Abandon Complacent Opposition And Follow Tucker

Conservatives Need To Abandon Complacent Opposition And Follow Tucker Into The Arena

William Benson, Daily Caller 

(watch Tucker Carlson’s YouTube video at the bottom...)

Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News is not merely a personal loss to the conservative movement, but represents the cohesion and uniparty interests arrayed against him and the American people. Nevertheless, there is an important lesson that Tucker taught conservatives who now have a chance to follow his lead.

Tucker Carlson is a power player of American politics. He is the judge, jury, and executioner of any Republican politician hoping to make a mark. Whether you agree with him or not, his showdown with Senator Ted Cruz is an especially important example. How many cable news hosts can make sitting United States senators ask for forgiveness? His audience not only listens to him, but takes action based on what he says. More importantly, Tucker goes beyond the headlines, seeking truth and answers where no one seems to even be asking questions

In retrospect, this is not only what made Tucker who he is, but his courage. Much earlier than other political figures, Tucker took aim at the uniparty and establishment interests. He called out the corruption of our elites of all political banners and went after those who threatened the interests of everyday Americans. His support of President Trump and his protectionist and immigration policies is representative of this.

Nevertheless, it does not precisely explain what happened with Fox. Some claim Fox’s legal settlement with Dominion Voting Systems involving the 2020 presidential election was the reason. However, this does not seem to be a solid case. Tucker was essential to the financial success of Fox News, and without question more important than the price of any lawsuit.

I believe Tucker’s departure was not because of any one specific thing, but rather what he stands for. On April 22, Tucker gave a keynote speech at the Heritage Foundation’s fiftieth anniversary gala. In this speech, Tucker gave a fiery condemnation of some of today’s most pressing political issues, calling out everything from establishment interests to transgenderism. Therefore, Tucker’s departure was not over speaking, but over what he said. He brings passion, energy, and most especially, a drive to win. This is a threat not only to the left, but to many on the right who would rather sit in complacent opposition.

The speech at Heritage may be considered the culmination of Tucker’s beliefs. A popular news host does not typically become as important a political figure as Tucker. That may be the problem, too, however. As the left moved further and further into their journalistic lies and cooperation with the government, Tucker sought to fight fire with fire. He recognized that there is no neutrality in this game of politics. If the left is biased, then so must the right be. To sign the suicide pact of liberal neutrality while political opponents ruthlessly persecute you and your way of life is to be fundamentally unserious about winning any real political battles.

Tucker took a stand and refused to submit to a casual politics only concerned with defeat. Whether the Heritage hypothesis is correct or not, or for whatever reason Fox may have had for its actions, it is a victory for the left to have Tucker lose his position on cable news. With his audience and platform missing a leader in action, Tucker can no longer command an entire voting bloc and call out news that most conservatives would not even dare touch — at least for now. With him out, the stranglehold of the left over the media only grows stronger.

It is important not to fall into despair, however. Tucker will be back — just look at his Twitter video traffic. His hard work, talent, charm, and charisma got him to where he was. If he could do it the first time, he can do it again. While it will certainly be a challenge, he will succeed. In this time, conservatives should not only support him, but commit to a plan of action. Give Tucker an audience. Give him a book deal. Give him the opportunity to speak his mind. When powerful interests left or right seek to take a political figure down, that person and his message should be taken very seriously.

Whether you agree with Tucker or not, his voice matters and what team he is on matters: our team. Tucker comes off as an authentic, decent human being. Politics is about optics, and Tucker’s charisma and schoolboy knot tie that came on the air every night was a visible face of someone who genuinely cared about the American people, getting the facts, and holding our political elites accountable for their corruption.

It is time to get serious on the right. Tucker will have his day in the sun again, and any political forge should tread carefully on him. Moreover, this should not stop conservatives from taking tactical next steps in our fight against the left. Republicans would be wise to not just attack the liberal media in the press, but actively take political action to curtail its influence. Fox’s actions towards Tucker are yet another reason to consider which conservatives are really on our side. These are questions that must be asked, and rather than sitting in front of the television every night to watch whoever may be in Tucker’s place, it is time to get up and abandon “defensive couch” conservatism and actively wield our political power to take on some of our most vicious foes in the media. After all, Tucker showed us that if you’re willing to be the man in the arena, people will listen.

William Benson is a writer who has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Lone Conservative, and The College Fix.

Democrats Are The Nigerian Princes Of American Politics

 Democrats Are The Nigerian Princes Of American Politics

Vince Coyner, American Thinker 

According to the American Heritage dictionary, this is the definition of “Stupid”:

1. Slow to learn or understand; obtuse.

2. Tending to make poor decisions or careless mistakes.

3. Marked by a lack of intelligence or care; foolish or careless.

That applies to a lot of Americans…Democrat voters in general and, in particular, a majority of blacks, college students, and white college-educated women.

Notice I said Democrat voters, not Democrat politicians. Democrat politicians may be many things, hypocrites, liars, traitors and more, but they’re not stupid as defined above. Why? Because they do exactly what they need to do to win and gain power and fortune.

There’s perhaps no better example than Joe Biden. The man is a congenital liar. Plagiarism has been a problem since he was in college and was actually the reason he withdrew from his first presidential campaign. Indeed, Biden is a lying machine! He claimed to have gone to college on a full scholarship, earned three degrees, and graduated in the top of his class. All lies.

Biden’s career of lies only became more consequential and destructive when he ran for president in 2020. Every campaign is full of hyperbole like “I’m going to cut taxes” or “I’ll be the education president.” But with Biden, the lies went far beyond white lies. He told the American people that his son Hunter’s laptop was Russian propaganda and that he never discussed business with his son. Perhaps most depressingly of all, once he became president, he went on TV and told the country that “White supremacists” are the most dangerous threat to the nation. All lies.

But Joe Biden is not stupid, although even before dementia began to set in, he probably wouldn’t have qualified for Mensa. He may never have been the brightest bulb, but he was and is crazy like a fox when it comes to accumulating money and power.

Not that there’s anything wrong with accumulating money and power. Most Americans would like to be financially secure and have the power to improve the lives of those around them and perhaps beyond. But there’s a difference between grifting for a living and doing an honest day’s work.

The question, then, is how does one guy of marginal intelligence get “elected” to the most powerful job in the world? Easy! Democrat operatives are the Nigerian Princes of American politics.

We’re all familiar with the Nigerian Prince schemes. You get an email telling you that some prince has millions of dollars tied up in an American bank, but he can’t get the money without paying some fee or tax, which, because of some visa application hiccup, he can’t pay. However, if you’ll just pay the $10,000 tax for him, he can get their money and will send you millions. Seems legit….

Any normal person would read the email, often filled with misspellings and outlandish claims, and delete it as an obvious scam. But there are a certain number of people who will take the bait and don’t quite figure out that it’s a scam until their bank accounts are empty.

But here’s the thing, those misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and outlandish claims aren’t a bug, they’re a feature! The whole point of the exercise isn’t to garner responses from millions of people who will do even a minimal amount of due diligence and discover the obvious fraud. That would waste the culprit’s time and make the whole endeavor too time-consuming to be profitable.

