The Daily Skirmish
- used by a campaign in Washington state in 2020
4/15/21 - America’s Ambassador to the UN Hates America
Why on earth is Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield representing us at the United Nations? Yesterday she talked about the United States rejoining the UN Human Rights Council. She said, “I’ve seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.” She went on to claim “white supremacy ” led to the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
In the first place, if America is such a horrible rotten place, why does she want to represent it? She’ll take our money and trash us nine ways to Sunday if we let her, but if she had the courage of her convictions, she’d be in the streets rioting, not in the executive suite taking blood money and basking in privilege.
Second, China, Cuba, and Venezuela are current members of the Human Rights Council, but she doesn’t criticize them. China stands accused of genocide of the Uighurs. Cuba keeps political prisoners and tortures them. Venezuela deliberately keeps its people near starvation so they’re too weak to rebel. You can scream all you want about how horrible America is, but the human rights record of the United States today is nothing like the atrocities committed on a daily basis as a matter of policy and regime preservation in those countries. Not hundreds of years ago - TODAY.
Third, she gave a speech in 2019 at a Confucius Institute funded by the government of China in which she praised China for promoting good governance, gender equity, and the rule of law in Africa. “I see no reason why China cannot share in those values,” she said. “In fact, China is in a unique position to spread these ideals given its strong footprint on the continent.” This is completely delusional. I see plenty of reasons why China cannot share in those values. If China is so good at governance, why did it feel compelled to stop reporting the number of mass disturbances involving a hundred people or more within its own borders a few years ago after it became apparent the numbers were going up and up and up? Gender equity? Ask the women of Xinjiang Province how they feel about that claim after they’ve undergone forced sterilization. And China doesn’t know the first thing about the rule of law, except they know they don’t want it. Everybody knows China has kangaroo courts where party bosses, not evidence or law, determine the outcome.
Madame Ambassador’s view of China is completely haywire. Moreover, her hatred of her own country drives her to completely wrong conclusions. If our founding documents were meant to perpetuate slavery into perpetuity, why did the framers include and the states ratify a clause in the Constitution allowing Congress to ban the importation of slaves starting in 1808, which Congress did at the first opportunity? She completely ignores this fact and the other ways the Founders tee’d things up to get rid of slavery.
Finally, her racial centralism and obsessive focus on America’s racial past dishonor the memory of the black soldiers who fought and died for the Union, not only in the Civil War, but also in the Revolutionary War. Moreover, if Frederick Douglass, who was an actual slave, could look past his personal anger and end up loving the Constitution, what’s wrong with her, and all the people like her who want to keep America in the doghouse forever? You’ll notice they never cut to the bottom line and say what would satisfy them. That’s because this is all a big game being run by the left. White supremacy is a club they use to keep beating people up with. The Left will keep using the club as long as it keeps working. If it stops working, they’ll drop it and pick up another club, exploiting every grain of discontent, just like Lenin said.
You heard her: slavery is America’s original sin. That means it can never be atoned for, no matter what America does or the people taken in by this guilt trip might want to do. Not even the hundreds of thousands of lives sacrificed to fighting slavery in the Civil War can wash the stain of original sin away. There’s no end to this, folks, and that’s why I, for one, say enough already. And we don’t need lectures about race from someone who praises the racist Han Chinese and gives them a complete pass even when they use slave labor and commit genocide of supposedly inferior races. How about making that your focus at the UN, Madame Ambassador? Or are you afraid they won’t invite you to make another speech?
4/14/21 - The Revolution Comes for the “Polluting Elite”
The revolution always devours its own. It’s worth remembering that as we’re watching Joe Biden’s international climate summit unfold next week.
The skunk at the garden party will be a recent report blaming rich people for climate change. The report calls them the “polluting elite” and says they must make radical changes to their lifestyle and behavior, or climate goals can’t be met. These uber-polluters fly the most, drive the biggest vehicles, and live in homes they don’t bother to insulate. The report says the world's wealthiest 1 percent produce twice the combined carbon emissions of the poorest 50 percent.
You hear that, John Kerry? Kerry loves to travel the world pontificating about climate change, but his family took a private jet to their vacation property in Idaho last week. The only thing bigger than Sasquatch footprints are the carbon footprints of John Kerry and his family. Except maybe the carbon footprint of Leonardo DiCaprio who once flew a private jet 8,000 miles to accept an environmental award.
Kerry, DiCaprio, Al Gore, and the rest of the “polluting elite” are just going to have to realize THEY are the problem and the revolution, finally, is coming for them, just like it did for Robespierre. You might be riding high now, fellas, but the guillotine awaits.
Why? Because you’re filthy rich and the lowly revolutionary proles can’t stand that fact. Yes, there is class division within the green revolution. Just listen to the lead author of the recent report: “We have got to cut over-consumption and the best place to start is over-consumption among the polluting elites who contribute, by far, more than their share of carbon emissions.” Overconsumption is the charge, and Kerry & Co. are guilty, guilty, guilty. Off with their heads! They should no longer be allowed to lobby against changes that will erode their precious lifestyles, the author said.
The recent report blaming rich people also went after a major sacred cow of the green revolution - electric vehicles. Those naughty rich people prancing around in Priuses are “still a drain on the energy system and all the emissions created making the vehicle in the first place.”
Class envy and class warfare inside the climate movement, who’d a thunk it? The revolution is devouring its own - and it’s delicious to watch.
4/13/21 - Letter to My Younger Self about Law & Order
When I was a young teen in the tumultuous 1960s, I would hear the old fuddy-duddies talk about law & order and society breaking down. ‘What’s the big deal’, I wondered. Now, I’m the old fuddy-duddy and this is what I have to say to my younger self:
Listen, kid. This country is nothing without the Rule of Law and, today, the Rule of Law is under severe attack. Just look at today’s news. Law enforcement had to use flash bangs, tear gas, and rubber bullets to disperse rioters in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center. 40 people were arrested. CBS News Rioters in Portland set dumpsters on fire, threw rocks through windows of a police precinct, and threw fireworks at police. Gateway Pundit There is no justification for rioting. If the rioters have complaints, rioting is not their only choice; there are lawful ways to petition government for redress of grievances. This issue was identified hundreds of years ago and the remedy is right there in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which embodies the Rule of Law.
Street rioting is not the only problem here. The city manager of Brooklyn Center was fired after calling for due process of law for the officer involved in the apparently accidental shooting of Daunte Wright. After the emergency vote, City Council Member Kris Lawrence-Anderson said she voted to fire the city manager because she was afraid of retaliation by rioters who might damage her property if she voted the other way. "He was doing a great job. I respect him dearly. I didn't want repercussions at a personal level," she said. In other words, she threw the Rule of Law under the bus and gave into the mob.
She might be a coward, but the politicians complicit in the months of rioting in Portland and the persistence of lawless autonomous zones around the country are far worse. That’s not just cowardice. That’s a career move. Here’s the game: let things rage out of control and people will beg for authoritarian solutions. These left-wing politicians will be only too happy to supply them - ‘Just give us more power, we’ll keep you safe.’ This is a breakdown, not only of law & order, but of the country itself. Pieces are seceding; I don’t know what else to call it.
So if you like things spinning out of control and flying apart, you should love what’s been called the Soros DAs. These are prosecutors now in office around the country who are not just ‘soft on crime’. They have radical notions like tearing up the law books and not enforcing laws passed by the legislature if the prosecutor deems the laws unworthy of enforcement.
We’ve been here before. Things have been pretty quiescent in this country for the last 50 years until recently, but there was a lot of labor strife in the 1870s, anarchists blowing people up with bombs in the 19-teens and ‘20s, and campus unrest and riots over Vietnam and civil rights in the 1960s when I was a young teen wondering ‘is this normal?’
It’s not normal to have people rioting in the streets. It’s not normal for politicians to cave in to the mob. It’s not normal to have politicians put their stamp of approval on months of rioting and refuse to intervene. So yes, kid, law & order IS important and the grassroots better organize more effectively to stop the madness before authoritarians seize the moment to seize our liberties. I can’t tell you what made Rome fall, but I can tell that, at the end, no one was left who was willing to fight for the Idea of Rome. It’s time to hear from the people who are willing to fight for the American Idea - one nation where the people are sovereign and free, with a government of laws, not men. That’s the big deal. If the American Idea isn’t worth fighting for, I don’t know what is. But that makes me an old fuddy-duddy, I suppose.
4/12/21 - Election Integrity Advocates Racking Up Victories
There’s some good news on the election integrity front.
The forensic examination of voting machines in Michigan is continuing. You may recall that the forensic examiners earlier found the machines in Antrim County deliberately generated a 68 percent error rate elections officials could then fill in any way they wanted. In a new report, a forensic examiner announced he had discovered an algorithm in Michigan machines that was used to shift votes in the 2020 election. Further, he found over 66,000 ballots not associated with a registered voter were recorded in nine counties. In addition, a machine was discovered to have a modem installed on its motherboard allowing the machine to connect to the Internet without visible wires or other apparent means. The same equipment is used in eight Michigan counties. Remember, we heard repeatedly after the election that voting machines don’t connect to the Internet. Now there is hard evidence at least some of them do.
What is it the Democrats don’t want us to know about what transpired on the Internet on election day? What are they hiding? It’s interesting that another forensic investigator, working in other states, reports he was offered $10 million to just walk away. Somebody’s getting nervous. The forensic examination story is continuing in Michigan, so we should learn more over time.
