Why Obama Failed

Especially poignant in his third term... 

 Why Obama Failed

Cameron Hilditch, National Review   

In a revealing interview, Obama tried to burnish his image for progressive posterity — but he still doesn’t understand his fundamental errors.

Barack Obama rose to political stardom in the wake of his 2004 convention speech, during which he made an implicit promise that he could transcend party divisions in Washington, bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats, and make the federal government functional again. I’ll confess that I really thought he wanted to do this when he ascended to the presidency. It took the first volume of his memoirs and a recent interview he gave to Ezra Klein of the New York Times to fully and finally disabuse me of that notion.

During his 2008 campaign, Obama seemed to display a certain capaciousness of intellect and imagination that would allow him to get inside his opponents’ heads, understand their position in good faith, and address it in a perspicacious way, creating an illusion of rapport. He also knew how to do this with journalists. The conservative columnist David Brooks, for instance, was caught off guard during an interview with Obama when it became apparent that the then-senator had a favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, of whom he could speak learnedly and with enthusiasm — a pleasant surprise for a conservative admirer of Niebuhr like Brooks. This circumspection is clearly a part of the Obama mythos that the man himself values, because he restates it at the beginning of his interview with Klein:

I forget whether it was Clarence Darrow, or Abraham Lincoln, or some apocryphal figure in the past who said, look, the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person’s argument better than they can. And for me, what that meant was that I had to understand their worldview. And I couldn’t expect them to understand mine if I wasn’t extending myself to understand theirs.

After reading this quotation, many conservatives will likely wonder if they have gone through the looking glass. Close observers of American politics over the last decade will be aware that President Obama made very little effort to understand the worldview of his Republican colleagues in Washington. In fact, an interesting companion piece to Klein’s interview is this reported essay by Alex Thompson, written last summer for Politico, on the Obama-Biden relationship. Thompson’s sources indicate that Obama was exceedingly bad at persuading his Republican colleagues to back his proposals:

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.” A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.”

Lest these recollections be dismissed as Republican potshots, Thompson also quotes from the memoirs of David Axelrod, one of Obama’s chief advisers, who makes the same point: “‘Few practiced politicians appreciate being lectured on where their political self-interest lies,’ he wrote of Obama’s style. ‘That hint of moral superiority and disdain for politicians who put elections first has hurt Obama as negotiator, and it’s why Biden, a politician’s politician, has often had better luck.’”

Despite his self-image as a latter-day Pericles, Obama turned out to be bad at building legislative coalitions inside the Beltway. Why was this? In short, it was because of his views on persuading the public as opposed to persuading his colleagues. As he told Klein:

The premise of persuading somebody who you can build some trust with, and have a history with and relationship, then there might be times where you say, you know what? You’re just full of it. And let me tell you why. And you can be very logical and incisive about how you want to dismantle their arguments. . . . But look, when you’re dealing at the macro level, when you’re dealing with 300 million people with enormous regional, and racial, and religious, and cultural differences, then now you are having to make some calculations. So let’s take the example you used. And I write extensively about the emergence of the Tea Party. And we could see that happening with Sarah Palin. She was sort of a prototype for the politics that led to the Tea Party, that in turn, ultimately led to Donald Trump, and that we’re still seeing today.

There were times where calling it out would have given me great satisfaction personally. But it wouldn’t have necessarily won the political day in terms of me getting a bill passed. And I think every president has to deal with this.

Obama seems to believe that when he was in discussions with congressional Republicans, face-to-face in the Oval Office, his best play was to try to win the argument on the theoretical plane, explaining forcefully and straightforwardly why their positions were flat-out incorrect. This is what appears to have rubbed Cantor the wrong way. Obama made a political bet that the context of one-on-one relationships would allow for this kind of argument from principle to be effective. His watertight syllogisms and unwavering honesty would, he imagined, cause the scales to fall from the eyes of McConnell & Co., ushering in a new era of “unity.”

By way of contrast, he also seems to believe that when dealing with the electorate, one has to handle arguments more carefully, to rhetorically triangulate in such a way as to offend the lowest number of potential voters. These two beliefs, about how a president persuades Congress and how he persuades the public, are sufficient to explain why Obama’s presidency was a failure, because the truth about political persuasion in America is precisely the opposite of what he thinks it is.

By temperament, Obama is a classical figure. His notion of changing the minds and policies of his fellow statesmen by having it out with them until they relented harks back to the senatorial style of the Roman Republic. He fatefully, and fatally, failed to take into account that national politics has not worked like this in the United States since the 1820s, before the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

The statesmen of pre-Jacksonian America — especially the senators — believed that government should be undertaken by a natural aristocracy of talent and intellect, which should be accountable to the public in only a limited and convoluted way. This was as true of Jeffersonians like John Quincy Adams as it was of Federalists like his father. In such a climate, political leaders at the national level could allow themselves to be persuaded by their peers into changing positions on a given issue without fearing fatal electoral reprisals. Politics at that time really did happen in Congress more than in the country at large.

But the huge wave of democratic discontent that swept General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee into office put an end to the aristocratic manners and mores that had governed national politics up to that point. As Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his great work The Age of Jackson:

The growing importance of the common man was accompanied by a declining importance of Congress. The function of the legislature was now rather to elicit, register, and influence public opinion than to assert its independent will. The great party leader was no longer the eloquent parliamentary orator, whose fine periods could sweep his colleagues into supporting his measures, but the popular hero, capable of bidding directly for the confidence of the masses.

Previously, the statesman had been relatively unbound by the will of his electorate. But in the new democratic age brought about by the Jacksonian revolution, he could be sure that any policy deviation from the expressed will of his constituents would cost him at the ballot box. Persuasion no longer happened in Congress. It happened in the country.

