Congress fix welfare, one state proves it can be done

 

Congress should free states to fix welfare.

One state proves it can be done

If Congress frees states to fix welfare and workforce development, it will save taxpayers money and transform our economies

Greg Sindelar - Daniel Erspamer, Fox News 

Our home states of Texas and Louisiana have a simple request of Congress: Let us follow Utah’s lead.

For nearly 25 years, Utah has integrated federal workforce development and safety net programs, with an innovative model that quickly moves people from welfare to work. Yet Congress bans other states from taking this road, leading to more people on welfare and workforce programs that don’t help people get better jobs. 

In the next month, Congress should free our states to fix welfare and workforce development – saving taxpayers money while transforming our economies.

We’re calling on Congress to reform the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which governs federal workforce development programs and is currently up for reauthorization. Since 1998, this law has forced states into a one-size-fits-all workforce development system that’s a synonym for failure.

People who participate in federal programs often get worse-paying jobs, as a Louisiana state audit proved this fall. The programs also regularly misrepresent their effectiveness, saying people got jobs when they didn’t actually seek help. 

This failed system, which cost nearly $4 billion in 2022, is meant to serve the same work-capable people who use the safety net. But it’s largely disconnected from welfare programs, which cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Utah shows a better way. Since 1997, the Beehive State created a novel system using federal workforce development funding. 

To this day, if you’re a Utah resident applying for unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid or cash welfare, you have to go through the state’s Department of Workforce Services. Your case worker helps you access the safety net while simultaneously developing a personalized plan of action to help you get back into a good-paying job as quickly as possible.

The system is purpose-built to help people move from government dependence to individual success.

Utah’s model is a key part of its booming economy, which is the strongest in the country, according to everyone from U.S. News and World Report to the American Legislative Exchange Council. 

Utah has the lowest rate of residents on food stamps and the second-lowest for Medicaid. It also has the highest state labor force participation rate in the country and a poverty rate of 8.6%, compared to 12.8% nationally. 

And Utah recovered from the pandemic faster than any other state, replacing nearly two jobs for every one that was lost – the best record in the nation. While Utah’s success also reflects smart policies and cultural values, its unique system of connecting welfare and workforce development is a major factor.

Congress grandfathered Utah’s model in 1998, yet blocking state innovation clearly hasn’t worked, as our states can attest. The Texas legislature called on Congress to give it the same authority as Utah earlier this year, while Louisiana conducted its recent workforce development audit to prove the need for reform.

Last month, Utah Rep. Burgess Owens introduced the "One Door To Work Act," which would free up to eight states from federal handcuffs, while the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has voted to let four small states innovate as they see fit.

While that’s progress over the status quo, the best bet is to empower every state to use federal workforce funding as they see fit. Some would create a truly integrated one-stop shop like Utah’s. Others could design their own innovative system. 

As Utah shows, when state officials – not federal bureaucrats – are in the driver’s seat, they can tailor their approach to their citizens’ unique needs. It helps to know the people you’re serving.

The nationwide opportunity is immense. More than 40 million Americans are on food stamps and 80 million are on Medicaid, yet hardly any are purposely connected with workforce development. Such separation ensures that millions of people stay on welfare, when they could and should be guided toward work.

If Congress grants states the freedom to innovate, they’ll save money for taxpayers by shrinking welfare rolls while expanding opportunity and creating booming economies. 

Utah proves what’s possible. Louisiana and Texas are ready to prove they can do even better.

Lessons From the Great Covid Cover-Up

 

Lessons From the Great Covid Cover-Up

Rand Paul, Imprimis 

U.S. Senator from Kentucky 

Author, Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on November 1, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

The Covid cover-up began in China. But in a way we make too big a deal of that. No one should be surprised that a totalitarian government run by the Chinese Communist Party would seek to cover up its responsibility for a worldwide pandemic. What was mind-jarring—and what we should focus our attention on—is the cover-up in our own country spearheaded by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his fellow public health bureaucrats. And they might have gotten away with their deception if a federal judge hadn’t ordered their emails released.

In brief, these emails reveal that at the same time Dr. Fauci and other public health “experts” were publicly disavowing the idea that the Covid virus originated with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, they were in general agreement among themselves that that was likely what had happened. So why hide the fact? 

In January 2020, Fauci was told that the Covid virus appeared “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” He and his fellow scientists were worried that it may have originated in the Wuhan lab because they knew that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under Fauci’s direction, had been funding work at the lab for years. They also knew of a paper by Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli describing gain-of-function research—which involves taking two viruses and combining their genetics to create something more dangerous, more lethal, or more contagious—on various coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab.

On February 1, just before 3:00 a.m., Fauci sent an email to Robert Kadlec, then-Secretary for Preparedness and Response at Health and Human Services. It read: “This just came out today. Gives a balanced view.” He attached an article published in Science arguing that Covid had jumped from bats to humans and seeking to discredit the lab-leak theory. When this email came to light, I was initially puzzled about its timing and urgency. But then I learned that one of Kadlec’s duties was to chair the committee responsible for screening gain-of-function proposals for safety purposes—and that the Wuhan coronavirus research proposal never came before his committee!

For a long time, even we in the U.S. Senate didn’t know that Kadlec headed the gain-of-function screening committee because of the pervasive secrecy throughout our government. The makeup of the committee is a secret, its deliberations are secret, and those on the committee do not like answering questions asked by the American people’s elected leaders in Congress. To this day, it is an open question how gain-of-function research was funded in Wuhan without committee review. It is not a stretch to think that someone with authority skirted the safety review process. If so, that person would have had a good reason to be very worried, even to the point of dishonesty, when the pandemic broke out.

Jeremy Farrar, the Anthony Fauci of the UK, told his brother that in the early stages of the pandemic, “a few scientists, including me, were beginning to suspect this might be a lab accident.” Farrar writes in his book Spike: “During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets.” Indeed, many Western bureaucrats, especially in the U.S., began using various forms of communication to shield their messages from future records requests. We have an email from one of Fauci’s assistants instructing other government employees to avoid using government email addresses. Which, by the way, is a crime.

Kristian G. Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, headed up a group of virologists who, by his own account, were “prompted by Jeremy Farrar, Tony Fauci, and [National Institutes of Health Director] Francis Collins” to research and publish a paper that would “provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypotheses around the origins of the virus.”  Andersen had written to Farrar a week earlier, alarmed by the fact that the virus appeared to be manmade. But now, under pressure, he and others were circling the wagons and changing their tune.

By mid-February, British zoologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a Fauci ally, organized a letter that was published in The Lancet stating that the authors stood together “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” What the letter failed to mention is the fact that Daszak’s organization received many millions of taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the State Department—before and during the pandemic—and that millions were funneled through EcoHealth to the Wuhan lab, some of which went to coronavirus research.

In March, the Andersen group’s paper, arguing that Covid didn’t come from a lab, was published in Nature Medicine. By that time, corporate media and Big Tech had taken to labeling anyone who supported the lab-leak theory as a purveyor of misinformation and disinformation. An ABC News article that cited the Andersen paper is a case in point: “Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes COVID-19 ‘is not a laboratory construct.’”