No, they make the email and the claims so obviously ludicrous that the only people who respond are those sufficiently gullible to end up forking over tens of thousands of dollars. The victims of these schemes may be rather dim, but the thieves are anything but. They’re highly sophisticated in understanding how the human mind works, and they are experts at manipulating it. If they weren’t, the scam never would have taken off, and tens of thousands of victims around the world wouldn’t be out of millions of dollars.

Now replace the Nigerian Prince scam with Democrat party propaganda, and you begin to see exactly what is going on. The Democrat party, along with its comrades in the media, academia, and the regulatory state, are the grifters sitting behind the computer screen spamming America with outlandish claims and promises of fortune, knowing that a certain element of the population is sufficiently gullible to believe them.

For fifty years, Democrats told American women that men were superfluous to raising children, but now that’s moot because men can have babies, genetic men are real women, and prepubescent children are mature enough to consent to sex change operations. They tell us with a straight face that the “Woman of the Year” should be a guy who used to be a mediocre men’s swimmer but who dominates when competing against real women.

For decades, Democrats told black Americans that Democrats were their champions when even a modicum of research would reveal that it was the Democrats who started a war to keep blacks in chains, fought the 13th, 14th, and15th Amendments, started the KKK, wrote Jim Crow laws, and filibustered the Civil Rights Act. It was the Democrats whose policies destroyed the nuclear black family and eviscerated cities like Detroit, Chicago, and others that were once engines of black advancement. It was the Democrats who called for defunding the police and for “equity” in the justice system, severing the connection between actions and consequences and leaving the blood of thousands of black Americans on streets across the country.

And perhaps most treacherously of all, it was Democrats who told blacks that America is a systemically racist nation where they had no chance for success, sparking the worst racial tension in America in two generations. Proving their disdain for black voters, they tell black Americans their lives are at risk because of racist whites when every black person in America knows they have far more to fear from black males, and it’s not even close.

Democrats constantly tell the middle class they’re being shafted because the rich didn’t pay their fair share. In reality, the top 10% of income earners pay 71% of all federal income taxes while the bottom 50% pay a mere 3%.

They also tell us the border is secure while we watch thousands of people simply walk into the country. Then, they call anyone who notices a racist.

Finally, in 2020 when Americans went to bed with Donald Trump ahead in the polls in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, only to wake up the next morning to find that Democrat-run cities had stopped counting the votes for hours and, then, when they restarted, Biden was magically ahead. Again, with straight faces, they tell us a guy who couldn’t fill a phone booth for his rallies beat a guy whose supporters overflowed football stadiums across the country, and the guys we see on video walking around with flags inside the Capitol on Jan 6th represent the biggest attack on America since 9/11.

The Nigerian Price scammers are pikers when compared to the Democrats. All they want is to empty someone’s bank account. Democrats want total control over everyone’s lives.

When the gullible give their money to the Nigerian Prince scammers, it’s only their bank accounts that are being emptied, but when gullible and stupid voters give their votes to Democrats, they’re undermining the Republic for the entire population. The difference is that most of the marks who fall for the Prince scam learn their lessons and rarely make the same mistake twice while the marks who vote for Democrats continue to do it regardless of the damage they do. There’s a word for that.

Bidens’ corrupt web unraveling before our eyes

Bidens’ corrupt web unraveling before our eyes

Michael Goodwin, New York Post 

It is said that history turns on small hinges, with the poem “For Want of a Nail” the classic example. 

Another example is unfolding before our eyes.

The sudden flurry of evidence and allegations about the Biden family’s money-making schemes is a direct result of the GOP winning control of the House of Representatives last year. 

The margin of midterm victory was very small — just five seats — but the impact is very large because the majority comes with subpoena power.

And aggressive new Republican committee leaders are eager and willing to use that power.

After a slow start, they are producing at near-daily pace documentation of serious wrongdoing.

None of this would be happening if Democrats still had control of the House. 

The breakthroughs include testimony showing how a group of retired intelligence officials influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, effectively proving the existence of a corrupt Deep State. 

There are also claims from an IRS whistleblower that federal law enforcement agencies are giving favored treatment to President Biden’s son in a long-running probe and that Attorney General Merrick Garland lied to Congress about the case.

The implications of these developments are enormous and while there is still much to be learned, it is possible investigators are on the cusp of revealing one of the largest scandals in the history of American politics.

The probers believe the president participated in and profited from the corrupt influence-peddling schemes while he was vice president. 

The arrows all point in that direction, with Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, head of the Oversight and Reform panel, producing bank records that show millions of dollars from China being divvied up among as many as nine Biden family members. 

In response, the president emerged from hiding to say only, “that’s not true,” without directly refuting the evidence collected by banks and subpoenaed by Congress. 

Meanwhile, two Ohio Republicans, Rep. Jim Jordan, head of the Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Turner, head of Intelligence, revealed a former deputy CIA director testified that Tony Blinken, then a Joe Biden campaign adviser and now secretary of state, helped provoke the infamous 2020 letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials.

The witness, Mike Morell, said he helped organize the letter after Blinken called him about The Post’s initial laptop stories and later sent the letter to Blinken because he wanted Biden to win.

Campaign dirty tricks 

The letter falsely suggested the Post stories were a form of Russian disinformation.

It hit the media just three days before the final presidential debate, allowing Biden to cite the letter as proof the laptop stories were false. 

Because of the assumed credibility of the 51 signers, the letter, along with blackouts by Big Tech and Big Media of The Post’s scoops, helped save Biden from likely defeat, polls showed. 

Linking the letter to the Biden campaign is significant because the president himself had to know the laptop was legitimate because the information on it included photos of him and messages and meetings.

As a Post editorial put it, the laptop was the real thing and the intel “letter was the real disinformation.” 

So a Deep State not only exists, it meddled in and tilted a presidential election. 

Part of that sinister force involved the many FBI former agents working at Facebook, Twitter and other tech firms, where they helped government officials censor the laptop stories and others that would have damaged Biden. 

And Blinken is not the only Biden aide up to his eyeballs in dirty tricks.

Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, worked for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and helped spread the Big Lie that the infamous Steele dossier was true. 

The most recent GOP bombshell involves the IRS whistleblower, who approached Comer and leaders of both parties with claims the IRS and Department of Justice are giving Hunter favored treatment. 

By accusing Garland of giving false testimony to Congress, the whistleblower, identified by his lawyer as a “criminal supervisory special agent” who has been overseeing the case for three years, dramatically ups the ante. 

Media wake-up call 

Comer, citing what he called “the Bidens’ tangled web of complex corporate and financial records,” reacted by saying: “We’ve been wondering all along where the heck the DOJ and the IRS have been. Now it appears the Biden Administration may have been working overtime to prevent the Bidens from facing any consequences.” 

The developments are so significant that even the media outlets that usually run a protection racket for Democrats have been forced to start doing their jobs.

All three broadcast networks covered the whistleblower’s claims, as did CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Associated Press. 

