“Today we are at a crossroads of history, our world is in upheaval.”

“This is not a clash of civilizations; it’s a clash between barbarism and civilizations, between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.”

“America and Israel must stand together. Because when we stand together something very simple happens: we win, they lose.”

“I want to thank President Trump for his leadership in brokering the historic Abraham Accords. Thank you President Trump for recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, for confronting Iran, for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the American embassy there”

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Many commentators are claiming that the near miss of the bullet intended to kill Donald Trump was an act of Divine protection. I think that they are selling God short.

As in the Bible, ever since his election in 2016, Trump has been subjected to the tribulations of Job. And, like Job, he has not been found wanting. President Trump was the victim of the Russia Hoax, the sham Mueller investigation, the fake impeachment over the Ukraine letter, the Big Lie that he instigated the January 6th riot (falsely termed an insurrection) the second fake impeachment based on that lie, the Stalinist show trial conducted by the partisan January 6th Committee, and an unending avalanche of the most vile media attacks on Trump and his family, several of which could be taken to be calls to do him harm.

Following his presidency and especially as he announced his candidacy for re-election, Trump became overnight the unprecedented object of a weaponized judicial system. Brought before the bar and charged with misuse of classified documents, election interference, business fraud, politicized hush money payments, and “rape” some 30 years after the alleged incident, Trump found himself in front of carefully selected anti-Trump judges in all cases but one, and twice found guilty in heavily anti-Trump districts. Objective legal scholars were virtually unanimous in the view that any convictions would be overturned on appeal. But the lengthy legal processes involved were also intended to prevent former President Trump from campaigning, to brand him a convicted felon at least during the campaign, and to either bankrupt him or force expenditure on lawyers of much of his campaign resources. Throughout, the media and Democrat propaganda diatribes against Trump escalated to the point where President Biden repeatedly called him “an existential threat to democracy” and urged that a “bullseye” be placed on him.

Tribulations of Job indeed!

Through all of this, Trump remained strong – strong in his faith in God and in his belief that he has been called upon to restore a better, fairer, and once again a Great America. And now God has reached out his Protective Hand to return to Trump and to the United States of America that which has been taken away.

Just in the last month or so:

The televised Trump/Biden debate exposed Biden’s dementia for all to see. Biden’s own adherents are urging him to abandon his candidacy, Dem donors are deserting the campaign. Dem senators and congressmen have surrendered the presidential race and seek to protect themselves, and his media prostitutes stumble back and forth between support and abandonment. Biden will remain the Democrat nominee for re-election, but only Republican overconfidence could enable him to win.

In the wake of the debate, Trump raised more money from more small contributors in a shorter time than any other presidential candidate in history.

The Supreme Court ruled that any president, including Donald Trump, has total immunity for all official acts performed while in office, thereby gutting many of the charges against Trump and virtually assuring that none of the remaining cases against him will come to trial until after the election. President Trump’s attorneys will appeal his New York conviction and all remaining federal charges based, among other issues, on this SC decision.

Despite incredible incompetence that enabled a rifle-bearing assassin to get within 130 yards of candidate Trump, the bullet merely grazed his ear. The resulting vast national outpouring of support solidifies Trump’s likelihood of re-election.

On the eve of the Republican Party convention, Florida judge Eileen Cannon dismissed the documents misuse and other charges before her on grounds that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith by Attorney General Garland was unconstitutional. Trump’s attorneys will cite this decision in calling for Washington Judge Chutkan to dismiss the charges brought before her, also by Jack Smith. Smith will appeal but the law seems to support the decision to dismiss.

As Trump received his nomination and chose the most solid of American achievers as his running mate, Elon Musk pledged donations of $45 million per month to the Trump re-election campaign, more than making up for the legal costs forced on President Trump by the Democrats.

The past month has truly been a divine wonderment of restoration for Trump and for America and a decisive blow to the forces of godless Marxism typified by the Biden regime and its supporters. A reversal this complete and this consistent cannot be a series of accidents, and indeed it was not. All that is good and pure in America, guided by the Judeo-Christian principles given to us by God and by the wisdom of our Founders, has risen. God and the Spirit of America, perhaps one and the same thing, have made Donald Trump the American Champion, the leader of the most powerful and complete People’s Movement in the history of the United States. Trump has been tried and has been found to be worthy. In the burning caldron of his trials, Donald Trump has been forged into the hardest steel. The American people will need his divinely-inspired strength, courage, patriotism and determination to Make American Great Once Again.

Stanley Escudero

July 14, 2024

The Lies We Have Lived Through

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” — Often attributed to Abraham Lincoln

By Victor Davis Hanson

July 1, 2024

After last Thursday’s debate, Biden himself laid to rest the Democratic lie that he was robust and in control of his faculties. In truth, he demonstrated to the nation that he is a sad, failing octogenarian who could not perform any job in America other than apparently the easy task of President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief in charge of our nuclear codes.

In 2019, Democratic primary candidates often hit rival Joe Biden for his apparent senior moments and incoherence. During the 2020 campaign, Biden often became in bizarre fashion animated and nasty (“you ain’t black”/“fat”/“lying dog-faced pony soldier”/“junkie”).

His “corn pop” stories were grotesque and had a senile accentuation of his earlier “super-predator” and “clean” black riffs. As president, his mental decline progressed geometrically, in the sense that every three months, Biden became far, far worse than during the prior 90 days. His handlers long ago had determined that masking his feebleness at the expense of the security and safety of the nation was a small price to pay to retain power.

What followed was the most comprehensive deceit in presidential history, analogous to insisting that frail and dying FDR in 1944 was just fine as the November election approached or that Woodrow Wilson was expertly running the country as he lay bedridden and near comatose.

Any who questioned the vigorous Biden narrative was trashed as “ageist.” Special counsel Robert Hur was dubbed a “hack” for accurately describing Biden as so amnesiac he would win nullification acquittal from a sympathetic jury.

An array of court sycophants periodically gave interviews, insisting that the robust Biden was smarter and wiser than ever. His press secretary, Karin Jean-Pierre, helped coin a new slur, “cheap fake,” for any who collated video and audio clips demonstrating that Biden was obviously non compos mentis. Would she say the same today after the about-face CNN panelists reviewed Biden’s serial debate lapses to support their now-opportune advocacy that he not run for reelection? Would she wish to be a passenger in a car driven by Biden?

In sum, the “dynamic Biden” farce was finally laid to rest by a debate, but not before it had served the original leftist Faustian bargain. Under the guise of COVID, an enfeebled and stationary Biden outsourced his entire 2020 campaign to toady journalists and surrogate politicians.

His task was to pose from his basement as the uniter, ‘good ol’ Joe from Scranton,’ serving as the pseudo-moderate veneer for the most far left agenda in recent history. In the bargain, Joe and Jill enjoyed the privileges of power and status, while they farmed out the presidency to an array of former Obama subordinates and the hard left of what is left of the old Democratic Party.

The useful lie continued throughout his presidency, escalating in direct proportion to Joe’s mounting stumbles, brain freezes, rambling, and incomprehensible speech. When our president said something either outrageous or unfathomable, the public was to assume that it was intemperate to attribute his failures to senility.

So, the nation became acculturated to deciphering about 60 percent of what he said and writing off the rest to his never-to-be-spoken-of disability. It was the cognitive bookend to the ruse that FDR was able to stand and walk—although far worse because being wheel-chair bound is not a limitation for a president, whereas cognitive incapacity of Biden’s magnitude most certainly is.

The Biden lie was the crown jewel of a number of other left-wing/media fabrications. The more they spread, the more they seemed absurd, and the more they were refuted—so all the more others took their place and the more their promulgators never apologized but simply moved on to their next one. The common denominator was that all the lies, during their existence, were useful to the progressive project.

The Russian collusion hoax helped lose Trump the 2016 popular vote. Its resumption during his presidency ate up 22 months of his administration during the Special Counsel Robert Mueller farce.

The October surprise laptop disinformation lie may have cost Trump the 2020 election. But it was concocted so that Joe Biden could stare at the debate camera and swear to the American people that Trump was a liar, citing “51 intelligence authorities” who insisted Hunter Biden’s laptop was a likely hallmark of Russian disinformation.

We were asked to believe that clever Russian disinformationists fabricated all the sick photos and selfies of poor Hunter, knew the Biden family’s intimate tensions and fault lines as evidenced in the computer’s texts and emails, and were able to package and deposit the computer to either a Russian operative masquerading as a computer repairment or have it delivered to the supposedly useful idiot. The truth was, the FBI had the laptop during the debate and had long verified its authenticity—and thus kept mum as its brethren intelligence apparatchiks lied to the nation.

What the untruth did not fully reveal was that Biden’s campaign foreign policy guru, Anthony Blinken (the current Secretary of State), cooked up the entire ruse. He enlisted former CIA grandee Mike Morell, who then rounded up on spec the confessed lying duo of John Brennan and James Clapper, who in turn drafted still more deceivers, among them the once esteemed Leon Panetta.

And the lie worked perfectly as envisioned, far better than even Russian “collusion.” The nation was deceived into believing that the “asset” Trump was reduced once again to colluding with Putin to enlist his former KGB soldiers to smear the upright Biden family and thus warp yet another election.

Note that all these lies were never retracted. No one ever apologizes. No one is ever punished, even when the lie is given under oath. No one ever has any regrets. And no one ever has any hesitation to lie again, given the utility of the prior untruth.

We were told by the deceitful Alejandro Mayorkas that the border was “secure” as he deliberately destroyed it and welcomed in over 10 million illegal aliens. That lie survived even the absurdity of years of nightly news clips (“cheap fakes?”) of thousands swarming an open border. And it died only when the 2024 election approached and the Biden administration read polls showing that a vast majority wanted the border closed and illegal entrants deported. Then suddenly, the lie that the border was secure transmogrified into the back-up lie that “Republicans would not help us close the now-insecure border.” Translated into Orwellian terms, the border that was crossed by 10 million was always secure but could have been made even more secure had Republicans joined Democrats to secure what was already “secure.”

We live in an era of lies. Sometimes they are purely political, like the Charlottesville “both sides” yarn. And sometimes they change history, like the fabrications that bats and pangolins, not the communist Chinese Wuhan virology lab, birthed the COVID-19 virus, or the Anthony Fauci contortion that his offices did not fund and help out, stealthily and in circumvention of U.S. law, deadly gain-of-function virology research in communist China.

Yet another lie was institutionalized: the January 6 riot was a full-fledged, carefully planned armed insurrection to overthrow the government. In contrast, the four months in 2020 of killing, assault, arson, and looting that saw over 35 dead, 1,500 injured law enforcement officers, $2 billion in damage, and a federal courthouse, a police precinct and a historic church torched were “cries of the heart” from the oppressed and victimized.

Those untruths ensured that hundreds of mostly naïve protestors who showed up in the capitol soon became convicted felons serving long sentences, while the 14,000 arrested for the 2020 mayhem were mostly released as overzealous but otherwise sympathetic activists.

These lies changed the course of the nation. They are birthed by the incestuous marriage of a Washington-New York political culture and a corrupt media.

The purveyors are Juvenal’s “who will police the police.” They are the administrative overseers in the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and the various cabinets and agencies. They feel they are exempt from any consequences for the damage they do, given that in their day jobs they operate as judges, jury and executioners.

Finally, while all governments lie, the left is far more adroit at it because, in their any-means-necessary/the-ends-justify-the-means credo, they spread supposedly good “lies” that stop the Hitlerian Trump, neuter the creepy deplorables/irredeemables/chumps/clingers or save the good people from the MAGA anti-vaxers and assorted yahoos.

Will the lies continue?

Indeed, they will thrive until the people slash the administrative state of its unaccountable and unelected “experts”; until they indict those in the future like Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, John Brennan and their brethren who lie under oath or to federal investigators; until they ostracize and utterly discredit those like Mayorkas, Fauci, and the Bidens whose deceptions took hostage an entire nation; and until they tune out a bankrupt media, the power cord of the entire Pravda enterprise.

“The split screen is killing Biden. Because he’s got his mouth open, he looks confused,

doesn’t know where he is. He’s lost his train of thought at least twice in disastrous shape.”

“This thing is over. He looks like he’s barely surviving.

I don’t mean the debate, I mean life.”

(Cenk Uygur, longtime host of far-left program “The Young Turks”)

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Lawfare Against Trump Is Running Out of Gas

Prosecutors are discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these proceedings, the more he rises in the polls.

By Victor Davis Hanson

January 15, 2024

We should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.

The prosecutors began accelerating their indictments only once Trump started to lead incumbent Joe Biden by sizable margins in head-to-head polls. Moreover, had Trump not run for the presidency, or had he been of the same party as most of the four prosecutors, he would have never been indicted by any of them.

Yet now they are in a doom loop of discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these star-chamber proceedings, the more he rises in the polls.

In truth, each succeeding cycle of corrupt leftwing lawfare that ends in failure—the Russian collusion hoax, the weaponized first impeachment, trying ex-president Trump in the Senate as a private citizen, the laptop disinformation set-up, the Alfa bank ping caper, the pathetic attempt to erase Trump from state ballots, and the unfolding Fani Willis moral debacle—does not return things to zero.

Rather, they serve as force multipliers for each other. Each overreach geometrically increases the dangers to democracy, ever more turns the public off, and ironically cascades sympathy and poll numbers for the very target of their paranoias.

Some of the prosecutors have colluded with White House lawyers and congressional liaisons. Some had run for office, offering campaign promises to get Trump convicted for something or other.

Now, after years of delays and deadends, all four are rushing to synchronize their trial dates to ensure that the front-running Trump is on the docket daily and not out on the 2024 campaign trail.

Do we recall when leftist legal eagles claimed that of all the iffy Trump indictments, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had the best case against Trump?

The phone call, we were told, was proof of “election interference.” It was Willis who got the first Trump “mug shot.” It was Willis, we were assured, who got Trump with the goods on tape, begging election officials to “find” the requisite missing votes that would prove his victory (note that he did not say “invent” the votes but to look for a supposedly existing trove of them).

And now Willis’s signature case is in shambles.

We learn, allegedly, that 1) Willis hired her stealth boyfriend Nathan Wade as a special counsel, the day before he filed for divorce (whose records were then mysteriously sealed by the court); 2) that Wade so far has received over $650,000 as special counsel, reportedly including a miraculous ability to charge for 24 hours of continuous legal service in a single day; 3) that Willis and Wade allegedly have used her greenlighted windfall to him to go on a number of pricey junkets and cruises; 4) that to try an ex-president and the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election, Willis picked Wade who had never tried a single felony case and was previously a “personal injury/accident” lawyer; 5) that the supposedly apolitical Willis had consulted with the January 6 partisan congressional special committee, while Wade had met for marathon meetings with the Biden White House legal counsel (and apparently billed Georgia taxpayers for receiving such federal tutorials).

The legal community’s initial dismissal of this sordid prosecutor’s office is reminiscent of the immediate efforts to downplay Claudine Gay’s plagiarism. But the charade will eventually end the same way, in this case with the resignation and likely indictment of the prosecutor, along with her boyfriend, who concocted quite a scheme at the expense of the taxpayers. Both have made a mockery of their indictment of an ex-president and, if the allegations are true, will be disbarred and prosecuted.

The other three indictments are even weaker. Alvin Bragg claims that Donald Trump’s efforts a near decade ago to enact nondisclosure agreements and payments to remain silent about embarrassing behavior constituted “campaign finance violations.”

If so, what then defines campaign violations when Ms. Clinton brazenly destroyed nearly 30,000 subpoenaed campaign-era emails, ordered subpoenaed communication devices smashed, illegally hired a foreign national to find dirt on a campaign rival, and used three paywalls to hide her hush payments to British subject Steele to concoct a smear dossier—with help from Russian sources—to destroy her 2016 rival?

Letitia James, apparently for the first time in New York history, believes a bank was somehow wronged when its seasoned auditors viewed Trump’s assets, approved a loan to him, profited from his timely payments of interest and principles, and lodged no complaints against Trump or his company.

James apparently believes that Donald Trump is the first and most egregious real estate baron in New York history who inflated the value of his holdings. Her indictments thus supposedly have nothing to do with a left-wing political activist who ran for attorney general on promises to get Trump.

As far as Jack Smith, he supposedly was to be focused on Trump’s removal of classified presidential files to an insecure location at his Mar-a-Lago home and Trump’s “insurrectionary” actions on January 6. But he seems way beyond that now and is trying to put a gag order on the presidential frontrunner and to ensure Trump is in court during the 2024 campaign—challenging the very administration that appointed Smith in the first place.

In truth, Trump was the first ex-president in history to be indicted for a dispute with archivists over the status and security of removed classified files. Such disagreements were historically adjudicated bureaucratically rather than criminally, and certainly not with performance-art FBI swat raids into an ex-presidential residence.

Moreover, true insurrectionists do not instruct protestors to assemble peacefully and patriotically. Insurrectionists themselves do not try to overthrow governments while unarmed and accompanied by bare-chested buffoons with cow horns and slow-moving septuagenarians draped in American flags. And during an “insurrection,” unarmed “rebels” are usually not invited into the government quarters by supposed government doormen, among them perhaps 150-200 FBI informants. They are usually not shot and killed for the crime of entering a broken window while unarmed. And governments need not lie about the violence of insurrectionaries if they are truly insurrectionists.

Jack Smith’s problem—aside from his similar previous effort as special counsel to bankrupt and destroy the life and career of former Virginia governor Bob McDonald, a conviction overturned 9-0 by the Supreme Court—is that his indictments are so asymmetrical as to be surreal.

If the Department of Justice really wishes to prosecute insurrection, then it should concentrate on 120 days of arson, looting, killing, and violent protests that destroyed $2 billion in property, led to over 35 deaths, injured 1,500 law enforcement officers, and saw a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic church torched by protestors, months of violent chaos planned and orchestrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and enabled by leftwing inert mayors and governors.

The future Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, sought to organize bail for violent rioters. She boasted on television that the protests would not stop, should not stop, and would continue beyond the 2020 elections. Could she have at least suggested to the rioters to protest “peacefully and patriotically?” And just last week, President Biden praised that months-long violent summer of looting, violence, arson, and destruction, calling it “the historic movement for justice in the summer of 2020.”

Or Smith could investigate the well-orchestrated and increasingly violent pro-Hamas rallies. These are “insurrections” that have stormed the California legislature, occupied the Capitol rotunda, defaced and defiled iconic federal monuments and cemeteries, shut down key bridges and freeways, attacked law enforcement, and led to violence and assaults.

If Trump is guilty of removing files that he had the statutory right as president to formally declassify, then what was senator and subsequent Vice President Joe Biden guilty of when he stealthily and unlawfully removed hundreds of files, kept the removals secret (until his administration went after Trump for the same offense), and sloppily stored them in his insecure garage?

At each juncture of these extra-legal efforts, past precedents, former customs, and accepted traditions are being destroyed by the Left, whose endless miscarriages of justice are the real threats to constitutional government. And the more impotent these serial and unending gambits become, the more strident and desperate they appear.

TRUMP WINS BIG

IN IOWA CAUCUS

Jan. 15, 2024 — Donald Trump has won a landslide election in the Iowa caucus – the first race of the 2024 Republican primary. The former President took an overwhelming victory against his competitors Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, leaving them in his wake and winning by 30 percentage points.

Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

The remedies are agreed upon, but the needed medicine is feared more than the disease. Because today, the government is the cause of our many crises.

By Victor Davis Hanson

April 16, 2023

Twenty-first-century America was on a trajectory of gradual decline—until it began to implode.

Was the accelerant the COVID-19 pandemic and unhinged lockdowns? Or was the catalyst the woke revolution fueled by the 2020 summer of exempted rioting, looting, arson, and violence? Or was it perhaps the deranged fixation on removing Donald Trump from the presidency and destroying the rule of law in the process? Or all that and more? 

Now with the election of Joe Biden, what had been a fast-tracked decline has accelerated at such an astonishing rate we can scarcely recognize our country.

Our largest cities are becoming uninhabitable—dilapidated, dangerous, and dysfunctional. The challenge is not just rampant crime, but the realization that if you, the citizen, are stabbed, shot, or beaten up on the street, the perpetrators may well be exempt from most punishments. And the victim either will be forgotten in his misery or, indeed, blamed for bringing such violence upon himself.

Urban schools are not places of instruction anymore. That fact is accepted by teachers’ unions, whose operative principle seems to be that the more hopeless the idea of educating urban youth is understood to be, the less burdensome the workload, and the greater their hazardous duty pay.

Urban chain stores are closing down on the principle that if police cannot or will not stop consumer violence and theft, then consumers there should not have any store to buy anything, anyway. If there is no store, how can it be looted or shop-lifted?

The only mystery remaining is how long these Democrat-controlled, racially charged, and corrupt municipalities can sustain their budgets and pension commitments with increasingly declining revenue. One can tax the well off, and perhaps even gouge them as California does. But one cannot insult and ridicule them in the process. Being highly taxed is one thing, being highly taxed while hated is quite another.

How eerie that medievalism—defecting, urinating, fornicating, injecting in the street—is relabeled “homelessness—as if the problem is merely a shortage of apartments or tent cities. Somehow cities developed the notion that it was crueler to be told not to pull down one’s pants and defecate in the street than it was for a pedestrian to step into infectious human excrement.

In the next five years, either cities will seek new governance to reduce taxes, break up municipal unions, mandate charter schools, restore police funding and manpower, recalibrate pensions, and prosecute criminals and corrupt officials—or Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and a score of others will become Detroit.

One of the strangest phenomena amid our current debility are the millions of affluent leftists and liberals who have fled their unworkable, now unlivable blue-run, but naturally beautiful cities like San Francisco or Portland. They seem to lack an abstract recognition why they are leaving, or why and how their new chosen destinations are so different and therefore so inviting to them. Is their motto, “I am fleeing what I created, but I still hate those who created what I want”?

To have a “border problem,” one must have a border. The United States has no southern border.

Upwards of 7 million illegal entries since the Biden inauguration are proof enough of that tragedy. Mexico brags that 40 million have come into the United States. It urges them to vote Democratic. And it relies on still more illegal entries to ensure yearly increases in its current $60 billion in remittance income sent from its expatriates in the United States. The donors apparently grow fonder of Mexico—the more they are safely distant from it.

America could close the border tomorrow and actually “make Mexico pay for the wall” by simply slapping a 10 percent export tax on all remittances sent to Mexico. Or we could make it illegal to send money out of the country if one is receiving federal subsidies and aid. Or we could fine employers for hiring those who are here illegally. Or, as a deterrent to future illegal entries, we could immediately deport all who illegally entered and reside in the United States—if they came within the last five years, or if they have a criminal record, or if they are not working and are on public assistance.

The result would not just be a restoration of American sovereignty, and decline in spiraling social service costs. There would follow better relations with Latin America and Mexico. Both treat us with contempt as a hectoring weakling because, unlike themselves, we do not believe in our own physical space, our own borders, and our freedom to do as we please rather than what others tell us to do.

Abroad, our allies and neutrals are distancing themselves from America—France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India, Turkey, South Korea—on the Ukraine War, China, the dollar as the global currency, and our popular culture.

Why? Our increasingly former friends conclude it is now dangerous to ally openly with the United States and for a variety of reasons:

1) They see the once indomitable United States as weak—as a possible liability rather than an asset. After China’s balloon surveillances, the Afghanistan flight, the inability to achieve strategic victory after intervening in Iraq and Libya, the current embarrassing Pentagon leak, the Anchorage mini-summit, the woke obsessions in the U.S. military, and the inability to ensure its military is well-staffed, apolitical, and equipped with the world’s most plentiful and cutting-edge weaponry, allies assume that the United States will not necessarily win any intervention it undertakes but may well drag them down with it.

2) The United States may suddenly turn on an ally, demonize it, and refuse to meet with its leaders, as Biden gratuitously maligned Saudi Arabia and Israel.

3) America asks allies to join its cause of the day regardless of whether it is in those nations’ own interest. So South Korea, Japan, India, or Egypt do not believe boycotting Russian oil or openly selling Ukraine weapons is necessarily in their interests. 

4) Our woke revolution is so volatile, irrational, and unpredictable that allies never know when they will be accused of being homophobic, transphobic, racist, or sexist and treated accordingly—or whether the United States will be eternally crippled by internal woke dissension and civil unrest.

5) The allies do not believe the United States can keep secrets, especially after the latest leak. From the Dobbs draft leak and the Comey leak of a confidential conversation with President Trump to the Vindman-Ciaramella-Schiff impeachment psychodrama leaks to Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, leakers and “whistleblowers” feel there are few consequences to leaking classified information (unless it is embarrassing to leftist administrations), or indeed leaking to the media to overturn institutions and presidencies.

America must reform the entire Pentagon process of spending and appropriations. It must end woke and identity politics, ideological indoctrination, and return to a meritocracy. It should prohibit retiring generals and admirals from revolving into defense contractor boards and lobbyists. It should finally enforce the Uniform Code of Military Justice that prohibits active and retired high-ranking officers from publicly attacking their current commander-in-chief. It should charge leakers with felonies and prosecute perjury. Had the government done that with Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Comey, and James Clapper the accruing deterrence would have discouraged others with lower profiles. 

Biden is on schedule to run up a $2 trillion annual deficit, adhering to the Bush, Obama, and Trump legacy of unfettered spending. In Biden’s case, he insanely printed over $4 trillion at a time when labor participation rates were already in decline, COVID-suppressed demand was returning, and transportation and production interruptions were reducing supply. He raised taxes, increased regulations, cut projected increases in gas and oil production, and canceled energy projects. The result was the highest inflation in 40 years, near-record energy costs, soaring interest rates, the largest modern percentage of debt to GDP at 130 percent, the greatest debt in our history at $33 trillion, and stagnant GDP. All that and more prompt the current Chinese-led effort to dethrone the dollar as the world’s currency. 