The man who fully grasped the profundity of this change was not Jackson himself but his successor and ally, Martin Van Buren. As Schlesinger writes, Van Buren

protested repeatedly against romantic views of the magic of oratory. When Macaulay declared grandly, in the well-known passage on Pitt, “Parliamentary Government is Government by speaking,” Van Buren begged to differ. True parliamentary leadership, he declared, involved “powers of the mind more humble in pretension and less dazzling in appearance but, as experience has often proved, far more effective in the end than the most brilliant oratory when not sustained by them.” Good judgment in timing measures, the capacity to strike directly at the opposition’s weakest point without wasting time in “mere oratorical” disquisition, skill in guiding the debate so as to capitalize on “latent diversities of feeling and opinion on points either not at all or only remotely bearing upon the principal subject,” and good sense to strive for objects not beyond practical reach — oratory was useless without these technical skills.

Schlesinger further notes that the two statesmen of the age most attached to the rhetorical, congressional model of persuasion, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, lost almost every political battle they fought during the 1830s. Their politics was out of place in the new democratic order, in which persuasion entailed appealing to the electoral interests of one’s colleagues in a way that was “intimate and conversational, with low-pitched voice and clear enunciation,” as Schlesinger describes it. “John Quincy Adams,” he goes on to write, “former professor of rhetoric at Harvard, . . . perfectly expressed the baffled exasperation of the old school in an outburst against James K. Polk: ‘He has no wit, no literature, no point of argument, no gracefulness of delivery, no elegance of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus; nothing that can constitute an orator, but confidence, fluency, and labor.’”

It’s easy to imagine President Obama saying something similar about Cantor or McConnell.

The really successful presidents also took an opposite tack to Obama’s when it came to persuading the public. Obama clearly felt that he had to handle the electorate with kid gloves. He tells Klein that “as the first African-American president, there was a presumption, not incorrect, that there were times where I was biting my tongue.” He uses the issue of race as an example: “Is it more important,” he asks, “for me to tell a basic historical truth, let’s say, about racism in America right now? Or is it more important for me to get a bill passed that provides a lot of people with health care that didn’t have it before?” He describes this as a choice between his “prophetic voice” and his “coalition-building political voice.”

Obama, clearly more comfortable using his “prophetic voice” in private political negotiations, told Klein that “there might be times where you say [to your colleagues], you know what? You’re just full of it. And let me tell you why. And you can be very logical and incisive about how you want to dismantle their arguments.” But it was in public, when using his “coalition-building political voice,” where he made his fatal mistake. Successful presidents have done precisely the opposite, using their “prophetic voice” to whip up popular energy and enthusiasm for their agenda and their “coalition-building political voice” to sell their colleagues on that agenda as something that is in the electoral interest of those same politicians. In short, instead of laying himself bare before the people and then managing their representatives carefully in private, Obama sought to manage the people carefully and then lay himself bare before their representatives, hoping to persuade the few where he knew he could not persuade the many.

The trouble for Obama was simply this: For any politician to use his or her “prophetic voice” effectively on the electorate, there has to be an authentic sense of solidarity and mutual affection between the former and the latter. Jackson, for instance, had a greater mutual affinity with the average American voter in the 1820s (at that time, only white men, sadly) than John Quincy Adams did. As Jackson’s biographer Robert Remini notes, “At one time in the history of the United States, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee was honored above all living men. And most dead ones, too.” The same affection existed between the common man and Franklin Roosevelt a century later. For example, during the Roosevelt administration, the British ambassador sent this report back to London: “Every house I visited — mill worker or unemployed — had a picture of the President. . . . He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems. And though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down.”

President Reagan could boast of a similar, though less intense, connection with the electorate; President Trump made the same kind of connection with the white working class in 2016, but, unlike Roosevelt and Reagan, he failed to expand his coalition beyond this base to any great degree.

Jackson, Roosevelt, and Reagan could use their prophetic voices in public because there was a genuine and unaffected synergy between the values of the electorate, broadly speaking, and their own. The public sensed that these presidents liked Americans (though with shameful exceptions in the case of Jackson, who despised two groups, African Americans and Native Americans). There are, as it turns out, a great many Americans whom Barack Obama doesn’t like and doesn’t trust, and he clearly feels that these Americans were sufficiently powerful during his presidency to prevent him from speaking frankly to the public about his beliefs without incurring a backlash. Unable or unwilling to trust the voters, both Obama and his successor squandered political opportunities for compromise.

This is an unpleasant conclusion. But the partisan rancor of Obama’s interview with Klein makes it quite unavoidable. He talks about Republicans’ “complete unwillingness to do anything about the slaughter of children,” totally ignoring his own party’s fanatical defense of an abortion regime the extremity of which is equaled only in China, Vietnam, and North Korea. He describes his opponents as “folks who feel threatened by change,” and calls the Republican voters represented in the Senate “irreconcilably wrong.” Of the Democratic Party, he boasts that “we don’t have the luxury of just consigning a group of people to say, you’re not real Americans,” implying that Republicans are engaged in this kind of activity habitually. Obama accuses “the previous Republican administration” of “completely ignoring science” on vaccines, a claim that none other than Anthony Fauci, who was there and should know, has debunked on several very public occasions. He also repeats the ahistorical lie that all the counter-majoritarian mechanisms in the Constitution arose out of a “very intentional desire for Southern states, for example, to maintain power and reduce the power of the federal government” — a kind of intellectual 7/10 split that must spell doom either for the former president’s intellectual reputation or for his honesty.

Perhaps the most partisan remark that the former president made came as part of his familiar critique of what’s often called “both-sidesism” in the media. He notes that “there are certain bad habits that the media cultivated and it had to, then, reexamine during the Trump era, the classic being what constitutes objectivity, as I joke about.” As an example of such joking, he feigns a bit of media commentary: “President Obama, today, was savagely attacked by the Republicans for suggesting that the earth is round. Republicans suggested that there’s some hidden documents showing the earth is, in fact, flat.” This is the kind of sarcasm that one would expect from a Twitter troll, not from a former president of the United States (though the line between those two things is admittedly blurrier than it used to be).

