It's News to Us!

It's News to Us!
Bill O'Reilly, billoreilly.com

Americans are divided, angry, sad, inspired in some cases, and watchful of the Black Lives Matter Movement.  This week one of its leaders proclaimed on national TV that “if this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn the system down.”

Hawk Newsome continued saying he might be talking figuratively ... or literally.

Very macho.  Very provocative.  Might be a threat.

Now, you would think the national press would be all over this story, trying to get accurate information about the Black Lives Matter operation to the American people, who the press is supposed to serve.  I mean, this is an important story, is it not?

Mr. Newsome, who heads the New York City chapter of Black Lives Matter, is the new Huey Newton, whom the 1960’s media largely adored.  Mr. Newton cofounded the Black Panther Party.

Do you know who cofounded the current Black Lives Matter organization?  Bet you don’t.  Because the press has totally ignored the real story regarding the BLM movement.

Three women are behind “The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation,” which is the central organization that directs policy. Alicia Garza, 39, is the chief strategic advisor.  Patrisse Cullors, 36, is also a top advisor.

Finally, Opal Tometi, 36, is the third force. She works with the BLM Foundation and is also the Executive Director of the “Black Alliance for Just Immigration.” That group is associated with the “Freedom Road Socialist Organization,” a Marxist-Leninist group that has received funding from the Tides Foundation run by George Soros.

Ah, the plot thickens.

The three women who essentially run the BLM Foundation keep a very low profile.  No cable news interviews for them. 

Nope, these ladies are serious.

In an interview with a professor from Morgan State University, Ms. Cullors said: “Myself and Alicia (Garza) in particular are trained organizers.  We are trained Marxists.  We are super-versed on ideological theories.”

So, do you think the protestors chanting “Black Lives Matter” in the streets understand what the “Black Lives Matter Global Network” really is? 

And then there’s the “Thousand Currents” operation out of Oakland, California.  Ever heard of it?  I didn’t think so.

Because the Black Lives Matter Foundation does not have tax exempt status, at least not yet, the radical left “Thousand Currents” outfit “fiscally sponsors” BLM.  The means it holds their donations, which now number in the millions.  Because the non-profit “Currents” is overseeing the cash, donors are allowed to write off donations to BLM, according to the IRS.

Karl Marx would love this; a capitalist government allowing tax deductions for money earmarked to destroy it.

And so ignorant celebrities and clueless corporations benefit financially when giving money to the radical left Black Lives Matter Global Organization Foundation.  Right on!

Another question. When BLM receives the donated money where does the cash wind up?  Well, according to FactCheck.org, 71 percent of it goes to salaries, benefits, and “consulting fees.”

Wow!  How great is this?  Your mom could be a “consultant.”

Interesting, right? The Black Lives Matter organization is run by Marxists who have access to lots and lots of money.

Who knew?  Certainly not anyone who follows the national press.  Those “news” organizations couldn’t care less.

As long as they can virtue-signal and damage “Donald Trump’s America,” the press is happy in its laziness and apathy.

Does the truth matter?

Not to the media.

Power to the people!

The Triumph of the Country Mouse

The Triumph of the Country Mouse
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, National Review 

Cities lose their charms when they’re engulfed in chaos, crime, and mobs — and run by virtue-signaling appeasers.

n Aesop’s Fables and Horace’s Satires a common classical allegory is variously retold about the country mouse and his sophisticated urban cousin.

The city-slicker mouse first visits his rustic cousin’s simple rural hole and is quickly bored and unimpressed by both the calm and the simple fare.

When the roles are soon reversed, the country cousin at first is delighted by big-city mouse’s sumptuous urban food scraps and the majestic halls where they may scuttle about. But as the crafty clawed house cat and sharp-toothed guard dogs threaten both, and the noise and bustle mount, the stressed-out country mouse scampers home — at last realizing that his unappreciated quiet and safe abode trump action and sophistication every time.

These Greek and Roman fables reflect the classical world’s paradox of not particularly enjoying life in the fetid, plague-ridden, and dangerous big cities of Athens, Rome, and Alexandria that nevertheless gave the world Socrates, Virgil, and magnificent libraries. As towns grew into metropolises, their sheen as heady places for art, literature, and cultural change began to fade. In response, the once commonplace farm and distant town were increasingly romanticized, especially in such genres as pastoralism and bucolic poetry. The escape to the country estate was the ideal of the Roman senator, the same way that the “ranch” sometimes becomes the getaway from the Washington swamp for American presidents.

Originally, city man was “astute” (asteios/astu: town)  and country man a rustic agroikos or bumpkin (argoikos/agros: farm). But it was not such a simple dichotomy, as even today “urbane” is not always an unqualified compliment, and “rustic” is sometimes a grudging commendation of authenticity.

The urbane city dweller (urbanus/urbs) was also often portrayed in Roman comedy and satire as a naïve and full-of-himself fop. In contrast, the rustic bumpkin (rusticus/rus: countryside) might have been grubby and smelly. But he is also usually commonsensical, grounded, and skeptical.

Globalization, we thought, confirmed the superiority and desirability of the urban coastal mice. From Miami to Boston, they looked across the sea to the EU for guidance, not to Appalachia. Likewise, the strip from San Diego to Seattle was a rich window further westward to Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei, not looking backward upon stagnant Bakersfield, Provo, or Missoula. Winners lived as urban gentry; losers were the clingers and deplorables of the interior.

Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Hollywood, Facebook, Google, Amazon, CBS, NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Wall Street are certainly not to be found in Kansas, South Dakota, or Arizona.