The remedies are agreed upon, but the needed medicine is feared more than the disease. Our elected leaders know we must, but never even attempt to, cut spending, reduce the size of the federal government radically, simplify the tax code and reduce taxes, deregulate, recalibrate Medicare and Social Security, develop our mineral, gas, and oil resources, and require labor participation for able-bodied entitlement recipients.

Never have Americans spent more on K-12 and higher education and never have they received less in return. The education industry is woke and nonmeritocratic. Research is diverted, sidetracked, and polluted by ideological commissars, endangering the U.S. lead in science, math, engineering, and the professions. Even scientists have become deductive, starting out with a preconceived woke conclusion they feel will win influence, grants, and notoriety and then scrambling to warp evidence to fit it.

The solutions are straightforward. Tax university endowment income—and lots of superfluous and harmful programs will vanish. 

Stop federal student loan guarantees, and soaring tuition and room-and-board costs will decline to the annual rate of inflation once universities must guarantee their own student loans. 

Require universities that receive federal funds of any sort to honor existing laws from the Bill of Rights to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That would end segregated dorms and graduations. The next time administrators at Stanford or San Francisco State either aid or ignore student efforts to shout down or disrupt speakers and suppress free expression, their institutions should quickly be fined by the U.S. government or have their federal funding yanked.

If SAT and ACT entrance tests are being abolished, then they could be rebooted as exit tests required for a bachelor’s degree analogous to a bar exam. With such minimum standards, we might ascertain what, if anything, students had learned upon graduation. College graduates should be able to choose between an academic master’s degree or the school of education credential to teach K-12. Most would flee the latter option. Right-to-teach laws and the end to mandatory teacher union dues, along with the end of tenure and its replacement by five-year contracts with required minimum standards of achievement, would all bring some accountability to what is now an entirely unaccountable profession.

Race is no longer an accurate barometer of either victimhood or legitimate grievance. If “affirmative” action were to continue, it should be based entirely on class considerations, not the current system of Elizabeth Warrenesque fakery or delusions that the elite children of Eric Holder, the Obamas, the Duchess of Sussex, or LeBron James are in some need of compensatory privilege for college admissions, appointments, or hiring.

Because America is now multiracial, with untold ethnic and racial agendas, and countless and contorted collective grievances, it is impossible to sort out victimizers and victims. Junk the entire illiberal and patently illegal system of racial discrimination, and there would be an organic return to merit, and with it, race would become incidental, not essential to American identities. After 1964, it seems Orwellian that liberal institutions could continue to assign dorms by race, segregate graduations, and impose racial requisites to participate in special programs.

America’s former strength—the most transparent, accurate, and trustworthy elections in the world—have descended into its greatest liability. In the space of a mere eight years, and especially in reaction to radical political changes made under the cover of the COVID lockdown, we have gone from 70 percent of the electorate in most states voting on election day to a mere 30 percent. Yet the ballot rejection rate somehow diminished, with the flood of non-Election-Day ballots that overwhelmed accustomed audit and verification.

Election night is a mere construct. It is mostly meaningless. Local, state, and federal election results are stalled and descend into days, weeks, and sometimes even months of bickering, counter charges of ballot tampering and fraud, ballot harvesting and curing, and a loss of confidence in the integrity of the final result. Debates mean little anymore, once a large portion of the electorate has already voted. No wonder deceased candidates can win. Gaffes are now determined by whether they occur before or after the majority of voters has cast their ballots. 

There should be a national uniform standard that allows states to set their ballot procedures—as long as they result in 70 percent of the electorate voting in person on election day. 

America is in a similar position to where it was in 1861, 1929, 1941, and 1968—only perhaps worse, given in all those cases, there was at least a president and Congress that identified and reacted to the crisis, whereas today our elected government is what caused the crisis.

“We’re Looking at Something Very Different – The Press Being Part of the Intelligence Community” – Lee Smith Describes the Latest Role of the Fake News (VIDEO)

By Jim Hoft
Published October 23, 2022 at 3:15pm

Author and investigative journalist Lee Smith explained the dangerous development inside our national media.

According to Lee Smith, and what appears to be quite evident, the American mainstream media is now part of the intelligence community. This was proven time and time again during the Trump years.

The purpose of today’s mainstream press is not to inform, but to move the masses in the direction designated by the intelligence community.

There are several examples of this:

** The Trump-Russia dossier
** The Trump peepee tapes
** The Alfa Bank lies
** Hunter Biden’s laptop of family crimes
** Joe Biden’s sniffing and rubbing
** Joe Biden’s clear dementia
** Elections are secure
** Vaccines are safe
** Vaccines stop the spread
** The COVID-19 virus was from a wet market
** Trump organized an insurrection

In each of these instances, the intel community along with Democrat leaders led the mainstream media to lie to the American public either by planting false information or by ignoring stories that harmed their cause.

Lee Smith: The important point and I emphasize this every time I speak to people about this issue is this. It’s not that the press is lazy. It’s not that the press is ignorant. The press is the outward face of the national security apparatus right now. This didn’t always use to be the case. We’re all familiar with the fact that the press has historically leaned to the left. That’s not what we’re looking at now. We’re looking at something very, very different. We’re looking at the press being a part of the intelligence community.

They’re the ones who are putting these operations out there. Whether we’re looking at the media’s effort to hide Hunter Biden’s laptop. Remember what happened here? We had the 50 plus intelligence officials saying, “Oh, that’s Russian disinformation.” That’s pushed into places like The New York Times and CNN. And how all of these outfits including social media are preventing this real news from getting out there. When the New York Post published it, they blocked it. They threw the New York Post’s account off of Twitter. So again as we move forward this is the fundamental thing to understand.

This is also why the intelligence community uses many of the same far-left reporters to spread their lies, time after time.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

“The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war” . Douglas MacArthur

Memorial Day isa day of remembrance. It was commemorated at first to honor the Union dead of the Civil War and was originally proclaimed Decoration Day on May 30, 1868. Decoration Day officially became Memorial Day in 1967. Solemn respect for those who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to the United States of America.

War in Afghanistan – 2,448 American military war dead

Iraq War – 4,486 American military war dead

Korean War Memorial – Washington DC . 54,246 American military war dead

Vietnam Memorial Wall – Washington DC . 58,220 American military war dead

The American Cemetery at Brittany, France …4.410 American military war dead . ..   . Cambridge , England … 3.812 American military war dead . .   . Epinal , France – American Cemetery … 5.525 American military war dead . .   . Henri-Chapelle , Belgium … 7.992 American military war dead . . . Luxembourg American Cemetery , Luxembourg … 5.076 American military war dead . . . Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Italy . 7,858 graves of American military war dead . . Meuse-Argonne, France … 14.246 American military war dead   . Netherlands American Cemetery , Netherlands … 8301 American military war dead . . Oise-Aisne , France … 6.012 American military war dead .   . Rhone , France … 861 American military war dead . . Sicily , Italy … 7.861 American military war dead . . St. Mihiel , France … 4.153 American military war dead

World War 1 – 53,402 American military dead

“Why They Can’t Make Trump Go Away“

Post-mortem of a failed hit. 

By Edward J. Erler

February 25, 2022

In the election of 2016, Donald Trump appealed to citizenship, sovereignty, and borders. This was a direct entreaty to the people as the ultimate source of sovereign authority, bypassing the ruling-class elites that dominate the media and the universities; his appeal also ignored political experts, pollsters, and government bureaucracy. In the postmodern world, the nation-state is under attack everywhere as the source of all evil, the cause of war, selfishness, racism, white privilege, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and all the other irrational phobias that make up the universe of political correctness. The idea of the nation-state itself is said to be irrational and arbitrary. 

All of this overwrought criticism of nationalism and the nation-state overlooks a very significant point developed in my new book, The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State: the nation-state is the only form of political organization that can sustain constitutional government and the rule of law. 

No empire has ever been a constitutional democracy or republic, nor will constitutional government exist in global government. If, as is widely alleged, the dialectic of History is inevitably tending toward global governance and universal citizenship, then it is also tending toward tyranny. 

The universal homogeneous state will not be a constitutional government based on the consent of the governed; it will be an administrative tyranny based on the rule of scientific experts. Science, not the consent of the governed, will be the basis for rule. There will be no citizens in this universal state; there will only be clients of the administrative state. We see clearly a presage of the future of the world in today’s United States, where administration has replaced politics and the Constitution. 

In that sense, Trump’s victory in 2016 was a defeat of the Washington establishment, including the leadership of both the Democrats and Republicans. His unexpected victory did not go unchallenged. The legitimacy of his election was questioned before Inauguration Day 2017 and talk of impeachment began almost immediately. The Washington establishment doesn’t take defeat lightly. 

Both Republicans and Democrats had a large stake in defending their entrenched privileges. The shared interest in maintaining those privileges for the most part transcended party differences. The Russia collusion conspiracy began almost immediately and was given life by the appointment of a special counsel. After a lengthy and costly—not to say highly partisan—investigation, the conspiracy was revealed to be a hoax manufactured in a frantic defense of the old order. 

What was most shocking about the allegations of Russian interference in the election of 2016, still vociferously maintained by Hillary Clinton and her co-conspirators in the Congress and the media, was the extent to which the intelligence agencies and the FBI were involved in actively abetting the conspiracy. President Trump was cleared by the investigation, however grudgingly, though denialists and dead-enders in both parties continue to maintain his guilt.

The First Impeachment of President Trump

An otherwise unremarkable phone call between President Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, then the newly-elected President of Ukraine, on July 25, 2019, mischaracterized and sensationalized by a national security officer, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (himself a naturalized American citizen born in Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet Union), was the event that finally led to the thinnest pretext for impeachment. The House voted for a bill of impeachment on December 18, 2019, charging the president with “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress” resulting from the phone call. 

Although Zelensky himself reported that Trump made no demands or attempts to exert improper influence on him, and it is clear that Trump had asked him to cooperate in an investigation that was being conducted independently by the Justice Department which, by all accounts, was a proper request, none of this mattered to Democrats. After all, it was well known from a widely circulated video that Vice President Biden, while still in office, had bragged about asserting his influence to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired for coming uncomfortably close to his son Hunter’s financial dealings in the country. So the dogs had to be thrown off the scent.

It is routine, not to say monotonous, to hear Democratic politicians and members of the media claim that Trump was requesting Zelensky to “dig up dirt” on a potential presidential rival. But an abundance of “dirt” had already been exposed about Hunter’s financial dealings, and a host of other unsavory political and non-political habits were eventually revealed in his laptops. Those laptops apparently were voluntarily handed over to a computer repairman who notified the FBI. There was thus no need to ask Zelensky to dig up “dirt.” What was really needed was a way for the media, with the cooperation of Big Tech, to conceal the “dirt” that had already been “dug up.” 

The concealment was a great success; the voting public, by and large, remained unaware. In some quarters, when the information began to leak out—mostly after the election—it was ascribed to “Russian disinformation,” and painted as an effort to help Trump win the election. In fact, it was electoral interference on the part of the media and Big Tech, suppressing relevant information that surely would have helped Trump’s election. Even at the late date when most of the information became known—not only about Hunter’s corrupt dealings in the Ukraine, China and Russia, but his father’s knowledge and complicity in these dealings—the suppression of the truth by the media and Big Tech prevented a free and fair election and was therefore illegal election interference. 

Revelations about the call originated with an anonymous “whistleblower” who possessed only hearsay evidence, and almost certainly was Vindman himself. The establishment members of the State Department and security agencies, of course, could only allege that President Trump had deviated from the ordinary “norms” of conducting foreign policy. They were anxious to defend their entrenched bureaucratic prerogatives from an innovator who had a different vision of how to represent America’s interests abroad. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy was decidedly not the view of the Washington foreign policy establishment. Perhaps impeachment would signal to the international community that the old world of multilateralism was still alive in the Washington establishment, and that “America First” was just a passing fancy, supported by the American people perhaps, but rejected by the foreign policy elites. Impeachment might serve to chastise the president and show that members of the deep state—even those appointed by the elected chief executive—were willing to defy his leadership by invoking their elite policy experience. A Senate conviction, however unlikely given the requirement of a two-thirds vote, would be a show of strength. 

The ensuing Senate impeachment trial presented high comedy on the part of the Democrats. They were unable to present any evidence of an impeachable offense. There was no evidence presented of any abuse of power beyond the president’s legitimate assertion of himself as the chief foreign policy officer of the United States. The members of the deep state foreign policy and security establishment simply resisted Trump’s attempt to occupy his proper constitutional role. To the deep state this was indeed an “abuse” of presidential power. The House managers’ presentation of their case against the president was a comedy worthy of Aristophanes: the representatives of the Washington establishment claimed they were acting to protect democracy against a president who was challenging the hegemony of the Washington oligarchy. The Senate trial, perhaps more precisely, was a farce masquerading as comedy. 

 “Territorial Integrity” for Ukraine, Open Borders for the United States 

Anxious to eliminate any vestiges of Trump’s foreign policy, Joe Biden moved quickly to stop putting America first. Biden has meekly restored the multilateralism demanded by the foreign policy elites who opposed Trump. The multilateral alliance has warned Putin that any advances on the territorial integrity of Ukraine will trigger severe consequences: economic sanctions, international condemnations, but probably not the promised membership in NATO that Ukraine desires and that Russia opposes. The Biden Administration blusters that “all options are on the table.” But the real conundrum is the fact that the Biden Administration is willing to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine while deliberately destroying the integrity of the border of the United States for political purposes. The Trump Administration had effectively secured the southern border and had made significant progress in solving the illegal immigration problem. Open borders, however, became the priority of the Biden Administration. Bidenissued open invitations to foreigners and soon his intentions were revealed to be perhaps the most cynical and politically destructive ever adopted in American history. The new White House policy intends nothing less than to encourage and subsidize massive illegal immigration and use government resources to settle them in politically strategic districts that would benefit the Democratic Party in future elections. 

Many reports have surfaced about late-night flights moving newly arrived illegal immigrants to swing districts for resettlement. They arrive without advance notice to local or state authorities, who are expected to accommodate them. These illegal immigrants will no doubt be expected to express their gratitude to the Democratic Party for the extraordinary efforts it made, however illegally, to accommodate them as future voters. Efforts are already underway to make it possible for aliens—legal and illegal—to vote. And, it must be noted, there are no constitutional barriers for states to make aliens eligible to vote, and voters in the states eligible to vote for members of the most numerous branch of the legislature of the state are eligible to vote for members of Congress. All of the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. It is only a question of whether the Biden Administration will last long enough to assemble all the pieces. It is no mystery what the finished puzzle will look like. 

Meanwhile, Biden and his minions in the CDC seem unconcerned by the fact that the hordes permitted to stream illegally through the open border are unvaccinated and untested for COVID. The COVID mandates seem to be ignored or enforced depending on what is politically advantageous to the regime. Thus, COVID is not so much a health issue as it is a political issue. When it involves illegal immigrants intended to become future voters in the Democratic Party, enforcement is lax or nonexistent; but for American citizens enforcement is draconian, heavy-handed, and arbitrary—i.e., typical of the administrative state. 

Perhaps the most important factor in the 2020 election was how the Wuhan virus provided an unexpected political weapon for the Democratic Party and the entrenched oligarchy, not only to consolidate its power but to terrorize the public into accepting oppressive government regulations that may extend into the indefinite future. Some of the regulations have been exercises in raw power, having little or no rational basis and little effect on curbing the pandemic.

Most telling, however, is the fact that the pandemic has resulted in the greatest transfer of wealth in history from the lower and middle classes to the wealthy and corporate classes. It is difficult to say whether the pandemic was an accident or not, but the massive transfer of wealth was certainly no accident. It was the beginning of the end of President Trump’s attempt to survive the all-out assault mounted against him by the combined forces of the oligarchy. 

Without the pandemic, Trump, in all probability, would have won reelection, and would have been better positioned to deal directly with the minions of the deep state—the self-appointed masters of the universe and those who support them. The Biden Administration will preside over the amalgamation of government and the masters of the universe. These would-be masters already control much of the government even as the government deludes itself into believing that it controls and regulates the masters. What is at stake, however, is the globalization of elite rule. The masters don’t want to rule only America; they easily overcame Trump and his anachronistic idea of the sovereign nation-state and America first. The real object is to establish the global elite ruling class. And here China is the key. China has a growing economy, the cheapest and most compliant labor pool, and does not have America’s quaint commitment to republicanism and the consent of the governed.

How America Became an Oligarchy

What was revealed in these events was the extent to which American democracy had in fact transmogrified into oligarchy. An alliance of corporate elites and the Washington establishment had been developing since World War II. Washington has long been in the business of “picking winners and losers” in the corporate world and market success has been increasingly dependent upon government access and government largess. In recent years, the most important alliances have been between government and Big Tech. The wealthy elites in the corporate world and the world of Big Tech have formed an open alliance with the Washington establishment to complete the transformation of American democracy. This is a deadly combination—and it is easy to recognize for anyone who is willing to look. 

The American regime still retains the form of a republic, but its substance has been transformed into an oligarchy, the rule of the few for the benefit of the few. Politicians of both parties, but most strikingly Republicans, have found it easy to ignore or evade promises made to constituents. It is necessary for politicians in an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy to speak the language of the people and express interest in their concerns, whether they consider those concerns real or imagined. In a representative democracy where the news cycle is short and panders to the sensational, it is easy for politicians to “talk the talk,” but delay or obfuscate the “walk,” counting on the people’s short attention span. 

The Tea Party movement, for example, raised populist concerns that could not be easily ignored, but the movement was eventually quelled by extravagant promises of reform in taxation and immigration. Almost everyone seemed to realize that the promises were insincere—the old “Washington shuffle.” There were many excuses, but there was never any intention of keeping those promises when they harmed the interests of the establishment, as all the demands of the Tea Party did. The Obama Administration, however, did take the Tea Party seriously and worked assiduously behind the scenes, using well-timed audits of donors, delays for approvals of tax-exempt status for Tea Party groups, leaks by IRS employees of the names of Tea Party donors, and other dirty tricks to delay and disable the movement. 

The Tea Party was shrewdly taken out of play by these tactics in Obama’s reelection in 2012. The Republicans, on the other hand, and the representatives of the oligarchic elites paid little attention to those whom Hillary Clinton called the “deplorables.” Trump, however, demonstrated that the memory of the people was not as fragile as the ruling elites thought. 

Why would Trump betray his own class—the oligarchy? Self-interest is not always the dominant motivating force in some men—sometimes an instinct for justice prevails or sometimes a reputation for justice might be a primary self-interest. But it took an oligarch—an insider and a traitor to his class—to make plain that the American regime had become an unjust oligarchy. 

His class reacted to his effrontery with deadly purpose. How dare he take the side of the people! How dare he invoke justice! The elites, in and out of government, mobilized against him with resources that no individual could match. In the 2016 presidential election, Trump dominated the media because he was newsworthy. He received free coverage, much of it live, where he could speak directly to the people. He also had free access to Twitter and Facebook which allowed him to bypass the mainstream media. In the 2020 campaign, the masters of the universe and the mainstream media would continue their opposition but with greater boldness and recklessness, simply printing rumors and outright fiction as fact. Their 2016 campaign turned on the Steele dossier and “Russian collusion,” both of which turned out to be hoaxes, but a steady stream of misrepresentations and fabrications became standard fare in 2020. The masters dogged Trump unmercifully, censoring him at crucial moments in a way that amounted to clear instances of election interference. 

The role of Dominion Voting Systems (which appears to be easily manipulated) may be revealed in the future, but the likelihood that there will ever be another free election in America is remote if the 2020 election is not thoroughly investigated. An alarming percentage of the electorate no longer believes that the 2020 election produced a fair result. More than 70 percent of Republicans believe the election was fraudulent, if not stolen. More than 74 million Americans voted for Trump, the highest vote total for a presidential candidate ever recorded, except for Biden. Confidence in the nation’s electoral system is at a low point; electoral manipulation—mail-in voting, extended time for voting, lack of voter I.D. requirements, lax signature verification requirements for absentee ballots, vote “harvesting,” ballot curing, and other measures inviting voter fraud—are obvious to everyone. Some just pretend it is justice. 

Two new bills pending before Congress, the Freedom to Vote Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, would federalize elections, and expand these opportunities for voting fraud that were prevalent in blue states in the election of 2020. The Freedom to Vote Act is nearly 600 pages of detailed federal regulations to nationalize state elections. Attempts to establish any integrity in voting, such as requiring voter I.D.—long ago endorsed as constitutionally sound by the Supreme Court—is stigmatized as “voter suppression” and an assault on democracy. Extended voting periods will be mandatory, as will mail-in ballots, liberal standards for absentee voting, and mandatory requirements for drop boxes for drive-by voting. Automatic and same-day registration would be required and election day would become a federal holiday. There will also be restrictions on congressional redistricting and campaign finance. 

The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act is designed to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder (2013) and restore its pre-clearance coverage formulas, especially those involving redistricting. This is a desperate attempt on the part of Democrats to pass legislation that will ensure the same access to potential voter fraud schemes that worked so well in the election of 2020. The attempt to federalize elections will certainly provoke constitutional challenges; the Democratic Party is attempting to push legislation through as part of its campaign to portray the Republicans as the party of Trump, supporters of insurrection, and the enemies of democracy. It is desperation on the part of the extreme Left which seems to have gained control of the Democratic Party. 

The Insurrectionist Smear 

In a shrill, divisive, and ultimately unsuccessful January speech this year urging passage of the two election bills, Biden drove the wedge of racial division further than he ever has in a shameful attack on those who opposed the legislation. Opposition to the legislation, he angrily shouted, is not only racism—it is insurrection! Voting rights are the very foundation of democracy, Biden said, and any opposition to extend and protect those rights is simply an extension of the “insurrection” of January 6. 

Biden even suggested that the midterm elections in November of 2022 might be “illegitimate” if the new election laws are not passed, thus casting doubts on the integrity of an electoral system in an election that the Democrats are widely predicted to lose! House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer echoed the suggestion that this fall’s election might not be valid without reform of popular state efforts to protect election integrity such as instituting voter I.D. laws, tightening absentee voter requirements, and eliminating automatic distribution of mail-in ballots, all invitations to voter fraud. The kind of “free and open” elections that the Democratic Party touts as suitable for democracy are obviously more amenable to fraud and manipulation; it is the kind of electoral system that an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy would need as part of its deception. A genuine democracy, in contrast, demands an orderly electoral system where the vote—which is the true foundation of the regime—is protected by restricting the franchise to citizens who can show proof of citizenship and residence. 

Opposition to the new voting rights legislation, Biden declared, is also redolent of “Jim Crow”—it is “Jim Crow 2.0.” The country has to make a choice: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” Biden does not mention that Jim Crow is the legacy of the Democratic Party, and that his own mentors in the Senate, including James Eastland, Robert Byrd, and Strom Thurmond, were arch-segregationists and opponents of key civil rights legislation. John Lewis, of course, was a civil rights activist in the era that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, perhaps the greatest expression of a color-blind constitution understood as “the equal protection of equal rights,” until, under the tutelage of successive Democratic administrations, the color-blind Constitution was transmogrified into affirmative action and its requirements of racial quotas and proportional racial results. During these years “racial consciousness” became the meme of the Democratic Party, which has always refused to accept colorblindness as the moving principle of the rule of law. 

Finally the Biden Administration touts the benefits of “equity,” the most racist notion of distributive justice ever to exist in America since the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. As for the admonition that we should take the side of Abraham Lincoln over Jefferson Davis, of course that is correct and has never been questioned except by Democratic Confederate sympathizers. But it has no application, despite what Biden suggests. The 14th Amendment’s Section 3, which prohibits anyone who has committed “insurrection” or “rebellion” against the United States. from holding office under the Constitution, was aimed at Confederate leaders such as Jefferson Davis, who had undoubtedly engaged in insurrection. Section 3 was the basis for the charge against President Trump in his second impeachment. Thus, in Biden’s view, you either endorse the two voting rights bills or you are committing insurrection against the United States. And who are the insurrectionists? None other than the Republicans in Congress who oppose the bills, and the January 6 rioters. The Justice Department views those who voted for Trump—whether Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, but mostly those who are white—as the greatest source, not only of white supremacy but so-called “anti-government ideology.” 

The administration is scouring the country to find the “insurrectionists” who invaded the Capitol on January 6, aided by a newly created unit in the Justice Department to investigate domestic terrorism. White supremacy and the political ideology Democrats associate with it has been declared the greatest source of domestic terrorism. White supremacy, according to the White House, inspired the January 6 rioters and Trump supporters. Biden’s views have been seconded by his Attorney General and the nominees who will head the new domestic terrorism agencies. The security state expands and has become dangerously political. 

Trump’s Second Impeachment

President Trump is now the only president impeached twice. From the beginning, the impeachment appeared to be an obvious overreach on the part of the House managers. The bill of impeachment was passed one week before the president was to leave office, but it was not delivered to the Senate until January 25, five days after Trump was no longer in office. The House leaders never intended to have a Senate trial while he was still in office. Granted, it would have been a very short trial had the House transmitted the Bill of Impeachment to the Senate immediately upon its passage, but if the president’s actions were as outrageous and as dangerous to democracy as the House managers made them out to be, conviction should have been simple since the Senate makes its own rules of evidence and due process rights do not apply. Impeachments are in their nature political—not legal—and an up-or-down vote with only a simulacrum of a trial might have resulted in conviction and removal, if enough Republicans were convinced that something as outrageous and threatening to democracy as an “insurrection or rebellion” had taken place. 

But the impeachment was never intended to remove Trump from office, only to prevent him from ever holding office again. Democrats have an abiding suspicion that Trump is still the biggest threat to the Washington establishment. There was considerable dispute among legal experts about whether a former president can be impeached. Most of the experts believed that the Constitution provides no obstacle to such an impeachment and, even though a former president cannot be removed from office, he can nevertheless be disqualified from holding future office. It is the latter—disqualification from future office—that was the obvious purpose of both the House and Senate leadership, along with some complicit Republicans. Does the plain language of the Constitution support this construction? I say that it does not.