These are the same outlets that largely ignored the laptop stories in 2020, even as Tony Bobulinski, a former partner of Hunter’s, authenticated key messages on the device, including one that referred to “the big guy” getting a secret 10% cut of a deal with a Chinese energy company.

Bobulinski identified Joe Biden as the secret partner, yet most major media organizations ignored him. 

That history and a set of iron-clad double standards that always favor Democrats raise doubts about how aggressive the media handmaidens will be as new disclosures emerge.

The Times, for instance, played the whistleblower story on page 19 in Friday’s paper under the murky headline of “I.R.S. Official Is Said to Claim Political Favoritism in Hunter Biden Investigation.” 

By burying the story and using the phrase “Is Said to Claim” in the headline, the editors inject skepticism into a clear, credible accusation.

The Times had the letter to Congress from the whistleblower’s lawyer, Mark Lytle, that explicitly lays out the claims and the whistleblower role in the probe, so it was disingenuous to imply there is any doubt about how specific the charges are. 

Consider also that Lytle said the agent went to Congress only after he had already made his complaints within the IRS and to the Department of Justice.

The implication is that he went to Congress because he didn’t believe either agency would act on his information. 

For the media, the emerging storylines represent a new chance to cover Biden honestly and accurately.

After years of looking the other way and pretending there was little or nothing to see in the laptop and other evidence, they are going to find it hard to dodge the landslide of incriminating evidence likely to come. 

Still, should reporters, editors or producers be confused about whether to report new developments, here is a foolproof guide: They should simply ask themselves what they would write or say if the same set of charges and facts involved another president, say one named Donald Trump. 

That should instantly clear up their confusion. 

Of course, such media fairness would require a completely new mindset, but America is long overdue for a miracle.

The Useful Veneer of the Aging Democrat

 

The Useful Veneer of the Aging Democrat

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Joe Biden is now 80 years-old. He will be 82 when he campaigns for the 2024 presidency—and a clearly debilitated 86 should he be elected and fill out his second term. He has been in government for over a half-century.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current representative from California is 83.

Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the second-ranking Democratic House member behind Pelosi, was House majority leader until early this year. He is 83, and has been an elected official for nearly 60 years.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is 72, with 48 years in elected government.

Democratic luminary and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) is 89, and ailing—after 53 years as an elected official.

James Clyburn (D-S.C.) is House minority whip and 82.

These are the official faces of the Democratic Party.

They came into power and maturity three decades ago during the Clinton years of 1993-1999.

Decades ago, they sometimes supported strong national defense, secure borders, gas and oil development, fully funding tqhe police, and a few restrictions on partial-birth abortions.

Not now.

Their role has changed from that of liberals of the Clinton era to serving as the thin power-holding veneer that masks the new real Democratic Party.

The party has been changed beyond recognition by Senators Bernie Sanders  (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the so-called Squad, the Congressional Black Caucus, newly elected senators like the Georgia duo of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—and Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Yet Biden and company are still familiar American faces.

Their final role is to acculturate the electorate to the new Democratic Party.

Its radicals are breathing down their necks to get out of the way. Yet for a while longer they still need such an ossified veneer of respectability to ease the transition to what is now essentially a socialist-European green party.

This new Democratic Party believes in defunding the police.

It supports the George-Soros-funded state and city district attorneys.

These prosecutors seek either to release violent criminals without bail or reduce their felonies to misdemeanors.

Critical legal and race theories are their creeds. So they argue that crimes have little to do with individual free will.

Criminals are not deterred by tough enforcement of the laws. Instead, “crime” reflects arbitrary constructs of a racially oppressive hierarchy.

They believe the woke revolution of using race and gender in lieu of a meritocracy should dominate government and corporate boardrooms.

Racial separation in graduations, dorms, and university programs are needed reparations.

Big Tech is their ally. All the better when it partners with government, especially the FBI and CIA, to suppress “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

They believe gender is socially constructed. Thus transitioning biological males can and should compete in women’s sports.

They want a Green New Deal right now, one that calls for the abolition of natural gas and oil for electricity generation and transportation.

Abortion is seen as a God-given right—even as a baby passes through the birth canal.

Climate change is their religion, trumping any concern for the viability of the middle-class suffering from inflation, high interest rates, and recession.

They want semiautomatic rifles to be banned. Concealed handgun permits should be almost impossible to obtain.

The more voters skip Election Day through mail-in balloting and early voting, the better.

There is no longer “dark money,” only useful “correct” money.

The more that Silicon Valley and Wall Street grandees quietly reroute hundreds of millions of dollars into hard-Left PACs and “nonpartisan” causes, the more the donors should expect lucrative crony-capitalist green deals and government concessions.

Much of the ideology of the new Democratic Party arose in academia, like critical race theory and modern monetary theory. The giveaway word is “theory”—a mask for any absurd doctrine that can be dressed up as a sophisticated new idea.

When Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the new Democratic minority leader in the House or Elizabeth Warren in the Senate advocates these positions, the voters recoil. That pushback is understandable, since almost none of these notions polls above 50 percent.

The role of a calcified Biden, Pelosi, Feinstein, Hoyer, or Clyburn is to reassure voters through their notoriety and apparently staid exteriors that they are hardly the sort to embrace revolution, although that is exactly what they do.

“Ol’ Joe” Biden’s old guard and the new hard Left play a game of mutual advantage.

The new majority of radical Democrats allows the old fogies to bask in the limelight until they drop—exempt from counter-revolutionary criticism or interparty primary challenges or demands to retire.

In return, the codgers reassure the nation that old faces like theirs cannot possibly be polyester revolutionary socialists—despite their role in airbrushing and photoshopping the radical catastrophe unfolding before our eyes.

'Incompetent' Cabinet... another example...

 

How Biden’s 'Incompetent' Health Secretary Caused a Child Labor Crisis

POTUS still scared to fire Xavier Becerra (because he's Hispanic)

Andrew Stiles, Free Beacon 

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/how-bidens-incompetent-health-secretary-caused-a-child-labor-crisis/

What's happened: Xavier Becerra, the embattled Health and Human Services secretary, was implicated in a damning New York Times report on the Biden administration's failure to stop the widespread exploitation of immigrant children.

What they're saying: Becerra has been described as an "incompetent and out to lunch" health secretary—a role for which he lacks the "relevant qualifications." The Times report appears to confirm this view.

• "Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk."

• "Under the law, the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for vetting sponsors to ensure they will provide for children’s well-being and protect them from trafficking or exploitation. But as shelters filled with children, the department began loosening some vetting restrictions and urging case managers to speed the process along."

• "At least five Health and Human Services staff members filed complaints and said they were pushed out after raising concerns about child safety."

• "We are pulling humanity out of 'Health and Human Services,'" a group of HHS employees wrote in a memo to their superiors earlier this year.

Warnings ignored: "I feel like short of protesting in the streets, I did everything I could to warn them," said Jallyn Saulog, the HHS official formerly in charge of the department's response to unaccompanied migrant children. "They just didn’t want to hear it."

HHS moved Saulog to a different position in 2021, several months after she filed a complaint with the agency's internal watchdog.