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama told a story to the electorate, about himself and about America, that he believed he could win over the voters he needed. He was right. But it’s clearly not the story he believed himself. These days, he’s telling a different story with a different audience in mind. In the pages of his memoirs and in interviews with progressive tastemakers like Klein, Obama is speaking in his prophetic voice at last. He’s authoring a revisionist history of his own presidency in real time, offering a commentary on his internal monologue as it played out during his eight years in office. The purpose of this revisionism is apparent. As he told Klein:

Part of what I try to make clear in the book is, and sometimes my friends in the Democratic Party who criticize us on the left misapprehend this idea that we had some ideological aversion to pushing the envelope on policy. That’s not the case. We had just political constraints we had to deal with, and we had an emergency we had to deal with.

Obama’s new audience is progressive posterity. He’s attempting to burnish his credentials with the radical activists of the present and the radical historians of the future. He wants to make it clear to them that any ostensible respect he may have shown for Republicans during his career was nothing more than a concession to electoral necessity. He wants them to know that the moderation was all for show — a tragic obligation kenotically undertaken by a progressive savior in a reactionary nation that couldn’t keep up with the pace of his moral leadership.

Ultimately, Obama failed as a leader because, unlike presidents past, he didn’t trust the public. He lacked both the courage and the convictions required to thrive in the democratic polity the birth of which Van Buren chronicled during the 1830s. To borrow from his own terminology, Obama would not prophesy for the public and he could not build coalitions with his colleagues. He knew that history had not dealt him an electorate the makeup of which intersected perfectly with his own ambitions, as it had for Jackson, Roosevelt, and Reagan. This is why he resents his Republican opponents so much. Neither they nor their voters were sufficiently made according to his own political image, an image that he still believes to be the best and clearest evidence of the small measure of moral credibility that can justly be claimed by the United States of America.

The Texas Voting Lie

The Texas Voting Lie

Rich Lowery, National Review 

None of the bill’s provisions would actually prevent anyone from voting, no matter what Democrats say.

The Democratic opposition to legislative minorities using whatever leverage they have to block legislation is highly situational.

In Washington, D.C., where Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress, the Senate filibuster is portrayed as a Jim Crow relic that is profoundly undemocratic.

In Austin, Texas, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the legislature, House Democrats’ walking out to prevent the passage of a bill with majority support is portrayed as a heroic act preserving our democracy.

The bill in question is an election-reform measure that Democrats allege is the latest instance of state-level GOP voter suppression.

The only recourse, they say, is at the federal level. The Senate filibuster should be eliminated — so much for the rights of legislative minorities — and then the narrowest-possible Democratic Senate majority should pass H.R.1, overriding long-standing, duly-passed election laws all around the country and essentially federalizing our elections.

Democracy, they tell us, demands nothing less.

To the contrary, this would be a power grab carried out under blatantly false pretenses.

The Texas bill is no more a voter-suppression measure than the Georgia election law that passed a few months ago, which occasioned outraged accusations of the arrival of Jim Crow 2.0 that ultimately fell flat.

The least defensible part of the Texas law is its provision saying that early voting on the Sunday before the election can’t begin until 1 p.m., which could crimp the traditional “souls to the polls” turnout efforts of black churches. A Republican legislator says this was a drafting error. Regardless, the provision should — and almost certainly will be — changed.

The rest of the legislation is unobjectionable. It pushes back against what were supposed to be temporary expedients during the pandemic, such as drive-through voting and 24-hour early-voting marathons. Texas democracy was healthy and robust prior to these emergency innovations, and it will be when they are gone.

It explicitly forbids election officials from implementing practices not contemplated under the state’s election statutes, as sometimes happened during the pandemic.

In many counties, it will extend the daily minimum time for early voting by one hour.

In certain circumstances, by the way, employers are required to give employees time off to go vote.

Its provisions for increased security and transparency are hardly draconian. Among other things, it would require voters to write a driver’s license number or other identifier on absentee ballots, matching the existing voter-ID requirement for registering to vote and voting in person.

It would ban public officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballots, a commonsense provision to keep excess ballots from floating around. Certainly, it’s not too much to ask that people affirmatively request their mail-in ballots.

It would mandate that all voting systems have a paper trail on or before 2026, with a funding incentive for counties to comply early.

For sizable jurisdictions that can easily pull it off, it would require livestreaming of vote-counting proceedings.

All of this is reported as “restrictive” in the press, but none of it would actually prevent anyone from voting, and there is zero chance that the bill would discernibly affect turnout.

To make this proposal the triggering event for a radical change in U.S. Senate rules to pass the most far-reaching, high-handed federal election bill in the country’s history, one that would wipe out countless state laws as well as bipartisan federal election legislation passed over the past 30 years, would be absurdly pretextual and disproportionate.

The Democrats, just like the Republicans, tend to be hypocritical on legislative-process questions, depending on what advances their interests. But on one thing they are admirably consistent, whether at the state or federal level, whether in the minority or majority — stirring up self-serving hysteria over GOP election laws.

© 2021 by King Features Syndicate

Ignore rising crime, pay a severe ballot-box price

Dems who ignore rising crime will pay a severe ballot-box price

Rich Lowery, New York Post

On the anniversary of the death of George Floyd, dozens of gunshots rang out in the middle of the day at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, forcing reporters and bystanders to duck and cover.

The symbolism was unmistakable — the yearlong bout of protest after Floyd’s killing has coincided with a surge of urban crime that has made gunplay dismayingly common.

Indeed, the intersection where Floyd was killed, now a memorial blocked to vehicular traffic, has become a watchword for mayhem.

The issue of public safety may be about to play its most significant role in our politics since the mid-1990s, the beginning of a decades-long decline in crime that steadily eroded its political salience.

Former President Donald Trump tried to make law and order a defining issue in 2020, but the rioting he so forcefully denounced was, in most places, too transitory to become an overwhelming issue. 

Now, more than a year into a serious crime wave, Democrats are fooling themselves if they think they won’t be blamed for rising violence in Democratic-run cities and states.

Overall, murder increased by more than 25 percent in the United States last year, the biggest jump in 60 years. Surely the dislocations of the pandemic have been a factor, but it’s also obvious that anti-police agitation has put the cops on their back feet. Exhibit A is Minneapolis.

In the fevered aftermath of the Floyd killing, the City Council pledged to do away with the police department, among the most outlandishly unachievable and self-destructive promises ever made by an elected body. Of course, it couldn’t follow through on it, any more than it could have followed through on a promise to eliminate traffic lights or municipal snow removal.