Article I, section iii, clause 7 specifies that:

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

It seems clear from the language of the Constitution that “removal from Office” is a prerequisite to “disqualification.” The use of a comma after “Office” with the use of “and” instead of “or” means that “removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office” belong together, and cannot be considered as separate measures. The House managers’ brief makes a strange argument that Article I “provides for two separate possible judgments in any impeachment case: removal and disqualification. Nowhere does the Constitution suggest that an impeachment is permitted only when both judgments can be imposed. “Instead,” the managers argue, “it treats them as distinct penalties, mandating only that the Senate not exceed them in rendering judgment. The separate availability of disqualification—without any suggestion that it must necessarily follow removal—confirms that former officials like President Trump can be tried by the Senate.”

The language of the Constitution does not support such a reading simply because it would allow “disqualification” of a sitting president from holding further office without mandating his removal from office. It is impossible to believe that the framers of the Constitution ever intended such a result. This tortured construction of the Constitution is purely ad hominem: since Trump could not be removed, the managers insisted that he could still be disqualified. The House managers’ argument of the separability of the clauses leads to a constitutionally absurd result. But this constitutional absurdity is what drives the managers’ attempt to eliminate a formidable political rival.

The one significant mistake made by the House managers was to charge Trump with “inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” The words “inciting violence” in the charge demands constitutional analysis. The Supreme Court has set clear standards as to what constitutes incitement. Trump’s attorney at the impeachment trial in the Senate took advantage of this fact, handily demonstrating Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021 did not come remotely close to the constitutional definition of incitement. The House managers would have been better advised to stick to the more political charge of “abuse of power.” But the only evidence of any “abuse of power” was Trump’s speech, so the managers were dealt a bad hand, as it were.

The leading Supreme Court case on incitement is Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and its progeny. The Court in Brandenburg ruled that “inciting violence” in and of itself is protected speech under the First Amendment until it becomes “incitement to imminent lawless action.” The lawless action must follow immediately as a result of the advocacy or the incitement—the speech must be “brigaded with” the action. The speech and the action must be so close as to occur almost simultaneously, i.e., to be indistinguishable from the incitement to the lawless action itself.

The Trump speech was far from a clear case of incitement according to this definition. Trump spoke at some distance from the action; the Ellipse is about two miles from where the so-called “insurrection” took place, so an immediate impact on the listeners was not possible. Furthermore, the breach of the barricades around the Capitol Building had already been made while Trump was still speaking, so none of those who entered the Capitol heard his speech. There was therefore no immediate connection between the speech and the action. Trump’s speech simply does not fit the standards articulated by the Supreme Court in Brandenburg. No amount of bluster on the part of the managers can stretch the facts of January 6 to fit Brandenburg standards. The facts do not fit!

It is true that Trump did say that the election had been stolen by various fraudulent means and warned “if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He made similar remarks about fighting during the speech. These remarks were given prominence by the managers during the impeachment trial as evidence of Trump’s incitement of insurrection. In Trump’s defense, his legal team played numerous clips of Democrats using the same rhetorical flourishes during campaign speeches, demonstrating that “fighting like hell” has become a favorite theme in political speeches. Video clips of a seemingly endless parade of prominent Democrats using the same and similar phrases provided Trump with an effective defense.

One part of Trump’s January 6 speech that was never mentioned by the House managers was something he said near the beginning of his speech when he instructed his audience that you will be “marching to the Capitol Building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” What was the action that Trump expected from the audience he was addressing: “primary the hell out of those that don’t fight.” “You primary them.” Trump was advising his audience here to take political action. Those members of Congress who are not willing to listen to the people, who are weak and won’t represent the people against the establishment, should be challenged in primary elections: “primary them.” This is not advocacy of illegal political acts, or insurrection. It would be a gross mischaracterization to say that these were incitements to imminent lawless violence—or incitement to insurrection. Since this admonition to act “peacefully and patriotically” was given at the beginning of the speech, even those who left early to walk to the Capitol were warned not to engage in riotous behavior. So much for incitement!

Of course, it easily could be argued that Trump was deliberately insulating his speech from charges of “incitement” by asking his audience to act peacefully, but that he was acutely aware that he was courting danger by inviting an audience to assemble near the Capitol and urging them to accompany him on a march on the Capitol on the day the electoral vote was to be counted. Trump surely knew that the major theme of his remarks, that the election had been stolen, would create unrest and possibly rioting. After all, many prominent Democrats had praised the BLM and Antifa rioters. Kamala Harris, when candidate for president, said the riots served the cause of social justice and should continue even after the election. She even contributed to a fund that provided bail for those rioters who had been arrested. Then-candidate Joe Biden shared Harris’ view, implying that rioting might become a permanent part of the American political scene, supplementing, if not replacing politics. It was a matter of simple justice. Matters as important as the defense of democracy can certainly call on non-democratic means to secure democratic ends. Collateral damage in terms of lives lost and property damaged was the cost of advancing social justice. George Floyd’s life was lost by state-sanctioned murder. Equity required that other lives—especially those of law enforcement—be taken as recompense and property destroyed and looted as an expression of outrage against injustice.

President Trump may have been incautious to stage his rally at the time and place that he did. He and his enthusiastic audience surely retained vivid memories of the riots of the past summer, including the one in May when rioters launched an assault on the White House, coming so close to breaking through the barriers surrounding the White House grounds that the secret service was forced to evacuate the president to a secure location. The Executive branch is a coequal branch of government which holds principal responsibility for the nation’s security. Was democracy in danger that day? Was this the equivalent of the Civil War or Pearl Harbor? No one, in or out of the media or Congress, made any such suggestions of this kind. In fact, President Trump was roundly criticized because he didn’t come forward to greet the rioters instead of cowardly retreating to safety. Democracy in danger? The presidency a coequal branch of government? Not in the Trump era. 

Instead of retreating on January 6, should we havet expected Trump’s May critics boldly to advance on the mob that was no less angry and determined than the May mob and confront them? They retreated, claiming that the sacred precincts of democracy had been violated and its high priests were prevented from performing the nation’s ceremonial duties. Many of the Capitol police, unlike the secret service, invited a considerable number of the Capitol invaders to enter the building pledging them to act peacefully. Others broke police lines, ignoring police warnings and engaged in violence that injured officers. All who violently breached the Capitol should be punished according to the applicable laws, but everyone must recognize that a general spirit of lawlessness drove the mob on January 6, a spirit that was prepared long in advance by the actions of BLM and Antifa in the riots of the summer of 2020. This was the true cause of January 6—Trump surely gave it impetus, but the casual acceptance of rioting as a source of “social justice” by the nation’s leaders released the spirit of lawlessness upon the nation that will not be easily contained.

The imprudence of Trump in staging his January 6 speech is hardly comparable to the recklessness of the praise that Biden and Harris heaped on BLM and Antifa for their destructive riots in the summer of 2020. And the hundreds of millions of dollars in financial support received from corporate America and its oligarchic elites must be regarded as contributions to rioters, if not terrorists. To call BLM and Antifa “social justice warriors” seems hardly appropriate; In fact, it is obscene. Nothing BLM or Antifa did that summer advanced the cause of social justice. In fact, the racial agenda that was set in motion by their activities may well have sounded the death knell of American democracy. 

The First Amendment Doesn’t Apply to Impeachment. Or Does it? 

The House managers argued that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to impeachment trials. The managers’ argument is exceedingly thin. “Most fundamentally,” they asserted, “the First Amendment protects private citizens from the government; it does not protect government officials from accountability for their own abuses in office.” The statement, however, is hardly on point. Of course, the First Amendment doesn’t insulate government officials from accountability for abuses, but what about freedom of speech? What constitutes an “abuse of speech” by a government official that is different from an “abuse of speech” by a private individual? An individual’s speech would be tested by Brandenburg standards; but is the government official’s speech held to different standards and, if so, what are they? 

The managers’ brief is not at all clear on this issue, but we have one hint. An example of an abuse of speech by a government official that would not receive First Amendment protection is claiming, without sufficient evidence, that an election won by a Democrat was fraudulent. The managers seem to argue that publicly inviting supporters to a rally in Washington, D.C., on the day of the electoral vote count before Congress, to hear speeches on the Ellipse supporting the charges of fraud, is itself “incitement” that does not fall within the protections of the First Amendment. Needless to say, this lacks clarity, especially when the managers proceed to test the former president’s speech by the standards of Brandenburg v. Ohio: “[E]ven if President Trump’s acts while occupying our highest office were treated like the acts of a private citizen, and even if the First Amendment somehow limited Congress’s power to respond to presidential abuses, a First Amendment defense would still fail. Speech is not protected where it is ‘directed to inciting or producing imminent lawlessness and is likely to incite or produce such action.’ Given the tense, angry, and armed mob before him, President Trump’s speech . . . plainly satisfies that standard.”

We have already exposed the misrepresentation by the managers of Trump’s speech and the audience to whom he spoke as well as the misrepresentation of the holding in the Brandenburg case. Under the Constitution, Trump’s speech did not amount to an incitement of imminent lawless action even if the managers had represented the facts correctly. Trump’s defense team easily disposed of the managers’ facile constitutional construction. 

The second impeachment of President Trump failed. It was as much a farce as the first. It was first and foremost an attempt to remove Trump from politics because, according to the Democrats, he was a danger to democracy. He was accused of fomenting what has come to be known as the “Big Lie,” the belief that the 2020 election was stolen. There is no evidence, say the defenders of Biden’s election—none whatsoever—to support the Big Lie. A multitude of courts have ruled against it. This last point is only partially true because almost all the decisions, in particular the Supreme Court ruling in Texas v. Pennsylvania, have been made on issues of standing and have not reached any of the merits of the substantive claims of election fraud. Very recent cases and challenges raise serious substantive claims, but the election itself will not be overturned. 

Still, the Washington establishment continues to characterize the riot at the Capitol as an insurrection that posed the greatest danger to American democracy, as Joe Biden recently stated, “since the Civil War.” It was fomented by Trump followers who, for the most part, were inspired by “white supremacy.” White supremacists are the greatest source of “domestic terrorism” and the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies have announced they will make the elimination of domestic terrorism that is connected to white supremacy their priority. Speeches by Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have come very close to identifying Trump supporters as the “white supremacists” who are most likely to be “domestic terrorists.”

The nation recently was scandalized when information surfaced that the Department of Education and the Justice Department, ostensibly acting at the request of the National School Boards Association, was prepared to declare parents who protested against school board education policies, particularly those involving critical race theory and vaccination and mask requirements, “domestic terrorists.” In hearings before Congress Attorney General Merrick Garland’s feeble attempts to deny the revelations about this policy fell embarrassingly flat when the evidence appeared overwhelming. The Justice Department on the one-year anniversary of January 6, 2021 announced the creation of a domestic terrorism unit to meet “the elevated threat from domestic violent extremists in the U.S.” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen testified before Congress. In other remarks made before the January 6 Committee Olsen said that “We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus. . . and extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.” Racial animus means primarily the supposed white supremacy said to have animated the January 6 rioters and that seems to go hand in hand with anti-government and anti-authority ideologies. 

One wonders how much Olsen knows about the American founding. Surely, he must have heard of the American Revolution, the greatest “anti-authority” movement probably in the history of the world. Those who are passionately enamored of “social justice” deny the relevance of the Declaration of Independence (wasn’t it written when there was still slavery in the country?), but anyone capable of thinking knows that it was a revolution in world historical consciousness which made not only constitutional government possible but, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, its central principle that “all men are created equal” was intended to be a “standard maxim for free society.” It was meant to be a “stumbling block,” Lincoln said, “to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation, they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.” 

The central principle of the Declaration—that “all men are created equal”—is the best defense against what is alleged to be “white supremacy.” But as we have seen over and over again, the Democrats and progressives have refused to accept equality as a constitutional or legal principle. That “hard nut” was “cracked” long ago by the progressives and their assault on the principles of the Declaration and the founding. It is now mere detritus left on the political battlefield. Progressive Democrats have abetted “white supremacy” by steadfastly refusing to accept equality as a principle of political life. 

But the principles of natural law and natural right adumbrated in the Declaration are as sound today as when they were written in 1776, and because those principles are non-historicist, they are applicable to all human beings at all times. Progressivism, despite its best efforts, has been unable to repeal human nature. The task of reviving natural law and natural right principles will not be easy, but not impossible, especially when right and natural justice is on the side of an appeal to first principles. According to the Declaration, the right of revolution is the most valuable right that human beings possess; it is the right that guarantees every other right and always resides in the people. It can never be given up and can never be surrendered or delegated to government as our Assistant Attorney General erroneously seems to think. 

It is the right “to alter or abolish” government and “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The “Safety and Happiness of the people was the end or purpose of government to which the people consented in the first place. When government proves unwilling or unable to secure those ends, the people have the natural right to withdraw their consent and establish new government. Tyrannical government may suppress the exercise of the right of revolution for a time, but it can never extinguish it as a fundamental right of the people as long as human nature exists. Assistant Attorney General Olsen may continue to be an anonymous cog in the ever-expanding security state, but the love of freedom which is an eternal aspiration of the human soul will always embrace the natural right to an “anti-government ideology” when government acts to deny the people of its right to “safety and happiness.” 

It may be utterly trite to remind readers that this is a profitable time to read or reread George Orwell’s prescient novel, 1984. In it he describes “New Speak,” the language of Oceania, the socialist utopia that was developed to enhance the tyrannical control of the party of “Big Brother.” No one who reads the novel, written almost 75 years ago, can fail to think of the similar way “political correctness” controls public discourse today. Orwell writes that “it would have been impossible to render” the central principles of “the Declaration of Independence into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be . . . the single word crimespeak.” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen described the principal mission of the newly proposed domestic terrorism unit as the investigation of individuals and groups harboring “anti-government ideologies.” This must necessarily include those who support the rights contained in the Declaration of Independence, including the right to “alter or abolish” government. This is now “crimespeak” in America. As a supporter of natural right and the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” I now confess myself to be a domestic terrorist. 

White Supremacy and Domestic Terrorism 

No reasoning person, nor anyone with the slightest degree of common sense can possibly believe that January 6 was the greatest danger to American democracy since the Civil War. Presidents may be indulged for employing a certain amount of hyperbole, but what Biden said goes beyond the kind of hyperbole that graces legitimate rhetorical flourishes—it is a damnable lie. It does have something in common with the Civil War, however. The Democratic Party before and during the Civil War insisted on dividing the nation by race and making race the persistent characteristic of the human persona. Biden and the Democratic Party today are on a crusade to do the same. The Democrats have a long track record of racial politics and show no signs of abandoning those long-established political goals. Before and during the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery; after the Civil War, it supported Black Codes, Jim Crow, and segregation; belatedly seeking to make amends, it supported a new kind of segregation, affirmative action and its terminus ad quem, equity, a racial spoils system. 

Biden and his attorney general, under the guise of prosecuting insurrectionists, are dividing the nation on racial lines. This is the real tragedy of January 6. Anyone who would deliberately and self-consciously advance racial division as the Biden Administration is doing does not have the nation’s best interests—nor democracy—in mind. Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the nation has made an extraordinary effort to overcome racial division, but it has faced massive obstacles from the Left. The emergence of “equity,” in all probability, has signaled the end of that great piece of legislation, as race has become openly and explicitly the basis of decisions guiding public policy. Whereas it was once thought necessary to disguise racial decisions as “goals and timetables” or as “equitable remedies” for the lingering effects of past discrimination, now the need for disguise has been thrown off and the ugly face of race is brazenly displayed. Equity means that goods and services—public policy—can be based on racial characteristics alone; there is no longer any need for justification. 

Was It an Insurrection? 

The hysteria surrounding the events of January 6 has been astounding. The argument has been that this was an attempted coup by an armed mob that sought to place Trump in office on the false claim that the election had been stolen from him. Democracy was under attack; the Constitution was endangered, and the fate of the constitutional republic was teetering on the edge of anarchy. The odd thing about this “armed rebellion” was that none of the insurrectionists were armed. One carried a folding knife, another showed up armed with bear spray, and another wore a bulletproof vest—all of these “armed” insurrectionists were surely conscious of the fact that they had to transit one of the most dangerous cities in America that had recently been in the grip of riots orchestrated by BLM and Antifa in order to get to the Capitol. What rational person wouldn’t carry bear spray or wear a bulletproof vest? I am frankly surprised that more didn’t resort to such protection. Leaving that aside, what serious insurrectionists show up to an insurrection without weapons? Or without the military or an armed militia to back them up? This was never intended to be an “armed insurrection” and no amount of hysteria can turn it into one. 

Early press reports that a Capitol police officer had been beaten to death by “insurrectionists” proved to be false; This was typical of the day’s media coverage. Several police officers did suffer injuries, none of them life-threatening. One officer died days later of a previous condition unrelated to the riots. He was treated as a savior who saved countless lives. I don’t minimize his contributions, but his efforts were magnified to exaggerate the actual “terrorism” of the rioters. One person who was killed that day was a rather petite woman, a military veteran and Trump supporter, who was deliberately shot by a Capitol policeman against whom the Justice Department, after a cursory investigation, has refused to file charges. The officer was never interviewed in the investigation and admitted that before he shot the unarmed Trump supporter, he could not see her hands. In other words, he did not know whether she was armed or not. The officer nevertheless said he shot her because she posed a threat to the Capitol, although he did not explain why others who were crowded around her did not pose a similar threat. This officer does not appear to have legally shot an unarmed person who was guilty, at most, of trespass. Yet the officer has since been promoted. At a minimum, the rioters are not the only ones who threatened democracy and the rule of law on that infamous day. 

The Justice Department has launched the largest manhunt in its history in an extraordinary effort to track down everyone who crossed the barriers or entered the Capitol. The public has been asked to help identify rioters who have been subsequently charged with a variety of offenses, including trespassing, obstructing or impeding a government meeting, destroying government property, and assaulting, resisting or impeding an officer. There have also been conspiracy charges: conspiracy to obstruct a congressional proceeding; conspiracy to obstruct law enforcement during civil disobedience, and conspiracy to injure an officer. Notably absent is that no one actually has been charged with “insurrection” or “conspiracy to commit insurrection,” for the simple reason that under the law it would be impossible to prove that an insurrection had taken place. 

An FBI report has alleged that there is no evidence that the so-called insurrection was planned.

Who would support the insurrectionists in their attempt to install Trump as president? Had they even thought that far? This was a comedy of errors—a riot, but not a coup. There was violence in the Capitol, typical of a riot, but no large-scale fires or property destruction such as occurred in the riots led by BLM or Antifa in the lawless months leading up to this unparalleled event. There was illegal trespass, and an illegal attempt to disrupt a congressional meeting, but hardly a threat to democracy. Did the United States come close to regime change on January 6, 2021? The troop of clowns who invaded the capitol might better be described as “merry pranksters.” How else can you describe the “rioter” in fur robes and Viking horns—called “QAnon Shaman” by the media, who spoke in a friendly manner with a Capitol police officer in the House chamber? He was nevertheless so dangerous, that he was held without bail, in solitary confinement, and ultimately sentenced to 41 months in prison. 

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, who issued the sentence, acknowledged that the Shaman had not engaged in any physical violence but asserted that “what you did was terrible. You made yourself the epitome of the riot . . . what you did here was actually obstruct the functioning of the whole government. It’s a serious crime.” At least Judge Lamberth didn’t say the Shaman engaged in insurrection. Perhaps he recognized that the insurrection exists only in the febrile imaginations of Joe Biden and the radical-left of the Democratic Party who seek to divide the nation once again along racial lines as did the Democrats of old. Insurrection has fallen on hard times. It has been replaced by the low art of race-baiting. That is the real threat to democracy.

Editor’s Note:  A version of this article originally appeared at The American Mind.

About Edward J. Erler

Edward Erler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and author of Property and the Pursuit of Happiness: John Locke, the Declaration and James Madison (Roman & Littlefield, July 2019) and The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration and the Nation-State

Conspirators in Their Own Words

Noble left-wing ends always justify odious means, in this case projecting one’s own conspiracist efforts by smearing innocent others as conspiracists.

By Victor Davis Hanson

March 20, 2022

For the last five years, the Left—defined as the fusion of the mainstream media, Silicon Valley, the radical new Democratic Party, and the vestigial Hillary Clinton machine—has crafted all sorts of conspiracies to destroy their perceived conservative enemies. 

Their method has focused on one major projection: alleging conspiracy on the part of others, which is a kind of confirmation of their own conspiracies to destroy their opponents in general, and Donald Trump in particular. 

Now they have been caught admitting to such nefariousness. Apparently, they still are exuberant about their slick shamelessness and simply can’t keep quiet. Or they believe radically changed conditions, such as the implosion of the Biden Administration, prompt necessary admissions. 

Hillary’s the One 

For nearly five years anyone who objected that the partisan Christopher Steele and his “dossier” were fraudulent, that Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS was a paid opposition hit team, and their joint birthing of “Trump-Russia collusion” was a myth, was smeared as a denialist or conspiracist. 

But examine what has transpired since 2016. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation found nothing. Mueller in congressional testimony was either addled or disingenuous. He even claimed he knew nothing of Fusion GPS or the dossier, the twin catalysts for his own investigation. 

The more Mueller meandered, the more it was clear that his henchman, partisan lawyer Andrew Weissmann, had hijacked the left-wing “All-Star” and “Dream Team” of lawyers and was running the charade. The more the Left boasted of the legal eagles set to tear apart Trump, the more glaring their failure to find any such evidence supporting their conspiracies. 

Christopher Steele, once the object of left-wing adulation who sought to warp the 2016 election by leaking his smears, is now a pariah. Indeed, he is relegated to the clown-like status of a Michael Avenatti. Steele has testified to what we already knew: He has no notes or sources to substantiate his ludicrous file. 

One of his two “Russian sources” turned out to be a left-wing minor researcher at the liberal Brookings Institution, Igor Danchenko. He is now under indictment for lying. The other is a former Clinton operative Charles Dolan. He now admits he has worked for the Russian government and its affiliates for years. 

So ponder that creepy circular firing squad: Hillary Clinton paid for Christopher Steele to find dirt on Donald Trump. She hid her checks by using the firewalls of the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS. 

Steele, who had not been in Russia in years, simply concocted the story, in part from the fantasies of a Clinton employee! So in the end, Hillary sought to smear Trump with a phony charge of Russian collusion by colluding herself with the Russians, albeit through various firewalls! 

When the investigators found nothing for their $40 million investment, serial leaking, and character assassination, when the author of the slanders cannot even point to a single source, and when his two informants are either under indictment or worked for both Hillary Clinton and the Russian government, then the accusers of conspiracy stand so accused. 

Gasbags Gaslighting 

When Donald Trump alleged that he had been wiretapped—apparently tipped off by a whistleblower—the country had a good belly laugh. Trump was deemed paranoid, a nut. Why would anyone in the lame-duck Obama Administration bureaucracy or the Clinton campaign have sought to monitor Trump’s communications? Who would even have had electronic access to such top-secret confidential communications, the very Domain Name System logs of candidate and then President Trump? 

But now we know that one Michael Sussmann—working again for Perkins Coie, and being paid by the DNC, as a front for candidate Clinton—contacted “techies” who as contractors had access to Trump’s most confidential and private communications. 

Sussmann then was told that a Russian bank, Alfa, had a back-channel line of direct communications with Trump. He then went to the FBI to substantiate to the media that his inventions were worthy of government investigation. Everyone from the ubiquitous Bruce Ohr to the Zelig-like Peter Strzok was somehow connected to the hoax. In truth, the bought techies searched Trump’s private logs for any and everything, and came up only with a Russian bank likely sending one-way spam to a Trump server. 

In other words, Trump was a recipient of electronic noise. But it was useful pings that gave the media a second life to “collusion”—another “bombshell” disclosure planted roundabout by Hillary Clinton who was still slandering Trump as a Putin puppet. 

Again, this sorry tale is not some allegation from the Right. We know the details from a writ of a federal prosecutor who had indicted Sussmann for purportedly lying. Soon he and his techie contractors will likely try to blame one another to avoid indictments, and we should expect even more conspiracies to emerge from those alleging conspiracy. 

Conspiracy Cons 

Most Americans concluded that January 6 was a buffoonish riot, in which hundreds of deluded protesters broke into the capitol, vandalized the premises, and disrupted the government. The public saw it as an embarrassment and believed the perpetrators deserved to be punished. 

But not the Left. They saw “conspiracy” in this keystone bunch. Soon they were screaming about an “insurrection” aspiring to a “coup d’etat,” and demanding over 20,000 soldiers to prevent a second wave. 

Very quickly, however, discrepancies in the left-wing narrative arose. “Five killed” proved to be one person “killed,” conservative protestor Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed military veteran lethally shot by a capitol officer with a checkered record, whose identity was mysteriously concealed from the public for months. 

The other four died from either natural causes or the press of the crowd. Officer Brian Sicknick was not murdered by insurrectionists as alleged. In truth, he died the next day of natural causes. Anyone who complained that the government suppressed communications concerning its preparations for the demonstration, thousands of hours of videos, and widespread use of FBI informants among the protestors was dubbed a nut, or perhaps an alt-Right traitor himself. 

Hundreds were arrested on trumped-up charges. Many sat in solitary confinement without charges filed for months. The Left cooed about a right-wing revolution foiled. 

But do not believe just conservatives that January 6 was a riotous charade trumped up into a politically useful “insurrection.” Instead listen to a left-wing New York Times reporter, Matthew Rosenberg. As an “investigative journalist” he both whipped up public outrage at the riot and in private bragged on a hidden microphone to a female acquaintance that it was mostly a bad joke, a break-in by spontaneously rioting buffoons. 

Or as Rosenberg put it of the supposedly violent insurrectionaries and the fear they instilled among reporters, “It was like, me and two other colleagues who were there [January 6] outside and we were just having fun! . . . I know I’m supposed to be traumatized, but like, all these colleagues who were in the [Capitol] building and are like ‘Oh my God it was so scary!’ I’m like, ‘f-ck off!’”

And what did the ace New York Times reporter conclude of the trauma from the “coup”?