Why it matters: It's another scandal that raises serious questions about Becerra's capacity to serve as health secretary. He has also been criticized for "passive" and "low profile" leadership styles, as well his botched handling of COVID-19 and the monkeypox outbreak of 2022.

Affirmative inaction: Becerra almost certainly would have been fired by now if he wasn't Hispanic. The Washington Post reported in January 2022 that White House officials were "loath" to get rid of him because they feared "the ire of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other grass-roots groups that pressed Biden to appoint more Latinos to his Cabinet."

New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns revealed that some Democrats thought Becerra was a "baffling" choice for health secretary when Biden was assembling his cabinet. It was actually a "panicked" and "hasty" pick by an administration attempting to "calm" dissent from Hispanic lawmakers and assemble "the most diverse cabinet in history."

Throughout the "fraught" nominating process characterized by "hurt feelings and [racial] grievance," Martin and Burns report, Biden chief of staff Ron Klain grew "weary" of the Democratic coalition's insistence on "treating the cabinet as an identity-politics Rubik's Cube."

Affirmative inaction: Becerra almost certainly would have been fired by now if he wasn't Hispanic. The Washington Post reported in January 2022 that White House officials were "loath" to get rid of him because they feared "the ire of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other grass-roots groups that pressed Biden to appoint more Latinos to his Cabinet."

New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns revealed that some Democrats thought Becerra was a "baffling" choice for health secretary when Biden was assembling his cabinet. It was actually a "panicked" and "hasty" pick by an administration attempting to "calm" dissent from Hispanic lawmakers and assemble "the most diverse cabinet in history."

Throughout the "fraught" nominating process characterized by "hurt feelings and [racial] grievance," Martin and Burns report, Biden chief of staff Ron Klain grew "weary" of the Democratic coalition's insistence on "treating the cabinet as an identity-politics Rubik's Cube."

Thumbing Their Noses

Thumbing Their Noses

Corbin K. Barthold, City Journal 

Under Lina Khan’s leadership, the Federal Trade Commission is openly subverting all three branches of government.

The Federal Trade Commission is an irregularity. Though the agency is nominally part of the executive branch, its five commissioners do not answer directly to the president. They are independent. The Constitution, with its three-branch structure, does not contemplate the existence of such an entity. You might think that such an agency, this “fourth branch” anomaly, would strive to show respect for Congress, the federal courts, and the president—as a matter of self-preservation, if nothing else. But under the leadership of Lina Khan, the FTC is defying, sidestepping, and subverting all three.

Start with the FTC’s disdain for Congress. Past is prologue in understanding the agency’s latest bout of defiance. The FTC is expected to root out unfair or deceptive conduct (i.e., to protect consumers) and to police unfair methods of competition (i.e., to prosecute antitrust violations). In 1975, Congress granted the FTC rulemaking power, but only for the consumer-protection category, and subject to extensive procedural restraints. The agency embarked on a rulemaking spree, attempting, among other things, to ban all television advertising directed at children. The Washington Post dubbed the FTC the “National Nanny,” and Congress limited its rulemaking authority yet further.

All federal agencies are supposed to proceed with care when crafting rules that will have the force of law. The special restrictions that Congress placed on the FTC require extra care—more notice, more public input, more justification. Nonetheless, last year, the agency announced a sweeping plan to enact rules governing what it dubs “commercial surveillance.” What rules, exactly, did the agency propose? Who can say? Then-commissioner Noah Phillips objected that the announcement, which calls for public comment on more than 90 mostly open-ended questions, “provides no notice whatsoever.” Will the rules the agency ultimately produces be well-considered and narrowly tailored? Don’t count on it. As Phillips observed, the proposal “recast[s] the Commission as a legislature, with virtually limitless rulemaking authority where personal data are concerned.”

It gets worse. Earlier this year, the FTC declared its intention to ban most employee noncompete agreements. It wants to do this by issuing a rule under its competition authority. Congress has never granted the agency the power to make competition rules. And even if the FTC could make such rules, it still could not make this rule, which is not a competition rule but a labor regulation. The agency is trying to dictate relations between workers and employers throughout the economy.

The FTC is also thumbing its nose at the judiciary. In West Virginia v. EPA(2022), the Supreme Court told (or reminded) federal agencies that they need clear statutory authority from Congress to resolve policy questions of “vast economic or political significance.” The FTC’s plan to ban noncompete clauses plainly violates this “major questions” principle: the agency wants to use a competition law (and a vague one at that) to alter some 30 million labor contracts. Maybe striking most noncompete clauses is a good move, and maybe not. Either way, it’s certainly a major move. The FTC is flouting the Supreme Court’s command to stay out of such matters absent a clear congressional mandate.

The agency’s pivot toward rulemaking snubs the judiciary in another way. Antitrust scrutiny comes in two forms: per se prohibition and “rule of reason” analysis. Markets are varied and complex. Often, a business practice—the use of noncompete clauses, for instance—will be pro-competitive in some contexts and anti-competitive in others. Over time, the courts have come to see that the rule of reason—the weighing of costs and benefits—is necessary in most instances. The FTC is ignoring the courts’ hard-won insight. More than that, it is evading their authority. By “establishing per se rules about conduct covered by the rule of reason,” former commissioner Phillips complains, the agency “effectively overrules Supreme Court precedent.”

Even when it brings individual antitrust cases, the FTC thinks that it knows better than the judiciary. For almost half a century, the federal courts have focused, when resolving antitrust suits, on whether firms are competing to provide the best products at the lowest prices. By and large, the agency’s three remaining commissioners—all Democrats, after the resignations of Phillips and fellow Republican Christine Wilson— reject this consumer-welfare standard. They want antitrust law to serve a range of ends, such as helping smaller companies and promoting workers’ rights. And if they cannot get the judicial branch to join the cause, they will try to go around it.

The FTC may oppose a proposed merger in its own administrative court, where, needless to say, it enjoys many advantages. To block a merger during the course of that in-house proceeding, the agency must obtain an order from a federal court. But why let an Article III judge weigh in when you can rely on some friendly European bureaucrats? Increasingly, the agency assumes that EU antitrust enforcers, rather than American courts, will block mergers while it proceeds in its internal forum. There is even evidence that FTC officials seek to evade judicial oversight by asking their European counterparts to attack deals the agency disfavors.

Is the FTC at least obeying the will of the executive branch? Shortly after Khan assumed office, President Biden signed a directive urging the agency to set standards around “unfair data collection and surveillance,” to “curtail the unfair use of noncompete clauses,” and “vigorously” to enforce the antitrust laws. To be sure, Khan shares these aspirations. But this is a far cry from saying that she is acting as the president’s faithful servant. The FTC’s rank and file are demoralized; many of its senior attorneys are jumping ship. The problem, it would appear, is not the agency’s sharp policy turn, but inept stewardship. Before Khan took the helm, another staunch progressive, Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, served as acting chair. In her resignation letter, Wilson lauded Slaughter’s transparency, openness to debate, and respect for agency staff. She accused Khan, by contrast, of showing “scorn” for the institution she is supposed to lead.