Still, cops have fled the force, while crime has soared. The impeccably progressive mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, who desperately wanted to ingratiate himself at a tribunal-like rally last summer but, to his credit, wouldn’t commit to defunding the police, now occasionally sounds like he’s channeling Rudy Giuliani circa 1993.

Another dyed-in-the-wool progressive, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, faced with ongoing unrest that once was blamed on Trump, has called for the city’s residents to “take the city back” and for unmasking, arresting and prosecuting rioters.

Los Angeles cut its police budget by 8 percent in the wake of the Floyd protests and now is adding it right back. In South Los Angeles, the LAPD is increasing patrols and vehicle stops to search for guns and gang members.

Irving Kristol famously said that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. If progressive politicians who are now sounding friendlier to the police haven’t been mugged, they at least have been alarmed by the sound of approaching gunfire.

The turnabout isn’t universal. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked the other day whether there is a crime problem. Sounding as evasive as when she discusses the border, Psaki would only say there is a “guns problem.” This was a reference to the completely unconvincing argument that increased gun sales have led to the spike in crime, when surges in gun sales since the mid-1990s never before led to higher crime.

The problem that Democrats have is that they have accepted — and celebrated the people making — a comprehensive case against the police as systematically racist.

This argument doesn’t naturally allow for nuance. In fact, it logically entails calling for fewer cops and less police funding, an agenda that will be hard to sell to most people in the best of circumstances but is toxic in an environment of rising crime.

Black Lives Matter has already been losing support in the polls, while trust in the police has been rising. Things would have to get much worse for crime to become as central an issue as it was in the 1970s. But Democrats who aren’t alarmed that reporters are dodging bullets at the George Floyd memorial are tempting political fate.

Marxist socialism and fascism-nationalist socialism are incompatible with military service

 Marxist socialism and fascism-nationalist socialism are incompatible with military service

All,

Marxist socialism and fascism-nationalist socialism are evil incarnate.

 

The 20th-century adherents of Marxist socialism and fascism-nationalist socialism killed more innocents than all previous wars of humanity combined. 

When the rest of the civilized world had abolished enslavement, 20th-century adherents of Marxist socialism and fascist-nationalist socialism revived it on an unprecedented scale.

20th-century Marxist socialism and fascist-nationalist socialism without a doubt have visited upon this planet more suffering and murdering and threw more people into abject poverty than any other religion or ideology in all recorded history.

To support or even tolerate Marxist socialist or fascist-nationalist socialist beliefs is to tacitly if not overtly support the holocaust, genocide, and organized war crimes carried out on a vast scale.

For those in a position of leadership, not to speak out against Marxist socialism and fascist-nationalist socialism is a dereliction of duty and dishonors hundreds of thousands of Americans in uniform who gave their lives defeating these oppressive, sadistic, and cruel belief systems. 

For anyone wearing the uniform, to not stand against Marxist and fascist-nationalist socialism is not just morally and ethically bankrupt, it is a violation of their oath of office.

They are a disgrace, unfit, and should be dismissed from the service.

Michael M. Walker

Col. USMC (Ret.)

Systemic Racism, Chicago-Style

Systemic Racism, Chicago-Style

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, American Greatness

The country, even the larger world, has heard a lot about “systemic racism” in America lately. It seems to be the flavor of the year and goes on and on, unabated. The White House preaches it and Biden’s U.N. ambassador tells us, “Racism was and continues to be a daily challenge wherever we are. And for millions, it’s more than a challenge. It’s deadly.”

Deadly, indeed!

According to its own tourist literature, Chicago, on Lake Michigan in Illinois, is among the largest cities in the United States. Famed for its bold architecture and deep-dish pizza, it has a skyline punctuated by skyscrapers such as the iconic John Hancock Center, 1,451-foot Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) and the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower. The city is also renowned for its museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago with its noted Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. 

The “Windy City” has a black population of just over 30 percent and is deadly dangerous. Chicago and Illinois both have some of the strongest gun control laws in the country, with more on the way—do you think it’s possible that the criminals might not be obeying those laws?

Well, let’s take an indicative deep dive and look closely into one of America’s largest cities, the city made famous by poet Carl Sandberg, who called it, “a city of broad shoulders . . . and hog butcher of the world.” Apparently, that’s not all that gets butchered in Chicago, these days. 

The facts are most illuminating, if not staggering.

In Chicago, there were 2,240 shootings and 440 homicides from January through July 2020. The numbers are way up again in 2021. Back in 2015, Chicago’s homicide rate had already risen to 18.6 per 100,000. By 2016, Chicago had recorded more homicides and shooting victims than New York City and Los Angeles combined. Chicago’s biggest criminal justice challenges have changed little over the last 50 years, and statistically reside with homicide, armed robbery, gang violence, and aggravated battery. Chicago is considered one of the most gang-infested cities in the United States, with an estimated population of over 100,000 active members from nearly 60 different factions. Gang warfare and retaliation are quite common in Chicago. It is estimated that gangs are responsible for 60 percent of the homicides in Chicago.

One thing stands out—almost every shooter and homicide victim (97.7 percent) are black. But Black Lives Matter and Chicago’s Democratic politicians continue to blame “police and systemic racism.”

Yet:

The mayor is black.

The superintendent of police is black.

The Cook County state’s attorney is black.

The chief judge of Cook County circuit courts is black.

The Illinois attorney general is black.

The fire department commissioner is black.

The Cook County board president is black.

The state senate majority leader is black.

The lieutenant governor is black.

The secretary of state is black.

The clerk of the circuit court of Cook County is black.

The Cook County clerk is black.

The city treasurer is black.

The Chicago Police Board president is black.

The Chicago Transit Authority president is black.

The CEO of Chicago public schools is black.

The commissioner of the Department of Water Management is black.

Forty percent of the City Council belongs to the black caucus. Nine aldermen are socialists.

Their average pay is $122,304 annually each, plus $122,000 per year in expenses. Their pension for life is 80 percent of final pay. 