I’m like come on, it’s not the kind place I can tell someone to man up but I kind of want to be like, ‘dude come on, you were not in any danger . . . These f-cking little dweebs who keep going on about their trauma. Shut the f-ck up. They’re f-cking bitches.

And was the riot preplanned and carefully orchestrated? Hardly: “They were making too big a deal. They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”

How about the “conspiracists” who believed there were lots of FBI operatives and informants among the rioters? They too were on to something: “There were a ton of FBI informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol.” 

Rosenberg is no conservative. He is not even a disinterested liberal observer. He is an activist New York Times reporter whose official “disclosures” helped to feed the false narrative of a right-wing coup—one that we now know he never even believed in himself.

Laptop Lap Dogs

When Hunter Biden’s laptop turned up just days before the 2020 election with incriminating emails outlining how the Biden family had been shaking down foreign governments using Joe Biden prominence as a past senator and vice president, the Left screamed “conspiracy”!

Joe Biden swore it was “Russian disinformation.” He attacked Trump for “collusion.” Fifty former “intelligence officers” signed on to a public letter blasting the mysteriously appearing laptop as a likely Russian disinformation plot.

We should have been suspicious for a variety of reasons. The two chief signees were John Brennan, former CIA director, and James Clapper, former director of national intelligence. Both were infamous for two reasons. One, they were loud, paid cable-TV pundits, hired to vent their hatred of Donald Trump. And two, both had been previously caught lying under oath to Congress about intelligence matters.

Anyone who read the communications, listened to confirmations of Hunter’s onetime partner Tony Bobulinski, knew anything about Hunter’s serial drug addictions and propensities for losing drug paraphernalia, cell phones, and laptops, and digested the left-wing outrage, knew the laptop was genuine.

No matter—the New York Times and other media blasted them as “conspiracists.” And those smears worked. Social media silenced the story. The mainstream media squashed it as well. The usual mob of Democratic flunkies weighed in on the damnable Ruskies out to get Joe and Hunter by planting a laptop in a Delaware computer service shop.

Yet, after Joe Biden was elected, after it seemed likely that Hunter might well be indicted, in part for the accurate information on the laptop, and after Biden had imploded the Democratic Party and thus might be seen as “expendable,” the Left now confesses that that the laptop really was authentic all along.

Conspiracists’ Conspiracies

We remember the conundrum over the 2020 election. Most conservatives sensed that the election was “only” rigged in the sense that the Left earlier had openly conspired to sue states to drop or change balloting laws. They had sought to warp bureaucracies to change protocols, to pour money into key precincts to absorb the work of registrars, and to transition the nation to a 100-million early and mail-in ballots election. Mark Zuckerberg alone poured nearly $420 million in what the Left used to call “dark money” to alter the very way Americans vote.

It worked.

For the first time in our history, well over 60 percent of the ballots were not cast on Election Day. That fact alone rendered the second presidential debate irrelevant. More mysteriously, the usual rejection rate of mail-in ballots fell from 3-5 percent in most states to a fraction of that normal percentage. So the deluge of ballots meant not that more were naturally suspect, but fewer than ever before?

But again, don’t believe conservatives. The Left was so giddy with their massaging of the election that they wanted their skullduggery high-fived and immortalized. So the “conspiracy” was lauded in detail in Molly Ball’s infamous Time magazine essay, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” 

Note what she boasted about:

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents, and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. . . . The participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. 

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.

Ball even bragged of a new “conspiracy” between “left-wing activists” and corporate CEOs. The former on cue were to taper off their post-George Floyd street violence and the latter were to begin sounding off about social justice issues: “There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.” 

If a conservative had written such a tale and serially used the word “conspiracy,” he would have been written off as insane. 

Note that all of the above admissions were either voluntary, or discovered through old “60 Minutes”-style ambush journalism, or arose due to criminal conduct, or were the result of likely political calculations. 

But again, it matters little because such exposés never come with apologies or efforts to atone for the damage. You see, noble left-wing ends always justify odious means, in this case projecting one’s own conspiracist efforts by smearing innocent others as conspiracists. 

Or as the late Harry Reid likewise bragged of his own lying about Mitt Romney’s tax returns in the 2012 presidential race, “It worked, didn’t it?”

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.

The ‘Civil War’ Psy-Op

Psychological operations can have many objectives, demoralization being the most common. But they can also be used to create opportunities that otherwise might not present themselves.

By Michael Anton

January 18, 2022

Regime propaganda is so ubiquitous that even if, like me, you make no effort to seek it out and even take steps to avoid it, you can’t help but notice that our masters have fastened onto a new narrative: the coming “civil war.” 

This was the crux of all the maudlin, dishonest January 6 retrospectives, of several “think pieces,” and at least three new books: America is facing a second civil war and it will be started by the Right. 

Really? With what? In one of his more lucid moments, Joe Biden himself noted that the disaffected on the Right have no chance of taking on the United States government without F-15s and nukes. Like the blind squirrel finding a nut, the old man was onto something. The government’s overwhelming advantages in technology, firepower, manpower, money, transportation, supply networks, surveillance tools and much else would be so lopsided as to make the military buzzword “asymmetric” a grim joke. Think, instead, Bambi versus Godzilla. 

To fight a civil war, you have to organize. But organizing is all but impossible for those who genuinely dream of taking on the state. The U.S. government is incompetent at many (most?) of its assigned responsibilities. But it’s quite good at keeping tabs on any hint of “right-wing” “insurrectionary” impulses. That task is made much easier by the fact that there is so little such activity to monitor—so little, in fact, that the feds increasingly feel compelled to incite it. 

It would be hard to hide a mass movement of people gearing up to fight a civil war. Do you see one anywhere? I don’t. If there were one, don’t you think the feds would be all over it? Of course they would. And don’t you think regime media would be blaring about it 24/7? Again—of course. This is a classic case of a dog not barking. Silence is confirmation that nothing is happening. 

Organization, like civil war, requires elites. Indeed civil wars, like all wars, are fought between two opposing factions of elites. Even backwoods insurgencies have leaders. Where are the elites poised to lead red America in a civil war? Who are they? There is Trump to be sure, and regime propaganda insists that he’s a modern-day Jeff Davis-Robert E. Lee hybrid. But this is the same Trump who spent January 6 tweeting. The real elites made sure that was his last day on that platform—and then impeached him for the second time. The real elites—Republican and Democrat alike—wish he would crawl into a hole and die. Trump may have tens of millions of committed followers. But a real civil war requires generals and colonels and captains and lieutenants and sergeants. Go ahead—name some. I’ll wait.

Granted, some on the Right speculate about the possibility or desirability of a “national divorce.” But they are in all cases proposing a peaceful way out of the present impasse—a parting that would be, if not necessarily amicable, at least orderly and bloodless. It’s one thing to argue that such is not possible; that’s a reasonable position, though one I think weaker than its alternative. It’s another to accuse advocates of national divorce of advocating or wishing for violence. That’s simply a lie. 

So what’s going on? Two things, I think—one conscious, the other less so. 

The conscious effort is what’s known in national security geek speak as a “psy-op,” a.k.a., a “psychological operation.” These are coordinated efforts to use propaganda, disinformation, truth and half-truth, to influence the target’s thinking in ways favorable to those behind the op. It’s not simply propaganda; that is, not Tokyo Rose merely telling American Marines they’re destined to lose. Seemingly fact-based lies are an essential element to a psy-op. Think Tokyo Rose telling Marines about to hit the beach that an American carrier has been sunk when it hasn’t. 

Psy-ops can have many objectives, demoralization being the most common. But they can also be used to prep the ground for other operations, to create opportunities that otherwise might not present themselves. 

That’s what’s going on now. The regime wishes to crush all actual and potential opposition. To do this, it needs to criminalize dissent. But doing that runs against the letter and spirit of the great charters of American liberty, and against the grain of the American character. To do what they want to do requires changing public opinion. Or, more specifically, it requires wearing down Americans’ inborn resistance to censorship and political persecution. 

But as much as Americans hate those things, they also hate and fear even the prospect of terrorism, civil strife, and domestic conflict. Here we come to another dog resolutely not barking. There is no terrorism, civil strife, or domestic conflict—at least not coming from the Right. Yet the Department of Justice recently created a “domestic terrorism unit” to target “those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.” 

Read carefully that unusually candid statement. They aren’t going after actual terrorists or terrorist acts. I suppose they would if they could find any. But there aren’t any to be found. So instead they’re targeting motives, animus, and ideologies—i.e., ideas and feelings, not actual acts. 

The closest thing they have is January 6—an unplanned, unarmed, inchoate protest in which the only victims of violence were protesters. The regime is trying to brainwash everyone that January 6 was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. But it’s not working—three-quarters of Americans think it was “a protest that went too far”—so the regime needs a Plan B. 

And that’s to sow disinformation of a coming “civil war.” Historians, philosophers, and survivors of civil wars all agree that they are the worst of all wars. Hence the desire to avoid them is understandably overwhelming, justifying (in many minds) almost any measures, including many that would be unthinkable absent the alleged threat. If the regime can stoke enough fear of an imminent civil war, suddenly all kinds of draconian measures that are presently out of the question will become possible. 

For this reason, there is perhaps no more urgent rhetorical task right now than to demonstrate, repeatedly, the falseness and dangerousness of this narrative. In that respect (as in many others) Julie Kelly remains a national treasure. 

Typically, the first rule of a psy-op is that you do not talk about the psy-op. And that remains the case with this one—to a point. But interestingly, regime voices have chosen this moment not merely to acknowledge the existence of psy-ops but to praise and recommend their use to further regime ends.

That may be a coincidence. Or it may emanate from an uncharacteristic sense of self-awareness on the part of the ruling class. Certainly some of them believe the nonsense that the Right is yearning and preparing for civil war. But just as certainly, many do not. The second rule of a psy-op is that those mounting it must be able to distinguish truth from falsehood. It’s possible that some who know they’re lying feel bad about it, at least on some subconscious level.

It’s also possible, even likely, that many elites intuit that if a civil war were to come, they would bear the lion’s share of the blame: for despoiling middle America for decades, and then for demonizing decent, normal people for daring to object to their despoilation. One way to cope, psychologically, with the guilty conscience that may arise from harming so many for so long is to contrive rationalizations for why the victims are evil and deserve it. 

The truth is that for the last 50 years, and accelerating greatly over the last 10, America’s elites have relentlessly divided the country, strip-mined its institutions, leeched its wealth, and attacked a large portion of its people. Those actions, taken together, may be said to be almost a recipe for civil war. Perhaps the smarter elites have concluded that such a war is now inevitable and they want to get a jumpstart on assigning blame. A cynical person (not me!) might wonder if civil war is not exactly what the ruling class wants and is trying to provoke. 

We might therefore analogize every fresh provocation to those feds who apparently entrapped some very imprudent men into trying to kidnap the governor of Michigan. They want you not just to talk about civil war, but to begin taking concrete actions that they can insist are preludes to war. Then they will have free rein to impose ever more censorship, surveillance, no-knock raids, computer and records seizures, asset confiscation, frivolous (but deadly serious) criminal charges, endless pretrial detention, and draconian sentences for misdemeanors and noncrimes. 

So my advice is: don’t give them any excuse. Be careful what you say and do. You may complain: “But it’s unfair that a stray comment might be used to throw me in federal lockup while leftist allies can loot and torch whole cities and get off scot-free.”

Indeed it is. But this whole system, this whole regime, is unfair—to you. That’s the whole point of it.

About Michael Anton

Michael Anton is a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a former national security official in the Trump Administration. He formerly wrote under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus when he was a senior editor of American Greatness. He is the author most recently of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.

The Morning Report – 1/13/22

—J.J. Sefton

Good morning, kids. Thursday and in response to my incredulity over America, via Fauci, actually funding the Chi-Coms to develop biological weapons, commenter/open blogger Joe Mannix hit me with a truth nuke attributed to his brother: “The problem is not that the system has become corrupt, but that corruption has become the system.”

When you look at every issue and everything we are dealing with in that context, it’s kind of a cold slap in the face. What’s even more of a gut punch is the realization that this state of affairs is not something new; it’s been this way for years, if not decades. You just didn’t realize it, primarily because socially and economically, the world – that is your world of family, work and community – was outwardly stable, predictable and secure. 

Perhaps the first major disruption to that was 9/11/01 and then the response to it in the ensuing months that did nothing to rectify the situation, but was used as a pretext to weaponize the security state against the American citizenry. It’s getting into the weeds a bit but we are only beginning to reap the whirlwind of the creation of the FISA courts, the warrantless wiretapping and all the rest of it (how the hell did I ever think that that was a good idea?).

So, on the heels of putting his foot in his mouth (i.e. shoving his head up his ass) about parroting the Leftist propaganda about J-6 being a “terrorist” attack, Ted Cruz is being lauded in the usual circles for defenestrating Dr. Fauci about his collusion with the Chi-Coms to weaponize and unleash General Tso’s Sickness. And yesterday, Kevin McCarthy flipped a rhetorical bird at Malig-Nancy Pelosi by refusing to testify in her J-6 kangaroo court while Mitch McConnell ripped Joey Soft-Serve a new one in the well of the Senate for his blood-libeling of those who oppose his nuking the filibuster to make permanent Democrat election rigging.

To all of this brave, uplifting, fightin’ mad Mr. Smith Goes to Washington rhetorical fireworks, I say thank you — and fuck you. When the chips were down last year, you sat on your hands, abrogated your oath to the Constitution and sold America down the river for good by not protesting a stolen election. That was on top of doing everything you could to stonewall and sabotage President Trump’s legislative agenda when in his first two years the GOP held both chambers of Congress and had an absolute mandate to reverse not just the Obama destruction, but most of everything going back to the New Deal. 

The possible exception to that, of course, being the “entitlements.” Even before that, for years and years it was “Build the dang fence!” before an election and then deriding us as “hobbits” for complaining about embracing amnesty afterwards. “We’re only one half of one third of three fifths of 99 44/100ths% Congress!” Dozens of single-sentence Obamacare repeals knowing full well the dog-eating bastard would veto it but stonewalling and ultimately a thumbs down when Trump pushed for it.

And suddenly, Joe Mannix’s brother’s admonition about corruption being the system shines an unflattering light on far too many of us who are happy to be a part of it when Uncle Sugar hands us a monthly check. Even though we’re at the bottom of the pyramid, we’re still a part of the system. That’s the hardest, coldest truth of all to have to face.

So, in terms of fighting against things like stolen elections, BLM/Antifa mass terrorism, Jive Kampf crackpot race theory, or trannies raping your children in the girls room, or forcible vaccination and lockdowns, open borders and all the rest of it, Congress, the courts and the bureaucracy will beat you down. In some instances, quite literally as was the case with concerned parents at school board meetings, the J-6 political prisoners, Kyle Rittenhouse, and for sure Ashli Babbit and Roseanne Boyland.

During any other time frame other than the past few years, that outwardly stable world I mentioned earlier of home, family and perceived security was the last thing anyone would want to jeopardize. It is I guess a natural instinct of self-preservation that influences us to go along in order to get along. But look at where we are; our freedom, our financial security and sense of physical security are day by day evaporating in front of our eyes. 

The abject desperation of the junta in power is in direct proportion to the dangerous rhetoric hurled at anyone who opposes or objects to them, i.e. all of us. We are rapidly heading to an inflection point where people are going to be in a world of hurt with very little in the way of options. And with a junta like this, history tells us time and again what their reaction is going to be.

December 26, 2021

Entering The American Twilight Zone

By Patricia Henry

We didn’t know it then, but on Election Night, November 8, 2020, America entered a Twilight Zone every bit as eerie and unanticipated as anything dreamed up by Rod Serling decades earlier.  It began with time standing still in the middle of the Election Night vote count, followed by a flood of outlandish vote totals being relayed to us, especially from Democrat strongholds in 7 swing states.  Then there was the alacrity with which network analysts declared Biden the winner, especially, the Fox news early projection of a Biden win in Arizona.  

Among Trump partisans and Republicans generally, there was shock and mounting disbelief.  Had the triumphant incumbent, fresh off years of creating a vibrant economy, establishing the conditions for a significant peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, erasing the brutal Caliphate, standing up to and quelling both the insatiable dragon of Communist China and Putin’s snarling Russian bear, shutting down the fiery Iranian mullahcracy, and creating American energy independence—had Trump somehow lost to the enfeebled, untrusted political cypher, Scranton Joe?  

Despite the 2020 election’s irregularities, which were legion, the next two months, leading up to the January 6 Capitol Hill debacle, were a study in media manipulation.  Virtually every organ and institution of public information joined hands to create a bum’s rush of legitimacy for Scranton Joe’s historic victory.  Not only was there an unprecedented (and unbelievable) turn out of voters, with Trump receiving 8 million more votes than any preceding sitting president, while the bumbling, lackluster, boring, invisible Biden, with no hint at any time in his political career of an excited public following, bested Trump by an additional 7 million votes.  This was an electoral miracle that rivaled Moses parting the Red Sea and Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.  

In fact, as evidence of major election irregularities and corruption began to surface in the form of hundreds of eyewitness reports and sworn affidavits, analyses by credentialed statisticians and computer experts, the sworn testimony (on penalty of perjury) of poll watchers and election workers, and even shocking video tape of poll workers in Democrat strongholds double and triple counting mysterious suitcases of unverified ballots, the press and our new masters in Big Tech, grew ever shriller and more derogatory of Trump and the claims of his legal team that there was something foul afoot on election night. 

But the courts remained the three monkeys of denial:  See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The “catch 22” machine was used to prevent court review of the growing mountain of charges and evidence.  When warnings of impending election fraud and manipulation had been raised prior to the vote, they were dismissed as being speculative.  When they were raised and demonstrated after the vote, they were dismissed for being after the fact and too late.  The American people were being treated to a legal system that could have been devised by Franz Kafka; a literal nightmare of injustice. 

The Twilight Zone script was now in full control.  Despite mountains of evidence of irregularities, corruption, and inexplicable anomalies, the FBI, the Justice Department, attorneys general at every level, the US Postal Inspection Service, and most every official and agency charged with safeguarding national election integrity demurred or tried to shut down any investigation and to shut up and intimidate any whistle blowers.    

Every attempt was made to create irreversible “facts on the ground.”  They rolled out an “Office of the President Elect” for Biden and Kamala to appear in fake stage sets sporting that escutcheon to convince America that they had effectively already been installed, irreversibly, as our leaders, although the election had not yet even been certified or affirmed, as required, by the Congress.  This all created a condition of unreality and deep distrust in a large portion of the American public.  As used to be said regarding Bill Clinton:  “Are you going to believe him or your lying eyes?”  

Then came January 6th.  President Trump had called for a mass rally in Washington, D.C. to show support for him and for a fairly arrived at election outcome.  It is unquestioned that well in advance he repeatedly offered up to 10,000 National Guard troops and other support for the DC and Capitol Police to manage the expected crowds and to guarantee a peaceful and orderly day of election certification by the Congress.  It is equally unquestioned that Speaker Pelosi, who had complete authority and the responsibility for safeguarding the Congress and its deliberations, refused President Trump’s proffer of support.  The stage was set; what could possibly go wrong?

When the day arrived, a fraction of the crowd, egged on by “persons unknown,” on video tape, with no connection to the Trump rally organizers, directed attendees to march to the Capitol and then to enter the grounds and building through police lines.  Curiously, again on video tape, there are several instances of police removing barricades and inviting the crowd on to the grounds and into the Capitol.  A tiny fraction of this crowd wrestled with police and smashed the glass in several doors and windows.  Everyone else sauntered peacefully through the hallowed halls like reverent tourists, even for the most part staying within the velvet rope lines in place to direct visitors (this all on video tape).  The resulting disruption lasted two or three hours.  Two unarmed women civilians died:  Ashli Babbitt, needlessly shot by a plainclothes capitol police officer, and another woman who appears to have died later as the result of a police beat down in one of the Capitol tunnels.  That’s it. 

Now, the creators of America’s Twilight Zone revved up their alternate reality narratives to blanket the landscape with the awful myth of a destructive insurrectionary riot at the US Capitol.  Speaker Pelosi and the Democrat spinmeisters had a tool with which to beat to death the Trump movement and anyone who opposed them or contradicted their version of electoral reality.  At this point, a supposedly terrified Speaker, in an empty city, called out the National Guard, twenty-five thousand strong, and ringed the Capitol with welded steel fences.  Not since the Civil War, with Johnny Reb almost within shouting distance, nor during the Whiskey Rebellion, when wild-eyed moonshiners might have threatened life and limb, had DC seen such melodrama. 

Americans have for a year sat peacefully at home and watched and listened to the unfounded ranting of Democrat politicians and their echo chamber in the mass and social media, accuse normal, moderate to conservative citizens of thought crimes and insurrectionary behavior because they do not share the current extreme Democrat political agenda.  

Our nation has become a sickening avatar of the perished Soviet Union, where Orwell’s Ministry of Truth was the mother of all lies.  Our media, our Pravda (meaning Truth in Russian) of America sets the party line and propagates it throughout the information channels of our nation.  We are governed by a barely functioning cypher in the presidency, who each day vandalizes our precious heritage and undermines the proud bulwark for freedom that America has become for the world.  The Democrat party of Truman, Kennedy, Stevenson, and Jackson is dead, murdered by treasonous political hacks and ignorant Communists masquerading as politicians and leaders. 

In the Soviet Union, itself a Twilight Zone of unreality, nothing real was permitted.  Speaking truth got you sentenced to the Gulag.  In pained humor, Soviet citizens described their rotten, fake economy this way:  We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.  Thus, every sector of their nation had been hollowed out by decades of lies, until it collapsed.  Creative and destructive forces on the globe have been balanced now for a century because the United States has been powerful. We are not pure and unblemished, but warts and all, we have been the last best hope of humanity on earth.  

If we allow the false reality of the Twilight Zone to rule us, we will be living in the twilight of America:  The end of the American Era may be here, if the American people do not take their fate, and the fate of freedom and respect for individual liberty and dignity back into their own hands.

Patricia Henry is the pen name of a denzen of deep blue America.

GREAT AMERICA

History Will Grind Out the Truth

As the second-century A.D. skeptic philosopher Sextus Empricus noted, eventually the truth emerges and cosmic justice is rendered: “The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind fine.” 

By Victor Davis Hanson

November 10, 2021

“History will figure that out on its own.” That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  

In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab—and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.  

Fauci offered arguments from authority by citing his own expertise, as well as that of “card-carrying” specialists. 

But in truth, there is little evidence that any animal species has been found infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus or a close relative that causes COVID-19 or a similar illness.  

Many federal health experts increasingly believe the virus was man-made. A number argue that it was likely a product of gain-of-function research that was funded in part by a U.S. government grant.  

Others concede that Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak—who was involved in gain-of-function research, often in cooperation with the Chinese—were not candid about the full extent of their ties to the Wuhan lab. But despite Chinese resistance to releasing pertinent data, history eventually will sort the truth out—as it does with most controversies of the moment.  

Five years ago, the New York Times, the Washington Post, most of the mainstream media, and the majority of the bipartisan Washington. D.C. political and government establishments insisted that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.  

In support of such conspiracy theories, they fixated on the so-called Steele dossier. It was a supposedly independent research effort detailing “proof” of Trump-Russian cooperation to rob Hillary Clinton of the election.  

That supposed evidence was the unspoken ground swell for a 22-month, $40-million special counsel investigation of Trump conducted by former FBI head Robert Mueller.  

For over 650 days, the country was consumed with “Russian collusion.” Cable news outlets, public television and radio pundits, along with high-ranking Democratic politicians, almost daily announced the impending end of the colluding Trump Administration. 

They peddled rumors of Trump’s supposed obscene activity in Moscow. They spun tales of mysterious meetings between Trump’s family and Russian operatives, and of Trump surrogates’ supposed trips to meet with Russian colluding officials.  

Christopher Steele, the architect of the “dossier,” had not been to Russia in decades. He was a rank partisan in the pay of the Clinton campaign—and for a time the FBI itself.  

Five years later, history has almost sorted out the fable that the most powerful, wealthy, and influential Americans in the nation once foisted upon the public.  

Special prosecutor John Durham seems to be slowly indicting the promulgators of the hoax. The earlier lengthy internal audit by Inspector General Michael Horowitz cited wrongdoing on the part of the Department of Justice and FBI.  

The Mueller investigation failed to find any proof of Russian-Trump collusion. The 2018 majority report of the House Intelligence Committee came to the same conclusion.   

The admission of false statements by former FBI interim director Andrew McCabe, along with the felonious altering of a court document by FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, were other elements of the warped and unprofessional behavior of the FBI.  

Both Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey were unable to answer fundamental questions while under oath about the dossier and the role of its authors in spreading the collusion hoax. Mueller’s legal team and Comey himself habitually leaked rumors that fed the collusion hoax. 

History, however, is slowly sorting it out—despite the approved narrative of the well-connected who misled the country to pursue their own political agendas.  

Someday historians of public health will unravel the full costs of locking down most of America in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. What are now near-taboo topics—the vigorous natural immunity offered from prior infection, and the terrible damage done by the quarantines—earn cancel culture damnation, employment suspension, and media calumny. But soon they likely will become matter-of-factly accepted as truth. 

The same will be said of the hysterical myths that surround the unfortunate January 6 riot at the Capitol. Five years from now history will show that there was no conspiracy, no pre-planned “insurrection”—as the FBI has already concluded.  

The late Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick was not murdered as was alleged. Those “armed” inside the Capitol did not carry—much less use—guns. The one violent death, that of Ashli Babbitt, was of an unarmed female who was lethally shot by an officer for attempting to enter through a broken window.  

The solitary confinement, indefinite incarceration, and inhumane jail conditions accorded some of the accused will be shown contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America. 

In other words, history eventually will sort it all out.  

Or as the second-century A.D. skeptic philosopher Sextus Empricus noted, eventually the truth emerges and cosmic justice is rendered: “The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind fine.”

They Shall Not Pass     

Yes, the alt-Left has gone too far.  No further shall they pass.

