California: where freedom goes to die

California: where freedom goes to die

Gavin Newsom has turned the Golden State into a woke dystopia.

Joel Kotkin, Spiked-Online 

California was once a byword for liberty and opportunity. The so-called Golden State was home first to the Gold Rush, then to Hollywood and then to the tech revolution in Silicon Valley. Californians have long been proud of that legacy – indeed, during a 2022 debate against Florida governor Ron DeSantis, California governor Gavin Newsom boasted that his state epitomised ‘freedom’. While this might once have been true, under Newsom’s direction, and that of the state’s essentially one-party legislature, California has been transformed into something unrecognisable.

However much one might dislike DeSantis’ sometimes heavy-handed approach to fighting wokeness in Florida, California is unlikely to meet most people’s definitions of freedom. The state government of California now forces shops to have a gender-neutral toy section. It seeks to extract billions as reparations for slavery. It aims to control speech and indoctrinate the young. It is attempting to regulate virtually every aspect of life in the name of ‘saving the planet’.

Maybe it depends on how you define ‘freedom’. California certainly offers freedoms to those on the margins. The homeless, undocumented migrants and petty criminals now have the freedom to commit crimes without much worry of prosecution. Back when Newsom was campaigning to be mayor of San Francisco 20 years ago, he pledged to eliminate homelessness in 10 years. Now California’s homeless numbers are growing not just in San Francisco, but also across the whole state. Overall, California has 30 per cent of the US’s homeless population. The state is hardly a ‘model for the nation’, as Newsom proudly proclaims.

Left out in this freedom equation are the basic rights of ordinary citizens – the people who pay taxes, raise families and rent or buy houses. For them, Newsom’s version of freedom is the ‘freedom’ to suffer the highest crime rate in a decade. For the pleasure of lackadaisical law enforcement, and a deteriorating infrastructure, California’s middle and working classes get the right to pay among the country’s highest state taxes. At the same time, businesses suffer a regulatory tsunami, with over 400,000 rules to adhere to, a number unparalleled in any other state.

This is a far cry from the ‘Californian ideology’ of old. The term was coined by two British academics in 1995 who wrote of ‘a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley’. They saw this mélange as a critical driver of the state’s innovative culture and economy. California had an essentially libertarian approach to economic growth, wide-open social freedoms and relentless entrepreneurialism. It was an open society back then – the opposite of what California is now becoming.

California may have once been liberal, or even libertarian, but now its politics are defined by the increasingly illiberal ‘progressive’ agenda. Newsom, even as San Francisco mayor in the 2000s, has long shown an authoritarian streak. In 2009, he demanded that the city’s farmers’ markets, food suppliers and vending machines offer only ‘healthy and sustainable food’. He also forced city workers to cut bagels into halves or quarters, and to replace crisps with vegetables, in a bid to reduce obesity.

As governor, Newsom and his legislature have been able to extend this kind of nanny-state authoritarianism to the whole state. California’s legislators have passed laws that restrict what doctors can tell their patients about Covid-19. These rules also prevented experts at Stanford University from testifying in court on the educational impact of lockdowns. This is part of what venerable Sacramento reporter Dan Walters describes as ‘a recent trend in California’s state government toward secrecy’. Increasingly, it operates effectively as a one-party state.

Newsom’s government has displayed the kind of authoritarianism that his buddy, President Xi of China, might appreciate. While supposedly ‘repressive’ Republican states like Texas and Florida work to prevent online censorship, Newsom’s California attempts to control social-media content from Sacramento. It has also severely diminished the rights of families, staunchly supporting schools to allow gender-confused children to transition behind their parents’ backs.

Newsom and Co have waged war on tobacco and banned flavoured vapes. They have even considered banning cigarettes for anyone born after 2007, in perpetuity. Bear in mind, this is in a state where marijuana is essentially legal and state-sanctioned. There’s even a new proposal in Sacramento to ban children under 12 from playing American football, a policy likely to be unwelcome among working- and middle-class people, particularly in the state’s interior.

It is in education, though, where Newsom’s authoritarian vision shines through the most. In California’s community-college system, with 116 colleges and 1.8million students, refusing to sign on to the ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ agenda can lead to your firing. This increasingly repressive ‘diversity-friendly’ campus culture has done nothing, however, to stem the toxic spread of anti-Semitism. Even the left-leaning dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, admitted that ‘nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism I see on college campuses now’.

Worse still, California’s school system is totally failing to educate children. Less than half of pupils meet national standards for literacy and barely one in five meets them for mathematics. And yet the Californian government still manages to find the time to pursue indoctrination on a massive scale. The state has now mandated lesson programmes on climate change, as well as new social-studies curricula that promote a critical race theory view of history. Taught by well-organised activist teachers, Californian children are more familiar with decolonisation and green issues than their times tables or the basics of grammar.

The proliferation of racial identity politics, in particular, has led to demands for the state’s small African American population to receive reparations. Already, a state task force has backed the idea of handing out $1.2million to every descendant of slaves. All this in a state where slavery was never legal, at least when under American control. Of course, California also has no means to pay for this reparations programme, particularly given its massive budget deficit. Debt has ballooned thanks to public spending having tripled on a per-capita basis over the past 50 years.

The next big thing on the identity-politics agenda is a proposed bill to revive affirmative-action quotas, which were resoundingly voted down in a referendum in 2020. California’s left is desperate to resurrect the ‘freedom’ to divvy up Californians by race and to discriminate against better-performing prospective university students, many of whom are themselves Asian ‘people of colour’.

Nothing has accelerated California’s decline quite like the state’s climate-change fetish. Under Newsom, California has passed a series of laws that make it almost impossible to build affordable housing. The state has essentially banned single-family zoning as a part of its ‘war against suburbia’, which is precisely where most Californians reside. Instead, in a bid to slash CO2 emissions, it seeks to increase housing density and restrict development to places where public transport is widely used. Outside of San Francisco and inner-city LA, this is essentially nowhere. Local control of zoning has been all but eliminated in favour of the state’s climate-oriented policies.