Things began to change a bit with the election of Donald Trump and his attack on Chinese mercantilism, the inequalities of globalization, open borders, and the deindustrialization of the American interior. Election-night Electoral College maps revealed high-density, blue corridors as bookends on a less settled but undeniably geographically vaster red interior. The interior, not the coasts, determined the Electoral College vote. Peter Strzok’s smelly Walmart deplorables and Barack Obama’s clingers for once seemed to have had the upper hand.

Then came the COVID-19 epidemic. Suddenly, green mass-transit rail, high-density, elevator-reliant town houses, and subways were petri dishes, in a way Wyoming, upstate New York, and the Sierra Nevada foothills were not. Translated, what was the upside of going to Greenwich, Conn., poetry readings of the latest hipster poet or buying the prints of the future Andy Warhol on Manhattan’s Upper West Side if you were either infected or locked in your cramped apartment dependent entirely on a host of previously taken-for-granted Others who brought you water, food, and power, and took out your garbage and sewage — or sometimes didn’t?

Michael Bloomberg’s slur of dumb farmers dropping seeds by rote into the ground to produce corn on autopilot suddenly seemed even dumber when boutique bread was not to be so easily had at the corner La Boulangerie.

The contagion and the lockdown led to economic catastrophe. If the cities might have fared better than the countryside in the abstract calculus of finance and stocks, the recession also gave us another, rawer glimpse of Armageddon to come. Urban services and necessities may break down, but at least in the countryside, the proverbial basics of existential survival — food, water, power, guns, and fuel — are not so tenuous.

In small towns, outlying suburbs, and farmhouses, you can grow food, have a well, pump out your own septic tank, take target practice at home, and have a gasoline tank or a generator in reserve. You can be worth $2 billion on the Magnificent Mile, but if your Gulfstream is locked down at the airport, your driver socially distanced at home, your elevator on the blink, and your food courier a day late, then you are poorer than a peasant in Nowhere, Okla. The poor in high-rises in Queens are far more vulnerable than those in rickety farmhouses in rural Ohio.

After the Trump election, the virus, the lockdown, and the recession, then came the looting, street violence, and arson of the protests that spiraled out of control after the initial demonstrations over the horrific death of George Floyd while in police custody. America saw that in extremis blue-city mayors and police chiefs would virtue-signal away the public’s own safety, to veneer either their own bias, fright, or impotence.

The country’s major cities — New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington, Philadelphia, and others — experienced not just mass fire and theft but state-sanctioned or de facto allowances of both. Police departments either could not — or would not — stop the stealing and burning. And officers on the beat often blamed their mayors and governors, who characteristically contextualized the violence, either because they felt they could do nothing about it or they wanted to do nothing about it, or they saw that excusing it was the more persuasive political narrative, at least in the short term. A family in the country may be two hours away from the rural constable, but when armed, it has some recourse against the nocturnal intruder, in a way that someone locked down in an apartment in gun- and ammunition-controlled Queens, with a politically beleaguered police force, does not.

On the national level, blue-state congressional representatives and senators treated chaos in city streets in the same way they had earlier packaged the epidemic, lockdown, and recession: more mayhem that could be blamed on Donald Trump and that would thus accomplish in November 2020 what Robert Mueller, Ukraine, and impeachment did not. Suddenly millions without masks reminded us that shouting about endemic and systematic racism exempted one from the quarantine — though Donald Trump’s flag-waving crowds did not enjoy the same privilege. The urbane who quoted “science” chapter and verse manufactured all sorts of pseudoscientific exegeses about how storming into restaurants to shout down patrons and strolling through burning and smoke-filled Walmarts to loot for hours were permissible indoor social congregations, while going to a peaceful indoor Trump rally was Typhoid Mary recklessness.

For many liberal urban dwellers, all the violence, filth, dependency, plague, incompetence, and sermonizing were no longer worth the salaries earned from globalized high-tech and finances. Even the city’s retro, gentrified neighborhoods, its internationalism and sophistication in food, drink, and entertainment, its cultural diversity, and its easy accessibility to millions of similarly enlightened liberals with superior tastes and tolerance began to wear. When stores go up in flames, or the 58th floor comes down with the coronavirus, or Mayor de Blasio plays “Imagine” to illustrate why there are no police on the streets, then who cares about the intellectual stimulation that supposedly comes by osmosis from the nation’s tony universities anchored in cities or their nearby suburbs?

Increasingly over the past four months, millions of city folk have discovered that the police are as essential as water, food, sewage, and gasoline. Without them, life reverts not to a summer of love but more often to the Lord of the Flies and Deadwood. The urban hipster and marketing executive discovered that a spark somewhere 2,000 miles away can ignite their own neighborhood, and all the kneeling, foot-washing, and social-media virtue-signaling won’t bring safety or food.

For the boutique owner, whose store was looted, defaced, and burned, the existential crisis was not just that capital and income were lost, and a lifetime investment wiped out, after the earlier one-two-three punch of plague/quarantine/depression.

Instead, the rub was that the urban store owner and his customer grasped that all that mayhem could easily happen again and on a moment’s notice — and the ensuing losses would once again be written off as the regrettable collateral damage that is sometimes necessary to “effect social change.” When the mayor and police look the other way as the mob carries off Louis Vuitton bags, and CNN reporters assure us of peaceful protests while flames engulf our television screens, why rebuild or restore what the authorities and the influential deem expendable? Why live in Detroit in 1970 when a constant 1967 repeat was supposed to be a tolerable cost of doing business there?