There are zero Republicans on the Chicago City Council.

William Hale Thompson was the last Republican mayor of Chicago long ago, in 1931.

For 89 years, Democrats have completely controlled the mayor’s office.

The fiscal deficit in Chicago is more than $838.2 million and counting. 

Can someone please explain how it’s possible for Republicans—Donald Trump in particular, or white people in general—to be responsible for Chicago’s horrendously dismal and unsafe conditions?

Truthfully, there can’t be a rational explanation because Chicago’s plague of urban warfare itself isn’t logical; it’s nothing less than horrifically cruel and self-destructive. 

A recent University of Chicago Crime Lab study was able to quantify how much of the city’s gunfire victimizes residents of struggling neighborhoods: Five South and Westside communities with nine percent of Chicago’s population (Austin, Englewood, New City, West Englewood, and Greater Grand Crossing) accounted for half the city’s increase in homicides. African American men ages 15-34 make up over 70 percent of the city’s total homicide victims, while accounting for just 4 percent of the city’s population. Almost 40 percent of victims had prior violent crime arrests.

Needless to say, Chicago is not working, and the statistics show it. It only gets worse year by year. It is certainly not because of any systemic racism, unless you wanted to argue that Chicago’s Democratic Party black elite officialdom doesn’t give a damn about Chicago’s black population. 

The long-term solution lies in substantial and deep cultural change: shoring up the mediating structures in society, from the family (two parents, with the father at home) to the church, to charter schools and school choice to robust civic associations. This effort takes decades to yield results but is nonetheless imperative.

The short-term answer may be to help and encourage the movement of the endangered black male population in the affected age group—from Chicago to other locations. By moving to smaller towns, to farms, and to states, like Vermont or the Dakotas, with much lower homicide rates—their lives would be spared.

Perhaps, it is time to try something else besides Chicago’s status quo—because yes, black lives do matter, even in Chicago.

Are Americans becoming Sovietized?

Are Americans becoming Sovietized?

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review

What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?

Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin's lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?

Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.

1. There was no escape from ideological indoctrination — anywhere. A job in the bureaucracy or a military assignment hinged not so much on merit, expertise or past achievement. What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.

Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion. Careerists assert that America was always and still is a systemically racist country, without ever producing proof or a sustained argument.

2. The Soviets fused their press with the government. Pravda, or "Truth," was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Communist Party partners.

In 2017, a Harvard study found that over 90% of the major TV news networks' coverage of the Trump administration's first 100 days was negative.

3. The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents.

Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot extremist sentiments. The U.S. Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.

CNN recently alleged that the Biden administration's Department of Homeland Security is considering partnering with private surveillance firms to get around government prohibitions on scrutinizing Americans' online activity.

4. The Soviet educational system sought not to enlighten but to indoctrinate young minds in proper government-approved thought.

Currently, cash-strapped universities nationwide are hiring thousands of diversity, equity and inclusion staffers and administrators. Their chief task is to scan the admissions, hiring, curriculum and administration at universities. Like good commissars, our diversity czars oversee compliance with the official narrative that a flawed America must confess, apologize for and renounce its evil foundations.

5. The Soviet Union was run by a pampered elite, exempt from the ramifications of their own radical ideologies.

Now, woke Silicon Valley billionaires talk socialistically but live royally. Coke and Delta Airlines CEOs who hector Americans about their illiberality make millions of dollars a year.

What unites current woke activists such as Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James Mark Zuckerberg and the Obamas are their huge estates and their multimillion-dollar wealth. Just as the select few of the old Soviet nomenklatura had their Black Sea dachas, America's loudest top-down revolutionaries prefer living in Martha's Vineyard, Beverly Hills, Montecito and Malibu.

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6. The Soviets mastered Trotskyization, or the rewriting and airbrushing away of history to fabricate present reality.

Are Americans any different when they indulge in a frenzy of name-changing, statue-toppling, monument-defacing, book-banning and cancel-culturing?

7. The Soviets created a climate of fear and rewarded stool pigeons for rooting out all potential enemies of the people.

Since when did Americans encourage co-workers to turn in others for an ill-considered word in a private conversation? Why do thousands now scour the internet to find any past incorrect expression of a rival? Why are there now new thought criminals supposedly guilty of climate racism, immigration racism or vaccination racism?

8. Soviet prosecutors and courts were weaponized according to ideology.

In America, where and for what reason you riot determines whether you face any legal consequences. Politically correct sanctuary cities defy the law with impunity. Jury members are terrified of being doxxed and hunted down for an incorrect verdict. The CIA and FBI are becoming as ideological as the old KGB.

9. The Soviets doled out prizes on the basis of correct Soviet thought.

In modern America, the Pulitzer Prizes and the Emmys, Grammys, Tonys and Oscars don't necessarily reflect the year's best work, but often the most politically correct work from the most woke.

10. The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom. Instead, they boasted that they were advocates for equity, champions of the underclass, enemies of privilege — and therefore could terminate anyone or anything they pleased.

Our wokists are similarly defending their thought-control efforts, forced re-education sessions, scripted confessionals, mandatory apologies and cancel culture on the pretense that we need long-overdue "fundamental transformation."

So if they destroy people in the name of equity, their nihilism is justified.

Climate Change -- Extinction Rebellion Idiots

 

Climate Change -- Extinction Rebellion Idiots

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

All,

Extinction Rebellion CO2 pollution radicals dumped manure at the entrance to the White House today.

How stupid can these morons be? 

If Extinction Rebellion really cared about CO2 pollution they would have dumped the manure at the entrance to the Chinese embassy on Wisconsin Avenue some three miles to the northwest.

Why are environmental radicals afraid to the tell the truth?

If China does not act then everything we do in the United States is utterly futile and doomed to failure. To understand why all you have to do is to look at this one image:

MLB swings and misses...

 

MLB swings and misses in political debacle to move All-Star game from Georgia

Charles Gasparino, NYPOST 

It’s clear Georgia’s new voter law is nothing close to the “Jim Crow on steroids” description attributed to our alleged unifier in chief, President Biden. Yet I’m pretty certain the law is an attempt by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp to ingratiate himself with Trump voters who believe Kemp didn’t do enough to prevent the Peach State from turning blue in the last election. 