Ultimately, California’s climate policies erode the lives of middle- and particularly working-class Californians. Environmental attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls such policies ‘the green Jim Crow’. The industries that have traditionally helped nurture upward mobility – manufacturing, construction and energy – are all being systematically undermined by climate regulation, not least as they have led to some of the highest energy prices in the US. Adjusted for cost of living, California now has the highest percentage of people living in poverty in the nation. Newsom’s idea of ‘freedom’ means that millions of Californians have the liberty to be poor.

The state’s headlong drive to achieve ‘Net Zero’ emissions has even made cooking harder. Newsom intends to force new restaurants to use electric stoves and ovens rather than gas cookers – an energy source that simply doesn’t work for cooking most Asian foods or for searing meats. Unsurprisingly, both the California Restaurant Association and ethnic business organisations oppose the policy.

Not content with destroying restaurants, Newsom has his sights set on other Californian businesses, too. More recently, the state has decided to impose minimum wages of roughly $20 an hour or more on industries like fast food and medical care. That means franchisees, many of them minorities, are being forced to lay off workers. They are now looking to either abandon their businesses or replace workers with automation. It’s true that those still working may benefit from the higher wages. But many more will indulge their ‘freedom’ to stay at home and enjoy the benefits of the expanding welfare state. Pizza Hut in California has already announced the furloughing of 1,200 delivery workers before the minimum-wage hike takes effect in April.

In California, our masters value not hard work or paying taxes, but dependency. Undocumented immigrants, hardworking or not, will get free healthcare. Working people, meanwhile, are paying ever-higher health-insurance premiums. Shop owners who want to protect their shelves from marauding criminals are given short shrift by lawmakers. It should be no surprise that California, once an irresistible lure to ambitious migrants, now ranks among the worst states in attracting newcomers.

Companies are also leaving the state in ever-greater numbers. Thanks to a bill passed last year, large companies – from oil firms to retailers – will soon have to report their ‘carbon footprint’, including travel by employees. The state harassment of businesses doesn’t stop at climate issues, either. Under a new law signed by Newsom late last year, venture capitalists now have to report the racial and gender breakdown of the companies they fund. California has a particular vendetta against Activision-Blizzard, a major videogame company. The state has forced the firm to spend a small fortune fighting off accusations it is ‘fostering a sexist culture’ and subjecting female employees to ‘constant sexual harassment’ – claims the state now admits had no evidence behind them. Meanwhile, entrepreneurship, the key to California’s past prosperity, is fading in the wake of regulatory and tax burdens. It now has a start-up rate less than half that of Florida.

Could things get less deranged in future? Newsom may be a woke tyrant, but he is also an opportunist of the first order who is desperate to hold on to power. Aware of his fading poll numbers and with an eye on the White House, he has vetoed several of the progressive left’s more lunatic bills recently, including an attempt to allow for supervised ‘drug injection’ sites. Newsom has even fought off the environmental lobby by refusing to shut down one of the state’s last nuclear power plants. His spokesman lambasted the greens’ demands as ‘fantasy and fairy dust’.

Newsom might also be wary of alienating the oligarchs and his family connections, notably the Gettys. They may have financed his campaigns and would likely want to see him in the White House. But they do not want their wealth to be expropriated. Perhaps this is why Newsom has expressed opposition to a proposed wealth tax. Many fear this could further accelerate the already devastating flow of affluent people out of the state – one of the leading causes of California’s fiscal crisis.

In California, we see the fulfilment of George Orwell’s vision that ‘freedom is slavery’ and ‘ignorance is strength’. But perhaps Californians, already distressed about the state of our state, will finally say ‘basta ya’ – enough already. Then we might see a return to the older version of freedom that the Golden State was once known for.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is out now. Follow him on Twitter: @joelkotkin 

The Hysterical Style in American Politics

 

The Hysterical Style in American Politics

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness. 

The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing “paranoid style” of conspiracy-fed extremism.

But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage.

Or, in the immortal words of Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

The 2008 economic emergency crested on September 7, with the near collapse of the home mortgage industry.

Obama took office on January 20, 2009, more than four months after the meltdown. In that interim, the officials had finally restored financial confidence and plotted a course of economic recovery.

No matter. The Obama administration never stopped hyping the financial meltdown as if it had just occurred. That way, it rammed through Obamacare, massive deficit spending, and the vast expansion of the federal government. All that stymied economic growth and recovery for years.

In 2016, Donald Trump was declared Hitler-like and an existential threat to democracy.

Amid this derangement syndrome, any means necessary to stop him were justified: the Russian collusion hoax, impeachment over a phone call, or the Hunter laptop disinformation farce.

Eventually, the left sought to normalize the once unthinkable: removing the leading presidential candidate from state ballots and indicting him in state and local courts.

Nothing was off limits—not forging a federal court document, calling for a military coup, rioting on Inauguration Day, or radically changing the way Americans voted in presidential elections.

In October 2017, allegations surfaced about serial sexual predation by liberal cinema icon Harvey Weinstein.

The #MeToo furor immediately followed.

At first, accusers properly outed dozens of mostly liberal celebrities, actors, authors, and CEOs for their prior and mostly covered-up sexual harassment and often assault.

But soon, the once legitimate movement had morphed into general hysteria. Thousands of men (and women) were persecuted for alleged offenses, often sexual banter or rude repartee, committed decades prior.

#MeToo jumped the shark with the left-wing effort to take down conservative Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Would-be accusers surfaced from his high school days, 35 years earlier, but without any supporting evidence or witnesses for their wild, lurid charges.