As we now know—thanks to the release of the Twitter Files following Elon Musk’s purchase of the company—the mainstream media and Big Tech did not act alone. In fact, many of their efforts to censor speech about the lab-leak theory, lockdowns, masks, vaccines, school closures, and a host of pandemic-related topics were directed by the FBI and other intelligence agencies. In other words, the First Amendment was thrown out the window.

***

The moral debate over gain-of-function research has been going on for a long time. It came to prominence with the debate over avian flu research in the early 2010s. Avian flu is a very bad disease, but like most animal viruses, it is adapted for its host—in this case chickens or other birds. It does not often infect humans, but when it does, certain strains kill up to 50 percent of those infected.

During an outbreak in 2010, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier wondered if it would be possible to make the avian flu contagious through the air to mammals, and his research became highly controversial. Proponents argued that it could provide valuable data for scientists to predict or combat future pandemics. Opponents argued that it could cause pandemics either through lab leaks or terrorism. Fauci was intimately familiar with this debate, because Fouchier’s research was funded by Fauci’s agency, and he argued at the time that the potential benefits outweighed the risks.

A growing number of virologists and other scientists worry that a lab leak will happen again, and with even more serious consequences. With Covid, the mortality rate was far less than one percent. Experiments are now being carried out with viruses that have the potential for mortality rates between 15 and 50 percent. In 2021, MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt wrote:

Once we consider the possibility of misuse [of gain-of-function research], let alone creative misuse, such research looks like a gamble that civilization can’t afford to risk. . . . I implore every scientist, funder, and nation working in this field: Please stop. No more trying to discover or make pandemic-capable viruses, enhance their virulence, or assemble them more easily. No more attempting to learn which components allow viruses to efficiently infect or replicate within human cells, or to devise inheritable ways to evade immunity. No more experiments likely to disseminate blueprints for plagues.

The potential for disaster cannot be overstated. Right now, people can order synthetic DNA on the internet, and if they know what they’re doing, they can make the polio virus, among many others. And there are increasing numbers of individuals who have the knowhow: according to Esvelt, “The U.S. grants 125 doctoral degrees in virology each year, accounting for one-third of the total worldwide. At least four times as many individuals with degrees in related fields . . . possess similar skills.”

The required information is publicly available due to taxpayer-funded initiatives to identify all the viruses in the world. With the support of people like Peter Daszak and Bill Gates, the U.S. has been the top international funder of pandemic virus identification for decades. This should give us pause: these programs involve digging rare viruses out of caves where humans might never encounter them and transporting them to major metropolitan areas, manipulating viruses to make them more dangerous and transmissible, and publishing the resulting knowledge to the world.

Even if the goal is preventing future pandemics, the risk-benefit ratio doesn’t add up. While advocates for identifying the world’s viruses argue that the knowledge gained will aid in developing vaccines, decades of virus identification have been fruitless, as no human vaccine has been developed in advance of a human epidemic. If we continue down this path, Esvelt believes that “deliberate pandemics” will kill “many more people than identification could save.”

To think that we can prevent future pandemics, even as we continue to seek, catalog, and manipulate dangerous viruses, is the height of hubris. Over the last few years, public health “experts” were wrong about almost everything. If we are to avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future, we must reform government and rein in out-of-control scientists and their enablers.

***

In December 2022, Congress passed a 4,155-page spending bill. It had a price tag of $1.7 trillion, including over a trillion dollars that had to be borrowed. It was appropriately called an “omni,” since everything but the kitchen sink was thrown in. On page 3,354, the Secretary of Health and Human Services was directed “not [to] fund research conducted by a foreign entity at a facility located in a country of concern . . . involving pathogens of pandemic potential or biological agents or toxins.”

This was a welcome attempt to stop the funding of dangerous research around the world, but Americans and their representatives must watch carefully to see whether our public health agencies attempt to sidestep it. The recent behavior of NIAID and NIH bureaucrats, as exemplified by their attempts to deceive Congress and the American people during the Covid pandemic, does not instill confidence.

A group of 34 prominent scientists recently presented a series of reforms to “strengthen the US government’s enhanced potential pandemic pathogen framework.” This Gain-of-Function Reform Group (GoF Group) recommended that gain-of-function experiments that confer “efficient human transmissibility” on a pathogen should be regulated. Adopting this standard would explicitly stop bureaucrats like Fauci from dancing around the gain-of-function definition and looking the other way as researchers create viruses that spread more easily in humans.

Current regulations allow gain-of-function research to occur if the research is said to be concerned with “developing and producing” vaccines. However, dangerous research should not be permitted or funded on the basis of a potential product. Rather, we should ban clearly dangerous research and highly scrutinize anything else that “could enhance the virulence or transmissibility of any pathogen,” as the GoF Group recommends.

We should treat this research as we do nuclear weapons—as the potential threat to human life is even greater. Ideally, as Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright recommends, “responsibility for US oversight of gain-of-function research of concern should be assigned to a single, independent federal agency that does not perform research and does not fund research. The oversight of research on fissionable materials by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides a precedent and a model.”

Another pervasive problem is conflict of interest. Under our current lax guidelines, researchers can essentially approve their own grants if they toe the official bureaucratic line. Consider the particularly egregious example of Kristian Andersen receiving a million-dollar grant mere months after abruptly switching his scientific opinion on Covid’s origin from a likely lab leak to “natural spillover.” We have always known that recipients of federal dollars might try to game the system. Conflict of interest regulations are littered throughout the federal code. One would think recusal for a conflict of interest would be the standard fallback procedure for all federal science funding. Yet when I questioned Fauci about whether any of the scientists on the vaccine-approval boards also received royalties from the drug companies that make vaccines, he responded that he did not have to inform Congress about royalty payments. In addition to the fact that he was the highest paid employee of the federal government, his own net worth is estimated to have doubled to more than $12.5 million during the pandemic. This is an insult to the American taxpayer and the American ideal. We should not allow this kind of obvious corruption.

The GoF Group calls for regulators to “recuse any individual whose agency is funding or participating in the proposed [gain-of-function research] from decision making in the [pandemic] review process.” Reviewers “should be subject to conflict of interest rules.” They also recommended including “representatives of civil society” in the review of potential pandemic pathogens.

For several years, I have proposed something similar for all grants funded by the federal government. Even before I became aware of the extent of Fauci’s abusive reign, I introduced the BASIC Research Act, which would add at least one scientist to each funding committee from a major field of research that has unanimity of support, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. The goal is to create more debate on the best use of limited government research funds. I would also add a taxpayer advocate to all funding committees. Perhaps then we would start to question absurd “scientific” research grants, such as the $2.3 million the NIH spent injecting beagle puppies with cocaine, or the $3 million NIH grant to put hamsters on steroids and watch them fight.

In addition, my legislation would prohibit grant applicants from requesting their own friends for funding review. We should also make all federal grant applications public.

To prevent what happened during the Covid pandemic from happening again, Congress must address the concentration of power over long periods of time in the hands of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. In particular, it should divide the power of the NIAID into three separate institutes overseeing allergic diseases, infectious diseases, and immunologic diseases. Each institute should be led by a director who is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for a limited term of five years.

Anthony Fauci—who wielded tremendous power over many decades—funded dangerous research, lied to Congress and the American people, flip-flopped on many of his prognostications, issued edicts that defied science, and attacked and smeared his scientific critics. His reprehensible behavior reminded me of nothing so much as C.S. Lewis’s description of the moral busybody: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. . . . [T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

We the American people must not allow bureaucratic “experts” to endanger our lives, lie to us, or curtail our constitutional rights. Never again. 