A Mayor de Blasio or Durkan and a Governor Inslee or Newsom were more or less indifferent when “brick-and-mortar” livelihoods were wiped out. Observably, they expressed very little outrage. Preventing the recurrence of anarchy might alienate the looters and burners, and especially their appeasers and contextualizers.

Add it all up, and as the country mouse of old learned, the giddiness and opulence of the city are increasingly not worth the danger, noise, and mess of the city, at least after February 2020. There are simply too many claws and too many sharp teeth to justify the rich crumbs from the opulent table.

There is another force-multiplier of urban disenchantment: In the age of Zoom and Skype, the bustle of the city may not be able to be fully replicated, and the drama of the live classroom relived, but tele-business still can be conducted well enough without having to navigate around the feces of Market Street, or the looting, shouting, and burning of Seattle. If one wishes to endure watching the torching of the Oakland Mercedes-Benz dealership, one can do it on YouTube in Red Bluff without smelling the burning plastic four blocks away. And when the NFL coaches take the knee this fall during the National Anthem, it will be far more out of sight and out of mind in Hawthorne, Calif., than when living in Silicon Valley.

With downloads, social media, and instant visual communications, the sanitized version of the city can be used well enough by the county dweller. It is of course not the city, but a workable facsimile that means not flying into JFK, or navigating West Hollywood, or staying in a hotel in Chicago.

The cities are broke — a fact that will be more widely appreciated when they return to “normal.” They are no longer even marginally clean and safe, and their police nationwide will calculate that it is not worth getting killed, being fired, spat upon, or put in prison to answer a 911 call.

Our big cities are governed by a blue paradigm that fairly or not will now be increasingly synonymous with crime, debt, and high taxes that ensure bad services. Most city dwellers by needs and habit will still stay there.

But millions will increasingly seek to avoid cities and will appreciate their virtual upsides from a distance without having to endure their real downsides.

Wherever we live, in our dreams at least, we are all country mice now.

NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson

Defund the Police: A Modest Proposal

Defund the Police: A Modest Proposal

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

All,

So apparently millions of Americans want to defund the police.

OK, I am enough of a libertarian to support their position…

…but I am also enough of a libertarian not want to impose that decision on everyone else. What to do?

Think back to the Roman Republic days of Spartacus! Roughly speaking, back then the fire department was for hire. 

If you bought a fire insurance policy then the fire department came as soon as you asked. If you didn’t pay then putting out the fire was your problem. 

The fire department also would respond to put out the fire for those who had not bought a policy but for a hefty price to be paid up front.

Lets do that with police coverage!

If you are a die-hard police “defunder” (pun intended) then you do not have to pay for the police and in turn you get no police protection.

If you want police protection then you buy it like say…car insurance:

I mean like you could buy the basic Bronze Plan* that includes 24-7 local police protection (detective and/or crime lab and crime scene investigator services available for additional fees and charges).

Silver* gets you both 24-7 local police and country sheriff protection – and for an upgrade to a Gold Plan* add in detective services and the State Police/Highway Patrol plus affordable co-pay crime lab and crime scene investigator services.

*SWAT, Hostage Rescue Team, and Crisis Negotiators sold separately.

For those absolutely wanting top-of-the-line coverage, the Platinum Plan** provides everything in the Gold Plan plus the State Bureau of Investigation and police EMT services (where available), all law enforcement agency detectives, crime labs and investigators (even district attorney investigators) and in case of civil disturbance or natural disaster, support from your National Guard and all with NO CO-PAYS!

**SWAT, Hostage Rescue Team, and Crisis Negotiators INCLUDED!

SPECIAL NOTE: Police security for elected officials handled separately on a "volunteer only" case-by-case basis.

Everything would be tracked through an improved 911 System. 

If are a “defunder” with second thoughts and in need of help all you have to do is call 911 or go on line at the 911 website with credit card in hand and you can purchase a year’s worth of coverage over the phone or on line and only pay a 30% surcharge.

Once your payment is verified the dispatcher will send the next available law enforcement officer included in your plan to your location.

That's the ticket! (again, pun intended)

P.S. As for me, sign me up for the Platinum Plan.

4 June 1940: When the Commonwealth of Nations Saved Civilization

4 June 1940: When the Commonwealth of Nations Saved Civilization

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (ret)

On 4 June 1940, Winston S. Churchill, the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, gave a speech to House of Commons. It was unarguably the most important moment of the 20^thcentury.

The question was not just of war or peace but also deciding the course for all humanity. In the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, the Commonwealth of Nations had stood, faced and battled the greatest alignment of evil in all history when the forces for good were at their absolute nadir.

Churchill was to announce whether evil indeed had triumphed or the fading forces of good would carry on come what may.

A Tragic Background

The terror had begun earlier. In March 1939, the German Nationalist Socialist war machine dismantled Czechoslovakia. In reaction, France and the United Kingdom enacted economic embargoes against Nazi Germany. Storm clouds of another Great War began to form on the horizon.

As the days of 1939 slipped away battle lines were drawn amongst the world’s seven great powers. A quick survey did little to encourage the embattled Free World leaders in London and Paris. In East Asia, Japan was occupied with its predatory war against China and the United States a neutral sleeping giant. As for the rest, the three great radical socialist states – nationalist socialist Germany, communist socialist Russian and Fascist socialist Italy – unexpectedly congealed into a tenuous mutual assistance bloc. How that happened is an often-ignored chapter of World War II.

On top of the economic pain inflicted on Germany, Hitler realized that in the event of war the Royal Navy would blockade their ports. That could cripple his war machine but there was a solution at hand: Soviet Russia could supply everything the Werhmacht needed. Conversely, if the leaders in London and Paris could win over Moscow then another world war might be averted.