#MeToo hysteria ended when too many liberal grandees were endangered. Most dramatically, former Joe Biden senatorial aide Tara Reade came forward during the 2020 campaign cycle with charges that front-runner Joe Biden had once sexually assaulted her—and was trashed by the liberal media.

The outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States during the winter of 2020 prompted an even greater hysteria.

Without scientific evidence, federal health czars Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were able to convince the Trump administration to shut down the economy in the country’s first national quarantine.

Suddenly, it became a thought crime to question the wisdom of six-foot social distancing, of mandatory mask wearing, of the Wuhan virology lab’s origin of the COVID virus, or of off-label use of prescription drugs.

Left-wing politicians and celebrities, from Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom to Jane Fonda, all blurted out the political advantages that the lockdowns offered—from recalibrating capitalism and health care to ensuring the 2020 defeat of Donald Trump.

The COVID hysteria magically ended when Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Suddenly, the lies about the bat or pangolin origins of the virus faded. The damage from the quarantines could no longer be repressed. And herd immunity gradually mitigated the epidemic.

The lockdown caused untold economic chaos, suicides, and health crises.

One result was the 120 days of looting, arson, death, destruction, and violence spawned by Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of the tragic death of George Floyd while in police custody in May 2020.

Suddenly, a hysterical lie took hold: American police were waging war against black males.

The details around Floyd’s sudden death—he was in the act of committing a felony, resisting arrest, suffering from coronary artery disease and the after-effects of COVID, and being high on dangerous drugs—were off limits.

The riot toll reached $2 billion in property damage, over 35 deaths, and 1,500 injured law enforcement officers. A federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic church were torched.

Police forces were defunded. Emboldened left-wing prosecutors nullified existing laws.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion commissars spread throughout American higher education as meritocracy came under assault.

Racial essentialism triumphed. Racially segregated dorms, campus spaces, and graduations were normalized.

Everything from destroying the southern border to dropping SAT requirements for college admission followed.

Sometimes real, sometimes hyped crises lead to these contrived left-wing hysterias—like the January 6 violent “armed insurrection” or the “fascist” “ultra-MAGA” threat.

Otherwise, the progressive movement cannot enact its unpopular agendas. So it must scare the people silly and gin up chaos to destroy its perceived enemies—any crisis it can.

2024 is an election about 10/7, not 1/6

 

The Long Read: 2024 is an election about 10/7, not 1/6

The 'Never Trump' Band Is on a reunion tour, but crowds are dwindling

 Hugh Hewitt, Fox News 

"Tyranny approaches! Despotism is just off stage! Guillotines are being sharpened!"

Well, no one actually said or wrote that guillotines are being sharpened, but that specific red light warning may have simply not made it past the editors of the river of op-eds warnings about the return of Donald Trump appearing in recent weeks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Hill or The Atlantic. 

All of these platforms have published alarmist cri de coeurs about the return of Trump since December. Nostradamuses of doom are overflowing the Acela corridor as frightened residents of the Beltway contemplate a second term of President Trump. 

Indeed, The Atlantic devoted almost all of its most recent year-end double issue to ringing the bells of the virtual city to sound the alarm about the advance towards the Capitol of the Dred Pirate Robert, aka, former President Donald Trump. [Note: I offered this reply essay to the editors of The Atlantic in December for their March issue and they offered to publish it on their website but not in the next issue of the magazine, so I declined the offer.]

The hysteria among the folks on whom Donald Trump casts a full spell of despair would be amusing — indeed it is already amusing to some — if it wasn’t both predictable and boring. 

It is also not believable. 

If anyone genuinely believes that Donald Trump is a "threat to democracy" they have either drunk the Kool-Aid or spilled it on their copies of the Constitution. It is a silly alarm, one that should be laughed at, not indulged. But it isn’t news that the Never Trump band has gotten back together, because it never broke up. 

Playing yet another encore set doesn’t, however, amuse people who have an abiding faith in the strength of the Constitution, because these cries of havoc and "Trump is coming, hide the children" are all based on the idea, always implicit and sometimes explicit, that a second Trump term would be lawless and Trump in a position to govern outside the law. That is, in a word, absurd. 

The Constitution is very strong, or at least has been since the Supreme Court’s 1954’s Brown v. Board decision which began to enforce the intent of the 14th Amendment. Prior to that time, we did indeed have presidents who would act lawlessly — FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans comes to mind, or Woodrow Wilson’s deep hostility to the Constitution and to the very idea of racial equality. But since the election of Ike and the arrival of the Warren Court, the Constitution, as amended by the people and interpreted by the Supreme Court, governs this country and lawless presidents are simply not a threat.  

As Richard Nixon demonstrated in 1974, when the Court orders a president to comply with the Court’s declaration of its understanding of the law —in Nixon’s case, that he turn over the tapes — the president complies. 

Rebukes of presidents by the Supreme Court that have been acquiesced in quickly by presidents have happened under President Biden (the student loan forgiveness fiasco), President Trump (the census questionnaire affair), President Obama (his illegal appointments to the National Labor Relations Board) and President Bush (decisions concerning the due process rights of prisoners at Gitmo.) 

In a second Trump term, the Roberts Court will still be there at 1 First Street and, along with the D.C. Circuit and every other federal court in the land, would be poised to rebuke any unlawful or unconstitutional actions by the executive should any overreaches occur. The modern Supreme Court and its counterparts at the circuit and district court levels have never failed in this duty and there is no serious argument that they would fail in the future. 

"But what if Trump does ‘X’ and the Court doesn’t stop him?" This is the political and constitutional equivalent of fantasy football, and a vigorous league for such speculations does indeed exist inside editorial pages and Beltway and New York City "think tanks," but that is not what happens in the real world. People sue to stop presidents who exceed their powers. The courts restrain presidents when they have indeed exceeded their powers. There is no reasonable argument that Trump would refuse to comply with any ruling against him. Not is there any way for a president to decline to obey a Court order. Neither is there any prospect of a Trump dictatorship. 

