legacies of a passionately reactionary 19th-century Romantic tradition. One is the dubious idea of the web of life—no species of plant or animal can become extinct without harming all the rest. This is nonsense, because species have come and gone for billions of years, without necessarily causing the extinction of great numbers of other species. In some cases the disappearance of some kinds of plant and animal life has opened up opportunities for others, in the way that the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to expand into new niches.

The notion of a self-regulating ecosystem disturbed by human activity that would automatically restore itself to a “natural” condition if not for human interference is another bit of unscientific nonsense taken on faith by the green lobby. The evidence suggests that greenhouse gasses in the industrial era have warmed the Earth’s atmosphere. But it is also true that global temperatures have fluctuated wildly for billions of years, most recently in the Pleistocene ice ages. Human civilization developed in one of several warm “interglacial” spells following repeated expansions of ice to cover much of the Northern Hemisphere. In addition to fluctuations like these, there are catastrophic events that alter the climate and wipe out many species, like the asteroid or comet thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and many other animals and plants on Earth. Contrary to what you would assume listening to green propaganda, if the human race vanished tomorrow the climate would not “stabilize” but would continue to fluctuate dramatically over time—at least until the gradual warming of the sun evaporates the oceans and turns the Earth into a steam-shrouded desert world in half a billion years, if the predictions of contemporary astrophysicists are correct.

But there is a crucial difference, according to the belief system of environmentalists. If an asteroid annihilates the dinosaurs, that is natural and not a crime. But if a local species of frog becomes extinct because officials drain a malarial swamp and replace it with a civic water reservoir that saves millions of people from infectious diseases, that is mass murder (of frogs).

According to the peculiar ethics of mainstream environmentalism, practically any modification of “the environment” or “the ecosystem” or “the planet” or “nature” is, by definition, harmful. Developers who cut down woods and build housing subdivisions are evil, because they are displacing the local plants and wildlife. Electricity that powers life-saving hospitals and air conditioners or heaters in buildings is sinful, if it is generated by coal or oil or natural gas that emits carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Paved roads? Forget it. They turn wild animals into roadkill.

In short—every single modification of nature by humanity is evil by definition, according to the popular conception of environmentalism.

It might seem that the term “planet,” as it’s used by the greens, has no fixed meaning whatsoever. But that would be a mistake. “The planet,” in the lexicon of environmentalism, is defined in contrast with what it is not: the “Not-Planet.”

The Not-Planet includes all human beings. In environmentalist ideology, we humans are not part of “nature” or “the environment” or “the planet.” We are something outside of nature: an alien, destructive force, modifying “the planet” from without. By this standard, all buildings and cities and other human settlements that billions of people depend on for their survival are rendered alien excrescences harming “the planet.” The sand on a beach is “the planet” but the moment you build a sand castle, the sand in the castle becomes Not-Planet. You have taken sand which might have been used by a beach crab for its burrow. How dare you!

Not all plants and animals are included in “the planet,” either. For environmentalists who are romantically nostalgic for the lifestyles of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, agriculture itself is an abomination, replacing “natural” ecosystems with farms and ranches populated by human-modified strains of grains and vegetables and fruit and livestock. A wild buffalo is part of “the planet” but a free-range cow on a ranch or a cow in a feedlot is not. The coyote that dwells in a suburb and kills and eats a pet poodle is “the planet,” but the poor pet poodle, like its grieving owner, is an interloper on “the planet.”

In 2015, George Monbiot lamented in The Guardian that, measured by weight, 60% of the mammals on Earth are livestock, and that while the human population is growing at 1% a year, the livestock population is growing at 2.4%. Global average meat consumption per person is 43 kilograms a year, but swiftly heading toward the U.K. level of 82 kg. The reason is Bennett’s law: As people become richer, they eat more protein and fat, especially the meat and milk and eggs of animals.