In the months that followed the destruction of Czechoslovakia, gaining the support of Josef Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics became THEpolitical drama waged between the liberal free-market democracies and Nazi Germany. Hitler emerged as winner when he formed an alliance with Stalin formalized in the Molotov-Ribbentrop (or German-Soviet Nonaggression) Pact of 23 August. 

That ensured Nazi Germany would not have to fight a two-front war – what Hitler believed to be a prime reason why Germany lost the First World War. But Germany gained even more. A second important piece of the German-Soviet alliance dealt with economic support. Due to the embargoes, the German war machine was in desperate need of oil, manganese, rubber, and other resources. 

By July 1939, German-Soviet trade negotiations had progressed and an agreement was signed on 19 August, just days before the Non-Aggression Pact. Later, on 11 February 1940, an expanded German-Soviet Commercial Treaty was penned that provided even more critical raw materials to the Werhmacht. The amounts provided by Moscow exceeded of 2,000,000 tons of supplies to include 900,000 tons of oil. It was no exaggeration to say that the Nazi German blitzkriegs of 1940-1941 ran on Soviet fuel.

Hitler had been able to join forces with Stalin because Nazi Germany was willing to give the Soviets what the Western Allies would not: A free hand to invade and seize neighboring nations in eastern Europe – all outlined in secret protocols within the August pact. Central to agreement was the joint invasion of Poland. 

On 1 September, Nationalist Socialist Germany simultaneously attacked Poland from eastern Germany and East Prussia. On 17 September, The Red Army invaded Poland. Hitler and Stalin, two radical socialist leaders, plunged the planet into the Second World War. 

The timing could be seen as an act of Providence for the Western Allies for if the Soviets also had invaded Poland on or about 1 September, they would have been compelled to go to war with both dictatorships. Instead, France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany alone on 3 September. 

When the Soviets struck Poland on 17 September, both Paris and London realized the battle for Poland was lost and they could not wage a war against the combined power of Nationalist Socialist Germany and communist socialist Russia. As a matter of survival, they found political expedients to restrict the war to Germany. It was a painful – even shameful – but absolutely necessary compromise. Europe continued to fall into darkness.

Dire June 1940

The subsequent events that led to Churchill’s speech read as an almost overpowering litany of depressing setbacks. Disaster and defeat seemed to be waiting at every turn and in culmination beat down the spirit of even the most ardent resister.

Stalin’s war making did not stop with Poland. The Red Army invaded Finland in November 1939 and in March 1940 the Soviets forced a peace on the Finns that strongly favored Moscow. To add to the lands gained in Poland and Finland, on 3 June 1940, Stalin secretly issued alert orders for the Red Army to prepare for an imminent invasion of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. While the West was appalled and watched helplessly, it was not a shock to the senior leaders of the two radical socialists regimes as Hitler and Stalin had agreed to everything in August 1939.

Hitler too carried on with his bloody campaigns of conquest. In a matter of two months, Nationalist Socialist Germany invaded and conquered Denmark (9 April), Luxembourg (10 May), the Netherlands (10-14 May), and Belgium (10-28 May). Norway, which also had been invaded on 9 April, still fought the Germans but its cause was hopeless. The same was true of France. Defended by what many considered the finest army in the world, the Third Republic was decisively beaten by 4 June.

The German Werhmacht seemed omnipotent.

Fighting beside the French Army was the British Commonwealth (the British Expeditionary Force or BEF) and it too had been pushed to brink of annihilation by Hitler’s panzers. Only through raw courage, daring, creativity, and at great risk, was the bulk of the BEF saved (Operation Dynamo). It was the one victory rising up in a sea of failures.

By 4 June 1940, the Commonwealth of Nations had lost it most powerful allies in Europe and stood alone in the face of relentless Nationalist Socialist aggression aided and abetted by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Finally, the Commonwealth of Nations had to be prepared to deal with socialist-fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, who had secretly informed his generals on 26 May at he soon intended to enter the war as Hitler’s ally. 

Britain’s Friends in the United States were of little use

While possessing tremendous latent power, the United States was of no material help on 4 June 1940. Lend-lease did not begin until much later – March 1941 – and the American armed forces woefully inadequate. The US Navy was America’s sole first-rate modern force of consequence. Naval aviation also was well developed consisting of 6 carrier air groups and 3 long-range patrol wings that were joined by 2 US Marine Air Groups.

In contrast, the US Army stood at just under 190,000 by the close of 1939 and modestly grew to 269,000 in 1940. As a comparison, the British Army held 1,650,000 soldiers in June 1940. The Commonwealth added about 400,000 more with most serving in the Indian Army.

The US Army only began to build its first main gun battle tank in 1939 and armed with an undersized 37mm cannon. By 1940, the US Army possessed 112 of these already obsolete M2 tanks (again in contrast, the British Army had over 800 main-gun tanks in 1940 although most were lost during the battle of France). Even the Italian and Japanese armored forces were superior to the Americans in June 1940. 

US Army Air Corps aircraft were more numerous (18 bomber and 30 fighter squadrons) and capable but lagged behind the other major powers – the one bright light shone on the limited presence of modern P-39 and P-40 fighters along with A-20, B-25, and B-17 bombers. The rest of the Air Corps was obsolete.

Eighty years ago the world teetered on the brink of great unspeakable darkness. 