By Thaddeus G. McCotter

October 8, 2021

In principle and practice the alt-Left has rejected, and is angling to redefine, the Constitution, the foundational ideals, the governing precepts, the history, the culture, and the entirety of America to “fundamentally transform” our free republic into the authoritarian socialist utopia of “their democracy.” (Which, as Katya Sedgwick points out, in reality, isn’t “democracy,” but rather an elitist administrative state providing the illusion of freedom through state-sanctioned “choices” and permitted freedoms.)

After a four-year year reprieve under President Trump, the alt-Left Biden Administration is now continuing Obama’s weaponization of the federal government to repress their fellow citizens who dare to dissent from the elitist administrative state’s diktats—the latest being parents who oppose the indoctrination of the children with the Marxist-derived, inherently racist critical race theory. 

Such unconscionable abuses of power will avail the alt-Left naught.

The American people’s patience is ending. They know the alt-Left is the reason Americans are fearful of acting in accordance with free consciences, fearful of speaking out, fearful of exercising their God-given, ostensibly government protected and respected individual rights. They know the alt-Left and its cancel culture are insidiously subverting our constitutional rights and pursuits of happiness. 

And the people will act accordingly. 

The Left knows it. You can see their fear of the sovereign American people with every one of the Biden Maladministration’s repulsive abuses of power. You can see it in every bought and paid for corporate media fluff piece pretending Biden and his cohorts are competent. You can see it in every flailing, faltering attempt to pass the Left’s insane-on-its-face $3.5 trillion partisan payoff to its political cronies that will expand an already inflationary economy to bursting. And the alt-Left knows it. You don’t need to be a climate alarmist to know which way the wind blows.

Discarding real science for political science as they pimped the American people’s pain during a pandemic to generate fear and make the public more malleable so they can advance their own partisan aims, the alt-Left usurps your God-given individual rights and replaces them with illusory, government-permitted behaviors. In furtherance of this aim, they redefine the pursuit of a “more perfect union” with the socialistically defined “common good.”

Ils ne passeront pas.

The Left is vitiating the sacred parent-child relationship; indoctrinating school children with racist ideology and self-hatred; concealing school systems’ actions toward and information about children from their parents on matters such as birth control, abortion, and gender; and, when parents dissent, declaring them domestic terrorists subject to the state’s repressive police powers.

Ils ne passeront pas.

Jettisoning pluralism for the identity politics of their DIE cult of “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” the alt-Left is indoctrinating people—at the risk of losing their jobs in both government (funded by the taxpayers) and in the private sector—with racist ideologies; this indoctrination is even being applied to the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the military, in crystalline violation of the seminal principle of equal protection under law and of a non-partisan armed services.

Ils ne passeront pas.

Trapped in a perpetual state of adolescence where they project their multitudinous sins upon their victims, the alt-Left serves as heralds of the cult of death in their promotion and glorification of abortion (even up to the point of birth) and euthanasia; and in their callous demands for health care to be rationed and/or denied the ill for political and/or fiscal reasons.

Ils ne passeront pas.

The claim that free speech is unsafe is made to silence dissenting views by the very same alt-Left that, at other times, argues “silence is violence.” These are the folks conspiring with Big Tech to implement the censorship the Left has foisted upon academia (under the Orwellian conceit of Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance”) to suffocate free inquiry and expression, and ultimately the very freedom of conscience requisite for institutions of higher learning, science, and indeed all of society to properly function, let alone reach its full potential.

Ils ne passeront pas.

The alt-Left Biden Maladministration is refusing to follow federal law and protect our nation’s borders, thereby cheapening the citizenship of all Americans, and those immigrants who are legally striving to earn it.

Ils ne passeront pas.

The alt-Left is conniving to “fundamentally transform” the most prosperous, equitable, and powerful nation in human history into a form of government that has uniformly led to poverty, oppression, and state-sanctioned mass murder.

Ils ne passeront pas.

Yes, the alt-Left has gone too far. No further shall they pass.

Resign

Kurt Schlichter | Posted: Aug 27, 2021 12:01 AM 

• Pat Buchanan In Afghanistan, the Worst Is Yet to Come

Rip those stars off your pathetic nostalgia costumes and resign. Quit. Tell that crusty Pinocchio in the White House and the faculty lounge Geppettos tugging his strings that you will have no more to do with his human centipede of failure in Kabul. 

It’s not hard – your stars are right there, generals, right on the shoulders of those new uniforms you decided to adopt with the express purpose of evoking World War II and the memory of victory over a modern, peer-competitor military. Maybe, you thought, wearing winner’s gear would ease the pain of getting creamed by a bunch of Seventh Century throwbacks.

Yeah, we know your boss is a senile old fool with delusions of competence. His failure will be addressed at the ballot box. But your failure, generals and admirals, is something only you can address, at least until President DeSantis comes and separates the wheat from the chaff in the Pentagon.

Yeah, we know, you have to follow the orders of the civilian authorities – though not if it’s Trump, since he was not part of the in-crowd you aspired to join as adjunct military members. Your passive-aggressive mutiny against the guy the American people elected set back civil-military relations 250 years. You took the one institution most Americans still trusted and turned it into a roiling cauldron of hot garbage. And don’t try to hide behind “You gotta support the troops.” We do. But you suck, and we know you suck, and you know you suck.

If you didn’t suck, you’d have quit. When President Durwood told you to ditch Bagram Air Base, you joint chiefs should have got together, realized this was going to get a bunch of the guys that America entrusted to you killed, and decided to resign. You can’t disobey, but you can take a stand. 

Well, you did take a kind of stand. You just stood there. As one sergeant major told me today, the newest second lieutenant would identify this op as a disaster in the making. Now, far be it from me to contradict an E9, but I expect he would agree that even the greenest Girl Scout recruit would ask, “What the unholy hell are you idiots thinking, pulling the military out and giving up our secure airbase before you’ve completed your noncombatant evacuation operation?”

You could have quit. You could have salvaged some shred of honor after your years of total failure, but making a stand would come at the expense of your careers. 

Yet it would have worked. A bunch of generals saying “No more?” That would have forced the politicians to do a rethink. But you just saluted, same as the guys who enabled Vietnam – something Army schools used to tell us (before they hired faculties full of pronoun people) we officers needed to do if the time came. 

You chose not to.

Maybe you dug the pomp and circumstance – it’s good to be the general. Or maybe you imagined that you – the guys who have not won a war in two decades – were the only ones competent and capable enough to polish this strategic turd into a tactical diamond.

But it’s hard to believe you’re that delusional. It’s hard to believe that even the same band of Ibram X. Kendi fanboys who couldn’t decide whether our greatest strategic threat is the weather or Americans who voted for Donald Trump could imagine that only they stood between President Asterisk and total defeat.

You know what the Sergeant Major of the Army tweeted today, just before about a dozen of our troops were blown apart in exactly the way anyone not rocking in his chair, gulping mush, and staring at his stories on the tee-vee saw coming? 

This gooey pablum would be funny if a dozen families weren’t getting a knock on the door tonight. But they are, and this frivolous idiocy is not funny. You need to resign too, Sergeant Major. Just go away.

Maybe General Milley did get something right. A soldier of recognized bravery earlier in his career, and (according to one soldier who served under him) a good battalion commander as a light colonel, he has demonstrated the Peter Principle in spades. He is the worst Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in history, a disaster in every way, but he has accomplished one thing besides adding to America’s “L” column. He has united the country. Remember his ridiculous screed about “white rage?” Well, today – because of his failure – he has managed to unite Americans of all colors and shades in their rage at a failed military establishment whose lack of seriousness and gross incompetence has not only humiliated our country but gotten our troops killed. He has created a rainbow of rage.

Resign

Salvage some dignity. Though, if I had a say, the whole lot of you would be court martialed for your negligence. You’d happily nuke from orbit a specialist who dropped his NVGs on a patrol, but you just lost another war and you’re probably headed to a board seat at Raytheon. The British Royal Navy used to shoot admirals for failure to encourage the others. I note that when this innovative personnel incentive program was in effect, Britannia ruled the waves. 

Today, what does America rule? The Chinese are laughing at us. The Taiwanese have got to be rethinking their position. Iran is cackling. Our allies are furious. Way to go.

This happened on your watch. You didn’t give the order, but you chose to go along and get along. Now a dozen of the men we entrusted to you are getting along to Dover, and we can only pray more don’t follow.

You won’t do it, because if you were the kind of men who would do it you would not have to be told to do it. But you should do it. It might save a little shred of your dignity. Rip those stars off your shoulders and throw them down on the Resolute desk.

Resign

Read –

Our Military Is A Woke Joke

Kurt Schlichter

8/16/2021 12:01:00 AM – Kurt Schlichter

Ignore those pictures of the Afghan army that our military senior leader geniuses spent 20 years and zillions of dollars on disintegrating in the face of a pack of glorified mountain banditos from the Seventh Century – the real story is that, finally, America’s fighting men and women are fully aware of the urgency of accepting and validating the trans experience. And it’s even better if said trans people are BIPOC. Plus differently abled. 

Our broke, woke armed forces would be a hysterically funny punchline if the joke wasn’t, “The greatest military in human history walks into a bar, puts down trillions of dollars and buckets of American blood, and asks the bartender, ‘So, what would it look like if all the generals and admirals sucked-up to the garbage establishment that has totally failed the people of the USA?’”

Yes, it is a joke, a sick one. Fire all the generals. Invite a few back, maybe a dozen. Clean out the Pentagon. Can all the “Diversity Consultants,” “Equal Opportunity Officers,” “Climate Change Mitigation Specialists,” and every other strap-hanging oxygen thief who doesn’t contribute to the only thing the military should be focusing on right now – putting Chi Coms in graves.

Yeah, there’s been a strategic failure of epic proportions by our civilian establishment. We need to fix that at the ballot box by tossing out every Democrat and every Liz Cheney-esque combat tourist who delights in sending our young people overseas to get ground up in idiotic wars designed to enrich their cronies. Hardest hit at the end of Afghanistan: Haliburton, Raytheon, KBR, and a hundred other contractors you never heard of. Oh, and the Afghan people, but they never really figured into this calculus except in the abstract idea that we were going to convert a nation of savages into Lil’ Vermonters living the Norman Rockwell dream of community democracy.

Twenty years of failure. Twenty years. How far and fast we fell. I was there thirty years ago, in VII Corps main, contributing my car washing skills, when the greatest military force in human history annihilated a country’s entire army in 100 hours and barely broke a sweat doing it. Amazingly, we did it without giving a single thought to our alleged privilege – to the extent cracking over reeking half-barrels in wooden outhouses in the middle of the desert constituted privilege. 

Look at us now. Look at the generals, in their stupid throwback uniforms from the Forties that are supposed to make the gender studies seminar we call the US Army think it’s the same force that broke Hitler. It’s not. A serious organization does not alternate its designation of America’s most serious threat between the weather, “racism,” and other Americans who dissent from the generals’ bosses’ political priorities.

The Navy is busy smashing ships into each other, or letting them burn, but it will tell you it’s the most effective, lethal fighting force ever. Baloney. It’s glided along on its WW2 legacy as well for going onto a century. It imagines that its glorious naval tradition is going to compensate for the fact that the Chinese are actually building combat-ready ships and learning how to use them. The Carthaginians were like that too – fat, smug, and eager to sacrifice their children to Moloch, just like our garbage elite. The Romans, who had no naval tradition, took one of their boats and copied it. Sound familiar? Then they built a navy. Also ring a bell? Then the Romans cleared the seas of Carthaginians and went on to rule the world for another 500+ years while Carthage’s field can still provide for all your sodium chloride needs.

By the time you read this missive, there will probably be little or no Afghanistan left unTalibanned – its capitals are getting grabbed up faster than the blueberry muffins at a Vindman family reunion. That guy represents everything wrong with our military and our elite – a mediocrity who stabbed his boss (and the American people) in the back by taking it upon himself to make foreign policy rather than help the guy elected to do so – is held up as an exemplar by our pathetic ruling caste. Recently, he posed (cringingly) with another disappointment who was tested and found wanting, the withered and wrinkly Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold the action hero is now just a grouchy old man with barely the virility to sex pester his maid anymore. That’s our military folks – the tough image hiding a pathetic reality. Like The Impregnator when he botched governing California, our military botches its one job when it fights anyone not willing to just roll over.

We saw the root cause when we watched those generals, bedecked in medals from their failed campaigns, sitting before Congress and defending their stupid reading lists consisting of the kind of stupid books that vapid, frigid Chardonnay junkies from Santa Monica read, not combat leaders. Move over, Sun Tzu – Henry “Ibram X. Kendi” Rogers has some insights into why the country you swore to die for sucks. That should motivate that 19-year old paratrooper from Omaha to take that hill! Thucydides, who we need more than ever right now, gets out of the way – here comes “Dr.” Robin DiAngelo to explain how everyone is racist, especially you. So wait, your job is to give your life…for racists?

No wonder we lose. We’re not a serious military. It’s now a jobs program for semi-employable field grade and flag officer failures to time-serve in until they can retire and get a sweet, sweet gig at Boeingrayheedynamics.

Who got fired for losing Afghanistan? No one (and don’t say David McKiernan, a solid officer who was politely asked to leave, not relieved, purely for show). 

And no one ever will. Accountability, the garlic to the vampires of our failed ruling caste, is just as foreign to the American military leadership as it is to our civilian leaders.

We will lose the next foreign war, which will most likely be with China. Thousands of Americans will die when their ships go down to PRA hypersonic missiles, and, after much soul-searching, the members of our establishment will determine that the fault lies with everyone else but them – especially you.

But the next war will probably not be a foreign one. Our lousy general officer corps got the message – the new enemy du jour is us. The dissenters. The deplorables. The ones they expect to breed the next generation of soldiers for them to play with – why, you couldn’t expect young Kaden from the Upper West Side to choose to be one of those dirty Marines instead of going to Dartmouth!

But on the bright side, when they try to turn the American military on the American people (“Kurt, you’re being crazy again. Also, it’s good that unarmed conservative vet Ashli Babbit was shot for trespassing and I support the Australians sending their army to make sure every kangaroo jockey downunder has a towel wrapped around his Foster’s hole.”) don’t worry too much. There’s no reason to believe that whatever remains undeserted of the two million or so active and reserve troops we have now will be any more effective here in CONUS against 100 million armed patriots with a significant number of vets of America’s military from when it didn’t suck than it was against those patient tribesmen in the Hindu Kush.

There’s hope for a rebirth – as a hierarchical organization, the military responds to what its civilian leadership demands. The current crop of lap dogs understood that President Asterisk wants wokeness and weather panic, and he got it. President DeSantis, after he fires just about everyone 07 and up (and a lot of O6s) must tell the remaining guys who will need to re-do the post-‘Nam rebuild that their focus is warfighting, warfighting, and more warfighting, and that the enemy is not racial hustles, the climate, or American patriots.

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MAKE AMERICA FLORIDA

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis directly responded to the attacks from Joe Biden and the White House over his decision to block forced vaccinations, forced mask mandates, block CDC demanded shut-downs and keep schools open and mask-free for in-person teaching.

DeSantis took direct aim at the manipulative control effort from the federal bureaucracy, and said Florida will not be a biomedical surveillance state. The remarks were deliberate, resolute and unwavering in defense of constitutional freedoms.

The visibly determined governor told Joe Biden the federal demands would not be happening “on my watch.”

Video – 

“If you are coming after the rights of parents in Florida, I’m standing in your way – and not letting you get away with it.  If you are trying to deny kids a proper in-person education, I’m standing in your way …

If you are trying to restrict people and impose mandates; if you are trying to lock people down; I am standing in your way and standing for the rights of the people in Florida …

Why don’t you do your job? Why don’t you get this border secure? And until you do that, I don’t want to hear a blip about COVID from you.”

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VOLUSIA COUNTY GOP

Trump Winds and Biden Whirlwinds

The Left is well on its way to incurring a massive pushback, with the potential to make the Tea Party boomerang seem like small stuff. 

By Victor Davis Hanson

July 11, 2021

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

What was common to the media’s deification of the criminally minded Michael Avenatti, and the promotion of a series of abject hoaxes? Do we remember the Steele “dossier,” the supposed authority of Fusion-GPS, the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn? 

Do we recall how the Left invented the Charlottesville construct out of a supposedly racist and unqualified endorsement by the president of the Klan and neo-Nazis? Who has forgotten the charge of “racism” for merely connecting the origins of COVID-19 to a Wuhan, level-4 security, gain-of-function-research, Chinese-military-affiliated virology lab rather than to a chopped-up wet bat or pangolin? 

Do we remember the names of our supposed best and brightest retired intelligence officials who lied shamelessly and on spec for the Biden campaign, claiming that Russian “disinformation” accounted for a supposedly fictitious Hunter Biden’s laptop? And are the fabrications by Joe Biden and the media—that men with guns staged an “armed insurrection” of January 6 and “killed” officer Brian Sicknick—the new standard of truth? 

What ties together the efforts of Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $40 million witch hunt, and the two impeachment proceedings—the last dispensing with witnesses, formal hearings, cross-examinations, a special prosecutor, and the Chief Justice presiding, all in mob-like efforts to try to convict in the Senate now private citizen Donald Trump? Must a Joe Biden, one day as president-emeritus and private citizen, fear that there will be no statutes of limitation to his vulnerability, when the vast trove of Hunter Biden’s laptop is finally accessed and turned over to a future hostile congress or federal prosecutor?

What is the common denominator of the Lt. General Michael Flynn debacle, the unmasking and leaking of surveilled American citizens, the nonstop politicized commentaries of retired military officers, and the weaponization of the intelligence agencies? What binds together the text trove of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the cleansing of FBI cell phones, or the forgeries of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith?

What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob? In other words, why in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws? What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the “content of our character,” and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are? What has the woke revolution offered us instead?

Since when did regaining a House majority equate to impeaching a president on the eve of a reelection campaign, with his future and fiercest campaign opponents possibly as senators to be sitting in judgment on him in any Senate trial? What was common to all the “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” mythologies regarding meetings with Russians in Trump Tower, or mysterious “pings” of Trump tower machines automatically communicating with Russians, or the certain impending indictments of the Trump family?

Since when do we go back over three decades to destroy a Supreme Court nominee, with rumors of teenage drinking and supposed sexual harassment, charges brought without independent witnesses and evidence, but with plenty of solid refutation? 

When did the 25th Amendment become a political tool to remove a president before a scheduled election? Since when does a Yale professor become a congressional deity for unprofessionally tele-diagnosing the president as mentally enfeebled—to the acclaim of Congress? Since when do the acting FBI head and the acting Attorney General spin mad ideas of entrapping the president with a wire to oust him as crazy? 

Since when do former officials and public intellectuals write openly about the possibilities of a coup d’etat? Or when was it honorable for an “anonymous” and supposedly “important” administration insider to brag publicly about deliberately obstructing and undermining a president, or for retired admirals to address the nation in op-eds raising the possibility of removing a president “the sooner, the better”? What exactly does “sooner” mean?

The ties that bound all these melodramas over the last four years were threefold: 1) venomous hatred of outlier, controversial, and combative Trump; 2) the sanctimonious, near-religious belief that any means necessary were justified in the noble aim of destroying his presidency—and damn any lasting damage to traditional customs and constitutional norms; and 3) no counterforce would ever dream of doing to the Left what it was doing to destroy Trump.

Now we have a new president, a new administration, and a media that has gone from hysterical and venomous hatred of a president to sudden puppy-dog obsequiousness. In a blink, the national press corps molted its National Enquirerexoskeleton and revealed its inner flabby Pravda essence.

What are the lasting consequences of all this madness? 

The Left should hope that House Republicans are Marquess of Queensberry players and do not emulate the Democrats’ behavior. They should hope that a Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee would not monitor the phone records of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). For if the opposition did gain the majority in November 2022, Joe Biden’s past involvement with foreign monied interests, and the evidence of his shady behavior from his own son’s laptop texts offer a far more convincing case of impeachable offenses—failure to report to the IRS off-the-books income, influence peddling, and abject lying about foreign quid pro quo involvement—than does a single Ukrainian phone call.  All that exposure is well aside from Biden’s deliberate decision not to enforce, as his job requires, federal immigration law. 

Is screaming that the Trump boys were crooked, about to be indicted, and should be investigated nonstop a good precedent for federal fishing investigations of Hunter Biden? The mystery of Hunter Biden’s audacity and shamelessness seems now simple: as his recent “artist” scam, and the excuses of the White House for his artifices, show, Hunter will never, ever stop his grift. 

Why? Aside from the easy lucre, a cynic might conclude that Hunter expresses bitterness at his own “clean” father for not appreciating dirty Hunter’s own slimy and raunchy “sacrifices” to enrich the Biden family in general, and in particular the “big guy” and Mr. “10 percent.”  In truth, Hunter’s spite increasingly borders on implicit blackmail of his presidential father, as if something like, “You owe me, so cut me some slack—or perhaps if I go down, so does the family.” 

In sum, Hunter is kryptonite to the White House and not just because of his drugs, his pornography, his women, and his criminality, but because in his delusions at least he thinks that all he did was the cost of business for the Biden family, and the proof of his pudding is in his family’s voracious eating.

If the media can force a compos mentis president to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment to stop the hysteria that he is both enfeebled and should be removed, what do we then do with a Joe Biden who is the first president since Woodrow Wilson who often seems not mentally or cognitively up to the job? Keep talking about Joe’s favorite ice cream or the décor of Air Force One?

Are we now to expect dissident retired generals and conservative admirals soon to swarm the airways and op-eds columns claiming that Biden is derelict, non compos mentis, and, in McCarthyite style, scanning the ranks for mythical insurrectionaries and thus using the tactics of the Nazis and Mussolini to divide us? Is that our new standard? If a Biden campaign helper or advisor is brought up on charges, will Fox, in CNN style, accidentally show up at the home of the accused to film a SWAT team arrest?

In truth, constitutional protections, sane media coverage, and acceptable behavior for the top echelon of the political-military-intelligence-industrial complex were abandoned during 2016. The old rules were jettisoned on the assumption that the nation’s moral superiors and Platonic guardians had the right, and indeed, the duty, to suspend norms and traditions for our own greater good of sandbagging a political campaign, undermining a presidential transition, and removing the elected Donald Trump any way possible. 

Again, none of our moral overseers ever produce any historical metrics to justify their precedents of sabotaging of a presidency. Were there Trump sins and crimes in office comparable to FDR having his daughter arrange trysts with his mistress in the White House, or putting Japanese-Americans in detention camps, or emulating JFK’s sexual depravities in the White House swimming pool, or wiretapping Civil Rights leaders for purposes of blackmail, or exposing oneself in LBJ-style, or the Clinton cigar antics, or siccing the IRS, Obama style, on political enemies, or the latter’s intelligence agencies green-lighting a foreign agent to use foreign sources to run a smear campaign against a presidential candidate?

So the problem now is that under such our new precedents, Joe Biden has more exposure to investigations of his own family’s criminality and behavior than Trump ever had. 

If Trump was rash, Biden really is cognitively compromised and would not fare as well against the same “prove you are sane” choruses. His executive orders are far more constitutionally questionable than Trump’s. And under the new rules of impeachment, he is far more culpable for using his office in the past for personal gain. The Left fished for liberal federal justices to derail the Trump executive-order agenda, and now the Right will simply copy that protocol and shop around for conservative judges to do the same to Biden’s edicts.

The Left is well on its way to incurring a pushback in 2022 comparable to 2010, with the potential to make the Tea Party boomerang seem like small stuff. And the difference this time around is that there are no customs, no traditions left in treatment accorded a political opponent in office. No one any longer knows what is fair play and what is out of bounds, but only what the Democrats have left us as the new normal: if you deem a candidate, a president-elect, and a president a radical threat to your agenda, then any means necessary to destroy or to remove him and his enablers are not merely legal but absolutely moral and necessary—and damned be the damage to the nation. 

What has been sown into the Trump wind, will likely be reaped in the Biden whirlwind.

Regime vs. Regime

We who swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic owe no allegiance whatever to the oligarchy that now runs this country. By Angelo Codevilla

May 20, 2021

The attempt of America’s ruling class to convict 455 persons of “armed insurrection”—i.e. of waging war against the United States, a species of treason—for protesting insufficient scrutiny of the 2020 election on January 6 in the Capitol, while at the same time it excuses and even cheers the burning and looting of courthouses, police stations, and downtowns all over America, is not the exercise of a “double standard.” 

The people in and out of government who do this are not corrupt. Instead, acting as part of the regime—the oligarchy—they are replacing the American republic and waging war to crush its remains.

The sooner Americans realize that we are being governed by people at war with our Constitution and contemptuous of ourselves, the sooner those people may be treated as the enemies they are.

In the Washington Post, the Justice Department explained why the words of its indictments of those it claims trespassed on the Capitol will not result in the severe prison sentences they imply. Those words try to fit acts prima facie of mostly peaceful protest into the Democratic Party’s and associated oligarchy’s narrative of “armed insurrection against our democracy.” But in the Post story these “legal experts” mention regretfully that, their best efforts notwithstanding, what remains of the U.S. legal system cannot wholly erase the fact that “trespassing is still only trespassing, even in the U.S. Capitol,” and that “a misdemeanor is still only a misdemeanor.” Drat, still! 

Nevertheless, these prosecutors and friendly experts fill most of the article with how they combine unlimited pretrial detention under harsh circumstances and limitation of legal assistance to press the accused to accept maximum penalties and to forgo bringing cases to juries.

The Narrative vs. Reality 

Keeping evaluation of cases within the administrative-judicial system—out of the hands of the accused’s peers—is an essential part of suppressing the reality of what happened and did not happen on January 6. Forcing the accused to plead guilty to charges formulated according to the narrative that white supremacist Americans unlawfully obstructed the 2020 election is essential to establishing the validity of that fraudulent political claim. 

That, in turn, is an essential weapon in the oligarchy’s attack on the American republic and its supporters. Reality is the opposite: the oligarchy itself committed the only unlawful acts of interference during the 2020 election. Anyone looking for evidence of oligarchic interference may begin with Time magazine’s February 4 story, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” and continue to the ongoing campaigns to thwart audits of vote counts.