Like chimpanzees, our closest relatives, we humans are omnivores who enjoy the taste of meat. Our precursors are thought to have hunted many large herbivores—mastodons, sloths, giant armadillos—to extinction to satisfy their appetites. In my part of central Texas, indigenous Americans drove herds of buffalo off of cliffs and killed the maimed and dying animals in order to have barbecues. Raising bovines in feedlots is more efficient, and, while cruel in many ways, it is no more cruel than stampeding them over bluffs, breaking their bones and spearing them with sharpened flints.

Humans are not the only species that hunts prey or modifies its surroundings to gain an advantage. It is our self-flagellating that sets us apart from other animals, not the fact that we change “the environment.” Is it a tragedy when a beaver family builds a dam, creating a lake that floods a field, drowning other animals and killing the plants and trees that grew there? If the answer of self-described environmentalists is no, if all animals except for humans are allowed to modify their environments for the benefit of their species at the expense of other species if necessary, then environmentalism is a weird cult that is founded on misanthropy.

By arguing that environmentalism is a post-Christian, Euro-American secular religion, hostile to society and civilization—and livestock and pets!—I do not mean to suggest that all policies advocated for by environmentalists are misguided. It is in our own self-interest to outlaw the dumping of poisonous wastes into rivers and watersheds. It may also be in our own self-interest to mitigate atmosphere-heating greenhouse gas emissions with costly measures of various kinds. But there are costs to mitigating climate change as well as benefits, and rational people can prefer a richer but warmer world to a poorer but slightly less warm one. All of these individual policies benefit humanity, so there is no need to justify them on the basis of a romantic creed that defines “the planet” or “the environment” in a way that excludes us and our works.

Michael Lind is a columnist at Tablet and a fellow at New America. His most recent book is The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite.

Thwarted Investigation into the Biden Family’s Corruption

Grassley Details How a ‘Triad’ of Media, FBI, and Dems Tried to Thwart Investigation into the Biden Family’s Corrupt Business Dealings

Debra Heine, American Greatness

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee’s first hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) detailed how a “triad” of partisan media, FBI, and Democrats used disinformation from a Russian agent to smear their investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.

In addition to Grassley, the committee on Thursday heard from Senator Ron Johnson (R- Wis.), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, former FBI agent Thomas Baker, Professor Jonathan Turley, and former FBI agent Nicole Parker.

“In the past few years, I’ve never seen so much effort from the FBI, the partisan media, and some of my Democrat colleagues to interfere with with and undermine very legitimate congressional inquiries,” Grassley said at the beginning of his testimony.

As one glaring example of this, Grassley cited the FBI’s corrupt Crossfire Hurricane investigation that sought to torpedo Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president, and when that failed, hobble his presidency and punish his associates.

“Bit by bit, piece by piece, it’s been deconstructed and shown to be a politically motivated investigation,” he testified.

The senator said that the most recent example of the “triad at work” involved their attempts to undermine his and Sen. Johnson’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which began in August in 2019. At the time, Grassley was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Johnson was chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

“On July 13 of 2020, then-Minority Leader [Chuck] Schumer, Senator Warner, then-Speaker Pelosi, and then-Chairman Schiff sent a letter with a classified attachment to the FBI. That letter expressed a purported belief that Congress was the subject of a foreign disinformation campaign.”

The letter, Grassley noted, specifically targeted his and Johnson’s investigation into the Biden clan’s shady business dealings.

The classified attachment, Grassley continued, contained unclassified elements that were leaked to the press regarding a Russian agent named Andriy Derkach who was supposedly feeding Russian disinformation to Johnson.

The Wisconsin senator said at the time that he’d never heard of the person until they brought it up.

“Of course, it was pure nonsense, but the irresponsible media portrayed this all as the truth,” Grassley testified. And congressional Democrats used the false narrative in an effort to thwart Grassley and Johnson’s investigation.

“Chairman Schiff claimed without any evidence whatsoever that our oversight work was rooted in Russian disinformation,” Grassley recalled.  The senator noted that their oversight work was actually rooted in official U.S. government and Obama administration records.

Next, as part of the Democrats’ aggressive disinformation campaign, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote an oped in the Washington Post accusing the Republicans’ investigation of “perpetuating Russian disinformation.”