The good news doesn’t stop there.
You might recall that, last month, a court found that the Democrat Secretary of State in Michigan violated the law when she loosened the signature verification requirements for absentee ballots without a formal rule or legislative authorization.
Wyoming’s Governor signed a bill requiring voter ID at the polls and for in-person early voting. Democrats can jump up and down about Jim Crow all they want, but voter ID is just common sense and everybody knows it.
Speaking of jumping up and down, Stacey Abrams is known for that, but large parts of her lawsuit alleging infringement of voting rights in the 2018 Georgia election was thrown out of court. AJC Running around yelling ‘voter suppression’ is easy. Proving it in court is quite a different matter.
Pennsylvania agreed to remove dead voters from the rolls to settle a lawsuit. Well, duh. Why such resistance to common-sense election safeguards? Because Democrats are trying to steal elections, that’s why.
Finally, a $160 billion class action lawsuit has been filed against Dominion Voting Systems, Facebook, and others over irregularities in the 2020 elections. Unhappy voters are invited to join the lawsuit.
That’s it for now but, as you can see, this story isn’t over, not by a longshot.
4/9/21 - How to End Joe Biden’s Crisis at the Southern Border
The Biden administration won’t call the situation at the southern border a ‘crisis’, but I will. It’s an immigration crisis. It’s a humanitarian crisis. It’s a national security crisis. It’s a crisis, no matter how you slice it.
Just look at the news for the last few days.
The number of illegal aliens crossing the border is at a 15-year high, with more than 172,000 apprehended last month, including a record number of unaccompanied minors. NPR
The Pentagon has approved the use of a third military base to house unaccompanied alien children. Fox News
Texas Governor Greg Abbott called on the Biden administration to close a San Antonio facility after allegations surfaced of child sex abuse and neglect there. Just the News
Two Yemeni men on the no-fly and FBI terrorist watch lists were arrested illegally crossing the southern border in January and March. Gateway Pundit The Biden administration is in full cover-up mode about it, taking the press release off a government website.
Border Patrol agents said a thousand illegal aliens a day are not being pursued after crossing the border because agents are overwhelmed with caring for families and unaccompanied alien children. MRCTV
U.S. authorities are releasing illegal alien families without court dates or sometimes any paperwork at all. AP
Government records show a record number of sex offenders are crossing the border illegally. More than one million illegal aliens are expected to cross the border this year, a government official said. OAN Epoch Times
Those are big numbers, so let’s look at what’s happened to some unfortunate souls in all of this. Two young girls from Ecuador, ages 3 and 5, were dropped over a 14-foot border wall into a remote area of New Mexico. Fortunately, the girls were seen and rescued. NBC News
Video showed a young boy wandering around in the Texas desert. "I came with a group, they dumped me and I don't know where they are," the boy said in Spanish. "They can rob me, kidnap me. I am afraid.” He doesn't know where his parents are.
Bet you didn’t hear about this one: A congresswoman toured the border and talked to girls under the age of 10 who had been gang-raped. “They had been screaming so loud that their vocal chords had given out,” the congresswoman said.
I don’t know how anybody can listen to a story like this and say Biden’s done a good thing here. Actually, I do know how. It’s called the higher morality and it’s how Leftists think. If you’re busy creating heaven on earth and one-party rule for the Democrats forever, all of this is perfectly fine with you - the human smugglers, the gang rapes, all of it. If you’re gonna make an omelet, you gotta break a few eggs, right? But the joke’s on you. As George Orwell pointed out, people who pursue supposedly noble with despicable means will never get there. They will become too corrupted in the process.
So hats off to the Governor of Iowa for refusing to play ball. She refused to allow the Biden administration to send unaccompanied alien children to her state. She said Biden has created a national security problem. “He’s the one that’s opened the borders. He needs to be responsible for this and he needs to stop it,” she said. More people need to stand up like her and say ‘no’ to Washington. It’s the only way we’ll shut this crisis down.
4/8/21 - Biden’s Worst Moves in Recent Days
What is Joe Biden’s worst move in recent days? Could it be the 4 Pinocchio’s he got from the left-wing Washington Post for lying about Georgia’s new voting law? Nah.
Could it be his administration admitting it might have to resume building Trump’s border wall because of the crisis Biden has caused at the southern border? Nope, that’s not it.
Could it be his advancing senility that is posing - in the words of one newsman - a “clear national security threat”? Close, but here’s the winner:
Destroying jobs and replacing them with jobs that will cost close to a million dollars apiece to create.
Killing the Keystone pipeline killed thousands of jobs. Biden’s proposal to raise small business taxes will kill more. Canceling the sale of oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico wiped out more. Rejoining the Paris climate change accords and raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour - these actions put more jobs on the chopping block. Stopping construction on the border wall destroyed 5,000 jobs. Are you detecting a pattern here?
But Lunchpail Joe cares about the little guy, right?
Biden says his infrastructure plan will create 19 million good-paying jobs. Actually, the analysis he cites shows 16.3 million jobs would be created over the next ten years if the government did nothing. So Biden wants to spend $2.25 trillion dollars to create 2.7 million jobs. That works out to about $830,000 to create each new job. Makes sense to me.
What kind of jobs does Biden want to create? He wants to replace high-paying coal, oil, and gas jobs with low-paying green energy jobs. Coal, oil, and gas workers make 80,000 to $100,000 a year. By comparison, installing solar panels pays about $45,000 a year. Wind power technicians make a little more. A job retraining program placed West Virginia coal miners into new jobs paying far less - $14 an hour - or about $28,000 a year.
So let me get this straight: Lunchpail Joe destroys good-paying jobs left and right, and wants to replace them with jobs paying far less than the median household income of $68,000 a year. Bad move, Joe.
It’s said Joe Biden wants to leave a legacy bigger than FDR’s. Some legacy.
4/7/21 - The Left Doubles Down on Georgia Election Law and Loses
I can’t believe it. The Left actually doubled down on its war of words over the Georgia election reform law. It’s that old saying, if you can’t argue the facts, pound the table.
Let’s start with demolishing Joe Biden, first. There he goes again, comparing the new Georgia voter ID law to Jim Crow. I defy anyone to tell me how the Georgia law is anything like Jim Crow. What are Jim Crow laws? They were laws that racially segregated the South after the Civil War. Blacks couldn’t sit at white lunch counters, drink from white water fountains, or use other whites-only public facilities. To say requiring all voters to show ID is anything remotely like Jim Crow is the mother of all false equivalencies. Of course minority voters can get IDs; most already have one. The rest can get free government-issued non-driver IDs in many states. To say blacks aren’t capable of getting IDs like other people is blatantly racist. The comparison to Jim Crow is so outlandish, it exposes the emptiness of the Left’s rhetoric. They can’t make their case so they seek refuge in hyperbole, the last refuge of the morally bankrupt.
A fact check by the liberal BBC found, contrary to the Left’s claims, the Georgia law does not prevent voting after work, does not prevent ‘Souls to the Polls’ early voting on Sunday, and does not prevent election officials from handing out water to people standing in line. Further, the law institutionalizes drop boxes for early voting. Drop boxes didn’t exist before the pandemic.
A completely unbalanced story from the leftist Guardian repeats the lie the Georgia law prevents all water from being handed out to voters in line. The Guardian goes on to mischaracterize election integrity measures as blatantly racist voter suppression. Limiting early voting, removing ineligible voters from the rolls, and tightening requirements for absentee voting are all portrayed as attempts to keep minorities from voting. No, they are aimed at shutting down proven avenues of election fraud. Fraud has been known to occur with every one of these things and reformers are right to try to get a grip on the situation. Calling these things racist just doesn’t cut it. It’s no longer acceptable to have dead people voting, or more precisely, allowing fraudsters to use dead people’s names to vote. Why would anybody want that possibility to continue to exist? There’s only one reason the Left wants to strip away election safeguards like scrubbing the voter rolls, and that’s to steal elections.
Major League Baseball’s decision to move the All-Star game from Atlanta to Denver drew comparisons between the election laws in Georgia and Colorado. Georgia’s Governor said the move doesn’t make sense given that Georgia allows more days of early voting than Colorado does. NPR went through both sets of laws. It acknowledged both states have restrictions on early voting and both require voter ID in some instances. It went on to praise Colorado’s vote-by-mail approach as superior to Georgia’s traditional emphasis on voting in person. 99.3 percent of Colorado voters use mailboxes or dropboxes. But in praising Colorado’s mail-in approach and criticizing tighter restrictions in Georgia, NPR misses the forest for the trees. The forest is all the problems with universal mail-in balloting in the 2020 election NPR does not even mention:
NPR isn’t telling you any of this. It’s true election laws are tighter in Georgia than Colorado with its loosey-goosey mail-in approach. You can call me a racist, but I sure hope they are.
4/6/21 - Transgender Surgery for 6-Year-Olds: Are You Kidding?
Arkansas’ Governor vetoed a bill that would ban puberty blockers and sex change surgery for minors, but he expects the legislature to override his veto. ABC News
Nothing against transgender people, but the Left is deliberately out trying to create more of them by, among other things, teaching gender spectrum and gender fluidity in public schools. The result is social contagion with more youngsters needlessly playing with matches, that is, with the notion they are a different gender. They are egged on by financially self-interested psychologists, surgeons, and the other corrupt professionals who make up the transgender-industrial complex.