When Richard Posner, then a law professor, turned his discerning eye on the FTC, he recognized a pattern. Decade after decade, the agency could consistently be described as “poorly managed,” “politicized,” and “largely impervious to criticism.” Posner made this observation in 1969, but it sounds remarkably contemporary. The body’s “performance has been gravely deficient through its entire history,” Posner concluded. “The costs of having a federal trade commission appear to exceed the benefits.”

As Posner realized, the FTC’s founders were “mistaken in supposing that an ‘independent’ agency” would be free “from debilitating political influences.” Rather than reduce politicization, independence may be increasing it. A federal district judge (an Obama appointee) recently acknowledged that the “for-cause protections” shielding the agency’s commissioners may well lie “past the outermost constitutional limits on the President’s removal power.” Stripping those commissioners of their autonomy might not turn the agency around, but no one could claim that Khan and her associates haven’t been asking for it.

CRT - ‘Tide Is Changing’

 CRT - ‘Tide Is Changing’

New Critical Race Theory Report Confirms ‘Tide Is Changing,’ Expert Says

Terri Wu, The Epoch Times

State and local countermeasures on critical race theory (CRT)—a quasi-Marxist framework that views America as systematically racist—are on the rise in 2023, at a pace equal to or faster than that of 2021 and 2022, according to a new report (pdf) released by CRT Forward, an initiative advocating CRT in schools, at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) law school.

In addition, anti-CRT measures in higher education and pushback on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies are also trending up in 2023, according to LaToya Baldwin Clark, a co-author of the report and an assistant law professor at UCLA, at a webinar releasing the report findings on Wednesday.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation and an expert on CRT, said the UCLA report was “fascinating.” “What it does is it quantifies the impact that the resistance to CRT has been,” he told The Epoch Times.

“About two weeks ago, Ibram X. Kendi went on CNN and complained that their momentum had been crushed by organized resistance. And there was a panel that included Robin DiAngelo; they complained about the same thing,” Gonzalez noted of two major CRT authors. “They said they had great hopes in 2020 and the beginning of 2021. But then, they encountered this level of resistance from the American people and their elected representatives. And the tide is changing. So I think this is what this report is about.”

“I think that the conservatives should not say mission accomplished. There’s a lot to be done, a lot, a lot,” he added. “But I think conservatives should be comforted by the fact that there has been significant resistance.”

According to the UCLA report, 563 measures were introduced at the state and local level in 2021 and 2022 to restrict CRT in either classroom teaching or curricular materials. Among them, 241 became adopted policies. Measures recorded in the report include legislation, resolutions, regulations, official statements, and policies; they affect 22 million children, about half of the 50.8 million public school students in America, said Clark.

She also said that she foresaw more state-level scrutiny of DEI spending in 2023, which in her words, were “very bureaucratic, burdensome ways of trying to get school districts and teachers not to teach CRT or anti-racism because they don’t want to then be subjected to all of these procedural bureaucratic requirements going down the line.”

Although red states adopted many more state-level measures than blue states, the numbers of adopted local measures are very similar, regardless of their state’s political leaning. Gonzalez said this was due to blue states’ many conservatives in various localities.

‘Divisive Concepts’

The year 2020 saw an escalated push of CRT in American society after the passing of George Floyd, a black person who died after a white policeman pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes during an arrest. At the webinar, Clark called the rise of “racial demands for justice and equality” in that year the “2020 uprising” and “2020 revolutions.”

Gonzalez, meanwhile, referred to it as the “2020 insurrection,” during which many cultural institutions adopted the CRT view that America was systematically racist. “[The Left] didn’t realize what they were doing; they actually went too far in 2020. They thought they had the country in their hands and they were going to be able to dismantle the country. And what they did was wake the American population.”

He added that he had spoken to many people across the nation as he traveled during and after the pandemic: “What I encountered was the institutions of civic society, rising up and saying, ‘No. No, we don’t like this. We don’t want this.’ And I think that changed the climate of opinion in the country.

“Obviously, in any democracy, that’s going to have an electoral impact and an impact on legislators, especially at the state level. And what they have done is that they have reacted by trying to shield the country from this attempt to transform it.”

“This UCLA report confirms that there has been this resistance to the transformation of America, to the dismantling of America, to the destruction of America’s cultural infrastructure,” he added.

The report traced the large-scale anti-CRT movement to former President Donald Trump’s executive order (E.O.) in September 2020. Although quickly rescinded by President Joe Biden in January 2021, the “divisive concepts” descriptions in the E.O. have been repeatedly used in anti-CRT measures, said both presenters at the webinar, Clark and senior attorney Emerson Sykes at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Clark acknowledged that the pushback on CRT existed before the September 2020 E.O.: “And [the E.O.] wasn’t something that [Trump] just thought of on his own. There were many conservative operatives, conservative organizations, and people who were pushing the Trump administration to do something along the lines of what they did.”

‘New and Innovative Ways’

Sykes touted ACLU’s legal success in halting Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” or “Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act” in universities and workplaces. The Act prohibits schools and workplaces from including CRT in their teachings and training.

After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the legislation into law in April 2022 with an effective date of July 1, U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker granted a preliminary injunction in August, blocking the restriction on companies’ CRT training. Then, in November, he gave another injunction and suspended the part of the legislation on colleges. However, the law is still effective in K-12 schools.

Sykes explained that such lawsuits were few because the legal system is protective of students in K-12 schools and weary of indoctrination. In addition, it was challenging to find plaintiffs “with Ron DeSantis going on TV every day, coming up with new and innovative ways” of warning educators not to teach CRT.

In response to a question about whether CRT or a different version of CRT than conservatives’ understanding was taught in schools, Clark said, “I don’t think that it is a good strategic move to say CRT is not being taught in schools.”

She suggested framing the issue not as anti-CRT but as resisting racial progress. According to her, now that the tracking mechanism of the CRT Forward project is in place, “part of the strategy has been we are going to keep [CRT] top of mind for our base when it comes to the 2024 election.”

Fiddling America Away

 

Fiddling America Away

Victor Davis Hanson, The Blade of Perseus 

The last few weeks, the world had been writing off the United States as either crazy or irrelevant as it watches America cannibalize itself.

Friends tremble at our sudden decline. Enemies rejoice. Neutrals make the necessary adjustments to join the ascendant non-American side.

The symptoms of our decline abroad appear everywhere. The more Joe Biden brags about the crippling oil sanctions on Russia, friends like India and allies like Japan ignore them. And why not, when Biden has no idea how long the war in Ukraine will last, or how much wherewithal the United States can, should, or will give Kyiv, or how its on-to-Red-Square blank check will finally end?

Big Biden talks about more solar and wind farms, and green new deals won’t fill the gas tanks in Munich or heat the homes of Kyoto, or lower the price of imported oil in the United Kingdom. Claiming the Afghanistan mess was a success fools no one.

Allies ask who are our leaders. An impaired Joe Biden who never is quite sure where he is, what he is doing, or whom he is with?