Rand Paul was elected to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky in 2010, following a successful career as a physician. He studied at Baylor University and earned his M.D. from Duke Medical School. A former president of Lions Clubs International, he is the founder of the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic, and he performs pro bono eye surgeries for patients across Kentucky and around the world. He is the author of numerous books, including The Case Against Socialism and Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up.

No one wants an EV...

 No one wants an EV...

Electric vehicles are a bad bargain for everyone

Washington Examiner 

If electric vehicles are as good as the Biden administration would have us believe, why are they so unpopular?

Two new reports this week show the folly of the government trying to force EVs onto unreceptive drivers. The cars are hideously expensive to produce and don't sell even after they are subsidized.

Consider the Oct. 25 study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. It analyzed “how regulatory credits, hidden costs, and subsidies disguise the real cost” of EVs. In 2021, $22 billion of government subsidies paid for by American taxpayers hid nearly $49,000 of the cost of producing each EV. To repeat: $49,000 of hidden costs per vehicle. “These costs are borne by gasoline vehicle owners, taxpayers, and utility ratepayers, who are all paying a hefty price for someone else’s EV,” said Jason Isaac, the foundation’s energy policy specialist.

Even massively subsidized, average electric cars cost $22,000 more than ordinary cars with gasoline engines. These expensive and unwanted vehicles don't make up for their extra costs by being cheaper to operate. Back-end operating subsidies, which are different from manufacturing subsidies, reduce the direct cost of electricity to drivers to make it like buying gas at $1.21 per gallon, but the hidden costs of charging equipment and charging losses make the real cost $1.38 per gallon.

It's also not even clear if the nation has the electricity capacity to handle the shift to a market only selling electric vehicles, as President Joe Biden is trying to mandate by 2035. This is especially so with Biden’s restrictions on the development and distribution of coal and natural gas. Volatility of, and strain on, regional and national electric grids could become a serious problem if all cars need to be regularly recharged.

The Texas study does not even include costs for battery replacements and disposal. Nor does it venture to suggest that the mining of lithium for batteries can keep up with demand. It doesn't look at the environmental costs of lithium mining, which can pollute air and water with heavy metals, massively erode soil, use copious water and energy in mining, and disrupt wildlife habitats.

Even with all the subsidies and mandates, consumers aren’t buying the EV fairy story. On Oct. 24, General Motors CEO Mary Barra published a letter to shareholders in which, amid a lot of happy talk about the company’s profitability, she admitted that the electric vehicle business was lagging.

“We are also moderating the acceleration of EV production in North America,” she wrote, “to protect our pricing, adjust to slower near-term growth in demand, and implement engineering efficiency and other improvements that will make our vehicles less expensive to produce, and more profitable.”

In other words, aside from the prestige Tesla brand, the public isn’t buying electric vehicles. In late September, Ford Motors announced it was halting work on a battery plant in Michigan, and no wonder: In the first six months of 2023, Tesla outsold its next 19 EV competitors, combined, by a nearly 10-1 margin.

Left-wing insistence that the government subsidize and mandate EVs ignores the significant advantages of hybrid vehicles. Even with all the government subsidies for EVs, unsubsidized hybrids command a larger share of the market. Hybrids use batteries so much smaller that Toyota says 90 hybrid batteries use no more raw materials (lithium, cobalt, graphite, and nickel) than a single EV battery. The Japanese automaker writes, “the overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetime is 37 times as much as a single battery-electric vehicle.”

Hybrids are far easier to operate because their tanks can be filled at the pump in just minutes, compared to up to an hour to recharge most EVs.

The left-wing fetish for EVs is wrongheaded, especially when it involves government command and expensive subsidies. The government should get out of the way and let the market for hybrids work. Both American wallets and the environment would surely benefit.

Fractures in the Regime

 

Fractures in the Regime

Cleomenes, American Mind 

The fringes are fraying.

The late Angelo Codevilla identified the American ruling class as a wealthy oligarchy whose power depends upon its “intersectional” clients. For most of the oligarchy, the ends of rule are wealth and affirmation of superiority over the people, but the intersectionals—inspired by resentment and identity politics—are driven by hatred and fevered dreams of revenge. The oligarchs—wealthier, whiter, and older—have created a monster which they cannot, in the end, control; without their clients, however, the oligarchs’ own rule would be vulnerable to a republican counteroffensive. The waxing hate and boldness of the intersectionals threaten to push the oligarchical revolution in directions unpalatable to its Directory. “Most ruling class notables,” explained Codevilla in these pages, “would prefer to suppress the deplorables while minimizing disruption of the economy and avoiding violence…but for the intersectionals…vengeance is electoral victory’s foremost prerogative. Determined as the chiefs may be that the intersectional tail must not wag the revolutionary dog, the fact is that each and every part of the intersectional coalition sees itself as the dog.”

Codevilla, following Thucydides, was certain about the overall logic of our oligarchical revolution from above, even if he could not foresee which event would precipitate a clash between the oligarchs and their clients on the Left, on the one hand, and republicans and the Right on the other. While accurately noting the vulnerability of the oligarchs to their clients’ passions, he perhaps underestimated the potential cracks within the oligarchy itself.

It is now clear that the intersectionals have turned upon a subset of the oligarchy, and that the oligarchy is fragmenting in the face of an ancient passion—hatred of the Jewish people. This development presents an opportunity for the Right which it should not squander. While certainly not fatal to the oligarchy, rampant antisemitism on the Left—or even indifference to it—will partially delegitimize the intersectionals, disorient and unbalance the regime, and open up hitherto inaccessible resources and talented recruits for what is currently the weaker party: the republican, patriotic Right.

Since Hamas’s atrocities, the masks, such as they were, have dropped. Something new and monstrous has grown within America and now fully revealed itself. Never before, in all our foreign wars, domestic strife, and political conflicts, have Americans ever celebrated and applauded such depravity. Twentieth century American war propaganda as promulgated by the intellectual elite certainly never went to such lengths as suggesting that mutilating children, raping young girls, and kidnapping the elderly was something to applaud or take pleasure in. It is now clear that a not insignificant portion of elite American youth is thoroughly depraved, corrupted by teachers, and supported by politicians and bureaucrats of equal depravity.

And this is just the beginning. There is no logical end point to the intersectionals’ depravity and viciousness, and Jewish Americans are not their final or even primary target. Lincoln and the Republicans understood that once the principle of slavery was admitted as justifiable on any basis, then no person—of any color—could ever be safe. The same logic applies to the intersectionals and their theory of “decolonization.” If it is acceptable to rape, mutilate, kidnap, and murder women, children, and the helpless elderly because of the sins of their ancestors, then no one, anywhere in this country, will ever be safe again (including the intersectionals themselves).