Today’s Justice Department, acting as part and parcel of the oligarchy that calls itself “our democracy” has pushed partisanship to the point of war by one regime in favor of another. Inevitably, this has created the horrid reality of political prisoners among us—people who are being punished for supporting the republic against the oligarchy. When regimes war on each other, whose side you are on becomes the practical definition of justice.

The following shows that the oligarchy’s system of justice consists precisely of negating what the U.S. Constitution defines as right. The founders passed the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth through Eighth Amendments, precisely to place the judicial power’s capacity to hurt individuals ultimately and firmly in the hands of the people. They did it to prevent those in power from using that power to cow opposition and force support. But that is exactly what the regime that calls itself “our democracy” is doing.

Consider: The Fourth Amendment prohibits officials from searching a person or his home and papers without prior consent or a legal order. A warrant must be based on probable cause, or reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior. It must also be very specific in describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. The Fourth Amendment is intended not just to prevent bothersome “fishing expeditions” into innocent matters. It also means to outlaw using investigations themselves as a form of punishment and intimidation.

And yet first the Justice Department, and now regime-friendly judges, have used and are using investigations to draw a dragnet through American society to embarrass, punish, and chill countless persons who are or may be opposed to the oligarchy’s desires. Having been at the Capitol on January 6, or merely in Washington, D.C., has been enough to earn a SWAT team’s intrusion and trashing of one’s home. Other departments of government including the armed forces, plus any number of corporations, examine social media posts for heterodox views. Though punishment does not always result, spreading fear always does. Which is the main point.

Political Power vs. Constitutional Rights

The Fifth Amendment’s prohibition of compulsory self-incrimination was meant to prevent officials from pressuring suspects into admitting guilt for crimes they did not commit. Guilt and innocence were supposed to be determined at trial. But the modern American justice system relies almost entirely on over-charging offenses and then discounting them to obtain a guilty plea—the truth of what really happened be damned. This has placed dictatorial discretion in officials’ hands, resulting in laxity for socio-political favorites and oppression for those out of favor. 

Misuse of the plea bargain system is playing a major role in the oligarchy’s attack on the republic because the oligarchs are combining it with neglect of the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, to hear and question witnesses, and to be defended by a lawyer. Trials for the events of January 6 are not to begin until at least some nine months after the fact, on no particular schedule. During this lengthy and indeterminate time, the accused are held in solitary confinement under conditions harsher than most murderers ever experience. Their lives have already been ruined. And for what? The pressure on them is enormous to sign anything and at least set a date by which their nightmare will end. 

This is possible because the Justice Department also acts in defiance of the Eighth Amendment, which protects against excessive bail or fines. The Constitution’s framers assumed that all but a few dangerous defendants would be granted bail—money pledged in exchange for the promise to appear for trial. Overheated rhetoric aside, none of the persons arrested in connection with January 6 actually injured anyone, or have a history of injuring anyone. The allegation that they are dangerous is purely a political one, and the purpose of denying them bail is all too obviously to pressure them to support a political narrative and to warn the oligarchy’s potential opponents of what the administrative system has in store for them. 

Deny Their Legitimacy

The Eighth Amendment also forbids cruel or unusual punishment. What might that be for trespassing? What is cruel or unusual punishment for disagreeing with the socio-political agenda of powerful people? 

The Bill of Rights has long since applied to the states. Erasing the distinction between what had been public and private, between the powers of those in political office and those of corporations, institutions, etc., is oligarchy’s essence. 

Arguably, the imposition of very cruel penalties on persons out of step with people and institutions that are part of the ruling oligarchy is contemporary America’s most prominent feature. These include deletion of careers and livelihoods, public imputations of racism, etc. They amount to something like outlawry. 

And for what, specifically? Loud and clear is the ruling narrative: “our democracy” is under armed assault by hordes of white supremacists who lurk throughout society, ready to unleash another, deadlier version of January 6. But the reality is that “trespassing is still only trespassing.” 

To keep this reality in context, one might recall Arlo Guthrie’s hilarious 1967 song “Alice’s Restaurant,” the saga of a hippie arrested for dumping trash, whom the legal system throws in with “all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people . . . Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! . . . nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me! . . . And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest Father raper of them all . . . he said, ‘What were you arrested for, kid?’ And I said, ‘Littering.’ And they all moved away from me.” 

Humor and irony, however, are powerless against the logic of warring regimes. The oligarchs are not fooling around. Appealing to the Constitution can only increase their determination to bury its remnants under the administrative powers it creates or enhances. This is a regime alien and inimical to ours. 

That is good as well as bad news. The good aspect of it is that we who swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic owe no allegiance whatever to the oligarchy that now runs this country. Nor can we persuade them about right and wrong. If we are to avoid becoming the oligarchy’s mere subjects we can and must treat them as the enemies they are: deny their legitimacy, and rebuild the republic amongst those of us who love it.

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About Angelo Codevilla

Angelo M. Codevilla is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and the author of To Make And Keep Peace (Hoover Institution Press, 2014).

Floridа Gov. Ron DeSantis listens to a report from a member of his administration during a meeting at the governor’s office in Tallahassee, Florida, on April 1, 2021. (Screenshot via Epoch Times)

Exclusive: Florida Gov. DeSantis Says Lockdowns Were a ‘Huge Mistake’

BY IVAN PENTCHOUKOV AND JAN JEKIELEK April 16, 2021 Updated: April 16, 2021 biggersmallerPrint

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide stay-at-home order on April 1 last year locking down the Sunshine State for 30 days amid a global panic about the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus outbreak. Sitting in his office exactly a year later, he told The Epoch Times that the lockdowns were a “huge mistake,” including in his own state.

“We wanted to mitigate the damage. Now, in hindsight, the 15 days to slow the spread and the 30—it didn’t work,” DeSantis said. “We shouldn’t have gone down that road.”

Florida’s lockdown order was notably less strict than some of the stay-at-home measures imposed in other states. Recreational activities like walking, biking, golf, and beachgoing were exempted while essential businesses were broadly defined.

“Our economy kept going,” DeSantis said. “It was much different than what you saw in some of those lockdown states.”

The governor nonetheless now regrets issuing the order at all and is convinced that states that have carried on with lockdowns are perpetuating a destructive blunder.

After the 30 days of the initial lockdown in Florida lapsed, DeSantis commenced a phased reopening. He faced fierce criticism at each stage from establishment media and his own constituents beholden to the lockdown narrative.

The governor fully reopened Florida on Sept. 25 last year. When cases began to rise as part of the winter surge he did not reimpose any restrictions. Lockdown proponents forecast doom and gloom. DeSantis stood his ground.

The governor’s persistence wasn’t a leap of faith. Less than two weeks after Florida’s full reopening in late September, scientists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford went public with the Great Barrington Declaration, which disavowed lockdowns as a destructive and futile mitigation measure. The declaration, which has since been signed by 13,985 medical and public health scientists, calls on public officials to adopt the focused protection approach—the exact strategy employed by DeSantis.

Despite dire predictions about the pandemic in Florida, DeSantis has been vindicated. On April 1, 2021, Florida ranked 27th among all states in deaths per capita from the CCP virus, commonly known as the coronavirus.

The ranking’s significance is amplified because the Sunshine State’s population is the sixth oldest in the United States by median age. California—the lockdown state often compared to Florida due to its lower per-capita death rate—is the sixth youngest. The risk of dying from the CCP virus is highest for people over 55, with the group accounting for 93 percent of the deaths nationwide.

While Florida is doing either better or relatively the same as the strict lockdown states in terms of CCP virus mortalities, the state’s economy is booming compared to the crippled economies in California and New York. Though less quantifiable, the human suffering from the lockdown-related rise in suicides, mental health issues, postponed medical treatments, and opioid deaths is undeniably immense.

“It’s been a huge, huge mistake in terms of policy,” DeSantis said.

“All I had to do was follow the data and just be willing to go forward into the teeth of the narrative and fight the media,” he added. “As people were beating up on me, what I said was I’d rather them beat up on me than have someone lose their job. I’d rather have them beat up on me than have kids locked out of school. I’m totally willing to take whatever heat comes our way because we’re doing the right thing.”

‘Don’t Let Them Roll Over Us’

The Epoch Times spent a day embedded with DeSantis as he crisscrossed the state on April 1, jetting southeast from the seat of state government in Tallahassee to a press conference in Titusville and then back north to the Clay County Fair on the outskirts of Jacksonville.

Across dozens of encounters with Floridians from all walks of life, one trend persisted. People thanked DeSantis for his work and his policies. Business owners praised him for not shutting them down.

Chris Allen, the owner of Java Jitters, opened a coffee shop in Orange Park Mall during the pandemic.

“We could not have done that if it wasn’t for Ron DeSantis,” Allen told The Epoch Times after personally thanking the governor during an encounter at the Clay County Fair.

At the time of the interview, Florida’s unemployment rate was 4.7 percent compared to 6.2 percent nationally. Lockdown states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California had some of the highest rates in the country—8.9 percent, 7.8 percent, 7.3 percent, and 8.5 percent respectively.

“I have a tough time paying for a meal in Florida just because I saved a lot of these restaurants from oblivion,” DeSantis said. Hours after this claim, a curly fries stand at the fair declined to charge the governor.

DeSantis said some people get emotional when they meet him. Several of the interactions with the governor at the Clay County Fair resembled that description. An visibly moved elderly veteran urged the governor to not “let them roll over us.”

“If we hadn’t stood up, these people may not have jobs, the businesses may have gone under, the kids wouldn’t be in school, there’d be all these things,” DeSantis said. “This really, really impacts people in a very personal way. And I don’t think anything prior to COVID that I’ve seen in politics can quite do it on this level. And it’s really unfortunate that there were governors that had power [who did] the opposite. It really shouldn’t depend on the governor.”

Reopening the state wasn’t as easy as lifting his own stay-at-home measures. When DeSantis issued the final reopening order in late September last year, he signed a companion order prohibiting local Florida governments from restricting people from working or operating a business. The order had far-reaching consequences across the state, especially in densely-populated, liberal-leaning locales where the local authorities imposed their own strict measures.

DeSantis adopted a hands-off approach to local regulations at first, thinking that voters would ultimately hold local authorities responsible. It became obvious eventually that some places would remain locked down despite the data showing that doing so would have no positive impact on the spread of the virus.

“They weren’t going to open this stuff up unless I pried it open,” DeSantis said.

“We had the data. We talked to some of the best scientists in the country,” DeSantis said, referring to Martin Kulldorff from Harvard, Jayanta Bhattacharya from Stanford, and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford. “Every Floridian has a right to work. Every business has a right to operate.”

In areas that were forced to reopen as a result, the economies are now booming with new hotels and restaurants opening, DeSantis said.

DeSantis received a law degree from Harvard and is a textualist when interpreting the Constitution. He believes barring the local authorities from placing restrictions on the people and businesses was squarely within his authority.

“You can’t have 67 different minimum wages, or 67 different regulations on hotels. We are one state economy, and we need to have certain rules of the road,” DeSantis said.

‘They Are Never Going to Admit They Were Wrong’

Standing behind the desk in his office in Tallahassee, DeSantis leafed through a folder of praise he’s received from around the nation and across the globe. Hanging on the walls around the relatively small space was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as well as the uniform the governor wore as the captain of the Yale baseball team.

When asked why he chose Lincoln, DeSantis said the president is the best example of a leader who had to make difficult decisions in a time of crisis. When asked why some of the leaders today have continued with lockdowns even with ample evidence of their ineffectiveness, the governor theorized that the people involved have committed too much to the narrative and have made it impossible to change course.

“You have a situation where if you’re in this field, the pandemic, that’s something that you kind of prepare for and you’re ready for. And a lot of these people muffed it,” he said.

“When push came to shove, they advocated policies that have not worked against the virus but have been very, very destructive. They are never going to admit they were wrong about anything, unfortunately.”

Elected leaders aren’t the only ones to blame, according to the governor. The media and big tech companies played a major role in perpetuating fears about the virus while selectively censoring one side of the mitigation debate. DeSantis said the media and tech giants stood to benefit from the lockdown as people stayed home and consumed their products.

“It was all just to generate the most clicks that they could. And so that was always trying to do the stuff that would inspire the most fear,” DeSantis said.

Two weeks after the interview, an undercover video recorded by Project Veritas showed a technical director at CNN talking about the boost the network received due to its pandemic coverage.

“It’s fear. Fear really drives numbers,” CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester said. “Fear is the thing that keeps you tuned in.”

The fear-mongering worked, DeSantis said, pointing to CDC statistics showing that 4 out of 10 American adults delayed or avoided getting urgent or routine medical treatment in June 2020. The agency’s report said that the pattern may have contributed to the excess deaths reported during that period, due to preventable illnesses and injuries going untreated.

Emergency room doctors had reported that fewer people were coming in with cardiac-related chest pains while more were coming in with late-stage appendicitis, something that is usually caught much earlier. The pandemic has also led to a sharp decrease in cancer screenings and detections.

“When you have people too scared to go to the emergency room when they’re literally having a heart attack, that didn’t happen in a vacuum,” DeSantis said. “Corporate media played a role in that, by really whipping up people into a frenzy.”

The profit motive wasn’t the only factor potentially driving the media’s slanted coverage, according to the governor. The pandemic hit the United States in an election year, presenting an opportunity to heap the blame on President Donald Trump.

“They viewed it as an opportunity to damage Trump. Obviously, they hated Trump more than anything,” DeSantis said.

‘Council of Censors’

In the April 1 interview, DeSantis criticized big tech companies for censoring critics of lockdowns. Less than a week after the interview, the governor himself became the victim of censorship. YouTube, without warning, scrubbed videos of a roundtable discussion between DeSantis and prominent scientists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford who assessed that lockdowns are ineffective.

The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) was the first to flag the video’s disappearance. The original clip is now hosted on a different platform and appears along with a full transcript on the AIER website.

“Google and YouTube have not been, throughout this pandemic, repositories of truth and scientific inquiry, but instead have acted as enforcers of a narrative, a big tech council of censors in service of the ruling elite” DeSantis said in response to YouTube’s censorship during an April 12 video conference call with three of the scientists from the banned video.

“When they took down the video … they were really continuing what they’ve been doing for the past year: stifle debate, short-circuit scientific inquiry, make sure that the narrative is not questioned. And I think that we’ve seen already that that has had catastrophic consequences for our society.”

The takedown of the video suggests that Big Tech intends to keep exercising the awesome power it directed against Trump in the closing days of the previous administration. Twitter and Facebook banned the president, cutting off a direct line of communication between the commander-in-chief and tens of millions of Americans.

DeSantis thinks that the power monopolies have now is far more extensive than what the United States had witnessed at the turn of the century.

“What we’ve seen with the big tech and the censorship, they are exercising more power than the monopolies at the beginning of the 20th century ever could have exercised,” the governor said. “The type of power that they’re exercising now in some respects is even more profound than the type of power that government typically exercises.”

No End In Sight

Desantis believes the lockdown states may never fully reopen because the leaders there have invested so heavily in the narrative while the voters have grown fearful.

While restrictions are easing across the nation, only six states, including Florida, have fully reopened, according to a tracker maintained by USA Today. Eight states never issued a stay-at-home order.

“I think if your goal is no cases, then there may never be an end to it, because you’re never gonna have zero COVID,” DeSantis said, adding that a more pragmatic goal would be to aim towards a hospitalization rate indicative of a respiratory virus endemic.

“But I don’t know that they’re willing to accept that reality. I think they’re going to try to have no cases at all, which would basically mean there would never be a full end to these policies, which is scary.”

This article is the first in a series based on interviews conducted with Gov. Ron DeSantis and senior members of his cabinet in early April of 2021.

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If enough people take seriously what Tucker said and stop letting Democrats have their way with American voting, we might be able to save our constitutional republic for all people, whatever their skin color, who value liberty.

Full transcript courtesy of Fox News:TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: 

“Good evening and welcome to “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Happy Monday. 

Last week, we said something on television that the usual chorus of hyper-aggressive liars is now pretending was somehow highly controversial. Ordinarily, we’d ignore all of this. Once you’ve been denounced as a white supremacist for quoting Martin Luther King, you realized none of it’s real. It’s all another form of social control. Honestly, who cares what they think?

But in this one case, we thought it might be worth pausing to restate the original point, both because it was true, and therefore worth saying, and also because America badly needs a national conversation about it. 

On Thursday, our friend Mark Steyn guest-hosted the 7:00 p.m. hour here on FOX. He did a segment on how federal authorities are allowing illegal aliens to fly without ID, something that in case you haven’t noticed, you are not permitted to do.

The following exchange took place in response to that story. We’re going to play the entire clips, you can be certain we’re not leaving out context. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON:  I’m laughing because this is one of about 10 stories that I know you’ve covered where the government shows preference to people who have shown absolute contempt for our customs, our laws, or system itself, and they’re being treated better than American citizens. 

Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement, if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that’s — that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true. 

Look, if this was happening in your house, if you were in sixth grade, for example, and without telling you, your parents adopted a bunch of new siblings and gave them brand-new bikes, and let them stay up later, and helped them with their homework and gave them twice the allowance that they gave you, you would say to your siblings, you know, I think we’re being replaced by kids that our parents love more. 

And it would be kind of hard to argue against you because look at the evidence. 

MARK STEYN, FOX NEWS HOST:  Right.

TUCKER:  So, this matters on a bunch of different levels. But on the most basic level, it’s a voting rights question. In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. 

So, every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter. So, I don’t understand we don’t understand this. I mean, everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the White Replacement Theory — no, no, no. This is a voting rights question. 

I have less political power because they’re importing a brand-new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? 

The power that I have —  

STEYN:  Yeah.

CARLSON:  — as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote, and they’re diluting it. No, they’re not allowed to do that. Why are we putting up with this? 

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON:  So, it’s a political question obviously. At least one prediction came true right away, all those little gatekeepers on Twitter did become hysterical. They spent the last four days jumping up and down, furiously trying once again to pull the show off the air. Once again, they will fail, though it is amusing to see them keep at it. They get so enraged, it’s a riot.

But why all the anger? If someone says something you think is wrong, is your first instinct to hurt them? Probably not. Normal people don’t respond that way. 

If you hear something you think is incorrect, you try to correct it. But getting the facts right is hardly the point of this exercise. The point is to prevent unauthorized conversations from starting in the first place. 

Shut up, racists! No more questions! You’ve heard that before. 

You wonder how much longer they imagine Americans are going to go along with this. An entire country forced to lie about everything all the time. It can’t go on forever but you can see why they’re trying it.

Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions. Let’s say that again for emphasis because it is the secret to the entire immigration debate. Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions. 

In order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country. They’re no longer trying to win you over with their program. They are obviously not trying to improve your life. They don’t even really care about your vote anymore. 

Their goal is to make you irrelevant. That is provably true and because it’s true, it drives them absolutely crazy when you say it out loud. A hurt dog barks. 

They scream about how noting the obvious is immoral. You are a racist if you dare to repeat things that they themselves probably say. Most people go along with this absurd standard. They dutifully shut up. They don’t think they have a choice.  

But no matter what they’re allowed to say in public, everyone understands the truth. When you change who votes, you change who wins. That fact has nothing inherently to do with race or nationality. It’s the nature of democracy. It is always true. 

You can watch it happen. You probably have. All across the country, we have seen huge changes in election outcomes caused by demographic change. New people move in and they vote differently. 

As a practical matter, it doesn’t matter what they look like or where they are from even. All that matters is that they have different political views. This is every bit as true when the migrants come from Brookline, as when they come from Oaxaca. 

In Vermont, white liberals fleeing the messed they made in New York turned the state blue. As recently as 1992, Vermont was reliably Republican, hard to believe as that is. Vermont is now a parody of lifestyle liberalism. That’s demographic change at work.

You see the same thing happening in the state of New Hampshire. It’s refugees from Massachusetts flood north and bring their bad habits with them. 

Montana, Idaho, Nevada all faced similar problems. The affluent liberals who wrecked California aren’t sticking around to see how that ends. They’re running to the pallid (ph) hideaways of Boise and Bozeman, distorting local culture and real estate markets as they do it. 

Pretty soon, people who are born in the Mountain West won’t be able to live there. They’ll be, yes, replaced by private equity barons, yoga instructors and senior vice presidents from Google. 

Beautiful places are always in danger of being overrun by the worst people, ask anyone who you grew in Aspen. 

But in most of this country, it is immigration from other nations, more than anything else that has driven political transformation. And this is different from what we have seen in Vermont. Americans have every right to move to new states if they want, even if they have silly political opinions.

But our leaders have no right to encourage foreigners to move to this country in order to change election results. Doing that is an attack on our democracy. 

Yet for decades, our leaders have done just that. And they keep doing it and they keep doing it because it works. 

Consider Virginia. The counties across the river from Washington, D.C., now contained one of the largest immigrant communities in the United States. Most of these immigrants are hardworking and decent people. Many of them have been very successful in business. Good for them. 

But they also have very different politics from the people who used to live there. Their votes have allowed Democrats to seize control of the entire state and change it into something unrecognizable. 

Governor Blackface Klan Robes in Richmond owes his job to immigrants in Arlington and Falls Church. Similar trends are now underway in Georgia, in North Carolina and many other states. Mass immigration increases the power of the Democratic Party, period. That’s the reason Democrats support it. It’s the only reason. 

If 200,000 immigrants from Poland showed up at our southern border tomorrow, Kamala Harris wouldn’t promise them health care. Why? Simple, Poles tend to vote Republican. That’s the difference.

Democrats would deport those migrants immediately. No more handwringing about how we’re a nation of immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of likely Republicans massing in Tijuana, that would qualify as a national crisis. We have a border wall by Wednesday. 

For Democrats, the point of immigration is not to show compassion to refugees, much less to improve our country. It is definitely not about racial injustice. Mass immigration hurts African-Americans may be more anyone else. 

Immigration is a means to electoral advantage. It is about power. More Democratic voters mean more power for Democratic politicians. That’s the signature lesson of the state of California. 

Between 1948 and 1992, the state of California voted for exactly one Democratic presidential candidate, one. Alone, among America’s big population centers, in vivid contrast to Chicago and New York, California was reliably, proudly Republican. For eight years, no less a figure than Ronald Reagan ran the state. California, the country’s best schools, best infrastructure, the best economy, not to mention the prettiest national environment on the planet. California was a model for the world. 

In 1980, Ronald Reagan, its former governor, became president of the United States. In retrospect, it never got any better for California. Midway through his second term, Reagan signed something called the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. 

Though he didn’t likely realize it at the time, that law made future Ronald Reagans impossible. The Immigration Reform and Control Act brought about an amnesty and a path to citizenship for nearly 3 million foreign nationals living in the U.S. illegally. 

The next year, by executive order, Reagan added to that number. He halted the deportation of another 100,000 illegal miners, the Dreamers of his day.

The rest of the world watched carefully as this happened. Would-be migrants everywhere concluded there was no real penalty for breaking America’s laws. In fact, there was a reward. 

Reagan also signed a law that required hospitals to provide free medical care regardless of immigration status. The Supreme Court had already guaranteed free education to anyone who showed up without a visa. So, free hospitals, free schools, amnesty if you get caught. Why wouldn’t the rest of the world come? 

They soon did. If you’re ever bored, go back and read the coverage of the 1986 amnesty bill the day it passed. Everyone at the time and both parties and the media assured Americans that the new law would control our border. It was called Immigration and Control Act after all. 

The opposite happened. Huge new waves of migrants arrived immediately, many of them illegally. California was transformed virtually overnight. It became a Democratic state. 

In 1988, George H.W. Bush narrowly won California in the presidential election. No Republican has won that state since. No Republican ever will win in California, not in our lifetimes. There are now about twice as many registered Democrats in California as there are Republicans. 

How did that happen? There’s not much debate about it. The counties in California with the highest percentage of Republicans are not coincidentally those with the lowest percentage of immigrants and vice versa. California changed because the population changed. 

Analysis, for example, the 2012 presidential election showed that if you were actually from there, if you lived in the state of California in 1980, you probably still voted Republican. Your views hadn’t really changed. 

But as your state swelled with foreign voters, your views became irrelevant. Your political power, the power to control your own life disappeared with the arrival of new people who diluted your vote. And that was the whole point. 

That’s not democracy. It’s cheating. Imagine watching a football game where one team decides to start the third quarter with an extra 40 players on the field. Would you consider that fair play? 

The Democratic Party did something very much like that in the state of California. They rigged the game with more people. They packed the electorate. As a result, Americans who grew up in California lost their most basic right in a democracy, which is the right to have their votes count. 

This is true for all native-born Americans, by the way, not just Republicans. Los Angeles now has the largest Latin American population outside of Mexico City. Whites are less than 30 percent of the population. They’re down for more than 90 percent in 1960.

But a less noticed decline has occurred among African-Americans. According to demographer, Joel Cockton (ph), in the last 30 years, the proportion of black residents in Los Angeles has dropped by half. The city of San Francisco is now just five percent black. In 1980, it was 13 percent. 

Now, you’ve heard a lot lately about the necessity for black political power. In California, that power is evaporating due to mass immigration. Democratic leaders never mentioned this trend, but it’s obvious to the people who live there. One poll found that over 60 percent of black people in California would very much like to leave. Many already have. 

The exodus of American-born Californians of every color began shortly after the 1986 amnesty. It has grown to a panic rush, as you know. It can now cost you five times as much to drive a U-Haul out of California than to drive a U-Haul in. That’s supply and demand at work. Not many Americans are moving to Los Angeles. 

Yet for every Californian who abandons the state, several other people arrive from foreign countries. And that’s why, since 1990, the total population of California has grown by 10 million people. That’s the equivalent of an entirely new Michigan and North Carolina in just 30 years. 

That’s an awful lot of people in a very short period of time. Most of these new arrivals come from poor places. Their standard of living rises once they get to California. 