Then, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)tried to offer a resolution in the Senate condemning their investigation into the Biden crime family.

“They, in a sense, were basically calling us Russian stooges,” Grassley stated. He added that the Democrats’ effort violated Senate rules and was “appropriately shut down.”

Under pressure from Democrat members of the “Gang of Eight”—senior lawmakers with access to intelligence secrets—the Republican Senators on August 6, 2020 received an FBI briefing on foreign “disinformation” that Grassley says was irrelevant to their investigation.  Details from the briefing were immediately leaked to the Washington Post, which used the info to smear their investigation.

The Post suggested that Johnson had ignored FBI warnings and thus may have been manipulated by the Kremlin. The Wall Street Journal in May of 2021 speculated that the bureau may have “set up” Grassley and Johnson at the behest of Democrats.

The two Senators became more concerned when the ensuing briefing by the FBI turned out to be what they described as “not specific” as well as “unconnected to our investigation.” (Their report was based on U.S. government documents.) They specifically expressed to the FBI during the briefing their concerns that it would be “subject to a leak” for partisan gain. Which is exactly what happened last week, despite the FBI’s promise to the Senators of confidentiality.

After the briefing, Johnson and Grassley sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding to know the reason for it, and never received an answer.

Still bitter, Grassley complained that the FBI had wrongly done the “Democrats’ bidding” in that instance.

He said another example of a Democrat/Media disinformation campaign involved George Kent, former State Department Deputy Assistant General.

Grassley explained that while he and Johnson had conducted a transcribed interview with Kent. During the interview, according to Grassley, Democrats asked Kent about information they had acquired from Derkach, their Russian agent source, and Kent shot it down as disinformation.

“In the end, it was the Democrats who introduced Russian disinformation from a Russian agent into the investigative record,” Grassley declared, adding that the Senate Intelligence Committee had already warned them that this agent was seeking to influence U.S. politics.

“It was not me or Senator Johnson, not our staff—it was the Democrats who inserted disinformation from the Russians into our official record,” Grassley noted. “The partisan media and Democrat leadership ought to be ashamed of themselves for the fake information that the spread about our investigation.”

The senator noted that “in the end,” the Democrat/media/FBI triad was unable to thwart their investigation, and on September 23, 2020, they released their first Biden investigation report.  The pair released their second report on the Bidens in November of 2020, after the election.

“Our reports exposed extensive financial relationships between Hunter and James Biden and Chinese nationals connected to the Communist regime,” Grassley stated.

After they lost their majority status in 2021, Grassley said the Senators continued their investigation into the Biden clan’s corruption.

“We acquired authentic bank records that substantiated the findings of our previous two reports that financially linked Hunter Biden and James Biden  to entities and individuals connected to the Communist Chinese regime,” he said. “We also acquired business records with Hunter and James Biden’s signatures alongside those same Communist Chinese nationals.”

Grassley said the records showed that companies linked to the Communist regime had wired payments to the Bidens.

“In three floor speeches, we made those bank records public and asked this question to our partisan detractors: “Are these official bank statements Russian disinformation?” he said.

The two senators shared the potentially criminal activity with David C. Weiss, U.S. Attorney for the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, but never got a response.

Grassley said that as he and Johnson have continued their investigation, they have been approached by multiple FBI whistleblowers.  Among the allegations, he said, is that “the FBI created an assessment” on the Biden allegations in August of 2020, the same month of the dubious FBI briefing on foreign disinformation.

“According to these whistleblowers, that assessment was used by FBI headquarters to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation,” Grassley stated.

“As a result, this scheme allegedly caused investigative activity [at the Bureau] to entirely cease,” he lamented.

“It’s been further alleged to me that in September of 2020, the same month Sen. Johnson and I released our first report, FBI headquarter personnel began placing their analysis of the credibility of reporting related to the Biden family in what I have been told is a restricted access sub-file..” he continued. “Further allegations to my office involve FBI personnel at the Washington Field Office who improperly ordered information to be closed by the FBI related to Hunter Biden’s potential criminal conduct in October 2020—just before the election—even though it was verified, or it was verifiable.”