Every bit of conjecture to the contrary is pure pulp fiction, fiction that is never specific as to what Trump would do that is lawless and why courts would allow such lawlessness if it actually happened. 

What most of these writers really fear is that, 1. Trump is going to thrash President Biden and 2. A second Trump term will be more effective than the first in advancing the former president’s avowed and legitimate political objectives, such as ridding the administrative state of career employees who act contrary to the direction of their political appointee masters. 

They are concerned that Trump will finish his wall on the border (and that it will in fact prove to be very effective in greatly curbing illegal immigration).

They are afraid he will extend the tax cuts he pushed through and that, empowered by GOP majorities in the House and Senate, will use the reconciliation process to take big swings at the sprawling and dysfunctional federal government. 

They are afraid, in short, of Trump not being buffaloed a second time by the permanent administrative state and its heels-dug-in-bureaucrats. 

Trump won’t be setting up a secret police, but he will be dismissing Christopher Wray and everyone else at the top of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Why? Because he’s not going to repeat the enormous mistake of the first term in trusting that the director in place —James Comey in 2017, Christopher Wray now – will be a fair-minded political appointee just investigating real crimes, not a sham Steele dossier update and expanded in 2025. Fool him once, shame on you. Fool him twice, shame on Trump. He won’t get fooled again. 

"But he will appoint extremists!" is the corollary alarm to "Trump as dictator." Another absurd charge. 

I expect many of the most accomplished veterans of Trump’s first term to be back for a second, and I expect many more Mike Pompeos and Robert O’Briens (Secretary of State and National Security Advisor at the end of Trump’s term) to have rallied to the former president’s re-election campaign. 

I think the former president learned quite a lot about whom to appoint and whom to trust in his first term. 

Would you see Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee in senior positions such as attorney general? It wouldn’t surprise me. 

Members of Congress like Elise Stefanik, Michael Waltz, and Mike Gallagher in senior Cabinet positions? I would hope so, and expect as much. 

If and when Trump secures the GOP nomination, I hope he will immediately name a running mate from the list I’ve already posted earlier this week in Fox News Opinion: Sen. Tom Cotton, Gallagher, Sen. Joni Ernst, Pompeo, O’Brien or Sen. Dan Sullivan. 

I expect Trump will pay much closer attention to appointees everywhere in the executive branch, and will also blanket the town with pardons for the extraordinary prosecutions we have seen from a deeply politicized Department of Justice. 

Trump will, of course, fire Jack Smith on day one of his second term (and no loss there as Smith should have been fired after the McDonnell prosecution, but is instead back for an encore presentation of ridiculous theories of criminal activity that isn’t criminal activity). 

Trump will again turn to the Federalist Society for suggestions of excellent appointees to the federal bench. 

The Senate isn’t dissolving though. "Advice and consent" will still be needed for every senior member of the cabinet and their top lieutenants, as well as for heads of agencies and members of boards, and the same process is needed for every new federal justice or judge. The Constitution will still rule the land. 

Most of the Never Trump rump that never went away are still here, banging their old pots and pans at my old network MSNBC or on their usual print platforms. And their alarm about Trump refusing to leave after one more term is simply idiotic. 

There is a XXII Amendment. It’s the supreme law of the land and it isn’t going to be repealed. There is no army in the field to seize control of the government.  It’s a joke to argue that there is, that any member of the uniformed services would countenance such an order, even if one were given and it wouldn’t be.  

It remains an insult unique to the Beltway and New York City to suggest the American people are stupid or tired of self-government. We aren’t. 

It is an inchoate slur on every future appointee that they would accept an illegal order. Tell us again which first term Trump appointees did that? 

Before you say Mark Meadows, understand that accepting immunity isn’t a plea deal. The list is short because it is non-existent. 

Indeed, the list of senior Trump officials convicted of malfeasance is very short, and Trump’s first National Security Advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn was, to most minds, targeted and entrapped. 

The general’s entrapment is, like Scooter Libby’s conviction, in the Bush era, a monument to overzealous prosecution and not to 21st century executive branch wrongdoing. 

By contrast, lots of people quit when they disagreed with Trump. It would happen again if new appointees disagreed with means or ends. 

Hysteria is never pretty. And the folks indulging it now in their faux frenzies over a hypothetical nomination and subsequent election of Donald Trump are simply caught up in make-believe dramas that have as much to do with reality as "The Hunger Games."

Just stop it. They have been singing the same song since 2015 and it’s driving them (and us) crazy. 

Not one of these people are acting like French nobility during the Revolution and trying to head for the border. 

IF Trump gets the nomination and IF he wins the election, he will take office on Monday, January 20, 2025. 

Count on the Never Trumpers staying at their posts pumping out another deluge of alarm for the foreseeable future, unmolested by the president save for his posts on X or Truth Social. 

I think Trump’s thousands of critics are brave enough to weather those online storms. There will probably be another march of the disappointed on the day after his second Inaugural just as there was after his first. 

Trump would yield that office four years hence, but the Never Trump won’t give up theirs, no matter how foolish they appear in the rear-view mirror. 

"We can’t risk it!" is what I expect to read in comments or replies. Honest to goodness do you folks ever look up from your sweat lodge circle of panic? Ours is a republic with problems and deep divisions, but we are indeed going to continue to rise to Ben Franklin’s challenge "to keep it" because we have grown rather accustomed to doing what is legal and especially to criticizing those in power. 

It’s not a revolutionary moment, not even close (although the Democrats’ Chicago convention might be an interesting bit of deja vu for those old enough to recall that melt-down.)

The doom-criers are actually not concerned about Trump winning and setting up some sort of Gestapo. They are really alarmed that an infirm Joe Biden won’t get out of the way for a nominee not named Kamala Harris and that this duo is going to get tossed out of office — peacefully — rather handily.  