We don’t allow 6-year-olds to make life-altering decisions. We don’t allow them to drive, gamble, or sign contracts. There’s no reason we should allow gender-dysphoric minors to take hormones or start sex change surgery because some psychiatrist wants to make a few bucks. There’s no reason we should allow them to start this process with the help of public school officials without the parents even knowing about it.
Six and 8-year-olds don’t know their own minds. There’s no reason to allow them to start a lifetime of powerful drugs or get irreversible mutilating surgery. Plenty of people who underwent this process ended up regretting their choices, or realizing it was all completely delusional, or even thinking of suicide. Just ask the 200 people who showed up at the world’s first detransition conference in England in 2019. Just ask Nathaniel who got the genitalia surgery and less than a year later said, “This whole thing was a bad idea. I am 19 years old, and I feel as though I have ruined my life.” Just ask Sydney: “Two years ago, I was a healthy, beautiful girl heading toward high school graduation. Before long, I turned into an overweight, pre-diabetic nightmare of a transgender man. I won’t place the full blame on health care providers, because I should have known better. But they sure helped me do a lot of harm to myself—and they made a hefty buck doing it.”
How many more stories like this do you need to hear before concluding that sex changes for minors are a really, really bad idea and should be outlawed. For every Nathaniel and Sydney, there are hundreds more who regret their choices and are seeking help to find their way back. As if all this were not enough, other dangers abound. A hormone blocker prescribed to transgender youth has been linked to over six thousand deaths. I wonder if the corrupt professionals like Planned Parenthood enabling all this disclose that to their young charges placing trust in their hands.
To allow this is child abuse. This is why legislators in Arkansas and eight other states are right to try to stop it. This is why parents in Wisconsin were right to file suit to block a school district from encouraging children to adopt transgender identities without notification to the parents. Daily Signal This is why Rand Paul was right to confront Biden nominee Rachel Levine over transgender surgery and drugs for young children. All the nominee said in response was that the matter could be discussed after confirmation. Daily Signal Well, it’s after confirmation. Rachel Levine was confirmed as assistant secretary for health in HHS. I call on Rand Paul to confront Rachel Levine on this issue again. Let’s have this out, and let’s hear the far-left crazies driving all this and the transgender-industrial complex defend the indefensible.
4/5/21 - Woke Corporations Embarrassing Themselves Over Georgia Law
We thought they were fools until they opened their mouths and proved we were right. The actions and statements of major corporations after Georgia passed an election reform law are based in lies and riddled with hypocrisy.
Delta Airline’s CEO called the final bill “unacceptable” and said it would make it harder for black people to vote. In fact, the Georgia law expanded access to in-person early voting, weekend voting, and the number of drop boxes in the state. Delta had previously lobbied for the bill and acknowledged it expanded voter access. Then it turned around and bashed the bill. The new law requires a photo ID to obtain an absentee ballot. Delta itself requires IDs to get on its planes. So Delta comes off looking more than a little foolish in all of this.
So does Coca-Cola, another company hoping to score woke points by criticizing the new law. The company itself requires a valid ID to attend its annual shareholders meeting. Somehow, that’s not racist, but requiring ID to vote is? How does that work?
Another organization awash in wokitude, Major League Baseball, announced it was moving the All-Star game out of Atlanta in response to the new law. Like Delta, MLB has its own ID requirements, to pick up All-Star game tickets for example. MLB wants to know people are who they say they are, imagine that. It’s also been pointed out that MLB is thrilled to do business in China, a racist country that is committing genocide, uses slave labor, puts dissenters in a thousand political prison camps, and kills people for their organs just to make money. MLB has no problem with any of that, but Georgia is beyond the pale? Get serious. MLB moved the All-Star game the day after it expanded its deal with the biggest human rights abuser on the planet, China. We don’t need lectures about human rights from Major League Baseball which makes a tidy profit turning a blind eye to human rights atrocities when it’s convenient to do so and its own wallet is at stake.
Joe Biden said he strongly supported moving the game out of Atlanta. Biden got 4 Pinocchio’s from the left-wing Washington Post for falsely claiming the Georgia law ended voting after 5 p.m. so people couldn’t vote after leaving work. This false claim was made at a press conference and again later in an official presidential statement.
Georgia’s new voter ID law has also been compared to the Jim Crow laws that segregated the South. But to say requiring ALL voters to show an ID is somehow the same or worse than not allowing blacks to sit at the lunch counter is just crazy-talk, and need not be taken seriously.
I would bet you Delta, Coke, and Major League Baseball all require photo ID to get into their office buildings. They should stick to their knitting and leave social commentary to people who know what they’re talking about. These organizations are way out of their league in the political arena.
4/2/21 - The Problem with Making All Roads Lead to Government
The Left is hell-bent on making all roads lead to government, but there are problems with making Big Government your god, and shrinking private activity part and parcel of your fake religion.
It was reported this week that the supersizing of Obamacare subsidies means that a lot of people can now get Obamacare policies with zero premiums or for as little as $10 a month. Only about half the number of people as predicted ever signed up for Obamacare, so it’s no wonder they had to make the bribes bigger. Obamacare may have partially addressed the preexisting conditions problem, but it caused high deductibles, high drug co-pays, and loss of access to the best doctors and hospitals. This made the overall package unattractive to many consumers, despite nominal preexisting condition coverage, and people sought alternatives like short-term plans and health cost-sharing ministries. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict the bigger bribes and $100 million in new government marketing efforts still won’t bring total enrollment anywhere close to the 21 million they promised way back when. So we get this cockamamie system that doesn’t work for a lot of people because leftists in government sneered at what private insurers were previously offering - ‘junk insurance’ they called it - and insurers wanted government-guaranteed customers and government-guaranteed profits, and to be relieved of the pressures of having to offer products people might actually want to buy.
It was also reported this week that Joe Biden’s multi-trillion dollar supposed infrastructure plan would put the federal government in the home-building business and in the broadband business to take Internet services out of the hands of private actors who make a profit. If you thought the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted in Biden’s Solyndra green energy scandals was bad, just wait. These new proposals have politicization written all over them and absolutely everything is going to go wrong. This is because government contracts are going to go to cronies with friends in high places who will have no market forces to discipline them and no incentive to get anything right.
In a third development this week, Virginia’s Governor was on the radio crowing about how the state is going to buy existing railroad tracks and get into the passenger rail business. They’re going to have a line from Southwest Virginia up to the D.C. suburbs. Here’s my question: Will anybody be on it? Did anyone in government even ask? If there was demand for another way to get from Southwest Virginia up to D.C., don’t you think it would have been built by now? Projects like this let politicians bask in the limelight and avoid accountability when it all turns to muck after they leave office.
So you can see some of the problems when all roads lead to government. There are more. You have a stock market hitting record highs because of Biden’s infrastructure proposal. The stock market stopped being about commerce a long time ago. The biggest factor driving the market on any given day is what the Fed does with interest rates. This is a market more concerned about what government will do than with genuine economic activity. Another problem with merging business and government is Big Tech. People on the Left and the Right are concerned with how powerful Big Tech has become. Now that the Left is back in power, Big Tech is fully philosophically aligned with government, and can justifiably now be called the government’s enforcer in silencing criticism and free speech.
There’s a word for all of this: It’s called fascism. All kinds of people use that word in all kinds of ways, but the textbook definition is the merger of big business and big government. The classic example is Mussolini’s Italy where the CEOs of the largest companies became the ministers in Mussolini’s cabinet. The biggest problem with this is the undue concentration of power, exactly what our Founders warned us about. Bad things happen when you put too much power into too few hands - scandals erupt, hundreds of millions of dollars get wasted, trains to nowhere get built, and companies like Enron seek out friends in government and favorable government policies instead of focusing on developing innovative products and services for real people.
You can make government your god and crusade against all private activity, but you will not bring about heaven on earth. Quite the opposite. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. There. I hope I’ve taken all the joy out of it for you, because you don’t deserve to feel good about any of it. Solyndra, here we come.
4/1/21 - Rule of Law Taking It on the Chin
A story in the news today got me thinking about how lawless we’re becoming as a nation and the trouble ahead if we don’t get back to the Rule of Law.
U.S. authorities are releasing illegal alien families without court dates or sometimes any paperwork at all, as the crisis at the southern border continues. AP They’re supposed to be given court dates. Courts are supposed to rule on their asylum claims. But that’s not going to happen now in a great many instances, thanks to the lawless Biden administration. There are immigration laws on the books and they don’t say ‘the border’s open, whatever, anything goes’. The Biden administration is unconstitutionally acting like Congress - rewriting the laws - and the judicial branch - deciding asylum claims in advance by ruling no rulings are necessary.
The Biden administration is not the only executive branch entity trashing the separation of powers and the Rule of Law. A week ago, the prosecutor in Baltimore decided people there can now engage in prostitution, do drugs, trespass, and urinate and defecate in public because she has decided those crimes still on the books will no longer be prosecuted. Office of the State's Attorney for Baltimore City. She’s not the only one. What are called the ‘Soros DAs’ are pursuing similar policies elsewhere around the country. This does not just mean an increase in street-level lawlessness. These laws are still on the books. State legislatures put them there. Now these rogue prosecutors are ripping up the law books. That’s not prosecutorial discretion; that’s lawlessness. Why aren’t state lawmakers screaming about it and hauling these prosecutors before committees to explain why they’re presuming to act like legislators? They should be.