By not only celebrating Hamas’s depravity in Israel but also treating American Jews as enemies, the intersectionals have clarified, despite their semantics and half-hearted dissimulations, their intentions toward their Jewish allies in both the Democratic Party and the broader Left. This was a strategic error, but unavoidable given the logic of intersectional vengeance. Any Jewish Democrat or leftist who denies the justice of the annihilation of the Jewish people in Israel will be treated by the intersectionals as an enemy and subject, depending upon the extent of intersectional power, to the same treatment. And, given how these matters invariably progress, the intersectionals won’t be satisfied with their Jewish allies’ mere silence, or apprehensive acceptance of the Left’s plans to solve the Jewish problem in Israel. To remain allies, Jewish Democrats and leftists will be coerced into positively affirming the destruction of the Jewish Israelis as a positive good. Anything less will be treated as evidence of bad faith and a lingering objection to the methods and goals of decolonization, and such Jews will be treated as enemies and traitors.

Indeed, while many liberal Jewish Americans, and particularly Jewish progressives, are shocked at the Left’s joining with the Islamists, they should not be so surprised. The totalitarian Left has a long history of this. Stalin, of course, purged his Jewish fellow party members and removed most Jews from public office—the purges were, in part but certainly not exclusively, a pogrom. After the war, the Polish and Czechoslovakian Communist parties purged high-ranking Jewish members, and also dismissed Jewish army officers and other officials, despite decades of “friendship” and ideological alliance. The reasons for these purges were complex, but no demonstration of loyalty, no prior service in peace or war, no renunciation of any identity or faith separate from the party was sufficient to save them from betrayal and expulsion.

Unaware of this history, or deluded about its implications, some Jewish intersectionals will cling ever more tightly, and commit themselves ever more fervently, to the feverish dreams of their party. Their (futile) hope is that by breaking all remaining ties, internally as well as externally, with their burdensome heritage, they will be fully accepted and safe amongst their intersectional comrades. Some Jewish Democrats, so long as they are able, will remain silent and hope that the storm clouds pass, or magically fade away. But others, in the Democratic Party and even among the intersectionals, will face the facts of life and draw the obvious conclusion: the party and the dominant intersectional factions are turning against Jewish Americans, this hostility by its very logic will intensify, and self-renunciation would be both ignoble and fail to provide any guarantee of safety. They will consider the new Democratic Party and its clients as an increasingly dangerous enemy, and act accordingly.

What of the Jewish members of the political ruling class? Aware of the hostility of their clients, some will hope for the best and continue to support the policies of the oligarchy as a whole, even as it brings them into greater danger. But others are already taking action against the intersectionals, and therefore, by definition, are beginning to oppose the logic of the ruling regime. As Curtis Yarvin, Michael Anton, and others have deduced, the oligarchical ruling class is an alliance between plutocrats and multinational corporations on the one hand, and the intellectual and bureaucratic elite in the universities, government, media, and foundations on the other. So far, the plutocrats and corporations have proven resistant to the siren call of “decolonization.” However, there is clearly a significant faction within the bureaucratic and intellectual elite which supports the decolonization of Israel (and logically, therefore, decolonization at home), and another faction which is indifferent, so long as their own interests are untouched. Just as Jewish intersectionals will come under increasing pressure, so will Jewish members of the ruling class- particularly, and increasingly, within the universities, media, and “cathedral” as a whole. And as the universities are the gateway to ruling class membership, those Jewish children of the economic and corporate elite will also come under pressure. Again, some will renounce their heritage, and others will try to adapt themselves to the new dispensation of power. But many Jewish members of the current oligarchy, and their children, will begin to see it as an enemy, and seek out new allies and new ways of thinking.

Following Gramsci, the Left has been marching through the institutions for the past 60 years. Many have been fully captured. Tactically, though, the Left’s actions are increasingly Maoist. Mao asserted that insurgents must utilize violence at every stage of the insurgency, but the violence must be carefully calibrated and appropriate to each stage. Violence and politics together open up opportunities for resource mobilization and the formation of a “counter-state,” which could eventually challenge and absorb the heretofore hostile or neutral state. Of the two, Mao believed that politics was more important than violence. Above all, the insurgency would succeed or fail depending upon the appeal of “the cause.” In fact, most insurgencies fail because their cause is not broad enough, and the insurgents begin to indulge in violence for its own sake.

What of the Right? It too has its factions. Some are the mirror image of their intersectional enemies. Not all are patriotic, and, for understandable reasons, many have lost faith in the republic. Codevilla himself—who clearly loved the republic—argued that it has been irretrievably lost, and that we must soberly consider what will come after its demise. Michael Anton has considered, without applauding, the rise of a Caesar to reimpose order on a corrupt oligarchy. The “Catholic integralists” hope for a state-imposed rebirth of virtue, such that the people might be lifted out of their corrupt lassitude. The future is opaque, but perhaps more complex, unstable, and dynamic than expected. The cracks within the oligarchy and amongst its clients portend further strife and a weaker regime, sooner than many had supposed. One point is clear: in order to exploit these weaknesses, the Right’s nationalist cause must appeal to and offer something to all Americans, rather than merely reflect the hatreds of the intersectional Left. What that cause might look like in reality is currently unclear. But once it is properly developed, it will find new opportunities for mobilizing recruits and resources against the prevailing regime.

Cleomenes is a writer in the United States.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Joseph Sullivan, Harbinger Sentinel

Think about it.... "Artificial Intelligence".... We're not talking about human intelligence in a non-oxymoronic way.... "Human Intelligence" can be defined as the end-product of all human life-experience - running the gamut from the pursuit of basic-survival to the conquest of space itself. Human Intelligence can come from the basic instincts we possess and beyond to observation, analysis and acceptance of what we perceive to be "REAL". Ultimately, our "perceptions" may be faulty at times, but our application of "logic" brings us to a "reasonable conclusion" about those observations, analyses and our acceptance of them - right or wrong...

Human evolution has essentially followed this process of "Human Intelligence" which allows us (among MANY other things) to differentiate between "apples and oranges"...

BUT THAT'S ALL ABOUT TO CHANGE...

Humanity is now poised to cede the processes that manage "data" (information) and reach conclusions about it through filters that vary with each application. The human "data processor" can tip-the-scale to produce the result they want-like-prefer... simply by adjusting the parameters...

We now have cameras that can use "artificial intelligence" to add or remove images from a photograph.... If you want to make yourself look better (or make someone look worse) you can do that with a couple of clicks...

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR...

We are now about to start living in a world where photographs will show us things that simply did not take place.... We will soon be presented with "studies" and "reports" that tell us things that are simply not true...

The "Information Age" in which none of us can gather and absorb enough "truthful information" to form solid, reliable conclusions will soon be overtaken by "new realities" of "altered states of information"...

"ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE" is MADNESS! It is the GENIE that should NEVER be released.... It cannot be CONTAINED.... It WILL NOT be "governable" through legislation. It will be like the worst of the "internet" on steroids!

If you believe that concepts like "fake news"; "stolen elections"; "lying governments"; "lying politicians"; "currency collapses"; "star-wars from space", etc., are fundamentally "BAD" for humanity - then imagine ANY or ALL of these managed by "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE".

PS.... If I sound like a "cranky old bastard" who rejects what he cannot control - that's because I am one...

The Mexican Border: Disaster Of “911” Proportions

 

The Mexican Border: Experts Call It A Disaster Of “911” Proportions

Please read added piece at the bottom...