The panic merchants are concerned that Trump will govern constitutionally and effectively pursuant to his objectives as he lays them out in the months ahead. 

They are really worried that there will be a whole lot more of Pompeos and many fewer Navarros, as Trump now knows who gets stuff done. 

A self-governing people may indeed decide they will put up with what we used to call "mean Tweets" and often brazen speech from the occupant of the Oval Office rather than four more years of President Biden and Vice President Harris and more Abbey Gates, Ukrainian invasions and massacres in Israel. 

They may have deep aesthetic objections to Trump, but on the whole, they would like the country to survive and their children and grandchildren to live in freedom and prosperity. 

They might very well prefer Trumponomics to Bidenomics. And if they do, it will be through the exercise of the franchise and the assembling of a Constitutional majority through the Electoral College. 

The "people" may indeed be wholly sick and tired not of Trump but of Manhattan-Beltway media elites telling them that what they think and their sincerely held views are illegitimate. 

The "people" overwhelmingly condemned the rioters of 1/6 and they never, ever bought into the idea that the riot that day presaged something bigger or enduring. 

It seems like Jack Smith has concluded Trump didn’t cause the riot and the vast majority of Americans seem to agree with that. 

The GOP has at least overwhelmingly rejected the idea that Trump is culpable for the riot. The frustration of 1/6 junkies at their own inability to expand what has become a cult of attachment to the direst view of those events then, now and in the future is huge, but their remedy is not to keep repeating the same unpersuasive arguments at a higher pitch and a louder volume. Study up on sunk costs. Cut the chord that has bound you – but not Trump, the GOP or the country — to 1/6. 

A second political earthquake even bigger than that delivered on election night 2016 may come in November. If it does, it will be in large part because media elites have again ignored issues like the collapse of control at the border or the disaster in Afghanistan for endless replays of 1/6 porn. If enough people say, "What is wrong with you people, did you not see 10/7, Putin in Ukraine, Abbey Gate?" the clap back at elites could be thunderous.

If that happens —if all those "ifs" become facts — what then? Will the alarmists concede or go the full route of those Congressional supporters of Al Gore in 2001, John Kerry in 2005 and Hillary Clinton in 2017 and file objections during the counting of the votes of the Electoral College or have Democrats now decided that is bad form and a "threat to democracy?"

My request: Will those who will refuse to agree to the peaceful transfer of power back to Trump if he wins, please stand up right now and tell us what they plan on doing? 

The folks who rioted in the Capitol have been prosecuted and many are serving long sentences. Are these writers of these various alarms and their heirs and assigns intent on inciting their readers to a frenzy which could result in violence? That’s not illegal under the Brandenburg test because they lack the ability to move public opinion to immediate violence, of course, but will they agree to at least stipulate that, if Trump wins wholly, they failed to persuade? 

I doubt the alarmists will do any of these things. But I hope they do. The alarmists have been willing to suggest for three years now that Trump should have been tried for inciting the riot. (Not even the prosecutor with no limits Jack Smith or his fellow Javerts in Manhattan or Atlanta have laid that absurdity before a Grand Jury). Trump did not do that. He is not Sulla marching north or Caesar marching south. Trump is a political actor. The hyperventilation? Nonsense. Foolishness. All of it. And a chasing after wind. 

If you believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, stop peddling imaginary threats to either. It is unseemly. And it betrays a slippery grasp on American history and an even less secure grip on how the Republic operates. 

We need to focus on the real threats to this country —the alliance of China, Russia and Iran — and the collapse of the border, much of public secondary education and almost all of elite institutions of higher Ed. 

There’s serious work to be done, but the endless wringing of hands over mean Tweets doesn’t do a thing to tackle our real problems and our very real enemies. 

Biden ‘Saves’ Democracy by Destroying it

Biden ‘Saves’ Democracy by Destroying it

Victor Davis Hanson, victorhanson.com 

When faced with the possible return of President Donald Trump, the current agenda of the Democratic Party is summed up simply as “We had to destroy democracy to save it.”

The effort shares a common theme: any means necessary are justified to prevent the people from choosing their own president, given the fear that a majority might vote to elect Donald Trump.

Sometimes the anti-democratic paranoia has been outsourced to state and local officials and prosecutors to erase Trump from the primary and likely general election ballots as well.

One unelected official in Maine, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, is a Democrat, an official never elected by the people, and a non-lawyer rendering a legal edict. Yet she has judged Trump guilty of “insurrection.”

And presto, she erased his name from the state’s ballot.

Yet Trump was never charged, much less convicted, of “insurrection.”

The statute Bellows cites is a post-Civil War clause of the 14th Amendment. It was passed over a century and a half ago. It was never intended to be used in an election year by an opposition party to disbar a rival presidential candidate.

In the earlier case of Colorado, the all-Democrat Supreme Court, in a 4-3 vote, took Trump off the ballot.

In sum, just five officials in two states have taken away the rights of some 7 million Americans to vote for the president of their choice.

Note that Trump continues to lead incumbent Joe Biden in the polls.

Sometimes, indictments are preferred to prevent Americans from voting for or against Trump.

Currently, four leftist prosecutors—three state and one federal—have indicted Trump.

They are petitioning courts to accelerate the usually lethargic legal process to ensure Trump is tied up in Atlanta, Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C., courtrooms nonstop during the 2024 election cycle.

Their aim is to keep Trump from campaigning, as he faces four left-wing prosecutors, four liberal judges, and four or five overwhelmingly Democratic jury pools.

Yet all the indictments are increasingly clouded in controversy, if not outright scandal.

Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis campaigned on promises to get Trump. She now faces allegations that she outsourced the prosecution to an unqualified personal injury lawyer—her current stealth boyfriend who was paid handsomely by Willis’s office and traveled on pricey junkets with her.

New York partisan attorney general Letitia James likewise sought office on promises to destroy Trump.