I’m also totally convinced that Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred shouldn’t be within a mile of this sordid political mess. 

I say this as someone who respects the MLB commish and likes him for his business acumen. For all the contretemps of the past year that hit the league amid COVID, he managed to cut a deal with the players ­union. It was a mess, but at least we had baseball during some dark times in 2020, and again this year. 

That’s why it’s confounding that he thought he should transform himself overnight into some sort of social-activist warrior for the sake of the league by moving this year’s All-Star game out of Atlanta, touching off a firestorm of criticism that some say may cost him his job.

No offense to Rob, but few great pitchers make great hitters, and there are few good businesspeople who can navigate the backstabbing world of politics. 

As I write this, Manfred is being vilified by fans for giving in to a left-wing mob, costing majority-minority Atlanta jobs, and being second-guessed by many MLB officials and owners for naively thrusting the game into one of the thorniest political issues of our time by taking a stand on Georgia’s controversial new law.

Still, you can sympathize with his predicament. The president of the United States falsely suggested the Georgia law was racist because people might have to show ID to vote. Biden then, idiotically, urged MLB to play the All-Star game somewhere else.

Once that fuse was lit, the usual group of corporate wokesters jumped into the fray: Delta, Coca-Cola and, of course, Larry Fink, the uber-progressive CEO of money-management powerhouse BlackRock that has seeded the Biden administration with its top executives. 

Then it was game on for the activists who descended on the commissioner’s office in droves. Manfred spoke with various players about the issue and was worried about protests and boycotts, people close to him tell me. 

Ultimately, Manfred feared that if the game remained in Truist Park in suburban Cobb County, Ga., he would be a pawn of progressive activists. An All-Star game that was supposed to be a celebration of Atlanta Braves great Hank Aaron (who died in January) would be reshaped into a political event to bash the Georgia law and possibly push other progressive edicts, such as legislation to nationalize voting regulations. 

Given the mounting pressure, Manfred believed the least political solution was to make a statement by taking a swipe at the Georgia law and then get out of town, I am told. 

The role of Stacey Abrams in this spectacle is note­worthy. Abrams, who nearly became governor in 2018, is credited with turning Georgia blue for the presidential election and creating a get-out-the-vote platform that elected Dems to two bitterly contested Georgia US Senate seats that made Chuck Schumer majority leader.

An Abrams spokesman says she never met with Manfred directly, nor did she support moving the game out of Atlanta since it would cost so many minority jobs. (An estimated $100 million in economic activity has now moved to the new site of the All-Star game, the majority-majority city of Denver.) 

However, the spokesman, Seth Bringman, confirmed that Abrams let it be known to MLB officials that she wanted the league to support her voting-rights efforts, including speaking out against the Georgia law. 

“In a single one-on-one conversation with an MLB senior adviser, she urged the league to keep the All-Star game in Georgia and to speak out against the law when they do,” said Bringman. 

A senior baseball executive has a less-benign take on Abrams’ part in the mess. In his telling, she was part of a group of activists, including NBA superstar LeBron James, who “wanted us to do more than just a pre-game ceremony . . . Baseball would have to be in the market for doing stuff” involving voting rights. 

One thing is certain: By mixing business with woke­ism, Manfred has satisfied no one. Abrams hasn’t stopped touting that she wanted the All-Star game to remain in Atlanta, even if only on her political terms. 

Even worse, many baseball fans (who trend conservative) want Manfred’s head. MLB officials are now worried about fan boycotts. 

In the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McCon­nell: “Republicans drink ­Coca-Cola, too, and we fly and we like baseball. It’s ­irritating one hell of a lot of Republican fans.” 

It’s a lesson our increasingly woke CEOs should heed, or they may soon be in the same no-win predicament as Manfred.

GEORGIA SMEAR BLOWING UP IN BIDEN’S FACE

 

GEORGIA SMEAR BLOWING UP IN BIDEN’S FACE

John Hinderacker, Powerline

The Democrats, in their seemingly endless quest to profit from race hatred, have lied repeatedly about Georgia’s election reform law. Their lies were too bald-faced even for their own captive press, earning Joe Biden the maximum Four Pinocchios from the Washington Post. Now the push-back is under way in earnest.

It turns out that Joe Biden’s own state, Delaware, has voting laws that are more restrictive (i.e., do a better job of protecting election integrity) than the new Georgia statute. So a Georgia representative has introduced legislation to conform Georgia’s election law to Delaware’s:

“This law will have five key features to make us like Delaware,” the state representative began. “Instead of having up to 19 days of early voting like we have here in Georgia, we’re going to have exactly zero early voting days, because that’s how they do it in Delaware.”

“Instead of having no-excuse absentee voting, like we have here in Georgia,” Cantrell continued, “we’re going to make you have an excuse to have an absentee ballot, and that excuse will be you’re either sick or you’re disabled, because that’s how they do it in Delaware.”

“Instead of having secure drop-boxes where you can place your absentee ballot in one of those drop-boxes for security’s sake, we’re going to provide you with exactly zero drop-boxes, because that’s how they do it in Delaware,” he said.

“And instead of being able to get food or drink from anyone outside of the 150-foot buffer zone while you’re voting, or being able to be provided water inside the 150-foot buffer area, we’re going to make it illegal for you to receive anything of value at any point while you’re standing in line to vote, because that’s how they do it in Delaware,” Cantrell added.

No word yet from Joe Biden on whether his own state’s election laws are “worse than Jim Crow.”

Also no word from Biden on whether the Masters golf tournament should proceed in the land of worse than Jim Crow.

Less than a week after President Joe Biden expressed strong support for Major League Baseball’s decision to move its All-Star game to Colorado, he refused to say the Masters Tournament should also boycott Georiga over the state’s newest election law on Tuesday.

“I think that’s up to the Masters,” Biden said before expressing support for corporations enacting economic sanctions over political disagreements. “It’s reassuring to see that for-profit operations and businesses are speaking up about how these new Jim Crow laws are just antithetical to who we are.”