Grassley said other whistleblower disclosures to his office have “made clear that the FBI has within its possession very significant, impactful, and voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by Hunter and James Biden.”

The whistleblowers also allegedly told the the senators that “Joe Biden was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some of them.”

Grassley said they are “still not sure what’s been done with this information, but the FBI’s track record doesn’t create much faith that the information is going to be followed up on.”

“It’s clear to me that the Justice Department and the FBI are suffering from a political infection,” the senator testified, “and if it’s not defeated, it will cause the American people to no longer trust these storied institutions.”

Debra Heine is a conservative Catholic mom of six and longtime political pundit. She has written for several conservative news websites over the years, including Breitbart and PJ Media.

"...hasn’t he done enough?"

 

Biden threatens to finish what he’s started, but hasn’t he done enough?

Michael Goodwin, New York Post

By frequently repeating a go-to line, Joe Biden sent me into flashbacks about the late New York Mayor Ed Koch.

“Let’s finish the job,” Biden said time after time in his State of the Union speech. It’s a line cooked up for a re-election campaign, and we’re certain to hear it endlessly if the president follows his plan to seek a second term. 

There’s the rub, and it’s where Koch comes in. 

In 1977, New York Mayor Abe Beame used a refrain similar to Biden’s as he sought a second term. Those were among the darkest days in Gotham as crime surged, municipal unions went on strikes and the city was frozen out of the credit markets because it had borrowed way beyond its means. Beame was befuddled and no match for the mayhem he helped to unleash. 

Koch, running against his fellow Democrat in the primary, picked up on Beame’s “finish the job” pitch in a deadly effective commercial of his own.

“Finish the job?” Koch deadpanned into the camera. “Hasn’t he done enough?”

Thankfully, Koch went on to victory and managed to bring New York back from the brink during his three terms in City Hall. 

A similar argument against Biden in 2024 should be similarly effective. America is a mess no matter how you slice it, and the befuddled man who bears much of the blame wants to finish the job? 

No thanks!

In fairness, Biden’s speech was well written and reasonably well delivered. The only problem is that so little of it was true.

Joe’s alternative USA

As such, it provided ample evidence he’s still not on speaking terms with facts. Unpopular, faced with mounting problems at home and growing aggression around the globe from China, Russia and Iran, the president demonstrated that he doesn’t live in the same America as most people. 

The one he described is far, far better than the real one. He even had the chutzpah to refer to the spy balloon incident as proof he’s standing up to China. 

Beijing must have gotten a laugh out of that. Maybe his Commie paymasters will send Hunter Biden another big fat check. 

The White House is so full of it these days that aides are whispering to the media that Biden’s tenure is so successful, he should be thought of as the second coming of FDR or even Lyndon Johnson.

True story. To believe it and argue it with a straight face is possible only for those who don’t get out of the office enough. Either that or they don’t believe in truth in packaging. 

In any event, they are detached from reality. As a Wall Street Journal story gently put it: “Recent surveys indicate the president’s agenda isn’t resonating with many Americans. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published this week found that 62% of the public thinks Mr. Biden hasn’t accomplished much during his first two years.” 

Smart people, those Americans, despite Biden’s attempt to hoodwink them.

We’re all worse off

That poll also finds that 41% of respondents say they are worse off financially since Biden became president. Other polls are even worse. One shows that only 37% of his fellow Dems want him to seek a second term, down 15 points in five months.

So he wants six more years in the Oval Office, but with Republicans taking the House and already starting probes into Biden family corruption, he should count himself lucky if he manages to finish the next two.

If he does, he’ll probably owe his survival to Vice President Kamala Harris, the world’s greatest living example of impeachment insurance. Even Democrats concede she’s a dud, and an unpopular one at that, so removing Biden mid-term could be even more dangerous for national security.

Failing politicians always want to say their messaging is the problem, and messaging may be a problem. But the real problem is always the same: They have bad ideas and bad policies.