She preposterously claims Trump overvalued his real estate collateral to a bank. Yet it eagerly made the loan, profited from it, and had no complaints given that Trump paid off the principle and interest as required.

Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg is even more desperate. He is now prosecuting Trump for campaign finance violations from nearly a decade ago, claiming a nondisclosure agreement with a purported sexual liaison somehow counts as a campaign violation.

Federal special prosecutor Jack Smith claims Trump should be convicted of improperly removing classified documents after leaving office. In the past, such disagreements over presidential papers were resolved bureaucratically.

Joe Biden, for example, improperly took out classified files after leaving the Senate and vice presidency and stored them in unsecure locations for over a decade.

All of these prosecutors are unapologetic anti-Trump progressives.

Some have communicated with the White House legal eagles, even though Joe Biden is likely to face Trump in the November election.

Some prosecutors are themselves facing controversies, if not scandals. Some wish to synchronize their drawn-out investigations and indictments to hinder the Trump reelection effort.

At other times, the effort to neuter Trump is waged by his rival Biden himself.

He has hammered Trump as an insurrectionist and guilty of a number of egregious crimes against democracy—even as Biden’s own Attorney General has appointed a special counsel to try Trump on just those federal charges concerning the January 6 demonstrations, a dead horse that Biden periodically still beats to death to scare voters.

Biden periodically smears half of America who supported or voted for Trump as “ultra-Maga” extremists and “semi-fascists” who would destroy democracy.

Yet the more Biden and the Left weaponize the judicial system to prevent Trump from running, and the more Biden screams and yells that Trump supporters are anti-American and anti-democratic, the more Trump soars in the polls while Biden sinks.

The left privately knows that its historically unprecedented strangulation of democracy is increasing Trump’s popularity. But like an addict, it cannot quit its Trump fix.

In sum, the Left is creating historic, anti-democratic precedents that will someday boomerang on Democrats should Republicans win the November election and follow the new Democrat model of extra-legal politics.

Democrats are tearing apart the country in a manner not seen since the Civil War era—apparently convinced democracy cannot be trusted and so itself must be sacrificed as the price of destroying Donald Trump.

A Culture in Collapse

 

A Culture in Collapse

Victor Davis Hanson, Blade of Perseus 

American Greatness 

American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable.

In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.

The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes.

Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not suffering from existential crises of famine, plague, or the collapse of our grid and fuel sources. Prior, far poorer, and war-torn generations now seem far better off than what we are becoming.

What is happening to us is not due to an adherence to a too strict conservative tradition but is almost exclusively the wage of the progressive project.

In short, we are seeing fissures that America has not experienced in our cultural history since the Civil War. The radical Left apparently feels such chaos, anarchy, and nihilism are necessary to topple past norms and customs and thereby adhere to a socialist, equity agenda that no one in normal times would stomach.

Some of the decay is existential and fundamental; some anecdotal and illustrative. But either way, while decline came about gradually over decades, its sudden and abrupt chaos during the three years of Biden’s presidency has shocked Americans.

Financial Implosion

As long as interest rates were de facto zero, both parties ran up gargantuan debt. Now the national debt has hit $34 trillion. But two odd things have also happened under the Biden administration that are beginning to undermine the very existence of the U.S. financial system:

1) Interest rates have soared from de facto zero and are on a trajectory to 5.5%—meaning that the interest on the debt, in theory, in the not too distant future will require 20 percent of the annual budget, squeezing out both entitlements and defense.

2) Yet the upcoming rendezvous with economic Armageddon has not slowed a Biden administration intent on borrowing nearly $2 trillion in the current fiscal year.

The public is baffled: is the Left playing chicken with us? Is the strategy to “gorge the beast,” thereby demanding even higher federal taxes, which, combined with many state taxes, now exceed 50 percent of one’s income?

Is the goal massive “redistribution” by ensuring “equity” by gouging the middle class and rich? Or is the left’s goal more nihilistic: to force a remedy for insolvency by ensuring high inflation, renouncing government debt, or government appropriation of private capital?

Military Crises

Americans have lost deterrence abroad.

Confusion reigns among the public over why the Biden administration fled from Afghanistan, leaving behind billions of dollars of munitions and equipment in the hands of Taliban terrorists. Why did it allow a Chinese spy balloon to traverse the continental U.S. with impunity?

And why did Biden signal to Russia when preparing an invasion of Ukraine that our reaction would depend on the magnitude of Putin’s offensive? Why has military recruitment cratered, shorting the Pentagon of thousands of soldiers?

Why do Iranian proxies attack almost daily U.S. installations abroad and ships in the Red Sea, apparently without fear of reprisal? Why did Hamas slaughter Israelis on October 7? What explains our indifference or ennui?

Is the answer a deliberate effort to curb supposed American “arrogance” by once more leading from behind? Are we rebooting the Obama Administration’s bankrupt idea of empowering an Iranian crescent from Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza to ensure “creative tension” between Israel and the moderate Arabs and Persian-led theocratic Shiites?

Why do our officer classes rotate in and out of lucrative military consultantships, lobbying billets, and board membership on corporate defense contractors—as if their innate talents rather than their lifelong contacts with current serving procurement officers earned their exorbitant fees?

Why did our retired four stars with disdain violate the uniform code of military justice by serially and publicly trashing the commander in chief? Why has the Pentagon revolutionized the entire system of recruitment, promotions, and tenure in the armed forces by predicating them in large part on race, gender, and sexual orientation rather than merit or battlefield efficacy? Did we learn anything from the old Soviet commissariat system? Would we prefer to lose a war by promoting equity than win one by ensuring liberty?

Why did the top brass go after supposedly “insurrectionist” white males (who died at twice their demographics during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan) in the military, only to discover from their own internal investigations that no such cabal of “domestic terrorists” existed, and only to drive out thousands more of the maligned by stupidly requiring COVID vaccinations from those with naturally acquired immunity?