Add to this the fact that some areas of the country are going lawless. Antifa rioted a hundred straight nights in Portland last summer. The riots continue to this day with recent attacks on school facilities in Portland and pro-law enforcement demonstrators in Oregon’s capital Salem. Gateway Pundit Epoch Times That brings us to the autonomous zone in Seattle last summer and the ongoing autonomous zone in Minneapolis today. Think of them as the new Fort Sumter’s. They have effectively seceded from the Union. And, yet, complicit politicians let them stand and egg them on. More lawlessness.
Some more examples of recent lawlessness come to mind - Ilhan Omar’s associates buying votes in her district (Washington Times Project Veritas), more than 130,000 proven instances of voter fraud in Nevada in the 2020 election (Congressional testimony), state officials changing the election laws without legislative approval, and the legislator in Georgia who was not content with casting her vote against Georgia’s new election integrity law, but had to crash the Governor’s bill-signing ceremony. The state police had to haul the legislator away (NPR). Allegedly, she stomped on an officer’s foot three times in the process. If that isn’t contempt for the Rule of Law, I don’t know what is - stamp your little foot. I gave you two examples earlier of executive branch officials not staying in their lane and presuming to legislate. The Georgia story is an example of a legislator who would not stay in her lane, but thought she was just entitled to put on the Governor’s hat when nobody elected her to do so.
We better get a grip, folks. We’re supposed to have the rule of law in this country. We’d better get back to it because the alternative is sheer chaos and politicians goading us into accepting authoritarian solutions for mayhem. People on the Left who worry about environmental sustainability better start worrying about cultural sustainability and the Rule of Law, before things start crashing down around our ears.
Why on earth is Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield representing us at the United Nations? Yesterday she talked about the United States rejoining the UN Human Rights Council. She said, “I’ve seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.” She went on to claim “white supremacy ” led to the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
In the first place, if America is such a horrible rotten place, why does she want to represent it? She’ll take our money and trash us nine ways to Sunday if we let her, but if she had the courage of her convictions, she’d be in the streets rioting, not in the executive suite taking blood money and basking in privilege.
Second, China, Cuba, and Venezuela are current members of the Human Rights Council, but she doesn’t criticize them. China stands accused of genocide of the Uighurs. Cuba keeps political prisoners and tortures them. Venezuela deliberately keeps its people near starvation so they’re too weak to rebel. You can scream all you want about how horrible America is, but the human rights record of the United States today is nothing like the atrocities committed on a daily basis as a matter of policy and regime preservation in those countries. Not hundreds of years ago - TODAY.
Third, she gave a speech in 2019 at a Confucius Institute funded by the government of China in which she praised China for promoting good governance, gender equity, and the rule of law in Africa. “I see no reason why China cannot share in those values,” she said. “In fact, China is in a unique position to spread these ideals given its strong footprint on the continent.” This is completely delusional. I see plenty of reasons why China cannot share in those values. If China is so good at governance, why did it feel compelled to stop reporting the number of mass disturbances involving a hundred people or more within its own borders a few years ago after it became apparent the numbers were going up and up and up? Gender equity? Ask the women of Xinjiang Province how they feel about that claim after they’ve undergone forced sterilization. And China doesn’t know the first thing about the rule of law, except they know they don’t want it. Everybody knows China has kangaroo courts where party bosses, not evidence or law, determine the outcome.
Madame Ambassador’s view of China is completely haywire. Moreover, her hatred of her own country drives her to completely wrong conclusions. If our founding documents were meant to perpetuate slavery into perpetuity, why did the framers include and the states ratify a clause in the Constitution allowing Congress to ban the importation of slaves starting in 1808, which Congress did at the first opportunity? She completely ignores this fact and the other ways the Founders tee’d things up to get rid of slavery.
Finally, her racial centralism and obsessive focus on America’s racial past dishonor the memory of the black soldiers who fought and died for the Union, not only in the Civil War, but also in the Revolutionary War. Moreover, if Frederick Douglass, who was an actual slave, could look past his personal anger and end up loving the Constitution, what’s wrong with her, and all the people like her who want to keep America in the doghouse forever? You’ll notice they never cut to the bottom line and say what would satisfy them. That’s because this is all a big game being run by the left. White supremacy is a club they use to keep beating people up with. The Left will keep using the club as long as it keeps working. If it stops working, they’ll drop it and pick up another club, exploiting every grain of discontent, just like Lenin said.
You heard her: slavery is America’s original sin. That means it can never be atoned for, no matter what America does or the people taken in by this guilt trip might want to do. Not even the hundreds of thousands of lives sacrificed to fighting slavery in the Civil War can wash the stain of original sin away. There’s no end to this, folks, and that’s why I, for one, say enough already. And we don’t need lectures about race from someone who praises the racist Han Chinese and gives them a complete pass even when they use slave labor and commit genocide of supposedly inferior races. How about making that your focus at the UN, Madame Ambassador? Or are you afraid they won’t invite you to make another speech?
4/14/21 - The Revolution Comes for the “Polluting Elite”
The revolution always devours its own. It’s worth remembering that as we’re watching Joe Biden’s international climate summit unfold next week.
The skunk at the garden party will be a recent report blaming rich people for climate change. The report calls them the “polluting elite” and says they must make radical changes to their lifestyle and behavior, or climate goals can’t be met. These uber-polluters fly the most, drive the biggest vehicles, and live in homes they don’t bother to insulate. The report says the world's wealthiest 1 percent produce twice the combined carbon emissions of the poorest 50 percent.
You hear that, John Kerry? Kerry loves to travel the world pontificating about climate change, but his family took a private jet to their vacation property in Idaho last week. The only thing bigger than Sasquatch footprints are the carbon footprints of John Kerry and his family. Except maybe the carbon footprint of Leonardo DiCaprio who once flew a private jet 8,000 miles to accept an environmental award.
Kerry, DiCaprio, Al Gore, and the rest of the “polluting elite” are just going to have to realize THEY are the problem and the revolution, finally, is coming for them, just like it did for Robespierre. You might be riding high now, fellas, but the guillotine awaits.
Why? Because you’re filthy rich and the lowly revolutionary proles can’t stand that fact. Yes, there is class division within the green revolution. Just listen to the lead author of the recent report: “We have got to cut over-consumption and the best place to start is over-consumption among the polluting elites who contribute, by far, more than their share of carbon emissions.” Overconsumption is the charge, and Kerry & Co. are guilty, guilty, guilty. Off with their heads! They should no longer be allowed to lobby against changes that will erode their precious lifestyles, the author said.
The recent report blaming rich people also went after a major sacred cow of the green revolution - electric vehicles. Those naughty rich people prancing around in Priuses are “still a drain on the energy system and all the emissions created making the vehicle in the first place.”
Class envy and class warfare inside the climate movement, who’d a thunk it? The revolution is devouring its own - and it’s delicious to watch.
4/13/21 - Letter to My Younger Self about Law & Order
When I was a young teen in the tumultuous 1960s, I would hear the old fuddy-duddies talk about law & order and society breaking down. ‘What’s the big deal’, I wondered. Now, I’m the old fuddy-duddy and this is what I have to say to my younger self:
Listen, kid. This country is nothing without the Rule of Law and, today, the Rule of Law is under severe attack. Just look at today’s news. Law enforcement had to use flash bangs, tear gas, and rubber bullets to disperse rioters in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center. 40 people were arrested. CBS News Rioters in Portland set dumpsters on fire, threw rocks through windows of a police precinct, and threw fireworks at police. Gateway Pundit There is no justification for rioting. If the rioters have complaints, rioting is not their only choice; there are lawful ways to petition government for redress of grievances. This issue was identified hundreds of years ago and the remedy is right there in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which embodies the Rule of Law.
Street rioting is not the only problem here. The city manager of Brooklyn Center was fired after calling for due process of law for the officer involved in the apparently accidental shooting of Daunte Wright. After the emergency vote, City Council Member Kris Lawrence-Anderson said she voted to fire the city manager because she was afraid of retaliation by rioters who might damage her property if she voted the other way. "He was doing a great job. I respect him dearly. I didn't want repercussions at a personal level," she said. In other words, she threw the Rule of Law under the bus and gave into the mob.
She might be a coward, but the politicians complicit in the months of rioting in Portland and the persistence of lawless autonomous zones around the country are far worse. That’s not just cowardice. That’s a career move. Here’s the game: let things rage out of control and people will beg for authoritarian solutions. These left-wing politicians will be only too happy to supply them - ‘Just give us more power, we’ll keep you safe.’ This is a breakdown, not only of law & order, but of the country itself. Pieces are seceding; I don’t know what else to call it.
So if you like things spinning out of control and flying apart, you should love what’s been called the Soros DAs. These are prosecutors now in office around the country who are not just ‘soft on crime’. They have radical notions like tearing up the law books and not enforcing laws passed by the legislature if the prosecutor deems the laws unworthy of enforcement.
We’ve been here before. Things have been pretty quiescent in this country for the last 50 years until recently, but there was a lot of labor strife in the 1870s, anarchists blowing people up with bombs in the 19-teens and ‘20s, and campus unrest and riots over Vietnam and civil rights in the 1960s when I was a young teen wondering ‘is this normal?’