Kamala Harris, whose only interests appear to be demagoguing racial and social tensions with a shrinking vocabulary?

Senator John Fetterman (D-Penn.), who was elected on the argument it was unkind not to vote for a candidate who was physically and mentally impaired?

Energy Department kingpin Sam Brinton, the cross-dresser in lipstick, now charged with felonies for stealing women’s luggage at airport carousels?

Pete Buttigieg, our transportation secretary, who virtue signals melodramas of the past when he is clueless how to fix crises in the present?

Our Pentagon brass who fixate on saying the correct thing now to ensure the lucrative defense contractor billets later?

Allies fear that after abandoning billions of dollars in weaponry in Kabul to the terrorist Taliban, and pumping billions of dollars more of arms into the Ukrainian meat grinder, and failing to increase U.S. armaments production, Washington simply does not have the resources to match China in either a looming proxy or head-to-head war.

Browse through any media account of the U.S. military, and the storyline is one of racial, gender, gay, or transgendered wokeism, or a looming manpower shortage—not a new lethal weapon, a new division of veteran soldiers, or a new program to up the level of training, physical prowess, and mental attitude among the ranks.

The men and women, whom Russia and China most fear, feel that they are unwelcome in the U.S. military and so no longer join. Those whom our enemies hope do enlist, sign up to the delight of their quota-driven, identify politics recruitment officers—and our enemies as well.

NATO member Turkey is calling for an ecumenical Islamic effort combining Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and the Arabs, Middle Easterners and all Muslims—to unite against Israel. And why not when Biden had gratuitously insulted and yet begged Saudi Arabia and the Gulf exporting states, ignored the Abraham Accords, ostracized Israel, radically cut back on U.S. energy production capability, and groveled to Iran to reenter the Iran Nuclear Deal?

China now openly talks of war with the United States. Beijing claims the Taiwan Strait as its own de facto territorial waters. It partners with Russia to add to a growing alliance of Iran, and North Korea, and beckons Turkey, ostensibly a NATO ally.

After refusing to come clean about its birthing in Wuhan of the gain-in-function, engineered COVID-19 virus that killed 1 million Americans, China is unapologetically defiant about sending a spy balloon over key classified sites throughout the continental United States—part of the continual, humiliating follow-up to its inaugural smack down of Biden’s diplomats at the Anchorage mini-summit.

Oil producers, China, hostiles like Russia and Iran, and opportunists like Turkey and India all foresee the end of the dollar as the international currency. After the American humiliation in Afghanistan, the Islamic world, particularly on the West Bank and in Syria, all see the United States as increasingly weak.

The Biden Administration brags that it has saved NATO by pouring weapons into European Ukraine. But Europe is starving for fossil-fuel energy, about exhausted with emptying its arsenals in aid to Ukraine, and terrified that Biden is just enough a multilateralist to lead the alliance into a confrontation with Russia, but also so incompetent as to ensure either an economic depression or nuclear standoff.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador basks in the publicity of helping an ailing Biden mount stairs, as he brags that 40 million Mexican nationals have entered the United States—the majority of them illegally. He prods Mexican expatriates to vote for Democrats to ensure the border is wide open and a perpetual vehicle for Mexican, not U.S. interests, in ensuring billions of dollars in remittances, defusing social tensions at home, and encouraging them abroad in the United States. Do we help defend the borders of Ukraine because we cannot defend our own? Are 100,000 dead Americans due to imported fentanyl mere collateral damage from open borders?

The more our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of defense tour the world, sound off on contemporary strategic issues, or weigh in on domestic politics, the more apprehensive our allies become, wondering how the once-vaunted U.S. Armed Forces have descended into some bizarre woke commissariat.

The international financial community is terrified of $33 trillion in aggregate U.S. debt, a record 130 percent of annual American GDP. It was aghast as the Biden Administration blundered ahead printing money to encourage labor non-participation during a supply chain crisis, inciting inflation, inviting high interest rates, and all but ensuring bank collapses.

The world abroad will tolerate no more lectures from American grandees about the evils of tribal hatred or the benefits of democracy—not when race relations in America are regressing to Balkan-like venom. Anti-democratic rogue regimes indict their former presidents; they put on trial their current political rivals; and they let criminals go free if they serve ideological ends. Now the United States does the same, driven by the Left’s paranoid and irrational hatred of Donald Trump, and its eagerness to destroy all customs and traditions to vent its antipathy to all things Trump.

Foreigners assume that downtown  Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, San Francisco, or Washington are medieval—filthy, unsafe, vacant, and malodorous. Western civilization discovered 2,500 years ago how to remove excrement from its city cores; now it has either lost or forgotten that ability along with the knowledge that crime and disease thrive amid sewage and garbage.

The U.S. media was once the world’s gold standard. The New York Times claimed it was the paper of record. Network news was liberally slanted but often fair. Crusading independent journalists often kept government honest. But all that has now become a global laughingstock: ridiculously wrong about “Russian collusion,” predictably partisan about “Russian disinformation” and Hunter Biden’s laptop, egging on Alvin Bragg’s pathetic indictment of candidate and former president Trump, and giddy when an ex-president’s home is raided by FBI, or he is tried as a private citizen by a partisan Senate.

So as the military, political, financial, economic, and cultural status of the United States reaches a nadir, what is the reaction of a blinkered America?

What remedies are Americans preparing, as they totter on the abyss of disasters comparable to the U.S. Civil War, Great Depression, World War II, or 1960s-style cultural madness?

Marshall Plans to balance budgets? A 600-ship navy? Two more crack army divisions? A continental missile-defense system? A restoration of the cores of American cities? Plans to secure the border? To ratchet up oil and gas production? To drop the racial and sexual tribalism and restore a meritocracy? To reform higher education? To begin charging criminals with the felonies they have committed? A cleaning of the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and IRS?

Hardly.

Instead Americans are wondering why a local prosecutor has charged with felonies the first president in history, and currently the leading 2024 presidential candidate, for having a purported liaison 16 years prior and concluding a non-disclosure agreement supposedly to hide it.

A man pretending to be a woman is cashing in on his media-created persona, winning million-dollar advertising contracts from woke corporations for hawking their beer and sports bras. Do these corporations believe that America’s women are so un-endowed that CEOs must hire a man without bosoms to become their national spokesperson for best accommodating cleavage he doesn’t have in a competition he doesn’t enter?

America’s downtowns are reaching a breaking point of vacancy, vagrancy, and violence that makes life there unsustainable, while the country argues over gender pronouns. As violent crime soars, especially hate crimes, interracial crimes, and inner-city crime, a mostly black woman’s championship basketball team stages a media psychodrama of pouting and hurt feelings—as it claims it was “disrespected” by left-wing First Lady Jill Biden and will not go to the White House but prefers instead to be hosted at one of the Obamas’ three mansion estates—a duo not heretofore known for welcoming in strangers, especially of the poorer sort.

What else rises to America’s fiddling attention as the world burns up abroad?