In sum, the U.S. will either undergo a post-Vietnam-like revolution in the military or, in late Roman imperial fashion, our armed forces will be unable to defend the interests or indeed, the very safety, of the U.S.

Race

Why, when so-called non-white ethnicities and races were achieving parity with or exceeding the majority population in per capita income and when racial intermarriage was commonplace, did we blow up the values of the civil rights movement and revert to precivilizational tribalism? Who were the sophists who convinced us that racially segregated dorms, safe spaces, and graduations, or using race as an arbiter of admissions and hiring, was not racist?

When did we lump together an entire cadre of diverse ancestries, ethnicities, religions, politics, classes, and values and dub them all “white,” and then smear them collectively in stereotypical fashion? When did we calibrate race as the chief determinative factor in our identities? Have we become premodern tribal people—feuding clans right out of the Norse sagas, ghosts of the Balkans nursing ancient grievances and hatreds? Since when in history has a nation’s “diversity” ever been preferable to its “unity”?

The Sexes

Did anyone in, say, 2004 believe that in just twenty years, the Left would try to mainstream the previously rare medical malady of gender dysphoria into a transgendered civil rights issue by insisting on three rather than two sexes?

Would anyone have believed that leftists, gays, and feminists would have done their best to destroy a half-century of female athletic achievement by allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports and thereby erase the record performances of three generations of women?

Would anyone have believed that a feminist and accomplished swimmer like Riley Gaines would be cornered, swarmed, threatened, and barricaded in at a university for the crime of daring to state the obvious: that transgendered women are still, in terms of their musculoskeletal physiques and frames, males and thereby have no business competing in women’s sports?

Would anyone have believed that a gay senate aide would have engaged in passive, unprotected sex in a public and hallowed Senate chamber, filmed in graphic detail his act of sodomy, had it circulated among friends and social media, and then, when outrage followed, claimed victimhood by accusing those offended of being homophobic toward him and his active homosexual partner?

Lawlessness

We are witnessing the steady erasure of jurisprudence, both civil and criminal. Does the law as we knew it a mere decade ago still exist? Massive looting with impunity is now largely exempt from justice in our major blue-state cities. In Compton, a van slams into a Mexican bakery as waiting crowds swarm, loot, and destroy the business. And for what? Some free pies and cakes? Or the nihilist delight in ruining the livelihood of a hardworking family business?

Such smash-and-grabs rob stores of billions of dollars in revenue each year. Can we even comprehend that employees and security guards are now ordered to stand down, as if the apprehension of such thieves might in some way seem illiberal or racist?

Does anyone even care that pro-Hamas protestors—many in America as guests on green cards and student visas—shouted support for the October 7 massacre of Jews, screamed for the destruction of Israel and the Jews in it, shut down the Manhattan and Golden Gate Bridges, defiled the Lincoln Memorial and White House gates, and disrupted Christmas celebrations in our major cities with complete exemption? Is storming the California legislature, and disrupting it in session, now a felony in the manner of those convicted after January 6, or do we have two sets of laws, dependent on ideology, race, and party affiliation?

In one of the most chilling videos in memory, Las Vegas Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus was recently violently attacked by an unshackled career felon defendant (with three prior violent felony convictions and facing additional new felony counts). The assailant, Deobra Redden, leaped over the justice’s bench with ease and began beating her and pulling her hair before two bailiffs, with great difficulty, managed to restrain him. Why was Redden out on parole given his violent record, and why was he not shackled given his toxic past? His self-admitted effort to kill the judge, his ability nearly to pull it off, and the record of past leniency accorded him are a commentary on a sick society.

But then again, in our major cities, George-Soros-subsidized prosecutors have all but destroyed civil society. They have been systematically releasing felons with violent criminal records on the same day they are arrested, freeing convicted felons early from prisons and jails, and sabotaging the law by arbitrary enforcement on the grounds that it is inherently either unfair or racist.

The post civilization civil bookend to that precivilizational subterfuge was a systematic legal effort, for the first time in American history, to remove in an election year the leading primary and general election candidate Donald Trump from various state ballots. The Soviet-like charge was that he was guilty of “insurrection,” a crime he has never been charged with, much less convicted of. Meanwhile, three state prosecutors and one special federal counsel—all leftists and some previously bragging in their own election campaigns of their intention to destroy Trump—have charged candidate Trump with an array of felonies. The vast majority of Americans agree Trump would never have been so charged had he just not sought to seek reelection—or had been a liberal Democrat.

Education

In ancient times, the President of the Harvard Corporation was a signature scholar and intellectual, befitting Harvard’s own self-regard as the world’s most preeminent university. No longer.

Now-resigned president Coleen Gay’s meteoric career was based on a flimsy record of a mere 11 articles—the majority of them plagiarized. Her entire career was fueled by the tired pretext that the privileged Gay was somehow deserving of special deference given her race and gender.

Confronted with such corruption, the Harvard Corporation, its legal team, and 700 faculty sought to downplay Gay’s intellectual theft. Indeed, they smeared her critics as racist—only then to deal with her new billet as a professor of Political Science with a long record of plagiarism that was exempt from the sort of punishments dealt out to students and faculty for less egregious defenses.

How did Ivy League degrees so quickly become mostly certifications of ideological and woke orthodoxy? Or is it worse than that? Does a Stanford history major or Yale literature graduate know anything, respectively, about the Civil War or Shakespeare’s plays? Do they even know that we, the public, know that they don’t know?

Was Elizabeth Warren really Harvard’s first law professor of color? Was Claudine Gay truly an impressive and respected scholar of political science? Are the governing members of the Harvard Corporation the nation’s best and brightest?

How in less than five years did our elite universities destroy meritocracy, abolish SAT requirements, require DEI oaths and pledges, and mirror the worst commissariat institutions of the old Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet Union? How and why these elite universities blew themselves up in a mere decade will baffle historians for decades to come.