John Grimaldi, Association of Mature American Citizens 

Tom Homan, former Acting Director of ICE, and Jaeson Jones, former Captain with the Texas Department of Public Safety, are veterans when it comes to the Mexican border and the dangers of the Biden administration’s lackadaisical approach to border security that has created what they call a humanitarian crisis. They played important roles under President Donald Trump’s successful efforts to secure America’s back door; they created the website Border 911 after President Biden opened that door to the world’s most desperate illegal migrants. As they put it in a recent interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens and host of AMAC’s Better For America podcast, “We’re witnessing the largest U.S. intelligence failure since 911.”

As Jones revealed, “the Biden administration opened our borders not only to Mexico but to the world and the cartels saw a massive gap and said to themselves, we can truly treat people as a commodity. Back in the day, it was about $100 to cross the river.  Today, if you are a Mexican citizen, it costs about $2,500. And, if you’re Central Americans, it’ll cost you $3,000, if you are Chinese, it’s $5,000 and if you’re Russian or Middle Eastern, it is $9,000 to cross the river in south Texas.”

Homan noted that he “worked for six presidents. Every president I worked for took steps to help secure the border because every president understood you can’t have national security unless you’ve got border security. Every president, even Clinton Obama took steps to secure the border. But, of course, no one did more than President Trump. But Joe Biden is the first president in United States history who unsecured the border.  Since he took the White House we’ve had over 360,000 children come across that border. This administration released them to so-called sponsors that they supposedly vetted. They can’t find nearly 100,000 of those children. They released them to sponsors. Now they lost track, and they can’t find them. Based on my 34 years of experience in numerous child trafficking investigations that I have conducted, many of those children right now are living with pedophiles, they’re in pornographic movies.  These children are living a life of hell because this administration refused to secure the border.  We gave them a game plan for how to do it. They have the Trump policy. All they have to do is to put the Mexico program back in place. But because they have this open border, they refuse to do anything to slow the flow. In the last two months, ICE has opened up three different investigations where they found children in forced labor.  These children live a life of hell. And while you and I and Jaeson are talking here right now, while we’re talking, women are being raped by the criminal cartels, they are being sexually assaulted numerous times. And a child is going to die on the border. So, this isn’t just talking points. People need to understand what’s happening right now.  Children are going to die, children are being sexually assaulted. So, this is the biggest humanitarian crisis this country has ever seen.

So, who is orchestrating this bloody drama? Homan says it’s criminal entities such as the Los Zetas cartel. “It’s one of the most hyper-violent cartels in Mexico. I worked the 72 migrants massacre in San Fernando [Mexico] in which 300 men, women, and children were cut into pieces by Los Zetas. They had gone far beyond organized crime and the terrorist acts that they were committing were going to come here because we began seeing it with beheadings in the United States. Our national incident based reporting system and the Uniform Crime Report, under the FBI, did not capture transnational crime at the time. until it was already impacting our citizens. The United States government, Mexico, and a global coalition of partners leveraging what we call the unified command, can collaborate, we can absolutely crush them. We know what we have to do. But I will tell you right now, if we continue to use a 60-year-old, failed model of a law enforcement investigative model, we will never fix this problem.” 

John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.

YouTube video... https://youtu.be/waFCLRIZ5k8?feature=shared

This next section was written today from a friend who is in Chiapas, MX... he is responding to my email, he is there to help mainly the children that are caught up in this disaster.

"It is truly a disaster. 

Breaks my heart. 

Another caravan left today of about 300 people. 

Some guy gave a speech. An organizer. At one point the crowd cheered like an invading army.

It is an opportunity for the church to win souls. It is a catastrophe for the country. It has also created opportunities for crimes of violence and robbery by those that prey on the weak. 

Our current administration is guilty of crimes against humanity. That is not hyperbole. They should be stripped from office and hung by the neck until dead. 

I recorded several minutes from yesterday’s preparation and today’s going forth. 

I cannot express it enough. 

I suspect that the organizers are communists. Their goal is to populate the USA with worker-bees who look to the government for handouts. The masses will be happy serving the collective. 

*rage!*

PARTY ICE BREAKER

Tell us one thing that people don’t know about you. 

Ok

“I abhor communists. I despise them. The CCP should be outlawed. Leftists should be driven from office. Their property should be seized and they should be expelled from the country.”

But other than that I’m sure they’re nice people. 🤦‍♂️ "

Ireland’s Tragic Demise

 

Ireland’s Tragic Demise

 John Mac Ghlionn, The American Mind 

Ireland’s leaders are inviting disaster.

The Ireland of today is very different to the Ireland of yesteryears. Irish eyes are not smiling, and for good reason. Today, my homeland is a horrific place to live: riots on the streets, vehicles ablaze, innocent children being stabbed, and women being raped and murdered.

Crime statistics released earlier this year by the Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police force, paint a rather troubling picture.

Crime statistics released earlier this year by the Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police force, paint a rather troubling picture. Since 2019, serious criminal offenses, including murder, rape, and sexual assaults, have skyrocketed. As the statistics show, in the space of four years, reports of rape have increased by 13 percent. Moreover, over the past 12 years, the number of sex crimes have increased by a whopping 75 percent. Last year, 44 cases of murder or manslaughter were recorded. In 2021, 25 cases were recorded. That’s a significant jump.

What’s going on?

Although Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) has pleaded with citizens not to associate mass migration with crime, it’s difficult not to. According to the Irish Prison Service’s most recent report, over 20 percent of individuals incarcerated last year were not of Irish nationality. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Seventeen percent of the population (1 in 6 people) was born outside of the country.

In the city of Galway, not far from where I was raised, Muhammad is the most popular name for new baby boys, a far cry from more traditional names like Ciaran, Sean, and Michael.

Interestingly, in 2019, the year violent crime started to spike, the number of people leaving Ireland surpassed the number of people returning. In 2022, as a result of an influx of foreigners arriving, the population of Ireland reached an all-time peak of 5.1 million. In recent times, the Irish government has provided refuge to at least 75,000 individuals fleeing the conflict in Ukraine.

The influx of this many Ukrainians is somewhat understandable. Ukraine was, after all, invaded.

But why so many people from Algeria?

As Gript’s Matt Treacy recently highlighted, there is a disproportionately high number of Algerians residing in Ireland compared to other E.U. countries. In fact, in 2022, more Algerians applied for asylum in Ireland than in any other country worldwide, without any clear justification for this trend. Treacy’s decision to focus on Algerians came shortly after a man of Algerian descent stabbed three children and a woman outside a school in central Dublin. One of his victims, a young girl, aged five, sustained severe injuries to the chest.

The attacker had successfully appealed a deportation order and was granted Irish citizenship, despite being arrested for another stabbing incident earlier this year and reportedly not being employed during his two-decade stay in the country. As of November 19, added Treacy, over 3,000 Algerian nationals were being accommodated by International Protections Accommodation Services (IPAS).

My interest here is not to pick on Algerians specifically; it’s to shine a light on the incompetence of Ireland’s leaders, who have chosen to embrace mass third-world immigration to a tiny island republic with no strong history of welcoming immigrants.

Shortly after the stabbings, the city of Dublin experienced severe riots, the worst in recent history. Close to 50 individuals were apprehended, and numerous others sustained injuries. Flames engulfed a number of buses and at least 11 police cars, leaving them in ruins. Rioters burned and looted numerous shops and threatened to burn down a migrant residence hotel.