Whole books can be written on how 20^thcentury radical socialism created police-state societies that repressed every type of freedom from speech, music, and architecture to every other form of art and creative activity.  The socialist dictatorships decided what information people could or could not have access to as well as where could live or work or even travel. But let us refine the inhumanity to the grimmest of human rights abuses: State sponsored murder.

The Soviet Union killed over 20 million “enemies of socialism.” The top three methods of extermination were (1) direct murder, (2) death through abuse and neglect in slave-labor gulag camps, and (3) starvation through man-made famines.

Nationalist Socialist Germany murdered 11 million “enemies of the state.” Like the Soviet Union, the Nationalist Socialists used a modified version of Soviet “big three” methods: (1) direct executions, (2) death camps for mass-scale genocide, and (3) death through abuse and neglect in slave-labor concentration camps.

While fascist socialism did not devolve into a concentration camp-mass murder gulag system it enacted anti-Semitic laws in 1938 and allowed the Nazis to send Jews and other enemies of Nationalist Socialism in Italy and other Italian controlled areas to Nazi concentration or death camps.

Imagine a world dominated by Communism, Nationalist Socialism and Fascist Socialism.

How many millions of innocents would have been slaughtered under the radical socialist behemoths had the Commonwealth surrendered? How many millions or more would have been condemned to slave labor camps? And the remaining billions of all humanity would have been doomed to a life of soul crushing oppression under the boot of radical socialism.

Those were the stakes in June 1940. 

The Commonwealth’s Reply

For the war leaders in London, outwardly there was little or nothing to look to in hope of getting past the omnipresent gloom. Only internal strength could see the Commonwealth of Nations through its moment of greatest peril. In the face of all that, on 4 June 1940, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill gave Hitler his answer:

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

What the Commonwealth of Nations achieved by refusing to surrender and battling back sewed the seed for liberty and justice to be enjoyed by billions of people for generations after. 

And a special debt is owned not just to the heroes from the British Isles and Commonwealth nations but to the heroic Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis and many others who fought for all our freedoms even though they would not gain their own full independence until years into the future. And also a great debt is owed to the French, Poles, Norwegians, Czechs and other Europeans whose nations had fallen under the yoke of totalitarian socialism but carried on the struggle by whatever means possible – and at great cost.

Peter Navarro hits Stephanopoulos curveballs out of the park

Peter Navarro hits Stephanopoulos curveballs out of the park 
Frank Miele, Heartland Diary

“Trade adviser” Peter Navarro gave one of the best performances ever by a senior Trump official during an ambush interview today. 

Appearing on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Navarro was textbook perfect in his ability to avoid being tripped up by the loaded questions thrown out by Stephanopoulos. 

From the first question, asked about Barack Obama’s latest attack on Trump, Navarro was ready for anything. 

 “I’m glad Mr. Obama has a new job as Joe Biden’s press secretary,” he started, getting in his zinger but then following it up with a cutting critique of Obama’s fake commencement address. “I note for the record in his speech that I read there was no mention of manufacturing, no mention of China. As far as I’m concerned, his administration was a kumbaya of incompetence in which we saw millions of manufacturing jobs go off to China. His new normal was a flatline in terms of wage growth, and I’m happy to report that this president, Donald J. Trump, in 3 1/2 years built the most beautiful economy in modern history, and the Chinese did take that down in about 30 days, but we are in the process right now of rebuilding that, and this president, Donald J. Trump, is the one who has the skills to do so. Because you know what George? What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go back to the future here. Buy American, deregulate and innovate. What do I mean by that? Bring jobs home. Make it here.” 

 Did you get all that? And that was just in the first minute. Navarro didn’t even break a sweat and you could sense Stephanopoulos wishing he had stayed in bed and let Martha Raddatz handle this interview! 

 If there was any doubt who was in charge of this interview, it evaporated when Stephanopoulos asked his gotcha follow up question:

 “You say the Chinese took down the American economy. So you’re saying they deliberately unleashed the COVID virus on the United States? You have any evidence of that?” 

 This is the typical Fake News trick of “interpreting” a response (i.e., lying about it) to try to get the guest to go down a rabbit hole. But Navarro was having none of it. 

 “I did not say they deliberately did it, but their China virus, let’s go over the facts here — correct me if I’m wrong: The virus was spawned in Wuhan province. Patient zero was in November. The Chinese, behind the shield of the World Health Organization, for two months hid the virus from the world, and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York, and around the world to seed that. 

 “They could have kept it in Wuhan. Instead, it became a pandemic. So, that’s why I say the Chinese did that to Americans and they are responsible. “Now, George, one other thing that I think is unconscionable about the Chinese behavior, as we speak, they signed a trade deal on January 15, and they promised not to steal our intellectual property, big part of that deal. 

 “Guess what? The FBI has now issued warnings that the Chinese government is hacking the intellectual property, so that they can steal vaccines for the world. And what would they do with it? It wouldn’t be a benign experience. They would use that vaccine to profiteer and hold the world hostage. 

 “So, yes, I do blame the Chinese. And it will be really interesting, George, as to how this election unfolds, because you have got Joe Biden, who has been a long friend of China, vs. President Trump… who is the only president who has ever stood up to China.”

 Question after question, Stephanopoulos looked for a chance to his Navarro with a haymaker, but Navarro sidestepped him on all his far-left propaganda and hit back hard with the facts. 

When Stephanopoulos quoted Joe Biden’s words against Trump for not standing up to China, Navarro turned it right back around against Biden:

 “Joe Biden’s has got 40 years of sucking up to the Chinese, including the eight years as vice president. And we know about the billion dollars that his son took from the Chinese.” 