It’s not normal to have people rioting in the streets. It’s not normal for politicians to cave in to the mob. It’s not normal to have politicians put their stamp of approval on months of rioting and refuse to intervene. So yes, kid, law & order IS important and the grassroots better organize more effectively to stop the madness before authoritarians seize the moment to seize our liberties. I can’t tell you what made Rome fall, but I can tell that, at the end, no one was left who was willing to fight for the Idea of Rome. It’s time to hear from the people who are willing to fight for the American Idea - one nation where the people are sovereign and free, with a government of laws, not men. That’s the big deal. If the American Idea isn’t worth fighting for, I don’t know what is. But that makes me an old fuddy-duddy, I suppose.
4/12/21 - Election Integrity Advocates Racking Up Victories
There’s some good news on the election integrity front.
The forensic examination of voting machines in Michigan is continuing. You may recall that the forensic examiners earlier found the machines in Antrim County deliberately generated a 68 percent error rate elections officials could then fill in any way they wanted. In a new report, a forensic examiner announced he had discovered an algorithm in Michigan machines that was used to shift votes in the 2020 election. Further, he found over 66,000 ballots not associated with a registered voter were recorded in nine counties. In addition, a machine was discovered to have a modem installed on its motherboard allowing the machine to connect to the Internet without visible wires or other apparent means. The same equipment is used in eight Michigan counties. Remember, we heard repeatedly after the election that voting machines don’t connect to the Internet. Now there is hard evidence at least some of them do.
What is it the Democrats don’t want us to know about what transpired on the Internet on election day? What are they hiding? It’s interesting that another forensic investigator, working in other states, reports he was offered $10 million to just walk away. Somebody’s getting nervous. The forensic examination story is continuing in Michigan, so we should learn more over time.
The good news doesn’t stop there.
You might recall that, last month, a court found that the Democrat Secretary of State in Michigan violated the law when she loosened the signature verification requirements for absentee ballots without a formal rule or legislative authorization.
Wyoming’s Governor signed a bill requiring voter ID at the polls and for in-person early voting. Democrats can jump up and down about Jim Crow all they want, but voter ID is just common sense and everybody knows it.
Speaking of jumping up and down, Stacey Abrams is known for that, but large parts of her lawsuit alleging infringement of voting rights in the 2018 Georgia election was thrown out of court. AJC Running around yelling ‘voter suppression’ is easy. Proving it in court is quite a different matter.
Pennsylvania agreed to remove dead voters from the rolls to settle a lawsuit. Well, duh. Why such resistance to common-sense election safeguards? Because Democrats are trying to steal elections, that’s why.
Finally, a $160 billion class action lawsuit has been filed against Dominion Voting Systems, Facebook, and others over irregularities in the 2020 elections. Unhappy voters are invited to join the lawsuit.
That’s it for now but, as you can see, this story isn’t over, not by a longshot.
4/9/21 - How to End Joe Biden’s Crisis at the Southern Border
The Biden administration won’t call the situation at the southern border a ‘crisis’, but I will. It’s an immigration crisis. It’s a humanitarian crisis. It’s a national security crisis. It’s a crisis, no matter how you slice it.
Just look at the news for the last few days.
The number of illegal aliens crossing the border is at a 15-year high, with more than 172,000 apprehended last month, including a record number of unaccompanied minors. NPR
The Pentagon has approved the use of a third military base to house unaccompanied alien children. Fox News
Texas Governor Greg Abbott called on the Biden administration to close a San Antonio facility after allegations surfaced of child sex abuse and neglect there. Just the News
Two Yemeni men on the no-fly and FBI terrorist watch lists were arrested illegally crossing the southern border in January and March. Gateway Pundit The Biden administration is in full cover-up mode about it, taking the press release off a government website.
Border Patrol agents said a thousand illegal aliens a day are not being pursued after crossing the border because agents are overwhelmed with caring for families and unaccompanied alien children. MRCTV
U.S. authorities are releasing illegal alien families without court dates or sometimes any paperwork at all. AP
Government records show a record number of sex offenders are crossing the border illegally. More than one million illegal aliens are expected to cross the border this year, a government official said. OAN Epoch Times
Those are big numbers, so let’s look at what’s happened to some unfortunate souls in all of this. Two young girls from Ecuador, ages 3 and 5, were dropped over a 14-foot border wall into a remote area of New Mexico. Fortunately, the girls were seen and rescued. NBC News
Video showed a young boy wandering around in the Texas desert. "I came with a group, they dumped me and I don't know where they are," the boy said in Spanish. "They can rob me, kidnap me. I am afraid.” He doesn't know where his parents are.
Bet you didn’t hear about this one: A congresswoman toured the border and talked to girls under the age of 10 who had been gang-raped. “They had been screaming so loud that their vocal chords had given out,” the congresswoman said.
I don’t know how anybody can listen to a story like this and say Biden’s done a good thing here. Actually, I do know how. It’s called the higher morality and it’s how Leftists think. If you’re busy creating heaven on earth and one-party rule for the Democrats forever, all of this is perfectly fine with you - the human smugglers, the gang rapes, all of it. If you’re gonna make an omelet, you gotta break a few eggs, right? But the joke’s on you. As George Orwell pointed out, people who pursue supposedly noble with despicable means will never get there. They will become too corrupted in the process.
So hats off to the Governor of Iowa for refusing to play ball. She refused to allow the Biden administration to send unaccompanied alien children to her state. She said Biden has created a national security problem. “He’s the one that’s opened the borders. He needs to be responsible for this and he needs to stop it,” she said. More people need to stand up like her and say ‘no’ to Washington. It’s the only way we’ll shut this crisis down.
4/8/21 - Biden’s Worst Moves in Recent Days
What is Joe Biden’s worst move in recent days? Could it be the 4 Pinocchio’s he got from the left-wing Washington Post for lying about Georgia’s new voting law? Nah.
Could it be his administration admitting it might have to resume building Trump’s border wall because of the crisis Biden has caused at the southern border? Nope, that’s not it.
Could it be his advancing senility that is posing - in the words of one newsman - a “clear national security threat”? Close, but here’s the winner:
Destroying jobs and replacing them with jobs that will cost close to a million dollars apiece to create.
Killing the Keystone pipeline killed thousands of jobs. Biden’s proposal to raise small business taxes will kill more. Canceling the sale of oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico wiped out more. Rejoining the Paris climate change accords and raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour - these actions put more jobs on the chopping block. Stopping construction on the border wall destroyed 5,000 jobs. Are you detecting a pattern here?
But Lunchpail Joe cares about the little guy, right?
Biden says his infrastructure plan will create 19 million good-paying jobs. Actually, the analysis he cites shows 16.3 million jobs would be created over the next ten years if the government did nothing. So Biden wants to spend $2.25 trillion dollars to create 2.7 million jobs. That works out to about $830,000 to create each new job. Makes sense to me.
What kind of jobs does Biden want to create? He wants to replace high-paying coal, oil, and gas jobs with low-paying green energy jobs. Coal, oil, and gas workers make 80,000 to $100,000 a year. By comparison, installing solar panels pays about $45,000 a year. Wind power technicians make a little more. A job retraining program placed West Virginia coal miners into new jobs paying far less - $14 an hour - or about $28,000 a year.
So let me get this straight: Lunchpail Joe destroys good-paying jobs left and right, and wants to replace them with jobs paying far less than the median household income of $68,000 a year. Bad move, Joe.
It’s said Joe Biden wants to leave a legacy bigger than FDR’s. Some legacy.
4/7/21 - The Left Doubles Down on Georgia Election Law and Loses
I can’t believe it. The Left actually doubled down on its war of words over the Georgia election reform law. It’s that old saying, if you can’t argue the facts, pound the table.
Let’s start with demolishing Joe Biden, first. There he goes again, comparing the new Georgia voter ID law to Jim Crow. I defy anyone to tell me how the Georgia law is anything like Jim Crow. What are Jim Crow laws? They were laws that racially segregated the South after the Civil War. Blacks couldn’t sit at white lunch counters, drink from white water fountains, or use other whites-only public facilities. To say requiring all voters to show ID is anything remotely like Jim Crow is the mother of all false equivalencies. Of course minority voters can get IDs; most already have one. The rest can get free government-issued non-driver IDs in many states. To say blacks aren’t capable of getting IDs like other people is blatantly racist. The comparison to Jim Crow is so outlandish, it exposes the emptiness of the Left’s rhetoric. They can’t make their case so they seek refuge in hyperbole, the last refuge of the morally bankrupt.
A fact check by the liberal BBC found, contrary to the Left’s claims, the Georgia law does not prevent voting after work, does not prevent ‘Souls to the Polls’ early voting on Sunday, and does not prevent election officials from handing out water to people standing in line. Further, the law institutionalizes drop boxes for early voting. Drop boxes didn’t exist before the pandemic.