And, what do you know? Major League Commissioner Rob Manfred is a member of the Augusta National Golf Club. So Marco Rubio has some questions for Manfred:

In a letter Rubio penned to Manfred, he wrote, “I write to ask you whether you intend to maintain your membership at Augusta National Golf Club. As you are well aware, the exclusive members-only club is located in the State of Georgia.”

The senator argued the decision will have a larger impact on several small and minority-owned businesses than the “new election law ever will.” Rubio claimed the move is one “that reeks of hypocrisy.”

He continued, “Will Major League Baseball now end its engagement with nations that do not hold elections at all like China and Cuba? Will you end your lucrative financial relationship with Tencent, a company with deep ties to the Communist Party and actively helps the Chinese Government hunt down and silence political dissidents?”

Of course not! There is no one as greedy as a liberal whose financial interests are threatened.

It turns out, too, that Major League Baseball is headquartered in New York. And–guess what?–New York has more restrictive election laws than Georgia. Can we expect MLB to pick up stakes and move to a state with truly lax laws, like, say, Minnesota? Don’t hold your breath. They wouldn’t want to take the risk that their headquarters may be burned down by the Antifa/BLM rioters whose cause they so fervently endorse.

So the Democrats’ anti-Georgia crusade has blown up like an exploding cigar. How long will it be until the press pivots to “Republicans pounce?”

Timeless Wisdom: The Age of Postman

Timeless Wisdom: The Age of Postman

Joshua Charles, ,Epoch Times

When I was 19, I read a book that would forever change my life. It was Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Though published in 1985, with each passing year, its insights have become more and more relevant and ominous.

Postman contends the following: electronic media is dumbing us down, transforming our dialogue into mere forms of entertainment driven by profit rather than substance, which in turn prevents us from not only speaking like adults, but even thinking like one. He traces this phenomenon in the realm of politics, religion, and education.

The introduction makes his terrifyingly prophetic thesis plain:

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. … In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

How can we read these words—surrounded by the ruins of a bankrupt and exhausted culture—and not conclude that, in Postman’s words, we have become “a trivial culture,” and are thus well on our way to becoming a captive one?

The Founding Fathers made two things exceptionally clear: for a society to remain free, its citizens must be both virtuous and knowledgeable. Freedom cannot be maintained by a society full of passion but devoid of reason.

And this is precisely why our politics has gone insane, and constantly extends itself deeper and deeper into our daily lives: we, as a culture, do not hold these values in high esteem. We denigrate them.

We do not value the pursuit of truth (do we even believe it exists?); we value the self-reinforcing echo chambers of our own creation.

We do not value knowledge; we value talking points and tweets (self-reinforcing, of course).

We do not value the self-control of virtue; we value the unrelenting narcissism of uninhibited self-expression and actualization.

We do not value history, and all the treasures of the human experience available for our training and growing in wisdom; we value anything new, fresh, hip, and contemporary that will satisfy our moment-to-moment desires and inexhaustible supplies of boredom.

We do not value substance, depth, and rationality; we value whatever can be sold, marketed, and peddled with glitz, glamor, and pizazz.

And all of these tendencies, in the “Age of Postman,” are now being used against us, to undo our capacity to think, and thereby dissolve our society which was always dependent on a thoughtful, informed citizenry to survive.

It is thus a great twist of irony that perhaps never before has America been so inundated with information and at the same time so bereft of wisdom. In a phrase I’ve used for many years, social media transforms adults into children with their own enthusiastic consent. This is exactly what Postman predicted: a time in which discourse would “abandon logic, reason, sequence, and rules of contradiction” in favor of mere entertainment. Aesthetically, Dadaism; philosophically, nihilism; and psychologically, schizophrenia.

And that is the great risk of a free society—that its people can become utterly corrupted, and that its government eventually, in one way or another, becomes a reflection of its people. Our politicians have obliged us, and in turn we experience the bitter fruits of a populace dumbed down by a constant stream of external stimulation that requires zero mental exertion. It is overwhelmingly sensory, appealing merely to our passions and our baser nature—the parts we share with animals. And yet it is the mind that distinguishes man from animals. Its debasement, therefore, is a debasement of our most fundamental human nature.

Postman warned of how this is precisely the sort of thing tyrants of all ages have sought to achieve:

“Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse. That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment—and cares. How delighted would be all the kings, czars, and führers of the past to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.”

But we didn’t need Postman to recognize this danger. We simply needed to heed the warnings of our Founders. They told us that while the American experiment was special, we ourselves were not. We Americans are human beings, the same as all the rest. “We make ourselves popular,” John Adams warned, “by telling our fellow-citizens that we have made discoveries, conceived inventions, and made improvements. We may boast that we are the chosen people, we may even thank God that we are not like other men. But, after all, it will be but flattery, and the delusion, the self-deceit of the Pharisee.”

As I wrote in 2016, “To echo our Declaration of Independence—when a long train of trivialities and amusements, pursuing invariably the same object evinces an obsession with comfort, fun, and entertainment, it is the people’s burden, their punishment, their harvest, to bear the affliction of a politics likewise made rotten and corrupt by their loss of moral health and intellectual energy.”

Absent what Churchill in the 1930s called “a supreme recovery of moral health and vigor,” a new age has dawned, or at least been consummated—one far more sinister and insidious than we realized.

Ours is the Age of Postman.

The Biden Conundrum

 

The Biden Conundrum

Bill O'Reilly, billoreilly.com

After six weeks in office, President Biden has not yet held a press conference, but his spokeswoman promises one at the end of this month.  That’s nice as a free country deserves to occasionally hear from the guy running it.

There is no question that Mr. Biden appears befuddled at times but, remember, he held his own in two debates with Donald Trump just a few months ago.  So, it’s hard to evaluate the 78-year-old President’s mental capacity in any kind of responsible way.

Having written “Killing Reagan,” I know about cognitive decline in the White House.  After President Reagan was almost killed by an assassin’s bullet, he was in and out mentally for a time.  Some days he simply could not do the job and there was quiet talk among some of his senior staff of exploring the 25th amendment.  That allows for temporary or permanent removal of a president if he or she is unable to function effectively.