Students in American universities, whether at Stanford Law School or San Francisco State University, shout obscenities at federal judges or seek to beat up invited speakers. Their disruptions are encouraged by their own deans’ silence or active encouragement. The common denominator in both cases is that the disrupters and attackers freely admit they violate university rules and/or the law, and yet assume their ideology and their claims on victimhood exempt them from any consequences for their atrocious conduct. And they are proven right on both counts.

All know that a few expulsions of the elite and pampered lawbreakers would restore sanity to lectures; all know that administrators either side with the culprits or fear their own careers would suffer should they enforce the rules they are charged to uphold

As transgenderism sweeps the country and wins the attention of the White House, the media do their best to hide the facts that the transgendered mass murderer in Nashville wrote a blueprint of how and why she would soon be killing 9-year-olds, that another would-be transgendered mass killer was stopped just in time in Colorado, that another transgender would-be assassin traveled to the home of Supreme Court Justice Kavanagh to murder him.

To speak the truth that men not just in cross-dress perform sexualized dance skits for audiences that include children, but remain both exempt from legal ramifications and are in hot demand is nearly felonious. Best-selling novelist J. K. Rowling, tennis great Martina Navratilova, and All-American swimmer Riley Gaines—they all cannot go out in public alone without assuming they will be physically attacked by the “peaceful” transgendered community. Their sin? The mere suggestion that those born as biological men cannot declare themselves women and thus assume thereby they are.

So America suffers the sins of omission—squabbling over the nonessential—and commission—losing wars, going broke, ruining its economy, flirting with civil war. We know these are all self-inflicted wounds. But apparently, we believe their remedies are worse than the original maladies. And so we fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve.

The world is terrified and stunned at the result—and increasingly looking elsewhere to non-American solutions.

 

Taiwan: Si vis pacem para bellum

Taiwan: Si vis pacem para bellum

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

 All,

The Taiwan situation is a tough one but we can find a prudent path forward.

If we learned anything from Putin's invasion of Ukraine it is that waffling and hedging encourages war. I also am sick of reading about all these war games where the US and PRC fight it out.

Those are two examples of poor strategy and only good strategy wins wars.

So let us start to think this problem through: What is a good strategy? 

Well, here is a thought: Si vis pacem para bellum. If seeking peace, prepare for war.

In the case of Taiwan that first means turning Taiwan into a bristling hedgehog in peace so as to make it unattractive to any invader in war.

Second, if war does come then ensure Taiwan will prove to be as tough as Ukraine so direct military intervention by an outside ally is unneeded.

That is the military strategy the United States should be pursuing today:

If we want peace for all in the region then we must do everything in out power to prepare Taiwan for war so we do not have to get involved.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Global Campaign to Target Shen Yun

 Global Campaign to Target Shen Yun

China-linked group using environmental law, dubious claims to target art group persecuted by CCP

Petr Stab, Epoch Times 

DEERPARK, N.Y.—Shen Yun is one of the world’s most recognizable performing arts companies. Its classical Chinese arts performances are met with high acclaim and each year draw audiences of over a million globally.

What many theatergoers don’t know, however, is that the company is being targeted in a systematic harassment campaign—both around the world and on U.S. soil—by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Over the years, the CCP has gone to great lengths to target Shen Yun, a U.S.-based company that aims to revive traditional Chinese culture as it existed before being largely destroyed under communism in China.

Just in recent weeks, the CCP sentenced the mother of one of Shen Yun’s principal dancers to four years in prison for her religious beliefs. In November, the local Chinese Embassy unsuccessfully pressured the government of the Dominican Republic to cancel the company’s performances. Similar efforts this year in South Korea resulted in multiple theaters dropping the show.

There also have been life-threatening incidents.

In 2021, a tour bus carrying performers in California came under gunfire. In multiple other incidents, the tires of the company’s buses have been sliced in such a way that they would have exploded on the road had the sabotage not been detected.

The main target of the CCP’s efforts, however, has been the performing arts company’s schools and training facilities at a campus in downstate New York located at a site called Dragon Springs. Internal CCP documents previously obtained by The Epoch Times revealed that the CCP issued orders to “attack” the site “systematically and strategically.”

Over the past 15 years, the campus has faced security intrusions, harassment, and vandalism.

The most elaborate effort to target the campus, however, has come from a string of unsuccessful environmental lawsuits filed by a  group with links to China.

The group, operating as a nonprofit under the name NYEnvironcom, was founded by Alex Scilla, an American who lived for about 15 years in China and maintains business interests there. He moved back to the United States in 2019 with what appears to be a singular focus of running the group, which in turn is almost wholly dedicated to the campaign against Dragon Springs. The group has financially supported a local activist, Grace Woodard, who also became one of its board members. Scilla’s ties to China were the subject of an investigation by The Epoch Times last year.

NYEnvironcom lists as a “partner” on its website a China-based company branded as Frontier Environ. Scilla set up the company in 2019, shortly after he moved back to the United States and started his nonprofit. His wife, who is Chinese, serves as the company’s supervisor, Chinese official records show. The company appears to be Scilla’s only business venture that could provide a source of income. Yet the company doesn’t appear to be performing any actual work. Previous inquiries to Scilla and Woodard about the group’s ties to China as well as its sources of funding went unanswered.

Scilla and Woodard have engaged in a pattern of meritless environmental lawsuits against Dragon Springs. But while all the lawsuits were dismissed in court, they were used by Scilla and Woodard to spur negative coverage in local media.

Lawsuits Dismissed

Woodard filed the first lawsuit in 2019, claiming that improvements to one of the entrances to the Dragon Springs property would disturb a wetland and damage her property—a vacant land across the road.

The suit was dismissed in 2020 by an Orange County Supreme Court judge, who ruled that there was in fact no wetland, that Woodard and her co-plaintiffs had “made no showing of any harm whatsoever,” and that they had “failed, in all respects” to provide evidence to back their claims.

Woodard appealed the ruling the next year and failed again.

In early 2022, Scilla and Woodard filed a suit alleging that Dragon Springs had released wastewater with fecal coliform into a local river. They announced the action at a press conference and managed to get several negative articles about Dragon Springs published in local media. Chinese media immediately picked up the news.

Yet the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal court later that year.

In his dismissal, the judge ruled that the required letter of notice sent by the group prior to filing the suit was insufficient and too vague.

That doesn’t appear to have deterred Scilla and Woodard. Earlier this year, Scilla’s group sent Dragon Springs another notice of intent to sue.

But according to Dragon Springs representatives, the newest notice is again faulty.

“Their letter was so incoherent and illogical that one couldn’t even say for certain what the exact allegations were,” George Xu, vice president of Dragon Springs, told The Epoch Times in a statement.

“The flaws in this latest notice to sue fit a very clear pattern. The previous lawsuits they brought against Dragon Springs were all dismissed because they were formulated around obvious false statements and irrational conclusions.”

According to Xu, the lawsuits instead are used to attack the school’s campus and its development.

“They were not genuinely protecting the environment. Instead, they want to do anything they can to inhibit our development and generate negative news about our campus,” he said. “So, while their lawsuits are failing before the law, they keep trying to hijack our legal system in order to attack Shen Yun.