Although such behavior shouldn’t be condoned, the frustration is understandable. Ireland is a beautiful place, full of great people—but it is being ruled by imbeciles. Moreover, the needless stabbings came shortly after another foreign-born criminal, Jozef Puska, was found guilty of killing Aishling Murphy, a 23-year-old teacher and musician who was tragically attacked while jogging in broad daylight. This shocking case rocked the country. After being stabbed at least 11 times in the neck, Puska left Murphy to perish in a nearby ditch.

The people of Ireland are fed up. They have had enough. But those who wish to speak out risk being met with the full force of the law. Varadkar and his colleagues are working on a series of “hate speech” laws that will radically transform a country once renowned for its freedom of speech. The laws will criminalize the “offense of preparing or possessing material likely to incite violence or hatred against persons on account of their protected characteristics.” This means that having the wrong kind of meme saved on your phone’s photo roll could subject you to criminal penalties.

Varadkar’s right-hand man, Tanaiste Micheál Martin, has promised that the hate speech laws will be implemented before the Christmas holiday. If signed to effect, the country may very well become a totalitarian state, where statements once considered routine could land a person in prison. 

A place once known for its céad míle fáiltes, craic, and its ceol (a hundred thousand welcomes, fun, and music) is morphing into something truly monstrous. The Irish people are still, by and large, a great bunch. However, they are being governed by elites who have little, if any, interest in protecting them from the very real—and very new—threats that they currently face.

ACLU Will Represent NRA Before Supreme Court

 

ACLU Will Represent NRA In Free Speech Case Before Supreme Court

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will represent the National Rifle Association (NRA) in a First Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Tom Ozimek,The Epoch Times 

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has found an unlikely ally in of the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which will represent the gun rights advocacy group at the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that centers of the constitutional right of free speech.

The NRA in 2018 brought a lawsuit against Maria Vullo, former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS), alleging that she violated the First Amendment by pressuring regulated financial institutions like banks and insurers to stop doing business with the gun rights group.

The case made its way through the courts, eventually landing before the Supreme Court, which in November agreed to take it up.

"We’re representing the NRA at the Supreme Court in their case against New York’s Department of Financial Services for abusing its regulatory power to violate the NRA’s First Amendment rights. The government can’t blacklist an advocacy group because of its viewpoint," the ACLU said in a post on X.

NRA President Charles Cotton welcomed the ACLU's announcement.

"The NRA is proud to stand with the ACLU and others who recognize this important truth: regulatory authority cannot be used to silence political speech," he said in a post on X.

The gun rights group's original lawsuit accused Ms. Vullo and the DFS of having engaged in a "campaign of selective prosecution, backroom exhortations, and public threats" to the detriment of the NRA and the Americans it represents.

Background

The lawsuit accuses Ms. Vullo of having warned regulated institutions that doing business with the NRA exposed them to "reputational risk," while also allegedly secretly offering leniency to insurers for unrelated infractions if they dropped the gun rights lobby as their client.

Citing private telephone calls, internal insurer documents, and statements by an anonymous banking executive, the complaint alleged that a number of regulated financial institutions saw Ms. Vullo's actions as "threatening" and either stopped their existing business arrangements with the NRA or refused new ones.

The complaint claims that the defendants' actions resulted in significant damages to the NRA, with the group seeking millions of dollars in damages.

Ms. Vullo and the DFS have argued that they merely issued advice and did not force businesses to cut ties with the NRA.

In 2021, a federal judge dismissed all claims apart from multiple free speech claims against Ms. Vullo.

Later, in 2022, the New York City-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the First Amendment cases also should have been dismissed, prompting the NRA's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

'Dangerous Playbook'

In its Dec. 9 announcement that it will be representing the NRA before the Supreme Court, the ACLU said that it doesn't support the NRA's mission, nor its views on gun rights, nor does it back the group's tactics. However, it made clear it opposes government suppression of free speech.

"While we vigorously oppose the NRA's viewpoint, we cannot give government officials the power to silence those with whom they disagree," the ACLU said, adding that, if the Supreme Court doesn't intervene, "it will create a dangerous playbook for state regulatory agencies across the country to blacklist or punish any viewpoint-based organizations."

Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), told The Epoch Times in an earlier interview that the actions of New York officials with respect to the NRA are the latest in a long line of attempts by the government to control speech by pressuring financial institutions to cut off services to disfavored organizations.

“There's significant pressure on banks to de-bank people that the political left, especially, do not agree with,” Mr. Tedesco told The Epoch Times. “And this has been happening for years.”

Uh Oh, The U.S. Military Went Woke

 

The U.S. Military Went Woke.

Time To Make Some Changes at the Top

Kevin Roberts, Ryan Williams, and Terry Schilling, Newsweek 

The war in Ukraine and Israel's response to the October 7 terrorist attack signal a worldwide turn away from U.S. leadership. While direct involvement in either conflict seems unlikely, U.S. troop deployments to the Middle East continue, and two U.S. carrier strike groups have formed a "naval bubble" around Israel. The Marine Corps Central Command even canceled its heralded Marine Corps Ball due to "operational commitments."

Heightened tensions come as the window of American leadership, and accompanying global stability, appears at risk of closing. Domestic instability among our European allies has compromised their ability to contribute to wars in their own backyard. Wise or not, every significant rival of America judges now to be a good time to test American leadership. Russian aggression in Ukraine, Chinese posturing towards Taiwan, and Iranian attacks on Americans signal the deterrent power of the American military is not what it once was. As the Biden administration fumbles, the rest of the world is turning against, or away from, America.

Conservatives must lead a "refounding" of the American military to embrace the possibility that war may be on the horizon. Too often, Americans hear a bipartisan chorus declaring the military a "melting pot" or "mirror" of civilian society. In this vein of rhetoric, the military's purpose is to reflect the country's demographic trends and be hospitable to the de rigueur conception of civil rights.

This reflects what Samuel Huntington, in The Soldier and the State, described as the tension between the "functional imperative" of the military to fight and win our nation's wars, and the "social imperative" to embrace the politics and ideologies of civil society. Huntington argued, rightly, that the military's adherence to its "functional imperative" demands an absolute adherence to merit and to the people, policies, and programs that make the military more lethal and effective.

In 1870-71, for example, the Germans defeated a French Army that had an excellent reputation and tremendous resources. But decades of politicized French high command officials left the army without competent leadership, and the nation suffered a humiliating defeat. This crisis of merit spurred a century-long cycle of French military losses.

Today's American military has fully embraced the social imperatives of the Left and the most progressive aspects of American society.

The U.S. Air Force selects officers based on a race- and sex-based quota system for officer applicants—an affirmative action program that would make the Ivy League blush.

In August, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command released a report on "Women in Combat"—not to analyze the effectiveness of Army Special Operations Forces, but to excoriate itself for supposed persistent bigotry.

Earlier this year, Army officials released a memo making soldiers undergoing "gender transition" non-deployable for almost one year. At a time of severe readiness concerns, such a concession to ideology is absurd. The military should not be in the business of accommodating social ideology if it means accepting non-deployability.

Each of these examples, and countless others, embody the faulty assumption that the military must reflect the society it is built to protect.

This assumption is pernicious because the 20th-century armed forces that won two world wars was built on a theory of separation from society. William T. Sherman, Jack Pershing, and George Marshall formed a tradition of military leadership built on ruthless standards of military competence, and near-indifference to political pressures and social concerns. These leaders built and led armies with global success, and we should recall their approach to civil-military relations in policymaking and oversight.