In the book, we document what happened in Ronald Reagan’s first term and how it was kept from the public. Eventually, President Reagan made a stunning comeback.

Today, some anti-Biden pundits believe old Joe is being set up for removal using the 25th amendment, but I don’t see that. The President has been exceedingly accommodating to the progressive movement so why would the ardent leftists, who control almost all access to Mr. Biden, want him gone?

At this point, President Biden is supporting the Green New Deal, quasi-open borders, massive, pork-laden spending, and higher taxes.  This is like a greatest hits album for leftists.  So, there will be no “Joe Must Go” chanting by progressives.  No way.  Joe must stay because he’ll do exactly what they tell him to do.

The chief domestic advisor to President Biden is the infamous Susan Rice.  She of Benghazi fame when, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration, misled the world about the Libyan terror attack that killed the U.S. Ambassador.  Ms. Rice is also a major pal of Michelle and Barack Obama. Believe me when I tell you that Ms. Rice is the exact opposite of befuddled.  She is laser-locked into changing the United States.  She wants to impose a paradise of equity, where certain groups of Americans get special treatment and government perks courtesy of everyone else. 

Joe B. is absolutely on board with that even though it’s possible he might not understand what it all means.

The Biden administration is not going to end well. I could be wrong, but I don’t see perspicacious leadership in the Oval Office.  I see a figurehead who may be unable to calculate the consequences of his policies. Does Joe understand Americans are paying a lot more for gas since Inauguration Day?  Is he processing that thousands of undocumented foreign nationals, some with Covid, are now crossing the southern border? 

Does Joe know that his “green” envoy, John Kerry, is in the pocket of the Iranians?

It would stun me if Joe Biden is actually aware that after six weeks, a number of bad things have happened in this country. Maybe he’ll be asked about all that in his end of March press conference. 

But knowing the White House press corps, I kind of doubt it.

Trumpism without Trump?

 

Trumpism without Trump?

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency disgraced and forever ruined politically.

Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, and first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office. He was the first to be impeached without the chief justice of the United States presiding over his trial.

His nonstop complaining about a stolen "landslide" election was blamed by many as a distraction that lost two Republican Senate seats from Georgia. The current Democratic-majority Congress was the result.

Americans were assured by Trump's impeachment prosecutors and the media that the Jan. 6 Capitol assault was his fault alone. So Trump was condemned as a veritable murderer, responsible for five deaths at the Capitol. Many of his own advisers and Cabinet members had loudly resigned in disgust.

Yet six weeks after leaving office, a Phoenix-like Trump brought a crowd at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference to its feet. His 90-minute blistering broadside against Joe Biden's radical first 40 days of executive orders and hard-left appointments enthused thousands.

Polls show that while he has lost some support in his party, Trump still wins 75 percent approval in the GOP.

So why is a supposedly once-toxic Trump apparently back at center stage?

The infamous Capitol riot is still under investigation. Elements of the media narrative of an "armed insurrection" that led to the alleged murder of officer Brian Sicknick are being debunked and quietly retracted.

Many Americans disapproved of an outgoing president holding a massive rally about alleged voter fraud in a highly polarized climate. But evidence has not yet suggested — as the media once insisted — that Sicknick was assaulted and murdered by a rioter.

One of the four protesters lost in or near that melee died through violence. She was an unarmed female military veteran shot while unlawfully breaking into the Capitol by a still unnamed police officer.

So far, no one arrested inside the Capitol has been charged with either carrying or using a firearm. The "armed insurrection" turns out to have been more of a leaderless, thuggish mob riot "incited" by no one in particular.

For all the national outrage at Trump, 95 percent of Republican House members voted against his impeachment. Eighty-six percent of Republican senators voted to acquit him of impeachment charges.

Biden so far has not turned out to be the "good old Joe from Scranton" moderate healer of media and Never Trump fantasies. Instead, his executive orders and appointments are the most radical and polarizing of any recent president.

Getting kicked off social media by Silicon Valley moguls ironically turned out to be a plus for Trump. His once controversial tweets and posts no longer distract from Biden's frequent displays of ineptitude. And in the lull, attention has turned to Trump's fiercest critics — especially Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California. Both are now mired in scandal, and Newsom is likely facing a recall election.

Ever so slowly, the image of the now-muted ex-president is transforming from former bad-boy bully to current bullied private citizen.

In addition, the 74-year-old ex-president acted like he was just 60 at the CPAC event. The 78-year-old Biden increasingly appears bewildered — and more like he is in his 80s.

The current detention of undocumented minors at the border and presidential orders to bomb in Syria remind voters that Biden is doing exactly what the now-silent media used to blast Trump for doing. A Biden-created border crisis, climbing gas prices and renewed aggression from China suggest that the "Make American Great Again" agenda may be missed after a little more than a month of reset.

The United States leads the world in COVID-19 vaccinations, in part because Trump wisely hedged bets by enlisting and often subsidizing several different companies.

Right after the Capitol riot, there was talk in Republican Party circles about building upon the successful MAGA agenda — but by engineering a Trump transition to a senior statesman role.

Insiders think impressive possible 2024 presidential candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others might better advance the popular MAGA cause — with the endorsement of Trump himself. The new standard-bearer then supposedly would lack Trump's off-putting manner that alienated swing voters.

That may happen. But for now, no one knows whether Trump's ability to cut through left-wing platitudes revs up more to vote than it does to turn off others.

Events have radically turned political realities upside down in just six weeks. We should expect far more volatility in the next four years.

Party insiders may dream of Trumpism without Trump, fearing that he could never win a majority of voters. They may be right. But then again, who has been right about Donald Trump's final demise in the last five years?

San Francisco, trip down Market St, 1906

 Just before the devastating 1906 earthquake and fires...

Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad

 

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

Glenn H. Reynolds, NY Post. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Hard-Left Turn Lead to Pushback?

 

Will Hard-Left Turn Lead to Pushback?

Victor Davis Hanson, Daily Signal  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statues continue to fall. Names change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will there be a reaction to this extremism?

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

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

(C)2021 The Center for American Greatness.

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