A completely unbalanced story from the leftist Guardian repeats the lie the Georgia law prevents all water from being handed out to voters in line. The Guardian goes on to mischaracterize election integrity measures as blatantly racist voter suppression. Limiting early voting, removing ineligible voters from the rolls, and tightening requirements for absentee voting are all portrayed as attempts to keep minorities from voting. No, they are aimed at shutting down proven avenues of election fraud. Fraud has been known to occur with every one of these things and reformers are right to try to get a grip on the situation. Calling these things racist just doesn’t cut it. It’s no longer acceptable to have dead people voting, or more precisely, allowing fraudsters to use dead people’s names to vote. Why would anybody want that possibility to continue to exist? There’s only one reason the Left wants to strip away election safeguards like scrubbing the voter rolls, and that’s to steal elections.
Major League Baseball’s decision to move the All-Star game from Atlanta to Denver drew comparisons between the election laws in Georgia and Colorado. Georgia’s Governor said the move doesn’t make sense given that Georgia allows more days of early voting than Colorado does. NPR went through both sets of laws. It acknowledged both states have restrictions on early voting and both require voter ID in some instances. It went on to praise Colorado’s vote-by-mail approach as superior to Georgia’s traditional emphasis on voting in person. 99.3 percent of Colorado voters use mailboxes or dropboxes. But in praising Colorado’s mail-in approach and criticizing tighter restrictions in Georgia, NPR misses the forest for the trees. The forest is all the problems with universal mail-in balloting in the 2020 election NPR does not even mention:
- An audit in Missoula, Montana showed 7 percent of all mail-in ballots were missing the envelope, signature, or date
- 12,000 more mail-in ballots were returned in Pennsylvania than were officially sent out
- Also in Pennsylvania, 100,000 absentee and mail-in ballots were returned one day after, the same day, and even before they were supposedly sent out
- 25,000 nursing home residents in Pennsylvania requested mail-in ballots at the exact same time, suggesting extensive ballot harvesting
- 100,000 mail-in ballots were backdated and delivered after the election in Wisconsin
- Nevada’s largest county sent more than 200,000 mail-in ballots to outdated addresses in the 2020 primary election, which were returned ‘undeliverable’.
- signature verification thresholds were set so low in Nevada, almost every mail-in ballot was accepted
- a postal worker alleged an anti-Trump postmaster illegally ordered employees to back-date mail-in ballots so they could be counted
- A Democrat operative admitted to rigging elections in New Jersey with fake mail-in ballots and leading teams to commit voter fraud for years
- A New Jersey judge invalidated an entire election and ordered a new election for Paterson City Council due to pervasive mail-in voter fraud
NPR isn’t telling you any of this. It’s true election laws are tighter in Georgia than Colorado with its loosey-goosey mail-in approach. You can call me a racist, but I sure hope they are.
4/6/21 - Transgender Surgery for 6-Year-Olds: Are You Kidding?
Arkansas’ Governor vetoed a bill that would ban puberty blockers and sex change surgery for minors, but he expects the legislature to override his veto. ABC News
Nothing against transgender people, but the Left is deliberately out trying to create more of them by, among other things, teaching gender spectrum and gender fluidity in public schools. The result is social contagion with more youngsters needlessly playing with matches, that is, with the notion they are a different gender. They are egged on by financially self-interested psychologists, surgeons, and the other corrupt professionals who make up the transgender-industrial complex.
We don’t allow 6-year-olds to make life-altering decisions. We don’t allow them to drive, gamble, or sign contracts. There’s no reason we should allow gender-dysphoric minors to take hormones or start sex change surgery because some psychiatrist wants to make a few bucks. There’s no reason we should allow them to start this process with the help of public school officials without the parents even knowing about it.
Six and 8-year-olds don’t know their own minds. There’s no reason to allow them to start a lifetime of powerful drugs or get irreversible mutilating surgery. Plenty of people who underwent this process ended up regretting their choices, or realizing it was all completely delusional, or even thinking of suicide. Just ask the 200 people who showed up at the world’s first detransition conference in England in 2019. Just ask Nathaniel who got the genitalia surgery and less than a year later said, “This whole thing was a bad idea. I am 19 years old, and I feel as though I have ruined my life.” Just ask Sydney: “Two years ago, I was a healthy, beautiful girl heading toward high school graduation. Before long, I turned into an overweight, pre-diabetic nightmare of a transgender man. I won’t place the full blame on health care providers, because I should have known better. But they sure helped me do a lot of harm to myself—and they made a hefty buck doing it.”
How many more stories like this do you need to hear before concluding that sex changes for minors are a really, really bad idea and should be outlawed. For every Nathaniel and Sydney, there are hundreds more who regret their choices and are seeking help to find their way back. As if all this were not enough, other dangers abound. A hormone blocker prescribed to transgender youth has been linked to over six thousand deaths. I wonder if the corrupt professionals like Planned Parenthood enabling all this disclose that to their young charges placing trust in their hands.
To allow this is child abuse. This is why legislators in Arkansas and eight other states are right to try to stop it. This is why parents in Wisconsin were right to file suit to block a school district from encouraging children to adopt transgender identities without notification to the parents. Daily Signal This is why Rand Paul was right to confront Biden nominee Rachel Levine over transgender surgery and drugs for young children. All the nominee said in response was that the matter could be discussed after confirmation. Daily Signal Well, it’s after confirmation. Rachel Levine was confirmed as assistant secretary for health in HHS. I call on Rand Paul to confront Rachel Levine on this issue again. Let’s have this out, and let’s hear the far-left crazies driving all this and the transgender-industrial complex defend the indefensible.
4/5/21 - Woke Corporations Embarrassing Themselves Over Georgia Law
We thought they were fools until they opened their mouths and proved we were right. The actions and statements of major corporations after Georgia passed an election reform law are based in lies and riddled with hypocrisy.
Delta Airline’s CEO called the final bill “unacceptable” and said it would make it harder for black people to vote. In fact, the Georgia law expanded access to in-person early voting, weekend voting, and the number of drop boxes in the state. Delta had previously lobbied for the bill and acknowledged it expanded voter access. Then it turned around and bashed the bill. The new law requires a photo ID to obtain an absentee ballot. Delta itself requires IDs to get on its planes. So Delta comes off looking more than a little foolish in all of this.
So does Coca-Cola, another company hoping to score woke points by criticizing the new law. The company itself requires a valid ID to attend its annual shareholders meeting. Somehow, that’s not racist, but requiring ID to vote is? How does that work?
Another organization awash in wokitude, Major League Baseball, announced it was moving the All-Star game out of Atlanta in response to the new law. Like Delta, MLB has its own ID requirements, to pick up All-Star game tickets for example. MLB wants to know people are who they say they are, imagine that. It’s also been pointed out that MLB is thrilled to do business in China, a racist country that is committing genocide, uses slave labor, puts dissenters in a thousand political prison camps, and kills people for their organs just to make money. MLB has no problem with any of that, but Georgia is beyond the pale? Get serious. MLB moved the All-Star game the day after it expanded its deal with the biggest human rights abuser on the planet, China. We don’t need lectures about human rights from Major League Baseball which makes a tidy profit turning a blind eye to human rights atrocities when it’s convenient to do so and its own wallet is at stake.
Joe Biden said he strongly supported moving the game out of Atlanta. Biden got 4 Pinocchio’s from the left-wing Washington Post for falsely claiming the Georgia law ended voting after 5 p.m. so people couldn’t vote after leaving work. This false claim was made at a press conference and again later in an official presidential statement.
Georgia’s new voter ID law has also been compared to the Jim Crow laws that segregated the South. But to say requiring ALL voters to show an ID is somehow the same or worse than not allowing blacks to sit at the lunch counter is just crazy-talk, and need not be taken seriously.
I would bet you Delta, Coke, and Major League Baseball all require photo ID to get into their office buildings. They should stick to their knitting and leave social commentary to people who know what they’re talking about. These organizations are way out of their league in the political arena.
4/2/21 - The Problem with Making All Roads Lead to Government
The Left is hell-bent on making all roads lead to government, but there are problems with making Big Government your god, and shrinking private activity part and parcel of your fake religion.
It was reported this week that the supersizing of Obamacare subsidies means that a lot of people can now get Obamacare policies with zero premiums or for as little as $10 a month. Only about half the number of people as predicted ever signed up for Obamacare, so it’s no wonder they had to make the bribes bigger. Obamacare may have partially addressed the preexisting conditions problem, but it caused high deductibles, high drug co-pays, and loss of access to the best doctors and hospitals. This made the overall package unattractive to many consumers, despite nominal preexisting condition coverage, and people sought alternatives like short-term plans and health cost-sharing ministries. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict the bigger bribes and $100 million in new government marketing efforts still won’t bring total enrollment anywhere close to the 21 million they promised way back when. So we get this cockamamie system that doesn’t work for a lot of people because leftists in government sneered at what private insurers were previously offering - ‘junk insurance’ they called it - and insurers wanted government-guaranteed customers and government-guaranteed profits, and to be relieved of the pressures of having to offer products people might actually want to buy.
It was also reported this week that Joe Biden’s multi-trillion dollar supposed infrastructure plan would put the federal government in the home-building business and in the broadband business to take Internet services out of the hands of private actors who make a profit. If you thought the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted in Biden’s Solyndra green energy scandals was bad, just wait. These new proposals have politicization written all over them and absolutely everything is going to go wrong. This is because government contracts are going to go to cronies with friends in high places who will have no market forces to discipline them and no incentive to get anything right.