 That of course raised a red flag for Democrat Stephanopoulos, who immediately tried to cover up the truth about the Biden family corruption. “That’s just not factual, sir. That is not a fact. He did not take a billion dollars from the Chinese.” 

 Oops, Navarro admitted. Yep, the billion dollars “Went into that hedge fund” run in part by Hunter Biden! Hit ’em where it hurts! 

 On every question, Navarro was prepared and knowledgeable. My favorite answer was his dismissal of fake whistleblower Rick Bright who said President Trump wasn’t doing enough to fight coronavirus. 

 “Here’s what happened with Rick Bright, and it’s an American tragedy, George. This guy is quite talented, but he was asked to be the field commander over at NIH to storm the testing hill with a billion dollars behind him. Instead of accepting that mission, he deserted. He went into a fox hole, wrote up the complaint. And now he’s part of a Capitol Hill partisan circus where he’s just become another pawn in the game. And the tragedy, George, is this man has talent. He’s a smart man. We could have used him on the battlefield. He’s not there now. And it was because of the decisions that he made.”

 Stephanopoulos tried to defend Bright, saying, “His expertise is vaccines. He wants to work in vaccine development. They’re putting him in diagnostic testing. Why shouldn’t a vaccine expert be working on vaccines?” Navarro hit this one out of the park! 

 “Here’s the thing, George, I was — I’ve been with the president since the campaign, right? I came here to do trade policy, right? What am I now? A conscript in the war on the China virus. I’m like a quartermaster and a shipping clerk half the time.

 “Do I complain? No. That’s my mission for this president, for this country. We do what we have to do when we have to do it for this country.

 “And Rick Bright, he made a choice. He could have been making a tremendous contribution over at NIH to testing and you and others have been complaining about testing. He could have been the field general. And now, he’s off the battlefield and it was by his own choice, sir.” 

 Bravo. 

 Everyone in the Trump administration should be provided with a copy of this interview and told to study it carefully. This was a master class in taking on the Fake News Media and turning their own questions against them.

Obamagate explained...

The Dems' least offensive candidate is still strangling them

The Dems' least offensive candidate is still strangling them

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Joe Biden is the apparent Democratic presidential nominee. After all, he had a seemingly insurmountable lead in delegates going into the rescheduled August convention in the postponed Democratic primary race.

Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment.

Biden was also not Michael Bloomberg. The multibillionaire former New York City mayor jumped into the race when Biden faltered and Sanders seemed unstoppable. But Bloomberg spent $1 billion only to confirm that he was haughty, a poor debater and an even worse campaigner. He often appeared to be an apologist for China and seemed clueless about the interior of the United States.

The least offensive candidate left standing was Biden. Many Democratic primary voters initially had written him off as an inept retread, a blowhard and an impediment to the leftward, identity-politics trajectory of the newly progressive Democratic party.

On the campaign trail, Biden insulted several voters, using insults such as "fat," "damn liar" and, weirdly, "lying dog-faced pony soldier."

Long ago he spun tall tales about how in his youth he had taken on a Delaware street gang with a 6-foot chain or slammed a bully's face into a store counter. More recently, he taunted President Trump with tough-guy boasts about taking him behind the proverbial gym and beating him up.

Biden has been unable to keep his hands off women. Even his supporters cringed when he was seen sniffing the hair, rubbing the shoulders or whispering into the ears of unsuspecting females, some of them minors. Stranger still, Biden waxed on about his commitment to the #MeToo movement. The handsy Biden has insisted that women who made accusations of sexual harassment must be believed.

The more House Democrats attacked Donald Trump for supposedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden's wheeler-dealer son Hunter, the more Biden's own suspect dealings with Ukraine surfaced. Such scrutiny followed from Biden's boast, caught on video, that he had leveraged Ukraine by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless a Ukrainian prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor had wanted to investigate the Ukrainian company for which Hunter Biden worked.

During the year-long rise, fall and rise of his campaign, the 77-year-old Biden often appeared confused. He was occasionally unable to remember names, places or dates. Biden would try to speak ex tempore but seemingly forget what he was trying to say.

The coronavirus epidemic and subsequent lockdown seemed to offer rest for Biden. But the more he recuperated from campaigning and sent out video communiques from his basement, the more he appeared to confirm that his problem was not simple exhaustion or age but real cognitive impairment.

With the Democratic nomination a lock, Biden assumed liberal reporters would allow him to campaign as a virtual candidate. They would forget his lapses and ignore prior controversies, including the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade, a former aide.

At first the media complied -- as it always had with Biden's troublesome habit of violating the personal space of women, his bizarre put-downs on the campaign trail, his exaggerated he-man stories, his mental lapses and his dealings with Ukraine. Again, to the Democratic establishment, Biden was far preferable to Sanders. Had the socialist Sanders won the nomination, he likely would have wrecked the Democratic Party in 2020.

But Biden misjudged the liberal media. Reporters were at first willing to overlook his liabilities. But the more Reade persisted in her accusations and the more the media ignored them, the more embarrassing the media's utter hypocrisy became. Journalists had torn apart Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations of sexual assault, after all.

So suddenly the press decided that Biden was no longer worth shielding. Yet the change of heart was not entirely for fear of appearing hypocritical. Rather, the media seems terrified of Biden's increasingly obvious cognitive decline.

In other words, the media was most certainly not going to be degraded on behalf of a nominee who may no longer seem viable.

In the three months before the Democratic National Convention, Americans will witness some of the strangest political scrambling in presidential campaign history. Simply put, how does the Democratic Party cut from its neck an albatross -- one who has the most delegates but is likely not up to serving as president?