That fits Biden to a T, which is why he has to resort to fiction to sell himself. 

Take his appeal to national unity, which especially rings a false note given his scurrilous smears of anyone who disagrees with him. He has cheapened the word “racist” by applying it, for example, to those who fought against Washington control of state election laws — even when members of his own party didn’t support his plan. 

Distorted race grievance

He did something similar Tuesday. After saluting the grieving parents of Tyre Nichols, the young black man beaten to death by five Memphis police officers, Biden launched into the loaded subject of “The Talk” and went on about how some black parents warn their children to interact carefully with police.

That part is true in the real world — but The Talk had nothing to do with the case at hand. That’s because the five Memphis cops were, like their victim, black males. 

Biden never mentioned that fact, thus simultaneously distorting a tragedy and smearing white cops for the sake of an applause line. 

He did similar things elsewhere, using wild accusations of greed to tar banks, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, credit card companies, airlines, cable and internet providers.

All of them, he said, were cheating customers and he was going to stop it.

All we have to do is give him a second term so he can finish the job.

The FBI as Intelligence Unit for the Administrative State

The FBI as Intelligence Unit for the Administrative State

Today, the heroes are few and outnumbered as the FBI has become the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party, which is the party of government.

Ken Masugi, American Greatness 

Who knew, only a few short years ago, that staring in our faces in 2023 would be the crisis posed by the title of this essential guide to the politics of our times: The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy, by former 33-year veteran FBI Agent Thomas Baker? 

Having followed his insightful columns on the FBI in the Wall Street Journal, I was excited to read Baker’s book and see his expanded argument, which is very much in line with my work and the work my colleague John Marini on the administrative state. Sketching his involvement in prominent cases (the Reagan assassination attempt, the downing of TWA flight 800, Whitey Bulger, various murders, and corruption cases), this model civil servant rose from the ranks to positions of great responsibility. With those achievements and experience Baker describes how his beloved agency betrayed its own standards and threatened what it was sworn to protect. This betrayal happened not by foreign subversion (though we’re seeing some signs of this beginning to happen now), but was an inside job that must become better known to a people who would govern themselves.

As increasing numbers of Americans become more aware of the collapse of formerly trusted institutions, they will need Baker’s insider account of the once-vaunted FBI for an explanation of our exasperating current condition brought on by the vicissitudes of politics. By connecting the dots he presents an ugly portrait that describes other malign bureaucracies, inflicting their damage on American political and moral character and undermining confidence in America’s future.

The FBI and Baker’s life present a sharp contrast between when America was a country that took itself seriously and the aimless, postmodern mess we see today, which seems incapable of doing what common sense demands. Borders, wars, inflation, and transgenderism are one-word reminders of this nation’s lack of seriousness about itself and its citizens. Baker’s instructive account will not reassure us.

Baker presents the FBI as “the good, the bad, and the ugly”—his own war stories, the bureau’s injustices, and finally its corruption under Robert Mueller and James Comey, unabated under Christopher Wray, another non-agent who doesn’t know what hit him or the FBI. 

Of interest to students of politics is that Baker draws on the work of AEI scholar Yuval Levin, whose 2020 book, A Time to Build, explains the contemporary crisis in terms of the culture war and the subsequent failure of institutions to produce virtuous characters. Instead, self-aggrandizing ambitions replace public-spirited servants. The successors of J. Edgar Hoover had altered the culture of the FBI, transforming it from a law enforcement agency to an intelligence agency, following 9/11. The bulk of Baker’s book explains how the “intelligence-driven” FBI would culminate “in the ugly disaster of the Russian collusion investigation code-named Crossfire Hurricane.”

It is not surprising that Baker attributes the corruption of the FBI to widespread contempt for the Constitution. Where there once was “reverence” for it and the “rights of Americans”—each agent carried a pocket copy—there is now Washington-centric overweening political ambition. This is not to overlook flaws under Hoover and other directors, but these older and eternal flaws owing to human nature could often be contained by adhering to shared principles that glorified the FBI as an institution more devoted than others by its commitment to the rule of law. In this spirit agents could circumvent Hoover’s silly rules—such as an agent must not drink coffee in public while on duty.