In a third development this week, Virginia’s Governor was on the radio crowing about how the state is going to buy existing railroad tracks and get into the passenger rail business. They’re going to have a line from Southwest Virginia up to the D.C. suburbs. Here’s my question: Will anybody be on it? Did anyone in government even ask? If there was demand for another way to get from Southwest Virginia up to D.C., don’t you think it would have been built by now? Projects like this let politicians bask in the limelight and avoid accountability when it all turns to muck after they leave office.
So you can see some of the problems when all roads lead to government. There are more. You have a stock market hitting record highs because of Biden’s infrastructure proposal. The stock market stopped being about commerce a long time ago. The biggest factor driving the market on any given day is what the Fed does with interest rates. This is a market more concerned about what government will do than with genuine economic activity. Another problem with merging business and government is Big Tech. People on the Left and the Right are concerned with how powerful Big Tech has become. Now that the Left is back in power, Big Tech is fully philosophically aligned with government, and can justifiably now be called the government’s enforcer in silencing criticism and free speech.
There’s a word for all of this: It’s called fascism. All kinds of people use that word in all kinds of ways, but the textbook definition is the merger of big business and big government. The classic example is Mussolini’s Italy where the CEOs of the largest companies became the ministers in Mussolini’s cabinet. The biggest problem with this is the undue concentration of power, exactly what our Founders warned us about. Bad things happen when you put too much power into too few hands - scandals erupt, hundreds of millions of dollars get wasted, trains to nowhere get built, and companies like Enron seek out friends in government and favorable government policies instead of focusing on developing innovative products and services for real people.
You can make government your god and crusade against all private activity, but you will not bring about heaven on earth. Quite the opposite. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. There. I hope I’ve taken all the joy out of it for you, because you don’t deserve to feel good about any of it. Solyndra, here we come.
4/1/21 - Rule of Law Taking It on the Chin
A story in the news today got me thinking about how lawless we’re becoming as a nation and the trouble ahead if we don’t get back to the Rule of Law.
U.S. authorities are releasing illegal alien families without court dates or sometimes any paperwork at all, as the crisis at the southern border continues. AP They’re supposed to be given court dates. Courts are supposed to rule on their asylum claims. But that’s not going to happen now in a great many instances, thanks to the lawless Biden administration. There are immigration laws on the books and they don’t say ‘the border’s open, whatever, anything goes’. The Biden administration is unconstitutionally acting like Congress - rewriting the laws - and the judicial branch - deciding asylum claims in advance by ruling no rulings are necessary.
The Biden administration is not the only executive branch entity trashing the separation of powers and the Rule of Law. A week ago, the prosecutor in Baltimore decided people there can now engage in prostitution, do drugs, trespass, and urinate and defecate in public because she has decided those crimes still on the books will no longer be prosecuted. Office of the State's Attorney for Baltimore City. She’s not the only one. What are called the ‘Soros DAs’ are pursuing similar policies elsewhere around the country. This does not just mean an increase in street-level lawlessness. These laws are still on the books. State legislatures put them there. Now these rogue prosecutors are ripping up the law books. That’s not prosecutorial discretion; that’s lawlessness. Why aren’t state lawmakers screaming about it and hauling these prosecutors before committees to explain why they’re presuming to act like legislators? They should be.
Add to this the fact that some areas of the country are going lawless. Antifa rioted a hundred straight nights in Portland last summer. The riots continue to this day with recent attacks on school facilities in Portland and pro-law enforcement demonstrators in Oregon’s capital Salem. Gateway Pundit Epoch Times That brings us to the autonomous zone in Seattle last summer and the ongoing autonomous zone in Minneapolis today. Think of them as the new Fort Sumter’s. They have effectively seceded from the Union. And, yet, complicit politicians let them stand and egg them on. More lawlessness.
Some more examples of recent lawlessness come to mind - Ilhan Omar’s associates buying votes in her district (Washington Times Project Veritas), more than 130,000 proven instances of voter fraud in Nevada in the 2020 election (Congressional testimony), state officials changing the election laws without legislative approval, and the legislator in Georgia who was not content with casting her vote against Georgia’s new election integrity law, but had to crash the Governor’s bill-signing ceremony. The state police had to haul the legislator away (NPR). Allegedly, she stomped on an officer’s foot three times in the process. If that isn’t contempt for the Rule of Law, I don’t know what is - stamp your little foot. I gave you two examples earlier of executive branch officials not staying in their lane and presuming to legislate. The Georgia story is an example of a legislator who would not stay in her lane, but thought she was just entitled to put on the Governor’s hat when nobody elected her to do so.
We better get a grip, folks. We’re supposed to have the rule of law in this country. We’d better get back to it because the alternative is sheer chaos and politicians goading us into accepting authoritarian solutions for mayhem. People on the Left who worry about environmental sustainability better start worrying about cultural sustainability and the Rule of Law, before things start crashing down around our ears.
3/31/21 -The Left’s Phony Income Inequality Narrative
Today, I talk about another fairy tale of the Left, income inequality or - as it’s been rebranded - ‘equity’. Here are the first three things that are wrong with this story:
First, equality before the law is great but economic equality is a false value. Would you rather live in poor but equal Pakistan or rich but unequal Singapore? If you choose poverty in Pakistan, we’ll see how long you stick to your convictions.
Second, studies showing big and widening income inequality in the United States are flawed. They generally do not take into account progressive taxation and government transfer payments, starting with Medicaid and food stamps. Progressive taxation and transfer payments both reduce economic inequality. So this whole narrative is being spun out of flawed studies. After correcting for the flaws, researchers found that income inequality is actually LOWER today than it was 50 years ago in the United States. (more documentation here)
Third, the inequality narrative is artificial because it ignores the choices people make and the consequences of those choices. A chart from the American Enterprise Institute shows that Asians in America have the highest median household income and the lowest rate of births to unwed mothers out of four demographic groups. Whites are next, with less income and more unwed births. Hispanics continue the trend, again lower income and a big jump in unwed mothers. Blacks are worst off of the four groups, with the lowest median household income and an astoundingly high 70 percent of births to unwed mothers. Personal choice matters. You can see that in other charts showing wide income disparities within each of these groups, disparities that would not exist if race were the only factor in play. Of course personal choices enter in.
Today, I talk about another fairy tale of the Left, income inequality or - as it’s been rebranded - ‘equity’. Here are the first three things that are wrong with this story:
First, equality before the law is great but economic equality is a false value. Would you rather live in poor but equal Pakistan or rich but unequal Singapore? If you choose poverty in Pakistan, we’ll see how long you stick to your convictions.
Second, studies showing big and widening income inequality in the United States are flawed. They generally do not take into account progressive taxation and government transfer payments, starting with Medicaid and food stamps. Progressive taxation and transfer payments both reduce economic inequality. So this whole narrative is being spun out of flawed studies. After correcting for the flaws, researchers found that income inequality is actually LOWER today than it was 50 years ago in the United States. (more documentation here)
Third, the inequality narrative is artificial because it ignores the choices people make and the consequences of those choices. A chart from the American Enterprise Institute shows that Asians in America have the highest median household income and the lowest rate of births to unwed mothers out of four demographic groups. Whites are next, with less income and more unwed births. Hispanics continue the trend, again lower income and a big jump in unwed mothers. Blacks are worst off of the four groups, with the lowest median household income and an astoundingly high 70 percent of births to unwed mothers. Personal choice matters. You can see that in other charts showing wide income disparities within each of these groups, disparities that would not exist if race were the only factor in play. Of course personal choices enter in.
Here’s a question that shows the importance of personal choice and just how artificial the Left’s narrative is: What are you doing with the second 40 hours of your work week? You want equity? Go out and work for it, nobody’s stopping you. Or maybe you just don’t want to work 100 hours a week at 7-11, like Vietnamese refugees I’ve met. I once asked a young man when I was working a booth at festival if people who work twice as much should make twice as much. He said back to me, “that’s a loaded question!” I said, “Of course it’s a loaded question, but it shows you there’s no justice in this thing you call social justice.”
There’s lots more wrong with the Left’s phony inequality narrative, but I’ll leave that for another day.
One last thought: the Democrats are talking about new death taxes. Yet, they complain minorities are disadvantaged because they don’t benefit from intergenerational wealth accumulation like whites do. I can’t think of a quicker way to kill wealth accumulation for blacks, not to mention everybody else, than death taxes. The National Black Chamber of Commerce agrees with me. Didn’t we just give black farmers a whole bunch of money in the COVID relief bill? Democrats, you are hopelessly confused and completely mixed up.
3/30/21 - The Left’s Phony Voter Suppression Narrative is Wearing Thin
It’s nice to see people on the political Right finally taking on the Left’s phony voter suppression narrative. The narrative has been out there for at least ten years and it’s making less and less sense by the day.
Senator Pat Toomey pointed out it’s a false narrative to say black people are not capable of getting voter ID. They get ID to drive a car and get on airplanes. “We’re not going to be cowed by being called racist over policy that has nothing to do with race,” he said.
Radio host Mark Levin observed the people calling for a vaccine passport are the same people who oppose voter ID. (3/29/21 show)
Congressman Mo Brooks said it’s racist to suggest whites, Asians, and Hispanics have no problem getting IDs, but somehow blacks need to be protected in this regard. The attitude “that somehow or another African Americans are inferior and unable to do what other races are doing” is racist, he said.