And how to do the deed without inciting the moribund Sanders campaign and his army of Bernie bros?
A host of Democratic donors and operatives would like Biden to disappear, clearing the way for a replacement such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, failed 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton or former first lady Michelle Obama.

But even if Democrats know why Biden must go, they haven't a clue about when or how.

Joe Biden Is Cooked

Joe Biden Is Cooked

Apart from the accumulated limitations of the former vice president’s performance as a functioning candidate, there are other problems already clawing at him or waiting to pounce.

Conrad Black, American Greatness 

Despite polls showing that he leads President Trump in key states and in the country overall, there remains something seriously missing and not credible in the putative presidential nomination of Joe Biden.

The polls are never accurate with Trump, and there is both a reticence by his supporters to identify themselves and some sampling errors by the main polling organizations because of the unusually high numbers of people this president draws to the polls in his support who are not otherwise frequent voters. 

The real test of these matters is how the people vote, and the country saw Joe Biden come in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, and descend to 11 percent in that state’s Democratic primary. Generally, no candidate in either party is nominated who loses badly in New Hampshire.

It did not require a resurrected Alexis de Tocqueville to observe that Biden’s sudden emergence from punch-drunk Palooka on the ropes to the anointed nominee in two weeks was not entirely spontaneous. In a formidable display of professionalism, the Democratic Party elders carried him to the finish line on March 3, knocking Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren out of the race and obtaining endorsements of Biden from three of them.

With Bloomberg spending $937 million in a few months to collect just five delegates from American Samoa—the costliest pursuit of votes per capita in world history—there was no one else to snatch the nomination from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who would have lost all 50 states (but not the District of Columbia) to Trump with his Marxist nonsense.

Biden won most of the Super Tuesday primaries. Once reestablished as the Democrats’ leading candidate, he is now awash in the endorsements of the Obamas, Clintons, and Sanders himself. But this is still the same person who got 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire.

The putative nominee was just getting into high gear as a human gaffe machine when the coronavirus pandemic mercifully rescued him from much direct exposure to the public and confined him to a little podium in his basement in Delaware, from which he skypes a somewhat moderated number of malapropisms and amnesiac lapses to the Trump-hating media.

More Troubles for Biden Await

Apart from the accumulated limitations of his performance as a functioning candidate, there are other problems already clawing at him or waiting to pounce.

There is no reason to believe that the issue of his and his son’s involvement in questionable financial activities in Ukraine and China will not return. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has assured President Trump and his representative, Rudolph Giuliani, that he will look into the matter of Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas firm. The Bidens deserve the presumption of innocence but, to use the clichés of the public relations business, the optics and externalities are not great.

Special counsel John Durham will be along some time in the next few months with indictments (or not) in the origins of the fraudulent Trump-Russian collusion outrage. It was clear from the December report of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz that there were many illegalities and improprieties in the FISA aspect of the matter: internal espionage, conducted under the spurious rubric of a counterintelligence investigation against a major party nominee and then a president-elect. Ample evidence exists that Biden was present when these matters were discussed with President Obama. That doesn’t make Biden guilty of anything, of course. But if there is a slew of indictments over activities that he was aware of, it isn’t a great election year image-builder either.

And then there is the Tara Reade affair. This is a responsible, credible, stable person. A Democrat, whose friends say they remember how upset she was when she left the employ of then-Senator Biden in 1993 claiming she had been raped by him. This isn’t a dippy Blasey-Ford rerun with a pseudo-anonymous frequent flyer who hates flying and has no corroboration of any kind and who can’t remember where an incident stopping far short of rape 36 years before had occurred, as in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Nor is it a recording of an 11-year-old bawdy comment unconnected to any act or plaintiff, as with candidate Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape that almost killed his 2016 campaign. This is a real rape charge from a substantial person.

Reade’s is a serious allegation from a believable woman with some corroboration and a consistent story. Biden has avoided all comment, and the anti-Trump media with whom he converses from his virus-shelter basement haven’t got around to asking him about Reade (showing their customary no-holds-barred professional impartiality).

The Democrats embarked en bloc in the Kavanaugh nomination battle over two years ago on the credo “believe all women,” and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said that her former patron, President Bill Clinton, should have resigned because of his sexual advances on various women.

Of course, this is not a sustainable position and we can’t just take a woman’s word for the assertion that a sex crime was committed many years before because she says so. We have to end this practice of career destruction by mere denunciation. But this, too, could profoundly shake the Biden campaign, which has not been conducted to this point by a tidal wave of well-earned popularity.

Another Nominee Waiting in the Wings?

There is an aura of otherworldly unreality about the Biden candidacy: a man who got 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire is effectively the party’s nominee a month later, and takes to his basement to avoid exposure to the media while he and his backers ignore several impending problems, any one of which could blow up his candidacy. Yet there are polls from ostensibly serious polling organizations claiming if the election were held today, Biden would defeat the president.

I believe that all of these supplementary problems will blow up during the spring and early summer. At that point, Biden could do the honorable thing and stand aside and ask his delegates to support a more presentable candidate than himself, well to the right of Sanders. After such a shuffle, when the delegate selection was over and too late for Sanders to restart his campaign, someone like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo could be nominated.

There is some precedent in the Democratic Party for former unsuccessful contenders for the highest office effectively nominating more promising candidates.

In 1912, with the convention deadlocked between Missouri’s House speaker Beauchamp Champ Clark and New Jersey governor and former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson, three-time unsuccessful presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan threw his weight behind Wilson, who was nominated and elected (as the Republicans were split between President  Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt).