The state however has become much poorer. In 1986, California was the richest landmass of its size in the world. California now has more poor people than any state in the country. 

As of this year, according to the best measurements available from the federal government, California has a higher poverty rate than Mississippi. It’s at the highest in the nation. 

How did this happen? In a healthy country, one that prides honesty and free inquiry and legitimate social science, we would be asking that question urgently. How did a place as idyllic as California becomes so miserable that huge numbers of people who are born there decided to abandon their homes and flee?

If you cared about the United States, you would want to know the answer. You would want to make absolutely certain it didn’t happen anywhere else. Yet the Democratic Party is working to make certain it happens everywhere else. 

That’s not a slur. It’s not a guess. We know it because they brag about it constantly. 

The left becomes unhinged if you point out that American voters are being replaced by Democratic Party loyalists from other countries. You’re absolutely not allowed to say that. But they’re allowed to say that and they do. They say it all the time.

They’ve done studies on it, written long books about it. Talked about it endlessly on television, often in the ugliest racial terms. They’re not ashamed at all. They don’t think they have to be ashamed. 

In the fall of 2018, a columnist from “The New York Times” wrote a piece that was literally entitled, “We can replace them.” In case you want to know the “them” was, the column told you explicitly. 

Thanks to demographic change, the author noted with hearty approval, the state of Georgia will soon be controlled by Democrats. Quote: The potential is there. Georgia is less than 53 percent non-Hispanic white, end quote.

Again, that’s a “New York Times” columnist. It’s not some QAnon blogger.

They tell you that demographic replacement is an obsession on the right. No, it’s not. They say it’s some horrifying right-wing conspiracy theory. The right is obsessed with it. 

No, the left is obsessed with it. In fact, it’s the central idea of the modern Democratic Party. Demographic replacement is their obsession, because it’s their path to power. 

Several years ago, future Obama cabinet secretary, Julian Castro, went on CBS to explain why Texas will soon be a Democratic state.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JULIAN CASTRO, FORMER HUD SECRETARY:  In a couple of presidential cycles, you’ll be on election night, you’ll be announcing that we’re calling the 38 electoral votes of Texas for the Democratic nominee for president. It’s changing. It is going to become a purple state and then a blue state because of the demographics, because of the population growth, of folks from outside of Texas.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON:  No one attacked Julian Castro for saying that. No one asked for these, quote, folks from outside Texas might be or why they had a right to control the future of people who already lived in Texas. Nobody said a word about it. It seemed normal. It was normal. It still is normal.

In Washington, what qualifies as shocking is any real attempt to protect democracy. 

In the summer of 2019, then President Donald Trump promised, falsely as it turned out, that he was going to deport huge numbers of foreign nationals living here illegally. 

Kamala Harris’ response to this was revealing. Harris could have argued as Democrats often do argue that deportation is cruel and it’s un-American. But she didn’t say that. Instead, she told the truth about it.

Quote: Let’s call this what it is, Harris wrote on Twitter. It’s an attempt to remake the demographics of our country by cracking down on immigrants. That this threat is coming from the president of the United States is deeply reprehensible and an affront to our values. We will fight this. 

But wait a second. Donald Trump had announced he was deporting illegal aliens. Illegal aliens aren’t allowed to vote in our elections. They’re not even allowed to live here. 

How is sending them home to their own countries, quote, an attempt to remake the demographics of our country? 

Illegal aliens shouldn’t even count in the demographics of our country. They’re not Americans. 

Kamala Harris’ response only makes sense if you believe that the millions of foreigners breaking our laws to live here are future Democratic voters. And that is exactly what Kamala Harris does believe. 

It’s shocking if you think about it. And that is why you are not allowed to think about it. Thinking about what Kamala Harris is planning, Kamala Harris herself would like you to know, is deeply reprehensible and an affront to our values. In other words, submit to our scheme or you’re immoral. 

If you heard prominent people talk like this in any other country, you’d be confused. A nation’s leadership class admitting they hope to replace their own citizens? It seems grotesque. 

If you believed in democracy, you would work to protect the potency of every citizen’s vote, obviously. You wonder if people even debate questions like this in countries that don’t hate themselves, countries like Japan or South Korea or Israel. 

Go to the Anti-Defamation League’s website sometime if you would like a glimpse of what an unvarnished conversation about a country’s national interests might look like. In a short essay posted to the site, the ADL explains why the state of Israel should not allow more Arabs to become citizens with voting rights. 

Quote: with historically high birth rates among the Palestinians and a possible influx of Palestinian refugees, and their descendants now living around the world, the ADL explains, Jews would quickly become a minority within a bi-national state, thus, likely ending any semblance of equal representation and protections. In this situation, the Jewish population would be increasingly politically and potentially physically vulnerable. 

It is unrealistic and unacceptable, the ADL continues, to expect the state of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and nationalist identity and become a vulnerable minority within what was once its own territory, end quote.

Now, from Israel’s perspective, this makes perfect sense. Why would any democratic nation make its own citizens less powerful? Isn’t that the deepest betrayal of all? 

In the words of the ADL, why would a government subvert its own sovereign existence? Good question. 

Maybe ADL president, Jonathan Greenblatt, will join us sometime to explain and tell us whether that same principle applies to the United States. Most Americans believe it does. 

Unfortunately, most Americans don’t have a say in the matter. Most Americans aren’t even allowed to have the conversation. So, they watch from the sidelines as their democracy gets murdered by people who claim to be its defenders. “Democracy, democracy, democracy,” screams the Twitter mob. 

Even as the votes of the people who were born here declined steadily in value, diluted (ph) and increasingly worthless like the U.S. dollar. 

This is what it looks like when an entire native population, black and white, but every one of them, an American, is systematically disenfranchised. Middle-class Americans become less powerful every year. They have less economic power, and thanks to mass immigration, they now have less political power. 

The leaders making these changes have no sympathy for their victims. They blame the country for its own suffering. You always hate the people you hurt. 

That’s all true. Every honest person knows that it’s true. As long as we’re here, we’re going to keep saying it out loud. 

So, you wake up one morning and you realize corporations are more powerful than they’ve ever been in American history. They seem to be in charge of our laws. They are silencing news outlets that disagree with them or the party they support. 

One senator in the Congress, Josh Hawley, of Missouri, thinks it is time to change this. “

———–

By Andrea Widburg

Florida headlines CPAC

“We will do what we’ve done right from the beginning, which is to win. We are not starting new parties, and we will not be dividing our power and our strength. Instead, we will be united and strong like never before. I am not starting a new party. That was fake news.”

Click on image – Full Speech

  Sen. Rick Scott applauds America First

President Trump did something that has never been done in our lifetime – he stood up to all of establishment Washington and said NO. 

• NO, I will NOT accept business as usual. 
• NO, I will NOT allow any more bad trade deals that favor Communist China and hurt American workers. 
• NO, I will NOT cozy up to Iran or back down from supporting Israel
• NO, I will NOT support unnecessary foreign wars or giveaways of American treasure or lives  
• NO, I will NOT stop pushing for secure borders. 
• And NO, I will NOT accept your political correctness or the push to silence conservative voices in America. 

Read More @ OAN Newsroom

*******

“We are in an oasis of freedom in a nation that’s suffering from the yoke of oppressive lockdowns’’

Click on image

.To see complete list of who spoke at CPAC click here

. 

“The Republican Civil War is now cancelled”

“The Democrats control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. In other words, they control Washington,” Sen. Scott writes. The memo continues:

Here is what they have done and are in the process of doing so far: cutting border security, granting amnesty to illegals, cancelling the Keystone pipeline destroying thousands of jobs, allowing males to compete in women’s sports, banning fracking on federal lands making us less energy independent and using tax dollars to pay for abortion in foreign countries. And they have built an amazing military-style wall around the US Capitol, at the same time they are stopping construction on the wall at our southern border.

Looking backward won’t help us win. Let us look forward and fix our eyes on what is important – an America with plenty of good-paying jobs, an America with great schools and safe communities, an America with freedoms and liberties people around the world would die for.  The only way we can lose is if we stop ourselves by needlessly fracturing

Read More @ Breitbart

****

 Keynote Speaker: President Donald Trump

CPAC was held at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando Feb. 25-28. The conference, which is usually held in the Washington, D.C., area, was moved to Florida.

Have Faith

Click on image

Leftists are useful idiots who serve only to destabilise the society. Yuri Bezmenov, a Russian born, KGB trained subverter tells about the influence of the Soviet Union on Western media and describes the stages of communist takeovers. This interview was conducted by G. Edward Griffin in 1984. Complete interview

https://youtu.be/Cnf0I2dQ0i0

‘The Remains of an Administration’

Obama entered office to gushes that he was a living god and the smartest man ever to enter the White House. He quickly won the Nobel Peace Prize and was courted internationally through a series of overseas tours. His brand was that he was not so much a citizen of an unexceptional America as a citizen of the now globalized world.

Obama entered with a supermajority in the Senate and a large majority in the House, with the likelihood of remaking the Supreme Court. When he left eight years later, he had lost both houses of Congress, lost the Supreme Court for a generation, and lost more than 1,000 state and local offices.

Once Obama discovered in his last year in office that the more he disappeared, the more the public liked the idea rather than the reality of Obama, his polls recovered. His designated successor, armed with Obama’s endorsement, a captive media, and a vast preponderance of money lost to outlier Donald Trump in the greatest upset in U.S. election history.

Trump, remember, ran on being the antithesis to Barack Obama. Gone with the Breeze Because Obama sought to ram down the throats of the public a radical progressive agenda on the force of his supposedly charismatic godhead, none of his initiatives ever won majority public support. A few were pushed through on entirely partisan votes or by executive — and thus easily reversible — orders.

For the most part, what Obama ran on in 2008, he quickly forgot. Instead, he sought to enact what he had once warned against, from open borders and gay marriage to radical deficit spending and one-size-fits-all federal medical care. In fact, Obamacare remains a mess and hobbles along, to the extent the individual mandate was scrapped.

The Obama future of centrally controlled, high-density, skyscraper apartment living, reliance on mass transit and subways, and energy-efficient crowded workplaces was rendered inert by COVID-19. Those who must soon return to the coastal corridor paradigm are not too happy about it. The Me Too movement is now dead, killed off by its own selective applications and hypocrisies. The Obama federal Title IX counterpart edicts to universities are now being overturned on grounds that they are likely unconstitutional. The Obama-administration appeasement of China is over and in retrospect seen as disastrous. “Reset” with Russia was as mythical as Russian “collusion.” The much-heralded Asian “pivot” is a forgotten divot. No one defends the Iran Deal much anymore, as Tehran struggles with sanctions, bankruptcy, a hostile Middle East, a suspect Chinese patron, the death of its terrorist master General Soleimani, popular unrest, and a COVID-19 mess. The idea of empowering the Iranian terrorist state and its appendages in Syria as a legitimate balance to Egypt, the moderate Gulf States, and even Israel was always unhinged. It was largely dreamed up by failed novelist Ben Rhodes, the organizer of the resistance foreign-policy shadow government that no one hears much about anymore. Even the Arab world is relieved that Obama’s estrangement with Israel is over with.

Whatever the Obama policy toward North Korea was, it was a prescription for nuclear missiles pointed at the U.S. America met the Paris climate accord more effectively than most signees to the agreement, and through hated natural gas and not beloved wind and solar. The world did not end when the Golan Heights was not going to be given back to Assad’s Syria, or as the American Embassy moved to Jerusalem. The epidemic put an end to lots of Obama lore. Secure borders are now the unquestioned consensus, not caravans blasting through rusty cyclone fences. Globalization is a synonym for Chinese hegemony. China is no longer a helpful partner in American efforts to address climate change and epidemics, as Obama once waxed.

The interior of the country is no longer written off, and jobs will come back without a magic wand, and more so due to fear of current Chinese monopolies of essential U.S. goods. Obama hollowed out the U.S. military and saw it rebuilt by Donald Trump. Grant, Harding, or Nixon? There is nothing left of the Obama creed of the “most scandal-free” administrant in memory. Before the collusion/obstruction hoax, the Horowitz report, the failed Mueller investigation, and the release of classified information, the public knew well of Fast and Furious, the data surveillance of the AP reporters, the GSA and VA messes, the weaponization of the IRS, the Benghazi mythologies, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, and the echo-chamber silence about the hidden details of the Iran deal. Each time Susan Rice was wheeled out to swear the truth, the public assumed it was a lie. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Slowly we are learning that the Obama administration — in its hatred of Donald Trump, in its paranoia that its precious legacy could in theory end in 2017, and in assurance that Hillary Clinton’s sure victory would cloak its wrongdoing — sought to disrupt a presidential campaign, wreck a presidential transition, and abort a presidency.

What did high Obama officials and leftovers not do to those ends? They spied on the incoming national-security advisor by the phony ruse of reverse targeting the Russian ambassador. They sought to ambush Michael Flynn in a perjury trap. They doctored and then likely destroyed the FBI 302 report of their ambush interview. During the campaign, they trafficked in a fake dossier, cobbled together by a bought foreign national, on the payroll of Hillary Clinton’s firewalls, and the FBI, whose made-up evidence was destroyed by Steele himself. Obama officials requested hundreds of unmaskings of those affiliated with Trump, and mysteriously many of the subsequent unredacted names ended up leaked to the press. They doctored emails to fool a FISA court into spying on an American citizen. The CIA used contractors abroad to entrap minor Trump campaign officials. The FBI outsourced its responsibilities to investigate the hacking of the DNC emails to Crowdstrike, whose mantra that the Russians did it was always suspect and soon confessed as unproven.

Former Obama officials — McCabe, Comey, Brennan, Clapper — blared on TV that Donald Trump was a Putin asset and a Russian colluder, even as they swore, while under oath, that they had no evidence for such assertions. In the end, all four at one time or another has either likely lied under oath to a congressional committee or lied to federal investigators. The scandal list could be expanded but its present status could be summed up as Obama himself likely knew of these efforts to surveille, disrupt, and ultimately destroy the Trump campaign and transition, and he correctly knew that no one would pursue the fact of his knowledge. Either his subordinates would provide a firewall around his divinity, or if they would or could not, the public could not absorb the idea that the Obama’s administration was the most corrupt and scandal-ridden in memory.

Finally, the Obama post presidency did not help his cause. After eight years of lecturing the nation about the proper time to profit, or identifying the point after which there was no need to make additional money, or that private businesspeople did not really build their businesses, or the need to spread the wealth around, Obama liberated from office almost immediately rushed to the life of private jets and luxury yachts. He signed multimillion-dollar tech and media deals characterized by requiring little expertise and less work but the promiscuous use of his brand and name. The erstwhile lecturer in chief about redlining and insidious bias bought a mansion in Washington’s toniest district; and after warning about rising seas, coastal flooding, and the need to lower them, he bought a seaside estate at Martha Vineyard, for the fire sale price of just under $12 million. In other words, he knew no time to stop profiting; there was no point when he had enough money; he saw no reason to spread his wealth around; and he really did build his own empire, The less charismatic purveyors of the Obama legacy have not done well.

Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to compile a dirty dossier on Trump and seed it in the Obama administration. She blew an election and ended up babbling and fixated permanently on her failure, before pathetically joining the “Resistance.” Joe Biden in his dotage may be spared her angst, given his own seeming inability to know exactly where he is and what he is supposed to say. Obama was supposed to have jump-started the careers of dozens of young, charismatic “diversity” imitators in the presidential arena, such as Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Deval Patrick, Kamala Harris, and Andrew Yang. All crashed and burned in the Democratic primaries, whether because they were not the Obama Adonis or because they reminded voters of his shallowness.

We were supposed to see a fundamental transformation of the country between 2009 and 2025, as the Obama-Clinton 16-year regnum finally made America right and correct. Instead, we witnessed eight years that ended in scandal whose full dimensions of criminality will take years to process.

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
May 26, 2020

SpaceX blasts into new era of human spaceflight

The spacecraft took off Saturday afternoon from the same launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, that was used during the Apollo missions to the moon a half-century ago.

The flight ushers in a new era in commercial space travel and marks the first time NASA has launched astronauts from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.

Elon Musk is rallying voters to vote for Trump

READ –

“The Obama administration Justice Dept. was a disgrace … but much more than that, it’s treason.” 

WATCH

Read more

 WATCH THIS

Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19

The following article is a systematic overview of COVID-19 driven by data from medical professionals and academic articles that will help you understand what is going on (sources include CDC, WHO, NIH, NHS, University of Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, NEJM, JAMA, and several others).

Data is data. Our focus here isn’t treatments but numbers. You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say. Numbers are universal.

I hope you walk away with a more informed perspective on how you can help and fight back against the hysteria that is driving our country into a dark place. You can help us focus our scarce resources on those who are most vulnerable, who need our help.

Note: The following graphs and numbers are as of mid-March 2020. Things are moving quickly, so I update this article twice a day. Most graphs are as of March 20th, 2020.

Best,

Aaron Ginn

Table of Contents

1. Total cases are the wrong metric
2. Time lapsing new cases gives us perspective
3. On a per-capita basis, we shouldn’t be panicking
4. COVID-19 is spreading
5. Watch the Bell Curve
6. A low probability of catching COVID-19
7. Common transmission modes
8. COVID-19 is likely to burn off in the summer
9. Children and Teens aren’t at risk
10. Strong, but unknown viral effect
11. What about asymptomatic spread?
12. 93% of people who think they are positive aren’t
13. 1% of cases will be severe
14. Declining fatality rate
15. So what should we do?
16. Start with basic hygiene
17. More data
18. Open schools
19. Open up public spaces
20. Support business and productivity
21. People fear what the government will do, not infection
22. Expand medical capacity
23. Don’t let them forget it and vote

Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19

Aaron Ginn

Mar 20 · 33 min read

Bell curves is the dominant trait of outbreaks. A virus doesn’t grow linearly forever. It accelerates, plateaus, and then declines. Whether it is environmental or our own efforts, viruses accelerate and quickly decline. This fact of nature is represented in Farr’s law. CDC’s of “bend the curve” or “flatten the curve” reflects this natural reality.

It is important to note that in both scenarios, the total number of COVID-19 cases will be similar. “Flattening the curve”’s focus is a shock to the healthcare system which can increase fatalities due to capacity constraints. In the long-term, it isn’t infection prevention. Unfortunately, “flattening the curve” doesn’t include other downsides and costs of execution.

Both the CDC and WHO are optimizing virality and healthcare utilization, while ignoring the economic shock to our system. Both organizations assume you are going to get infected, eventually, and it won’t be that bad.

A low probability of catching COVID-19

The World Health Organization (“WHO”) released a study on how China responded to COVID-19. Currently, this study is one of the most exhaustive pieces published on how the virus spreads.

The results of their research show that COVID-19 doesn’t spread as easily as we first thought or the media had us believe (remember people abandoned their dogs out of fear of getting infected). According to their report if you come in contact with someone who tests positive for COVID-19 you have a 1–5% chance of catching it as well. The variability is large because the infection is based on the type of contact and how long.

The majority of viral infections come from prolonged exposures in confined spaces with other infected individuals. Person-to-person and surface contact is by far the most common cause. From the WHO report, “When a cluster of several infected people occurred in China, it was most often (78–85%) caused by an infection within the family by droplets and other carriers of infection in close contact with an infected person.

From the CDC’s study on transmission in China and Princess Cruise outbreak –

A growing body of evidence indicates that COVID-19 transmission is facilitated in confined settings; for example, a large cluster (634 confirmed cases) of COVID-19 secondary infections occurred aboard a cruise ship in Japan, representing about one fifth of the persons aboard who were tested for the virus. This finding indicates the high transmissibility of COVID-19 in enclosed spaces

Dr. Paul Auwaerter, the Clinical Director for the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine echoes this finding,

“If you have a COVID-19 patient in your household, your risk of developing the infection is about 10%….If you were casually exposed to the virus in the workplace (e.g., you were not locked up in conference room for six hours with someone who was infected [like a hospital]), your chance of infection is about 0.5%”

According to Dr. Auwaerter, these transmission rates are very similar to the seasonal flu.

Air-based transmission or untraceable community spread is very unlikely. According to WHO’s COVID-19 lead Maria Van Kerkhove, true community based spreading is very rare. The data from China shows that community-based spread was only a very small handful of cases. “This virus is not circulating in the community, even in the highest incidence areas across China,” Van Kerkhove said.

“Transmission by fine aerosols in the air over long distances is not one of the main causes of spread. Most of the 2,055 infected hospital workers were either infected at home or in the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan when hospital safeguards were not raised yet,” she said.

True community spread involves transmission where people get infected in public spaces and there is no way to trace back the source of infection. WHO believes that is not what the Chinese data shows. If community spread was super common, it wouldn’t be possible to reduce the new cases through “social distancing”.

“We have never seen before a respiratory pathogen that’s capable of community transmission but at the same time which can also be contained with the right measures. If this was an influenza epidemic, we would have expected to see widespread community transmission across the globe by now and efforts to slow it down or contain it would not be feasible,” said Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of WHO.

An author of a working paper from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University said, “The current scientific consensus is that most transmission via respiratory secretions happens in the form of large respiratory droplets … rather than small aerosols. Droplets, fortunately, are heavy enough that they don’t travel very far and instead fall from the air after traveling only a few feet.”

The media was put into a frenzy when the above authors released their study on COVID-19’s ability to survive in the air. The study did find the virus could survive in the air for a couple of hours; however, this study was designed as academic exercise rather than a real-world test. This study put COVID-19 into a spray bottle to “mist” it into the air. I don’t know anyone who coughs in mist form and it is unclear if the viral load was large enough to infect another individual As one doctor, who wants to remain anonymous, told me, “Corona doesn’t have wings”.

To summarize, China, Singapore, and South Korea’s containment efforts worked because community-based and airborne transmission aren’t common. The most common form of transmission is person-to-person or surface-based.

Common transmission surfaces

COVID-19’s ability to live for a long period of time is limited on most surfaces and it is quite easy to kill with typical household cleaners, just like the normal flu.

• COVID-19 be detected on copper after 4 hours and 24 hours on cardboard.
• COVID-19 survived best on plastic and stainless steel, remaining viable for up to 72 hours
• COVID-19 is very vulnerable to UV light and heat.

Presence doesn’t mean infectious. The viral concentration falls significantly over time. The virus showed a half-life of about 0.8 hours on copper, 3.46 hours on cardboard, 5.6 hours on steel and 6.8 hours on plastic.

According to Dylan Morris, one of the authors, “We do not know how much virus is actually needed to infect a human being with high probability, nor how easily the virus is transferred from the cardboard to one’s hand when touching a package”

According to Dr. Auwaerter, “It’s thought that this virus can survive on surfaces such as hands, hard surfaces, and fabrics. Preliminary data indicates up to 72 hours on hard surfaces like steel and plastic, and up to 12 hours on fabric.”

COVID-19 will likely “burn off” in the summer

Due to COVID-19’s sensitivity to UV light and heat (just like the normal influenza virus), it is very likely that it will “burn off” as humidity increases and temperatures rise.

Released on March 10th, one study mapped COVID-19 virality capability by high temperature and high humidity. It found that both significantly reduced the ability of the virus to spread from person-to-person. From the study,

“This result is consistent with the fact that the high temperature and high humidity significantly reduce the transmission of influenza. It indicates that the arrival of summer and rainy season in the northern hemisphere can effectively reduce the transmission of the COVID-19.”

The University of Maryland mapped severe COVID-19 outbreaks with local weather patterns around the world, from the US to China. They found that the virus thrives in a certain temperature and humidity channel. “The researchers found that all cities experiencing significant outbreaks of COVID-19 have very similar winter climates with an average temperature of 41 to 52 degrees Fahrenheit, an average humidity level of 47% to 79% with a narrow east-west distribution along the same 30–50 N” latitude”, said the University of Maryland.

“Based on what we have documented so far, it appears that the virus has a harder time spreading between people in warmer, tropical climates,” said study leader Mohammad Sajadi, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine in the UMSOM, physician-scientist at the Institute of Human Virology and a member of GVN.

In the image below, the zone at risk for a significant community spread in the near-term includes land areas within the green bands.

As of right now reported cases as a function of latitude, about one-third of the world’s population is below 22.5°N yet has not experienced meaningfully high levels of infections.

About 95% of all infections in a latitude band encompassing 55% of the world’s population, which includes a large portion of America.

Infections as a function of temperature and humidity: 90% still in the blue zone

Children and Teens aren’t at risk

It’s already well established that the young aren’t particularly vulnerable. In fact, there isn’t a single death reported below the age of 10 in the world and most children who test positive don’t show symptoms. As well, infection rates are lower for individuals below the age of 19, which is similar to SARS and MERS (COVID-19’s sister viruses).

According to the WHO’s COVID-19 mission in China, only 8.1% of cases were 20-somethings, 1.2% were teens, and 0.9% were 9 or younger. As of the study date February 20th, 78% of the cases reported were ages 30 to 69. The WHO hypothesizes this is for a biological reason and isn’t related to lifestyle or exposure.

“Even when we looked at households, we did not find a single example of a child bringing the infection into the household and transmitting to the parents. It was the other way around. And the children tend to have a mild disease,” said Van Kerkhove.

According to a WSJ article, children have a near-zero chance of becoming ill. They are more likely to get normal flu than COVID-19.

• A World Health Organization report on China concluded that cases of Covid-19 in children were “relatively rare and mild.” Among cases in people under age 19, only 2.5% developed severe disease while 0.2% developed critical disease. Among nearly 6,300 Covid-19 cases reported by the Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention on March 8, there were no reported deaths in anyone under 30. Only 0.7% of infections were in children under 9 and 4.6% of cases were in those ages 10 to 19 years old
• Only 2% of the patients in a review of nearly 45,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases in China were children, and there were no reported deaths in children under 10, according to a study published in JAMA last month. (In contrast, there have been 136 pediatric deaths from influenza in the U.S. this flu season.)
• About 8% of cases were in people in their 20s. Those 10 to 19 years old accounted for 1% of cases and those under 10 also accounted for only 1%.