Such scrutiny is appropriate, even for senior officers serving in uniform. By law, the U.S. Senate has the responsibility and authority to review every general and flag officer in the military up for promotion. This authority is entrusted to our elected leaders to ensure the very best officers lead aircraft carriers, infantry divisions, and Marine Expeditionary Forces.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville's (R-Alabama) holds on military promotions over the Pentagon's unjust decision to fund abortion tourism is a righteous manifestation of the Senate's responsibility to scrutinize military leadership. Analysis from the Center for Renewing America indicates over 40 percent of the officers whose promotion Tuberville has held up have publicly supported "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" policies, and dozens of them have egregiously politicized their service through social media comments, speeches, or policy decisions.

If the nation is to reclaim the military as an institution built for victory in war, conservatives must have the courage and audacity to reform the institution, starting at the top, with uniformed leadership.

In his farewell address, President George Washington himself warned of the rise of "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men" who would "usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." Nor was this concern confined to the early days of our republic—President Dwight Eisenhower warned "against the acquisition of unwarranted influence" and its "potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power."

It is not disrespectful to question the suitability of a general or admiral for promotion. Such oversight is foundational to restoring the unitary place of merit at the center of military decisionmaking. As the risk of war seems to rise, there is no time to waste.

Dr. Kevin Roberts is the president of The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America. Ryan Williams is the president and publisher of The Claremont Review of Books and the American Mind. Terry Schilling is the president of American Principles Project.

Hunter’s indictment = Democrat's maddening truth

 

With Hunter’s indictment, Democrats face a moment of maddening truth

Jonathan Turley, The Hill 

Author Aldous Huxley once said, “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

Such a moment of madness has arrived in Congress as members prepare to vote on the formal approval of an impeachment inquiry. The second indictment of Hunter Biden shattered long-standing denials and narratives repeated by the White House and members of Congress. What is left in its wake is now plain to the public: corruption.

The vote is not whether to impeach President Biden, but whether members support the investigation into these growing allegations of corruption by the Biden family. According to recent polling, nearly 70 percent of voters (and 40 percent of Democrats) believe that Biden has acted unlawfully or unethically or both. Yet with almost half of the Democratic Party viewing Biden’s conduct as worthy of investigation, it is not clear whether a single Democratic member will vote to look into these allegations.

In September, I testified at the first impeachment inquiry hearing and stated that the evidence had clearly passed the threshold for such an inquiry. While there was no requirement to hold a formal vote to start this process (as the Democrats did with Trump), I encouraged the members to hold such a vote.

Since that hearing, the evidence has only mounted against President Biden. It is now clear that Biden lied when he maintained as a candidate, and later as president, that he had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings with foreign interests. Even Hunter himself contradicted the president on this claim.

It is also now clear that he lied in denying that his son never made money in China. The indictment confirms massive transfers from Chinese sources.

It is also clear that Hunter was engaged in raw influence peddling. This included threatening at least one Chinese businessman that his father was sitting next to him and would retaliate against him if he did not send millions to the Bidens.

President Biden also lied when he claimed this week that he had not had any “interactions” with his son’s business associates. There are emails, audiotapes and testimony now disproving that claim.

Millions of dollars flowed to Biden family members through a labyrinth of shell companies and accounts. Hunter Biden sent emails saying that up to half of his income went to his father while they used shared accounts and credit cards for expenses.

Even Biden associates now admit that they were selling “the Biden brand” and influence with Joe Biden. Advocates simply argue that they were merely selling the “illusion” of influence.

It is now time to see if a single Democratic member will stand against corruption and support an inquiry into the president’s role and later cover-up of this corruption. That includes the use of White House staff to spread false claims and attack critics.

I have previously discussed four possible articles of impeachment that warrant investigation.

One of the false narratives being bandied about is that there is no proof that the influence peddling Biden’s son and brothers benefited the president himself. Thus, the argument goes, even though he was the subject of the influence peddling, Joe Biden did not legally or constitutionally benefit from the payments to constitute bribery or other crimes.

That is utter nonsense. The courts have repeatedly found that benefits to family members (far more modest than the millions in this case) can constitute bribery for a politician. That has also been the position of the Justice Department in past cases. Regardless of whether Hunter or his associates were speaking truthfully about handing over percentages of these funds to Joe Biden, he practically and legally benefited from the millions going to his family. 

Even if members insist that they are not yet convinced, it makes no sense to insist that there is no direct evidence while opposing efforts to establish such evidence. These members have opposed any investigation into the allegations from the start.

Polling suggests most people believe there was a massive influence peddling operation built around Joe Biden, and that the president lied about not knowing about these deals. It is now time to get answers directly from the key players, from Hunter Biden to the president himself.

There is more at stake for the members than a Democratic president. The Democratic Party has already embraced censorship and abandoned its long advocacy of free speech. Democrats are now running on the pledge to expand censorship on social media. The question is whether, as a party, it will now vote to shield corruption, even with almost half of Democratic voters calling for answers.

The Democratic Party that I was raised in and supported was more than the party of censorship and corruption. It fought for free speech and good government. There were principles that came before personalities.

That is why we have reached a point of inescapable clarity. There is no principled basis to oppose an investigation into these chilling allegations. Stripped of the false narratives and faux constitutional claims, what remains are raw politics and utter madness. 

The only question is, who will step forward on the Democratic side to demand not impeachment but answers?

So let’s call the vote.

Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.

California Screaming

California Screaming

Michael P. Ramirez, Michael Ramirez Essay

Just when you thought things could not be worse for America under another Biden term, the prospect of a Gavin Newsom presidency emerges from the depths of the president’s latest polls.  

The attention-seeking Governor grabbed more headlines in a debate with Governor DeSantis on Fox News.

It was billed as the battle of governors, the Red State vs Blue State debate. It pitted Newsom’s deep blue liberal policies against DeSantis’ deep red conservative ones. 

For those who think Biden’s policies couldn’t get worse, take a look at Gavin Newsom’s California…

The debate went about how you might expect it. Untethered, it featured more of Governor DeSantis, Governor Newsom, and Fox host Sean Hannity talking over each other than anything else. But it provided a brief glimpse into some of Newsom’s progressive policies and the impact they have had on his constituents.

The most reassuring thing Newsom said during the entire debate, was pledging not to run for president in 2024… but like everything else he said, it must be taken with a Pacific Ocean of salt. Being from California, trust me, his policies have been more like rubbing salt into your wounds.

Newsom may look and sound like slick polished chrome, that is until you rub off the fake metal coating and reveal the plastic underneath. Tasked with defending his state record, he was doomed from the start. 

California is seen more and more by progressives as the blueprint for our nation. California’s governor has paired with a supermajority of Democrats in his state legislature to implement every liberal desire they have.

It is a liberal’s dream and a taxpayer’s nightmare. 

California should be a dream. It is the largest state with the largest population, 39.24 million. It is 12% of our national population. If it were a country, California would have the 5th largest economy in the world, only behind the U.S., China, Japan, and Germany. But California ranks 30th in employment to population ratio in the nation. At 13.2%, California has the highest poverty rate in America. In 2023, 31.1% of Californians are poor or near poor.