To appreciate Baker we needn’t summarize his earlier career, , which he played roles in  many well-known and lesser-known episodes in FBI and American history. When he was transferred in the summer of 1970 to the prestigious New York Office (NYO), for example, he successfully argued, based on his New York City background, he should not work in the security division, where new agents were typically assigned, but instead in the organized crime unit. On this decision, Baker somberly reflects, 

The entire Security Division of the NYO came under great scrutiny as the establishment turned against President Nixon. The agents and supervisors who “did something” such as searches and wiretapping of the radicals now fell under the investigative spotlight themselves. In fact, almost every agent who worked on security matters in the early 1970s became the subject of prosecutorial attention.

For all the domestic terrorism of that period, recounted so damningly in Days of Rage, it was the FBI who often paid more significantly than the bomb makers and bombers who received minimal sentences, if any at all. 

Good work and survival has its rewards. As head of security for the U.S. embassy in Paris for the fabled Ambassador Pamela Harriman, Baker became familiar with the government’s odd relationship with the CIA and its curious standards. He was astonished to see a straight-faced willingness to lie about its work, even to the ambassador and to Baker. A few years later, in the days following 9/11, President George W. Bush would praise the CIA director and chastise the new head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, for the reports they were respectively providing. The change of mission and political emphasis combined to produce the collapse and corruption of the FBI. 

Mueller’s own eccentric judgments in the Atlanta Olympics bombing, Whitey Bulger, and anthrax cases led to injustices. “Although Mueller as a federal prosecutor had worked with dozens of Special Agents—case agents—in both Boston and San Francisco he did not know FBI culture nor how the Bureau functioned . . . But Mueller wanted centralization. Everything back at FBI headquarters, all information and decision making.” Against the expertise (both domestic and foreign) and prudence of the field offices, especially those in New York and Washington, Mueller demanded centralization. 

Thus, when the younger Bush ordered a change in rules that allowed retired federal law enforcement and intelligence officers to return to active duty, “Mueller was the only head of a federal law enforcement or intelligence agency who refused to enact the order.” Thus “non-agents [were] running public affairs, congressional affairs, and serving as general counsel.” He was so set on changing the culture of the agency away from the agents—whose first training involved firearms after all—and replacing them with “professionals.” (For what it’s worth, I have known and seen the effects of such “professionals” in the few dealings I’ve had with the FBI.)

Mueller set the stage for “the ultimate offender” James Comey, whom he maneuvered into the director’s office. The moralistic prig surrounded himself with unethical partisans, such as the notorious Peter Strzok and the “deceitful and dastardly” Andrew McCabe. From what we know about Comey, Trump was far too slow in firing the freak, “a celebrity who has used the institution as a stage to elevate himself . . . [who] continually substituted his own moral interpretation over established norms and precedents.” He usurped the prosecutor’s role in declining to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her email and server. To this, I add that Comey’s pride in affirmative-action recruiting, as he portrays in his self-serving autobiography, exemplifies his approach to changing the FBI culture—of course women and minority recruitment will generally drive an agency leftward. 

Contrast Baker’s ethics catechism: “First you’re good. Then you think you’re good. Then you’re no good.” This encapsulates the collapse of Comey into “The Worst FBI Director,” as his chapter 31 is titled. 

Comey thought his goodness obviated any need for a “predicate,” a reasonable supposition that Trump or anyone in his campaign had done anything illegal. Through being a part of a conspiracy of weaving a series of lies and misrepresentations, however, the FBI director attempted to incriminate the president. Instead of protecting the country from criminals, Comey played the moral zealot, inflicting his own political views on the country and criminalizing those he disliked. And, when challenged, he blamed his partisan subordinates as part of his defense, when his own agenda of culture change empowered these scoundrels. Therefore, having the FBI investigate a president, without any justification and, even worse, apparently for partisan purposes, “was the most damaging decision to the FBI’s reputation to date and has jeopardized our liberties in this nation.” Here Baker understates the evil: Comey’s zealotry wound up affecting the election and, afterward, delegitimizing the president if not the Republican Party. 