“What is so ironic about these baseless lawsuits is that, from day one, our campus was designed and built in the ancient Chinese ideal of being in harmony with nature.

“We are responsible and capable stewards of the environment, and we take this responsibility very seriously.”

Scilla’s group is based about 40 miles away in New Paltz, New York—a fertile ground for environmental advocacy because of the nearby Ashokan Reservoir, which provides drinking water for New York City. The group, however, has shown little interest in environmental issues in its own backyard.

As for Woodard, her own neighborhood in Godeffroy has struggled for years with toxic algae bloom on Guymard Lake. In 2021, the lake was included by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) on its “list of impaired waters” for excessive phosphorus levels. But again, neither NYEnvironcom nor Woodard appears to be interested in the issue.

‘Frivolous’ Suit

Scilla’s latest letter mentions water samples with elevated levels of coliform, but it’s not clear where exactly the water comes from and how it got polluted.

The Dragon Springs campus is served by its own wastewater treatment plant, which eliminates bacteria in the wastewater, including coliform. Moreover, none of the treated wastewater is released into the river.

The plant operated “in a satisfactory manner,” according to a report from a September 2022 DEC inspection reviewed by The Epoch Times.

Scilla and Woodard claimed to the court last year that one sample that showed elevated coliform presence was collected in a “ponded area” on the Basher Kill river adjacent to the Dragon Springs property. Security camera footage reviewed by The Epoch Times indicated the “ponded area” didn’t exist at the time the sample was supposedly collected. Due to drought, the river had receded and the area dried up, save for a few puddles.

“There’s no telling what may have been soaking in these tiny, isolated puddles, given the densely wooded area is teeming with wildlife, and animal feces contain coliform, too,” Xu previously told The Epoch Times.

It appears Scilla and Woodard again refer to that sample in the latest letter.

“This latest notice contains flaws that border on the ridiculous,” Xu said.

“The samples they present are taken from puddles on the river bank that have no connection with our wastewater treatment plant. Their sampling method is very questionable, has no credible chain of custody, and their assertions lack the specificity required by law in order to sue under the Clean Water Act. We were advised by legal counsel that any legal action based on what is presented in this notice is not viable and is, in fact, frivolous.”

CCP Strategies

To use American groups, environmental laws, or local ordinances as tools to achieve its goals would be fully in character for the CCP, said Trevor Loudon, an expert on communist infiltration in the West.

“We know that the Chinese will use American groups to help them economically or help them militarily,” Loudon told The Epoch Times in an interview last year. “Why would they not use Americans to shut down cultural opposition, too?”

If somebody with strong China ties goes on to exert a focused effort against Shen Yun’s home base, “it would seem the most obvious conclusion” that the CCP is involved, he said.

Casey Fleming, CEO of BlackOps Partners and a counterintelligence expert, agreed that such a move would be right out of the CCP’s playbook.

The regime pursues the strategies of “unrestricted warfare” and “hybrid warfare”—using any and all aspects of society as tools to achieve the same objectives as a war, to defeat and dominate the enemy, he told The Epoch Times in an interview last year.

“They use all methods—‘religious warfare,’ ‘economic warfare,’ ‘drug warfare,’ ‘education warfare,’ ‘family warfare’—everything you can possibly imagine,” he said. “So yes, culture is absolutely critical for them to unwind our society for takeover.”

Environmental activism can be exploited for this purpose, too, to frustrate economic development and serve as a cover for intelligence gathering, he said.

The FBI has placed significant focus on investigating CCP influence in the United States in recent years.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, in a July 2020 speech at the Hudson Institute, said that “of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China.”

“We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours,” he said.

Wray also warned that the Chinese diplomats were targeting “federal, state, and even local officials” across the nation as part of their influence operations.

“All of these seemingly inconsequential pressures add up to a policymaking environment in which Americans find themselves held over a barrel by the Chinese Communist Party,” Wray said in his speech.

Fleeing Religious Persecution

Shen Yun was founded by adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, who face severe persecution in China. Falun Gong is a spiritual practice consisting of slow-moving exercises, meditation, and spiritual teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

The practice was widely popular in China in the 1990s, with 70 million to 100 million people practicing by 1999, according to state estimates. That popularity, however, was perceived as a threat by a few leaders of the ruling communist regime, which launched a Cultural Revolution-style campaign to eradicate the practice in 1999.

Human rights advocates estimate that millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been subjected to illegal imprisonment and torture. In 2019, the London-based China Tribunal concluded that the Chinese regime had been systematically harvesting the organs of prisoners of conscience, for years and “on a significant scale,” with the primary target being Falun Gong practitioners.

The Dragon Springs site has in part served as a sanctuary for those escaping the persecution and has seeded a significant Chinese community in the area.

The campus is something of an architectural marvel. It includes a Tang dynasty-style Buddhist temple built using the ancient technique of interlocked wood joints, without any nails or screws. It also hosts rehearsal spaces for Shen Yun and two arts schools, Fei Tian Academy of the Arts and Fei Tian College, which teach classical Chinese dance and music as well as orchestral music and operatic singing.

“Essentially, Dragon Springs is the only place in the world where such a wide spectrum of authentic Chinese culture exists and is being nurtured, free of any communist influence,” Xu previously told The Epoch Times.

“All of our work here at Dragon Springs shows to the world how wonderful Chinese culture was before it was suffocated by the CCP, and that is why the CCP is so afraid of our site. … Our very existence exposes it as the tyrant and fraud that it is.”

Indict One—And All?

Indict One—And All?

Were the opposition to match tit-for-tat these Democratic means, then the republic would not survive.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

As we await the publication of all the impending indictments of former President Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Americans are trying to figure out what constitutes an indictable offense for current and retired public officials.

Most legal experts, Left and Right, have noted:

1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Nancy Pelosi gave the game away, when in her dotage, she muttered that Trump had a right to prove his innocence as if he is presumed guilty.

2) No former president has ever been indicted—and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.

3) Trump is currently ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination to face Democratic incumbent Biden. And in head-to-head matchups, he outpolls Biden. For a prosecutor of the same party as the current president facing reelection to seek to destroy the viability of a likely opponent is a first in U.S. history. But again, it is now in accordance with Third World norms.

4) At least two left-leaning federal and state prosecutors previously have passed on the same evidence Bragg is now using for his indictments. They have explained that such a prosecution is infeasible because of statutes of limitations, because of a state attorney improperly appropriating the role of a federal prosecutor, and because non-disclosures agreements are a fact of life and not strictly illegal.

5) Bragg’s chief witness Michael Cohen is a felon and confessed liar, with a deep personal hatred of Donald Trump—a fact well known to all potential prosecutors.

6) The current indictment follows a long line of historic harassment of Trump, including the first incidence of two impeachments of a sitting president, the first impeachment trial of a president as a private citizen, and the first FBI armed raid of a retired president’s home, the first instance of an FBI director leaking confidential presidential conversations to the media for the purpose of appointing a special counsel to remove a president.

Such asymmetry also raises questions about the equal application of our laws as they apply to all our other officials, current and out-of-office