However even if children and teens are not suffering severe symptoms themselves, they may “shed” large amounts of virus and may do so for many days, says James Campbell, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Children had a virus in their secretions for six to 22 days or an average of 12 days. “Shedding virus doesn’t always mean you’re able to transmit the virus”, he notes. It is still important to consider that prolonged shedding of high viral loads from children is still a risky combination within the home since the majority of transmission occurs within a home-like confined environment.

A strong, but unknown viral effect

While the true viral capacity is unknown at this moment, it is theorized that COVID-19 is more than the seasonal flu but less than other viruses. The average number of people to which a single infected person will transmit the virus, or Ro, range from as low as 1.5 to a high of 3.0

Newer analysis suggests that this viral rate is declining. According to Nobel Laureate and biophysicist Michael Levitt, the infection rate is declining –

“Every coronavirus patient in China infected on average 2.2 people a day — spelling exponential growth that can only lead to disaster. But then it started dropping, and the number of new daily infections is now close to zero.” He compared it to interest rates again: “even if the interest rate keeps dropping, you still make money. The sum you invested does not lessen, it just grows more slowly. When discussing diseases, it frightens people a lot because they keep hearing about new cases every day. But the fact that the infection rate is slowing down means the end of the pandemic is near.”

What about asymptomatic spread?

The majority of cases see symptoms within a few days, not two weeks as originally believed.

On true asymptomatic spread, the data is still unclear but increasingly unlikely. Two studies point to a low infection rate from pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. One study said 10% of infections come from people who don’t show symptoms, yet. Another WHO study reported 1.2% of confirmed cases were truly asymptomatic. Several studies confirming asymptotic spread have ended up disproven. It is important to note there is a difference between “never showing symptoms” and “pre-symptomatic” and the media is promoting an unproven narrative. Almost all people end up in the latter camp within five days, almost never the former. It is very unlikely for individuals with COVID-19 to never show symptoms. WHO and CDC claim that asymptomatic spread isn’t a concern and quite rare.

Iceland is leading the global in testing its entire population of ~300,000 for asymptomatic spread, not just those that show symptoms. They randomly tested 1,800 citizens who don’t show symptoms and, as far as they knew, were not exposed to positive individuals. Of this sample, only 19 tested positive for COVID-19, or 1.1% of the sample.

Obviously, this type of viral spread is the most concerning; however based on the level of media attention and the global size of positive infections, it seems more probable we keep looking for a COVID-19 viral trait that doesn’t exist.

Another way of looking at virality and asymptotic spread is the number of flight attendants, airport staff, or pilots that have tested positive for COVID-19. Out of the thousands of flights since November 2019, only a handful of airport and airline staff have tested positive (such as AA pilot, some BA staff, and several TSA employees).

Outside of medical and hospital staff, these individuals are in greatest contact with infected persons in confined spaces. Despite having no protective gear and most likely these people were asymptomatic, airline and airport staff aren’t likely to catch COVID-19 compared to the rest of the population. Those employed in the travel sector are infected at a lower rate than the general population or healthcare workers.

“We still believe, looking at the data, that the force of infection here, the major driver, is people who are symptomatic, unwell, and transmitting to others along the human-to-human route,” Dr. Mike Ryan of WHO Emergencies Program.

If the symptoms are so close to other less fatal coronaviruses, what is the positivity rate of those tested?

93% of people who think they are positive aren’t

Looking at the success in S. Korea and Singapore, the important tool in our war chest is measurement. If we are concerned about the general non-infected population, what is the probability those who show symptoms actually test positive? What is the chance that the cough from your neighbor is COVID-19? This “conversion rate” will show whether or not you have a cold (another coronavirus) or heading to isolation for two weeks. Global data shows that ~95% of people who are tested aren’t positive. The positivity rate varies by country.

• UK: 7,132 concluded tests, of which 13 positive (0.2% positivity rate).
• UK: 48,492 tests, of which 1,950 (4.0% positivity rate)
• Italy: 9,462 tests, of which 470 positive (at least 5.0% positivity rate).
• Italy: 3,300 tests, of which 99 positive (3.0% positivity rate)
• Iceland: 3,787 tests, of which 218 positive (5.7% positive rate)
• France: 762 tests, of which 17 positive, 179 awaiting results (at least 2.2% positivity rate).
• Austria: 321 tests, of which 2 positive, awaiting results: unknown (at least 0.6% positivity rate).
• South Korea: 66,652 tests with 1766 positives 25,568 awaiting results (4.3% positivity rate).
• United States: 445 concluded tests, of which 14 positive (3.1% positivity rate).

In the US, drive-thru testing facilities are being deployed around the nation. Gov. Cuomo of NY released initial data from their drive-thru testing. Out of the 600~ that was tested in a single day, ~7% were positive. Tested individuals actively show symptoms and present a doctor’s note. This result is similar to public tracking on US nationwide positivity rate.

University of Oxford’s Our World in Data attempts to track public reporting on individuals tested vs positive cases of COVID-19. For the US, it estimates 14.25% of those tested are positive.

Last week, the US was significantly behind in testing, near the bottom of all countries worldwide. As of March 20th, a week later, the US is much closer to other G8 and European countries, but there is a long way to go.

Based on the initial results and the results from other countries, the total number of positive COVID-19 cases will increase as testing increases, but the fatality rate will continue to fall and the severity case mix will fall.

In general, the size of the US population infected with COVID-19 will be much smaller than originally estimated as most symptomatic individuals aren’t positive. 93% — 99% have other conditions.

Globally, the US has a long way to go to catch up in testing. As testing expands, the total number of cases will increase, but the mild to severe case ratio will decline dramatically.

1% of cases will be severe

Looking at the whole funnel from top to bottom, ~1% of everyone who is tested for COVID-19 with the US will have a severe case that will require a hospital visit or long-term admission.

Globally, 80–85% of all cases are mild. These will not require a hospital visit and home-based treatment/ no treatment is effective.

As of mid-March, the US has a significantly lower case severity rate than other countries. Our current severe caseload is similar to South Korea. This data has been spotty in the past; however, lower severity is reflected in the US COVID-19 fatality rates (addressed later).

Early reports from CDC, suggest that 12% of COVID-19 cases need some form of hospitalization, which is lower than the projected severity rate of 20%, with 80% being mild cases.

For context, this year’s flu season has led to at least 17 million medical visits and 370,000 hospitalizations (0.1%) out of 30–50 million infections. Recalling that only comparing aggregate total cases isn’t helpful, breaking down active cases on a per-capita basis paints a different picture on severity. This is data as of March 20th, 2020.

Declining fatality rate

As the US continues to expand testing, the case fatality rate will decline over the next few weeks. There is little doubt that serious and fatal cases of COVID-19 are being properly recorded. What is unclear is the total size of mild cases. WHO originally estimated a case fatality rate of 4% at the beginning of the outbreak but revised estimates downward 2.3% — 3% for all age groups. CDC estimates 0.5% — 3%, however stresses that closer to 1% is more probable. Dr. Paul Auwaerter estimated 0.5% — 2%, leaning towards the lower end. A paper released on March 19th analyzed a wider data set from China and lowered the fatality rate to 1.4%. This won’t be clear for the US until we see the broader population that is positive but with mild cases. With little doubt, the fatality rate and severity rate will decline as more people are tested and more mild cases are counted.

Higher fatality rates in China, Iran, and Italy are more likely associated with a sudden shock to the healthcare system unable to address demands and doesn’t accurately reflect viral fatality rates. As COVID-19 spread throughout China, the fatality rate drastically fell outside of Hubei. This was attributed to the outbreak slowing spreading to several provinces with low infection rates.

John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center recently wrote about fatality rates and how our current instrumentation is leading to faulty policy solutions:

“The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.

Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty…”

“Reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.”

Looking at the US fatality, the fatality rate is drastically declining as the number of cases increases, halving every four or five days. The fatality rate will eventually level off and plateau as the US case-mix becomes apparent.

• 4.06% March 8 (22 deaths of 541 cases)
• 3.69% March 9 (26 of 704)
• 3.01% March 10 (30 of 994)
• 2.95% March 11 (38 of 1,295)
• 2.52% March 12 (42 of 1,695)
• 2.27% March 13 (49 of 2,247)
• 1.93% March 14 (57 of 2,954)
• 1.84% March 15 (68 of 3,680)
• 1.90% March 16 (86 of 4,503)
• 1.76% March 17 (109 of 6,196)
• 1.66% March 18 (150 of 9,003)
• 1.51% March 19th (208 of 13,789)
• 1.32% March 20th (256 of 19,383)

Source: Worldometers.info

Mapped against other countries, our fatality rate and case-mix are following a similar pattern to South Korea which is a good sign, a supposed model of how to manage COVID-19.

Here are deaths weighted by the total number of cases as of March 20th, 2020. Ranked by the total number of cases, our death rate is closer to South Korea’s than Spain’s or Italy’s.

The initial higher fatality rate for the US is trending much lower than originally estimated. A study of about half deaths within the US (154 of 264), almost all fit a similar demographic profile as the other global ~11,000 fatalities.

Another analysis by Nature, comparing the fatality rate (since revised down) and infectious rate of COVID-19 to other illnesses. COVID-19 is now within range of its other sisters of less potent coronaviruses.

As the global health community continues to gather and report data, the claim that “COVID-19 isn’t just like the flu” (though still severe) is looking less credible as fatality rates continue to decline and measuring of mild cases increases.

It is important to consider case-mix when looking at fatality rates. The fatality rate is significantly higher for patients with an underlying condition.

The fatality rates by underling condition mimics the rise in the average fatality rate with those with underlying conditions who get the seasonal flu.

• Pneumonia and influenza: 1.53% — 1.93%
• Chronic lower respiratory disease: 1.48% — 1.93%
• All respiratory causes: 3.04% — 4.14%
• Heart disease: 3.21% — 4.4%
• Cancer: 0.68% — 1.05%
• Diabetes: 0.26% — 0.39%
• For all underlying conditions: 10.17% — 13.67%.

Comparing case-mix across countries with a wide range of fatality (China and Italy) and those with low fatality rates (S. Korea) reveals a stark difference in age; therefore, underlying conditions also vary significantly across countries. These two factors contribute the most to a country’s fatality rate.

Divided by most at risk and low risk, Italy had significantly more cases of high at-risk patients than Germany or Korea

Based on an initial CDC study of 2,449 COVID-19 cases (almost half of current US cases have missing demographic data), the United States case-mix looks more like S. Korea and Germany rather than China or Italy. Approximately 69% of COVID-19 cases are in the lower at-risk population of under 65, while 31% are older than 65 higher risk population. This suggests the US will experience a declining fatality rate; however, the US has over 100 million adults with underlying and chronic illnesses that will negatively impact our fatality rate.

An older population skew within the infected population explains most of the disparity in fatality rates between high and low countries. According to a study of the fatalities of COVID-19 cases in Italy, 99% of all deaths had an underlying pathology. Only 0.8% had no underlying condition.

Most of those infected in Italy were over the age of 60, but the median age of a fatality was 80. All of Italy’s fatality under the age of 40 were males with serious pre-existing medical conditions.

This doesn’t factor in a wide variance in healthcare capacity, such as hospital beds per 1,000 citizens which could affect health outcomes; however, this doesn’t seem to be highly correlated with fatality rates at this moment.

• S. Korea — 11.5
• Germany — 8.3
• China — 4.2
• Italy — 3.4
• United States — 2.9
• Singapore — 2.4

So what should we do?

The first rule of medicine is to do no harm.

Local governments and politicians are inflicting massive harm and disruption with little evidence to support their draconian edicts. Every local government is in a mimetic race to one-up each other in authoritarian city ordinances to show us who has more “abundance of caution”. Politicians are competing, not on more evidence or more COVID-19 cures but more caution. As unemployment rises and families feel unbearably burdened already, they feel pressure to “fix” the situation they created with even more radical and “creative” policy solutions. This only creates more problems and an even larger snowball effect. The first place to start is to stop killing the patient and focus on what works.

Start with basic hygiene

The most effective means to reduce spread is basic hygiene. Most American’s don’t wash their hands enough and aren’t aware of how to actually wash your hands. Masks aren’t particularly effective if you touch your eyes with infected hands. Ask businesses and public places to freely distribute disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer to the customers and patrons. If you get sick or feel sick, stay home. These are basic rules for preventing illness that doesn’t require trillions of dollars.

More data

The best examples of defeating COVID-19 requires lots of data. We are very behind in measuring our population and the impact of the virus but this has turned a corner the last few days. The swift change in direction should be applauded. Private companies are quickly developing and deploying tests, much faster than CDC could ever imagine. The inclusion of private businesses in developing solutions is creative and admirable. Data will calm nerves and allow us to utilize more evidence in our strategy. Once we have proper measurement implemented (the ability to test hundreds every day in a given metro), let’s add even more data into that funnel — reopen public life.

Taiwan is held up as a model for its approach. They embraced both data, tracking, free movement of people, evidence-based prevention, and focused their energy on those most vulnerable — preexisting conditions and those over the age of 65. Here are some of the steps they took:

• QR code scanning and online reporting of each person’s travel history
• Health symptoms were used to classify traveler infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the past 14 days
• People with low risk were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS to their phones for faster immigration clearance
• Those with higher risk were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phone to ensure that they remained there during the incubation period
• Taiwan also proactively seeks out patients with severe respiratory symptoms (based on information from a national health database) to see who had tested negative for influenza so that they could be retested for COVID-19

Open schools

Closing schools is counterproductive. The economic cost for closing schools in the U.S. for four weeks could cost between $10 and $47 billion dollars (0.1–0.3% of GDP) and lead to a reduction of 6% to 19% in key health care personnel.

CDC’s guidance on closing schools specifically for COVID-19 –

Available modeling data indicate that early, short to medium closures do not impact the epi curve of COVID-19 or available health care measures (e.g., hospitalizations). There may be some impact of much longer closures (8 weeks, 20 weeks) further into community spread, but that modeling also shows that other mitigation efforts (e.g., handwashing, home isolation) have more impact on both spread of disease and health care measures. In other countries, those places who closed school (e.g., Hong Kong) have not had more success in reducing spread than those that did not (e.g., Singapore).

Based on transmission evidence children are more likely to catch COVID-19 in the home than at school. As well, they are more likely to expose older vulnerable adults as multi-generational homes are more common. As well, the school provides a single point of testing a large population for a possible infection in the home to prevent community spread.

Open up public spaces

With such little evidence of prolific community spread and our guiding healthcare institutions reporting the same results, shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses. The data is overwhelming at this point that community-based spread and airborne transmission is not a threat. We don’t have significant examples of spreading through restaurants or gyms. When you consider the environment COVID-19 prefers, isolating every family in their home is a perfect situation for infection and transmission among other family members. Evidence from South Korea and Singapore shows that it is completely possible and preferred to continue on with life while making accommodations that are data-driven, such as social distancing and regular temperature checks.

Support business and productivity

The data shows that the overwhelming majority of the working population will not be personally impacted, both individually or their children. This is an unnecessary burden that is distracting resources and energy away from those who need it the most. By preventing Americans from being productive and specializing at what they do best (their vocation), we are pulling resources towards unproductive tasks and damaging the economy. We will need money for this fight.

At this rate, we will spend more money on “shelter-in-place” than if we completely rebuilt our acute care and emergency capacity.

Americans won’t have the freedom to go help those who get sick, volunteer their time at a hospital, or give generously to a charity. Instead, big government came barrelling in like a bull in a china shop claiming they could solve COVID-19. The same government that continued to not test incoming passengers from Europe and who couldn’t manufacture enough test kits with two months’ notice.

Let Americans be free to be a part of the solution, calling us to a higher civic duty to help those most in need and protect the vulnerable. Not sitting in isolation like losers.

People fear what the government will do, not an infection

Rampant hoarding and a volatile stock market aren’t being driven by COVID-19. An overwhelming majority of American’s don’t believe they will be infected. Rather hoarding behavior strongly demonstrates an irrational hysteria, from purchasing infective household masks to buying toilet paper in the troves. This fear is being driven by government action, fearing what the government will do next. In South Korea, most citizens didn’t fear infection but the government and public shaming. By presenting a consistent and clear plan that is targeted and specific to those who need the most help will reduce the volatility and hysteria. A sign the logic behind these government actions aren’t widely accepted, nor believed as rational by the American people is the existence itself of the volatility and hysteria. Over three-fourths of Americans are scared not of COVID-19 but what it is doing to our society.

In CDC’s worst-case scenario, CDC expects more than 150–200 million infections within the US. This estimate is hundreds of times bigger than China’s infection rate (30% of our population compared to 0.006% in China). Does that really sound plausible to you? China has a sub-par healthcare system, attempted to suppress the news about COVID-19 early on, a lack of transparency, an authoritarian government, and millions of Chinese traveling for the Lunar Festival at the height of the outbreak. In the US, we have a significant lead time, several therapies proving successful, transparency, a top tier healthcare system, a democratic government, and media providing ample accountability.

Infection isn’t our primary risk at this point.

Expand medical capacity

COVID-19 is a significant medical threat that needs to be tackled, both finding a cure and limiting spread; however, some would argue that a country’s authoritarian response to COVID-19 helped stop the spread. Probably not. In South Korea and Taiwan, I can go to the gym and eat at a restaurant which is more than I can say about San Francisco and New York, despite a significantly lower caseload on a per-capita basis.

None of the countries the global health authorities admire for their approach issued “shelter-in-place” orders, rather they used data, measurement,and promoted common sense self-hygiene.

Does stopping air travel have a greater impact than closing all restaurants? Does closing schools reduce the infection rate by 10%? Not one policymaker has offered evidence of any of these approaches. Typically, the argument given is “out of an abundance of caution”. I didn’t know there was such a law. Let’s be frank, these acts are emotionally driven by fear, not evidence-based thinking in the process of destroying people’s lives overnight. While all of these decisions are made by elites isolated in their castles of power and ego, the shock is utterly devastating Main Street.

A friend who runs a guy will run out of cash in a few weeks. A friend who is a pastor let go of half of his staff as donations fell by 60%. A waitress at my favorite breakfast place told me her family will have no income in a few days as they force the closure of restaurants. While political elites twiddle their thumbs with models and projections based on faulty assumptions, people’s lives are being destroyed with Marxian vigor. The best compromise elites can come up with is $2,000.

Does it make more sense for us to pay a tax to expand medical capacity quickly or pay the cost to our whole nation of a recession? Take the example of closing schools which will easily cost our economy $50 billion. For that single unanimous totalitarian act, we could have built 50 hospitals with 500+ beds per hospital.

Eliminate arcane certificate of need and expand acute medical capacity to support possible higher healthcare utilization this season.

Don’t let them forget it and vote

These days are precarious as Governors float the idea of martial law for not following “social distancing”, as well as they liked while they violate those same rules on national TV. Remember this tone is for a virus that has impacted 0.004% of our population. Imagine if this was a truly existential threat to our Republic.

The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society. Data is data. Facts are facts. We should be focused on resolving COVID-19 with continued testing, measuring, and be vigilant about protecting those with underlying conditions and the elderly from exposure. We are blessed in one way, there is an election in November. Never forget what happened and vote.

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You may ask yourself. Who is this guy? Who is this author? I’m a nobody. That is also the point. The average American feels utterly powerless right now. I’m an individual American who sees his community and loved ones being decimated without given a choice, without empathy, and while the media cheers on with high ratings.

When this is all over, look for massive confirmation bias and pyrrhic celebration by elites. There will be vain cheering in the halls of power as Main Street sits in pieces. Expect no apology, that would be political suicide. Rather, expect to be given a Jedi mind trick of “I’m the government and I helped.”

The health of the State will be even stronger with more Americans dependent on welfare, another trillion stimulus filled with pork for powerful friends, and a bailout for companies that charged us $200 change fees for nearly a decade. Washington DC will be fine. New York will still have all of the money in the world. Our communities will be left with nothing but a shadow of the longest bull market in the history of our country.

Progressive Petards

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Since at least 2016, CNN has mostly ceased being a news agency, but that hasn’t stopped it from being an active participant in #TheResistance. The network is so caught up in the fervor of this movement that many of its guests and regular hosts have been fired, reprimanded, or apologized for threats to the president or general obscene references (e.g., Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, Kathy Griffin).

Many of its marquee reporters have resigned, were fired, or reassigned for fake-news bias (e.g., Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris), or came under fire for false reporting (Jim Sciutto, Marshall Cohen, and Carl Bernstein) or have had to offer retractions and/or apologies (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.)

Its anchors have apologized for obscenity (Anderson Cooper) or simply making up false statements (Chris Cuomo), while analysts have been caught in a number of contradictions about their own role in on-going scandals (James Clapper).

The common denominator has been the new journalistic ethos that aborting the Trump presidency justifies any means necessary to achieve such noble ends. Throughout CNN’s descent into parody, progressives still smiled at the usefulness of CNN for the larger project of delegitimizing the Trump presidency. Few understood the Thucydidean concept that once nihilists destroy norms and protocols of ethical behavior for perceived short-term advantage, they usually rue the loss when they themselves become victims of their own biased zealotry and are in dire need of the civilizational help they recently ruined.

So it was last week, when CNN moderator Abby Phillip warped the recent Democratic presidential primary debate by not asking, so much as accusing, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) about a claim that he said a woman such as Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) could not be elected president—in the fashion of a “When did you stop beating your wife?” question: “Senator Sanders, CNN reported yesterday, and Senator Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”

Leftists were outraged at the CNN host’s flagrant bias—as if there was gambling really going on in Casablanca, as if CNN’s own Candy Crowley had not attempted to hijack the second 2012 presidential debate to aid favorite Barack Obama, or as if CNN’s Donna Brazile had not leaked a debate question to aid Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Diversity Drama

The same irony is on display with the Democratic presidential field. One strange theme has been dominant since the primary debates began: the more the white frontrunners pontificated on “diversity” and deplored “white privilege,” the whiter the Democratic field seemed to grow—until there were no nonwhite candidates left.

Those who followed the Democratic field were vexed, given that for three decades the Left has canonized its two fundamental identity politics principles of “proportional representation” and “disproportional impact.” These are the rather strange ideas that racial, ethnic, and gender groups must be represented in coveted jobs and billets according to their percentages in the general population—and its addendum that if there was not proper proportional representation, then no evidence of bias or discrimination was needed to take reparatory action to ensure that race governed hiring and admissions.

Thus, according to progressive doctrine, the white liberals and democratic socialists on the Democratic debate platform, not Democratic voters, pollsters, and donors themselves, are in a way culpable for the absence of candidates of color, whether or not a Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders, or Warren was guided by prejudicial behavior in beating a Booker, Castro, Harris, Patrick, or Yang.

Perhaps if the Democratic candidates lived by the rules they had enforced on universities or other public agencies, then an underrepresented Cory Booker or Julian Castro would have been by fiat reinstated on the debate stage and an “overrepresented” Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg, the beneficiaries of centuries of “white privilege,” would be passed over from the opportunity—for the greater societal good of diversity.

The idea that a Biden or Warren “earned” their stronger polling or greater fundraising, based on any meritocratic notion of out-debating, out-hustling, out-campaigning, or out-politicking a Harris, Castro, or Booker would be considered not just absurd, but proof of the bias of any who embraced such a structurally racist position.

Absurd? Perhaps, but for the rest of the country that has been lectured unceasingly by progressive elite scolds, it was pure schadenfreude.

Impeachment Indiscretion

Democrats may also be hoisted by their own petard in the ongoing impeachment psychodrama. They more or less rigged the House impeachment proceeding, by using their majority to depart from past practice. They monopolized the witness lists, selectively leaked, and rushed to indict Trump on the theory that every day the president was not impeached was another day the country was endangered.

Then when bipartisan support never appeared, when there was no special counsel’s damning report, when there was no public majority support, and when there was not the appearance of constitutional indictments for treason, bribery, and specific high crimes and misdemeanors, the impeachment writs simply sat, ossifying as if the House prosecutors suddenly wished to be sober, judicious, and reflective, when in truth they were finagling ways to fortify their anemic writs before what they feared would be a disastrous and embarrassing Senate acquittal.

Democrats insisted that the Senate trial have witnesses and that Republican senators conduct the proceeding in a nonpartisan fashion antithetical to the partisan manner in which they had rammed through impeachment in the House. In other words, Democrats demanded that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) not replay the roles of Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

Yet the obvious expectation in such a free-for-all impeachment and trial circus was always that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden would be the most preeminent witnesses called, given Trump’s logical defense that the younger Biden was utterly corrupt, was known to be corrupt but found useful by Ukrainians, and thus naturally such a high-profile case justified presidential suspicions of Ukrainian requests for aid—with the corollary that the elder Biden, the font for Hunter’s ability to leverage money for access, would not be able to testify honestly about the degree to which he knew of his son’s skullduggery.

Joe Biden, despite his senior moments and his lifelong reckless speech, may be for now the Democrats only hope to carry the Midwest swing states that sent Donald Trump to the White House. Thus, the Democrats in the very fashion they have conducted themselves throughout this impeachment farce, may be insidiously destroying the candidate with the best chance of regaining the White House—even while likely enhancing Donald Trump’s polls.

That the Democrats realized such risks and ignored them, either suggests the Left wants to finish off the Biden candidacy, or their obsessions with destroying Trump outweighs any practical considerations of replacing the president with one of their own.

Blinding Rage

These are strange times, in which progressives grow near quiet when courageous Iranians hit the streets to protest a murderous government, but express remorse over the killing of one of the most murderous of all Iranian autocrats.

For years, leftists have decried the bipartisan kid-gloves treatment of China, as its mercantilism systematically hollowed out the old Democratic blue-collar base in the Midwest—only to blast the first president who agreed that China had to be confronted before it eroded what was left of the American industrial heartland.

And we were always warned to fear the government overreach of the intelligence agencies, even as ex-high officials go on liberal networks, warping their use of their security clearances, to contextualize their own previous unethical behavior.

Of all the strange symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome, progressive self-immolation is the strangest.

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Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California.

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