In 1932, legendary media magnate William Randolph Hearst, who had once entertained some political ambitions, permitted Franklin D. Roosevelt to be nominated by causing his own candidate, House Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas, to withdraw in Roosevelt’s favor, in exchange for the vice presidency (an office Garner memorably disparaged in scatological terms).

Unless Biden comes out of hiding and takes some serious positions and looks and sounds like a leader, and can neutralize the Ukrainian, Durham, and Reade issues, his utility will have been to deny the nomination to Sanders and keep the place warm for a more plausible candidate. Whatever some polls say, this candidate cannot defeat the incumbent, unless Trump takes complete leave of his senses and starts to live up to the Democrats’ hideous caricature of him as a monster who incarnates corruption and incompetence.

Journalists ~ Russia Collusion Hoax?

Journalists ~ Russia Collusion Hoax?

Should journalists who propagated the Russia collusion hoax be jailed?
John Hinderaker, Powerline 

Roger Simon asks that question. He rightly indicts the journalists who spread the idiotic lie that President Trump “colluded” with Putin’s Russia:

"A penalty of some kind, indeed a serious one, should certainly be levied for misinforming the public on the most important subject of our day, which has happened repeatedly over the last few years concerning the Russia probe. And when these prevarications can be shown to have been deliberate, to have been done knowingly, difficult as that may be to prove, the line to sedition may have been crossed and there is an argument the reporters involved should face legal consequences. They should also be fired.

Many of the major media organizations and their reporters lied about Russia collusion on a regular basis, even, in the cases of the New York Times and the Washington Post, winning Pulitzers for their deceptions.

This evolved out of what we might call a “systemic folie á deux,” a corrupt alliance between the (almost always anonymous) leaker with an ax to grind and the leakee (i. e. the reporter) who is all too eager to grind that ax. A search for the leakers, who are in legal jeopardy, is putatively underway by the DOJ, but, although it obviously takes two for this pernicious tango, the leakees seem bound to get off scot-free."

Unjust? Of course, it is. And not so deep down, the media outlets know this.

In the end, Roger isn’t serious about jailing journalists, much as they might deserve it. But I would add this observation: Why is it that journalists who lied about Russia collusion will no doubt “get off scot-free,” while proudly displaying Pulitzers on their mantels? Why is it that the media organizations that employ them and share their political biases feel no need to sanction them in any way, let alone fire them?

The answer, I think, has a lot to do with the virtual abolition of libel law in the political arena. In a sane legal environment, journalists who published lies about people like Carter Page, and even President Trump, would have to worry about legal liability and the humiliation that comes with an adverse jury verdict. More important, perhaps, their employers would have to worry about paying civil judgments.

But when it comes to defamation, we don’t have a sane legal environment. The U.S. Supreme Court has seen to that in a series of decisions that deserve to be controversial. Wherever you think the boundaries of defamation law should properly be drawn, I think it is almost indisputable that our current legal regime goes too far in immunizing reporters, editors, newspapers and cable news networks against the consequences of negligently or maliciously propagating career-destroying and life-destroying falsehoods about public figures and matters of public interest.

Maybe if President Trump gets another Supreme Court appointment our extremist defamation jurisprudence will be moderated so that there is at least a possibility of holding journalists accountable.

Maybe the Press Should be Quarantined

Maybe the Press Should be Quarantined 
Bill O'Reilly, billoreilly.com 

If you are observant during this time of national isolation, you can learn a lot about your country and, perhaps, yourself.  This is a once in a lifetime experience that will change many things in America; some for the better, some for the worse.

On display right before our eyes is the collapse of honest journalism.  This has been brewing for a while.  In fact, Ted Koppel believes that I, your humble correspondent, ignited the situation by injecting opinion into a prime time cable news program beginning way back in 1996.  Mr. Koppel said that to my face on The O’Reilly Factor.

But Ted ascribes far too much influence to me.  All I did was take the newspaper editorial pages and hone them on television. Nothing wrong with that.  Of course, the concept can be misused by dishonest people but that’s been going on since William Randolph Hearst.

What we are vividly experiencing now in America is a herd media mentality that is using the medical catastrophe to sell a narrative to the folks: the virus is largely Trump’s fault and voters must banish him come November.
My opinion is not stated to support or engender sympathy for President Trump. Americans have seen him talk about the pandemic for hours each week.  Surely, we the people can arrive at a conclusion about the President using our eyewitness capabilities.

But the actual news reporting on the government’s response to the virus is heavily skewed to make Mr. Trump look bad. The hostility of many in the White House press corps is stark and anyone who denies that is a deceiver.  Obviously, the animus directed at Mr. Trump by “objective” reporters violates every journalistic tenet. Reporters can and should ask the toughest questions they can formulate.  But they should not inject hostility into the query.

What is happening here is failure to communicate honestly, with apologies to Cool Hand Luke.  National news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, and CNN, among others, are all practicing “outcome journalism.”  These outfits do not demand their employees search for factual truth.  Instead, editors and TV executives want a clear outcome from the pandemic reporting.  And that is Trump must go. Therefore, almost every bit of the President’s virus response will be portrayed as wrong, stupid, or even lethal.

It should be noted that there are some pro-Trump expositions in the media, but the hate-Trump presentations heavily outnumber them.

Once a free society cannot get honest, objective information, it becomes less able to make responsible decisions.  That is absolutely happening right now in America. The relentless contagion of propaganda funded by massive media corporations has spread to every part of this country.

It is not an overstatement to say the press collapse is a virus that is harming us all.  And there’s no vaccine in sight.