The End of Sovereignty

The Biden administration has shattered federal immigration law, as some 10 million illegal entries will have crossed unlawfully and with impunity in the first Biden term—all by intent. The southern border is not merely porous; it no longer even exists.

Did the Left want new constituents? New entitlement recipients to grow government and raise taxes on the clingers and deplorables?

Did it want a larger DEI base to replace the steady exodus of non-whites from left-wing agendas? Does it shun sovereignty, preferring a global village without arbitrary borders? Do these utopians in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard similarly feel their own yards and grounds need no walls, no barriers, and no boundaries to deny the underprivileged their rights to enjoy what the predatory classes possess?

In this new America of ours, Joe Biden is hale and savvy, while Hunter did nothing wrong. Our heroes are Dylan Mulvaney, Gen. Rachel Levine, and the two Sams, Bankman-Fried and Brinton.

In today’s America, Karin Jean-Pierre is truthful, while Alejandro Mayorkas is honest. An innocent and saintly George Floyd was randomly murdered; his death proof of systemic police racism. And defunding the police brought calm and quiet, in the way our border is secure and the homeless are mere victims.

Dr. Jill is an impressive academic. Oprah and LeBron are the downtrodden and victimized. Gen. Mark Milley is a brave maverick, and so is Adam Schiff. The flight from Afghanistan marked a brilliantly organized retreat.

The Chinese balloon really did not take too many pictures of sensitive areas. January 6 was an armed insurrection, preplanned by fiery conspirators and revolutionaries. Ashli Babbitt deserved to be blasted in the neck for entering a broken window.

Kamala Harris is a wordsmith. Russian collusion really happened. So did Russian laptop disinformation. Christopher Steele’s dossier was mostly true, in the fashion of Claudine Gay’s dissertation and Barack Obama’s memoir. And 51 former intelligence authorities bravely came forward to offer their expertise in certifying that Hunter’s laptop was cooked up in Moscow.

With all this, what do we think the Iranians, Putin’s Russians, the communist Chinese, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas now think of the United States?

That we are the nation that won World War II or fled from Afghanistan? Did the eight million who broke our laws and simply walked across our border respect us, fear us, admire us, or come here to manipulate and use us? Did Hamas appreciate the hundreds of millions of dollars we gave them, in the same way Iran was friendlier after we lifted the sanctions?

In sum, American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable.

 

It’s not just Trump

 

It’s not just Trump: 

Democrats are moving to bar Republicans from ballots nationwide

Jonathan Turley, New York Post 

As the decisions disqualifying former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election work their way through the courts, a new filing in Pennsylvania seeks the same “ballot cleansing” by barring Republican Rep. Scott Perry.

It’s only the latest effort targeting congressional candidates as Democrats seek to bar opponents as “insurrectionists” for questioning the election of President Biden.

We have become a nation of Madame Defarges — eagerly knitting names of those to be subject to arbitrary justice.

Former congressional candidate Gene Stilp, who’s made headlines by burning MAGA flags with swastikas outside courthouses, filed the challenge.

Using the 14th Amendment to disqualify candidates like Perry is consistent with Stilp’s signature flag-burning stunts.

But what’s chilling is how many support such efforts, including Democratic officeholders from Maine’s secretary of state to dozens of members of Congress.

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) sought to bar 126 members of Congress under the same theory for challenging the election before Jan. 6, 2021.

Similar legislation from Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats, including New York Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman and Ritchie Torres and “Squad” members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

When Maine’s secretary of state disqualified Trump, three in the state’s congressional delegation — Sens. Angus King (I) and Susan Collins (R) and Rep. Jared Golden (D) — condemned the decision. But others supported the antidemocratic action.

The grounds were virtually identical to those of Stilp. He accuses Perry of supporting challenges to Biden’s election and opposing its certification.

Of course, he ignores Democratic members who sought to block certification of Republican presidents under the very same law with no factual or legal basis.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) praised the effort then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) organized to challenge the certification of President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election.

Jan. 6 committee head Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) voted to challenge it in the House.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sought to block certification of the 2016 election result — particularly ironic since he’s a leading voice calling for Trump to be disqualified.

He insisted last week on CNN that the effort to prevent citizens from voting for Trump is the very embodiment of democracy: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.”

That is akin to treating every criminal charge as a consensual act of incarceration because the accused chose his path in life.

This is also being played out in state races.

The filing against Perry came the same day Pennsylvania Democratic state Sen. Art Haywood made public a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee against his Republican colleague Doug Mastriano accusing him of playing a role in the plot to overturn the election.

Notably, in his effort to “hold insurrectionists accountable,” Haywood admitted he relied on the same evidence from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that was used in the Colorado case.

“Insurrectionist” is the newest label to excuse any abuse.

During the McCarthy period, individuals were accused of being Communists or “fellow travelers.”

Now you have Stilp accusing Perry of being “supportive of insurrectionists.”

Democrats and pundits have claimed civil libertarians and journalists who have testified against the government’s growing censorship efforts are enablers of insurrectionists and even “Putin lovers.”

These Democratic members and activists vividly demonstrated this unfounded theory’s dangerous implications.

Figures like Stilp are wrong on the law but right about one thing: There are few real limits once you embrace this theory.

If the challenges work, there is no reason they can’t be used unilaterally against any candidate (and without any criminal charges, let alone convictions).

It is instantly both self-executing and self-satisfying. It would put the world’s most successful democracy on a slippery slope to political chaos.

That is why the Supreme Court needs to take up this issue and put this pernicious theory to bed once and for all.

Until the court rejects this antidemocratic ploy, activists eager to win elections through the courts will keep using it, and it will metastasize throughout our body politic.

With the support of elected officials across the country, they can then join Stilp in moving from burning flags to torching the Constitution in a fit of exhilarating rage.

Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.

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.