In his most touching passages Baker bemoans the loss of culture reflected in the lack of respect for the Constitution. If only they had kept the pocket constitutions every agent used to carry! But even the Constitution can be hijacked—as it has been during his lifetime, to justify the administrative state—that nexus of mentalities and public and private institutions advancing the agenda of unelected leftist elites. 

For a comprehensive analysis of the FBI understood in this way, see Glenn Ellmers’ incisive review of a scholarly history of Hoover’s FBI. Among other things, the FBI played a role in Watergate not unlike its role in the episode with Trump.  Citing the work of John Marini on the administrative state, Ellmers concludes that “the FBI is an indispensable weapon for the permanent government, which now constitutes the most powerful faction in American society.” 

Baker adds yet more horrors in discussing the role of the post-9/11 CIA: as an unintended consequence, the “FBI is now more likely to accept and act on any referral from the CIA . . .” Will the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) abuses continue? Will individual American rights be controlled by the CIA’s overseas sources, say, out of Kyiv? Recognizing the need to separate domestic and foreign investigations need not result in the “stovepiping” of information exposed in the Pearl Harbor attack by Roberta Wohlstetter over 50 years ago. 

In this connection, Baker rightly denounces a “domestic terrorism law,” which would institutionalize the recent abuses. “Say something out of the mainstream, and you may become a subject of investigation.” That is the threat in the FBI having become an intelligence agency (and a lawless one at that), rather than a law enforcement agency. Its analysts would necessarily gather far more information than they could possibly use–and that information would remain forever at the disposal of partisan abusers.  

Consider agents’ uninvestigated role in the Governor Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot and in January 6. Centralized and politicized, the FBI no longer respects the rule of law nor the judgment of its own veteran agents. Whereas gun-toting agents once respected the law, a new category of post-9/11 employee, intelligence analysts, “now play a major role in the Bureau’s mission.” Do they respect the Constitution’s liberties?

My own take on the Comey corruption is that he had more dirt on candidate Hillary Clinton, with which he planned to blackmail her should she prove corrupt in his estimation. But Trump somehow won, “requiring” him to find a way to use Hillary campaign dirt against Trump. Comey resembles a vain artist, who, seeing an imperfection in his creation then tries to fix it by creating a worse mess than what originally existed. He should have stuck to paint-by-numbers. Yet he still remains implausibly proud of his creation. 

For all the virtues of his book, however, Baker seems unwilling to embrace the need for political change in order to revive the FBI or at least make it less dangerous. In the era of the administrative state, attempts to restore the earlier culture without more significant political change become a futile endeavor. By the time of Watergate the FBI had already, in Ellmers’ view, emerged as “a partisan police force for the Democratic Party” This problem, in other words, is long in the making. If not Baker himself, then someone approaching his background and character needs to expose the January 6 show trials and the FBI’s role in them. They truly are, as Baker demonstrates, a “threat to democracy.”

Today, the heroes are few and outnumbered. Attorney General William Barr fought his own department and Comey’s replacement Christopher Wray in a struggle between the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 cultures. But it was not even close to enough. As Ellmers and Marini have argued, the corruption was well under way before 9/11, in Watergate. What the reaction to 9/11 added to the administrative state was an arbitrary distinction between life under war and life under peace: that is, we are governed 24/7 by “emergency.” Yesterday terrorists, today COVID, and tomorrow . . . what? A climate emergency? As Baker, considering other evils, concludes in the book, “There is much injustice in our world.”

Ken Masugi, Ph.D., is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He has been a speechwriter for two cabinet members, and a special assistant for Clarence Thomas when he was chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Masugi is co-author, editor, or co-editor of 10 books on American politics. He has taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he was Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor; James Madison College of Michigan State University; the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University; and Princeton University.