Housing and Homelessness were two of Newsom’s priorities in 2019. Both are worse today. 

California has 30% of the nation’s homeless, 50% of them sleep outside. Since 2020, the national average has increased by 0.4%. California’s homeless population increased by 6%. California, Vermont, and Oregon share the highest homeless rate in America. 

California is 49th in housing affordability. The average median-priced home in October 2023 is $840,360, a .4% decrease from September. According to the California Association of Realtors, fewer than 1 in 5 or 16% of Californians can afford to buy a median-priced single-family home.

These are the results when Governor Newsom prioritizes things.

So, what happened to the California Dream? 

Long before the Mamas and the Papas sang about California Dreamin’ in 1966, hundreds of thousands rushed to the state in search of the American dream during the Gold Rush in 1848. California was seen as a land of opportunities, new beginnings, jobs, and steady sunshine. 

People are now leaving California in bigger numbers. California had negative population growth in 2021 and 2022. Between July 2021 and July 2022, in just one year, more California residents fled to other states than the entire amount of people who came for the gold rush between 1848 and 1852.

It’s now a California exodus. A quick look at RentCafe, a cost-of-living calculator site, provides a few clues as to why. The cost of living in California is 42% higher than the national average. 

Compared to the national average:

Housing (buy and rent) is 101% higher.

Utilities (monthly) are 22% higher.

Food is 17% higher.

Healthcare is 9% higher.

Transportation is 27% higher.

Goods and services are 10% higher.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center confirms this. California has the highest cost of living in the country. It also has the highest state income tax and the highest state sales tax rate.

A CALmatters report states, “…California ranks fairly high in overall taxation: 10th highest both per capita and as a percentage of personal income, based on the latest available data from the U.S. Census.”

While residents are fleeing California, criminals are getting bolder. You‘ve seen the videos of the daylight crime raves causing retail stores to close across the state. In the name of progressive sentencing reforms, criminals are no longer being held accountable. Liberal crime policies, jail release, early parole, and bail reforms have continued to turn California into a haven for crime.

California ranks 17th in the nation in violent crimes. That is a 6.1% increase in reported violent crimes and a 6.2% increase in property-related crimes from 2021 to 2023. California has the third-highest vehicle theft rate in the nation. In that same time period, motor vehicle robberies increased by 33.5%, and drug offenses increased by 1%. 

They can steal all the cars they want because our energy costs will eventually make them too costly to run. 

Remember last year? Right in the middle of record inflation, California’s soaring energy increases were 1.7% faster than the rest of the country, while residential prices were expanding at 2.7 times the national rate. On top of that, Governor Newsom has pledged 100% zero-carbon electricity generation and a carbon-neutral state by 2045. The California Utilities Commission will add gigawatts of renewables and batteries, and upgrade the state transmission grid for the low cost of about $80 billion. That’s about $2,005 cost per person… if they don’t exceed those projections.

To put that in perspective, the initial cost of California’s High-Speed rail fifteen years ago was $33 billion. Not a single train has run yet. A November update now projects that cost to rise to $128 billion. 

Where does all this money come from? Businesses and the wealthy are the largest contributors to state revenue. These policies, high taxes, exorbitant housing, and cost of living increases are driving the tax base away. Irresponsible state spending, the disappearance of federal COVID giveaways, and a decline in state revenue have turned a $97.5 billion state surplus into a $31.5 billion deficit. 

My band played a gig in Needles, California at the end of this summer. Just across the state line, in Arizona, gas prices were around $3.15 cheaper per gallon. That’s’ worth screaming about. 

Disinformation starts at the top

The Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop was labeled as disinformation in 2020.  

Disinformation starts at the top — with America’s elites

Glenn H. Reynolds, New York Post 

The Javelin missiles making mincemeat out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tanks in Ukraine work differently from old-fashioned antitank weapons. 

Instead of flying straight at the tank and having to defeat the thick armor on the front and sides, they pop up into the air and come down from above, attacking the comparatively defenseless top, where the armor is much thinner.

That works well for tanks, whose defenses haven’t caught up with the new realities yet.

But something similar is happening in our ideological wars, and we’re not doing well there.

Just like tanks, our society is more vulnerable to “misinformation” attacks at the top, but we’ve been concentrating our defenses further down, with poor results.

Efforts at protecting our society from “foreign disinformation” are mostly aimed at keeping unapproved messages from reaching the common people, who are presumed to be too dumb to see through foreign propaganda. 

There are two problems with this.

One is that the common people are also what are known as “voters,” and efforts to limit their exposure to unwelcome information and ideas are inevitably — and I mean inevitably — perverted into domestic political manipulation. 

Witness the massive collaborative effort of tech companies, the media and what can fairly be called the “Deep State” to suppress truthful reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election.

They told us the story was foreign disinformation.

But actually it was true. Their efforts to squash it were the actual manipulation — and may have altered the close 2020 contest’s outcome.

The other problem is that while the apparatchiks are trying hard to limit what ordinary people are exposed to, misinformation and disinformation are rife within the top layers of our society.

This makes sense, of course. Influencing a country by changing the minds of its working class is difficult. 

There are far more of them than there are elites.

They pay less attention to the sort of media that might change their minds — you can try to make sports channels or thriller movies politically correct, but they’ll just quit watching — and they care less about the sort of issues you want to influence.

Contrast that with the elites. There are maybe 1 or 2 million total, of whom only a few tens of thousands really matter. 

Change their thinking and you can change the nation.

In modern America, after all, very few important matters are put to the voters. 

They’re decided by unelected administrators: government bureaucrats, college administrators, corporate executives.

After George Floyd’s death, we didn’t have a national election on what to do. Institutions just executed a simultaneous turn to the same policies — defunding police, for example — most of which wouldn’t have passed muster with voters and have been disastrous. 

But everything from TV commercials to civil-rights policies to educational curricula changed all at once, in the same way.

And the armor is thinner. 

Educated people, trained in school, tend to believe what they’re told. 

Working-class people tend to be more cynical about media and “experts.”

Our ruling class is a monoculture of people educated in the same schools, in the same ways and with the same values.

Whatever fools one of them will probably fool all of them or enough to make a difference.

And they can be easily bought. Not just our political class but the entire upper stratum is for sale.

You can buy universities with donations, grants and institutes, you can buy politicians with campaign donations and jobs and consulting fees for families (see, e.g., Hunter Biden), you can buy off corporations even more directly.

They’re for sale, and they’re not even ashamed of it anymore.

Our ruling class mostly believes Israel is an “apartheid state” committing “genocide” — it’s not, and it’s not — capitalism produces poverty (rather the reverse, actually), “Western colonialism” is responsible for the ills of the Third World (nope) and whether one is male or female is purely a matter of social construction (also nope). 

It thinks the only way to defeat racism is by being racist and the way to end urban violence is to disarm people in the suburbs.

So we need to look at armoring the top of our society against bad ideas instead of trying to limit what ordinary people can read online. 

That would require limits on foreign funding, the cultivation of strong moral and patriotic values in our leadership and the reduction of top-level influence on society as a whole. 

Breaking up big businesses and shrinking big universities and big government would make them less appealing targets and take away some of their power.

But doing that would reduce the amount of graft available, and it’s hard to imagine our leadership class going along.

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