Black civil rights attorney Leo Terrell agrees. “I’m offended by anyone who tries to play the race card to protect me because I’m black,” he said. Anyone who tries to compare Georgia’s new voter ID requirement for absentee balloting to Jim Crow laws is way off base, he said. Jim Crow does not exist and voter ID requirements do not segregate by race. “I find it offensive for anyone to say that black people have a problem getting an identification card, a driver’s license, voter ID. You look at every demographic, everyone supports voter ID because we want to make sure that the people are the right person. Election integrity is to make sure we don’t have fraudulent voting,” Terrell said. He also pointed out that the long voting lines the Democrats complain about are in Democrat districts and the new Georgia law addresses them.
Phill Kline, director of the Amistad election integrity project, said private financing of elections by Mark Zuckerberg and others amounts to the government trying to increase the turnout of particular demographics, which is every bit as objectionable as targeting blacks to suppress their votes would be.
If these arguments don’t convince you, maybe facts will.
A watchdog report found that private money mixed up in administering public elections drove up Democrat turnout and may have swung Arizona to Biden. This is one reason a lot of people want to prohibit state and local governments from taking private money to administer elections.
The heavily Democratic town of Missoula, Montana had all mail-in balloting in the 2020 election. An audit showed that 7 percent were counted illegally because they were missing the envelope, signature, or dates, or had some other irregularity. That’s what happens when you strip away election safeguards for supposedly good reasons.
A court in Michigan ruled last week that 177,000 voter registrations were outdated and ordered them removed from the voter rolls. Too bad this didn’t happen before the 2020 election like it was supposed to.
Another court in Michigan ruled the Secretary of State unlawfully directed city clerks to ignore signature matching requirements on absentee ballots in the 2020 election.
Trying to keep ineligible voters on the rolls, ignoring signature requirements, and counting defective mail-in ballots - these things are being done, not to help minorities, but to help the Democrats steal elections and grab power, plain and simple. To deny this is reality suppression.
3/29/21 - The Jack-Booted Thugs of the Democrat Party
It must be very exciting to get up every morning and believe you are ushering in Utopia, heaven on earth. What Democrats and other Leftists won’t tell you, though, is that their Utopia is fenced and gated, and topped with razor wire and guard towers.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at some of the stories in the news, lately, about the authoritarian Left.
A former federal prosecutor, a Democrat, has started a campaign to have companies sign a loyalty oath that Joe Biden won the election fair and square and not to donate to any politician who thinks otherwise. “What we’re trying to do is force companies’ hands so they can’t be agnostic,” the Democrat said. “Force” - an interesting choice of words, don’t you think?
A bill to expand assisted suicide in California would force doctors who refuse to provide such services to refer people elsewhere for lethal drugs against their conscience.
The Democrats’ so-called Equality Act legislation would trample religious freedom, force females to compete against biological males in school sports, and bring a flood of lawsuits against anyone who refuses to go along with the new gay and transgender orthodoxy.
A father in Canada was jailed and faces 5 years in prison for refusing to call his gender-dysphoric daughter a boy after a court ordered the father to use gender-affirming pronouns. Before you shrug this one off because it’s just Canada, you should know New York City has a gender pronoun rule on the books.
In another attack on free speech, House Democrats sent a letter to cable and streaming companies urging them not to air certain news networks the Democrats don’t like.
Illinois teachers are being forced into racial and social justice classes, on pain of losing their license to teach if they refuse. They are expected to carry the indoctrination into their classrooms.
North Carolina’s largest school district has started an anti-whiteness campaign calling for teachers to “override families” if parents object to their children being indoctrinated in anti-colonial and antiracist theory. “You can’t let parents deter you from the work,” it was said.
Teachers in Loudon County, Virginia went farther, compiling enemies lists of parents suspected of disagreeing with their teaching of critical race theory and calling for the parents to be “silenced” and publicly exposed.
If this is heaven on earth, count me out. It’s time to tell the truth about the jack-booted thugs of the Democrat Party. They and other Leftists control freaks are hell-bent on suing churches out of existence, separating children from their parents, and steamrolling anyone who gets in their way. They’ve already told us what they have planned for people who won’t walk into their Utopian cages willingly - enemies lists, reeducation camps, Maoist-style public humiliation sessions, and mass executions. This is what they have planned for you, if you cross them.
This is why, for me, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the authoritarianism of the Left - how much freedom are they trying to take away from people, supposedly for our own good. The whole situation is getting out of hand and it’s time for everyone who loves their freedom to challenge every single policy proposal from the Left and refuse to discuss its merits until a thorough airing is had on how the proposal will destroy liberty and make life unlivable. Democrats and the Left - nice smile, teeth of iron.
3/26/21 - Here’s What Happened While You Were Dreaming About Free Community College
National security experts have been warning for some time that our nuclear deterrent is deteriorating. The subject made news this week when Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee criticized Joe Biden for not taking action to modernize America’s aging nuclear stockpile at a time when China and Russia are aggressively building up theirs.
Part of the problem is that we import 90 percent of our uranium and no longer have the capability to enrich it. We are drawing down our stockpiles which are expected to run out in 2040.
An aging nuclear deterrent is not the only national security challenge the U.S. faces at this time.
The Pentagon’s decisions to put climate change and social justice at the center of its decision making shows a bureaucracy confused about its mission. This leftward ideological tilt poses risks to America’s war-fighting capabilities.
China has the largest navy in the world and has passed the U.S. in missile development and the number of air defense systems.
China is still dominant in rare earth minerals needed for nuclear subs, F-35s, and other military applications. Former President Trump’s plan to stockpile rare earths has not been implemented.
War game simulations show the Air Force needs 75 more squadrons to win a conventional war with China or Russia.
Russia tested a weapon in space, firing a projectile that could be used to kill satellites in orbit. People laughed when Donald Trump started the U.S. Space Force, but the threat is real.
North Korea is now believed to have 60 nuclear weapons and the third-largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world.
Islamic State is resurgent and recruiting a new generation of jihadi fighters, which spells trouble long-term. Despite losing territory, it remains capable of small terrorist attacks and making mischief by allying with others, as in Afghanistan.
Iran’s first successful launch of a military satellite a year ago brought it a few steps closer to developing ICBM capability.
These are just a few of the national security challenges we face. So you see, there’s more to think about than free community college and racial centralism. Time to get serious, folks.
3/25/21 - Predictable Calls for Gun Control
The Democrats predictably called for more gun control after the Atlanta and Boulder shootings, like they always do. But their proposals, by and large, would not prevent future mass shootings.
Let’s look at the Boulder case. Gun control starting ramping up in Colorado after Columbine, but it’s as useless there as it’s proven to be in Chicago where wholesale slaughter still occurs on a weekly basis. Colorado already has universal background checks, large-capacity magazine bans, and a ‘red flag’ law. But none of these restrictions stopped the Boulder attack. The ‘red flag’ law had no effect in this case, despite the fact the family knew he had the rifle and his older brother said the suspect was mentally ill. “Colorado has every gun law known to this country … but that didn’t prevent this incident,” a former FBI official told Fox News. More gun control measures already under consideration in Colorado before the shooting would tighten gun-storage rules and require reporting of lost or stolen firearms. Based on what we know so far, neither of these proposals would have had any bearing on the shooting.
The shooter had an AR-15 style rifle and a semiautomatic pistol. He bought them on March 16th despite a juvenile guilty plea to assault in 2017. Juvenile records are typically sealed, and for good reasons. Boulder had an assault weapons ban until March 12th when it was temporarily blocked by a judge in a gun rights case. Some say keeping the ban in place would have stopped the shooting, but the suspect didn’t live in Boulder; he drove in from another town. Moreover, Boulder apparently wasn’t enforcing its assault weapons ban, anyway.
Gun control is an invitation to endless whack-a-mole. Whenever a law doesn’t work as advertised, there are calls for more laws. If the laws aren’t enforced, well then maybe we need to force officials to enforce the unenforced laws more. If shootings continue after all that , then we need a federal universal background check, even though a study showed the vast majority of the guns used in almost 20 mass shootings were purchased with a federal background check. The shooters in Orlando and Las Vegas passed their background checks. All these laws can be evaded by straw purchases, where individuals ask other people to buy guns for them. Even if you were to write an entire Napoleonic Code to cover every conceivable situation, you would still have knife attacks with multiple victims as occurred on the London Bridge in 2019. It’s a fool’s errand; the problem needs to be solved some other way.
It’s being argued that a federal assault weapons ban would put a stop to all mass shootings like the one in Boulder. Maybe, but ask yourself some questions: How authoritarian do you want to get? How does taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens reduce crime? Why take away rights from all Americans when only a tiny handful poses any problem?
H.R. 127, introduced in Congress in January, would, among other things, mandate a federal gun license, start up a national gun registry, require a mental health exam for ALL gun owners, and require every gun owner to purchase liability insurance. This flips the Constitution on its head. Instead of being born with a right to bear arms, everyone would have to petition the government to grant them the privilege of gun ownership. There are good reasons not to turn our rights into privileges the government can take away at any time. Think about free speech, for example. What if you had to get a federal license before you could post on social media, and the government official handling your request didn’t like your politics? Natural unalienable rights or government privileges - to me, the choice is clear.
The people in government predictably calling for more gun control at the moment are authoritarians to their fingertips. They want ALL my rights, so I’m not willing to give them ANY of my rights. They won’t stop with a federal assault weapons ban or a gun registry, just ask them. They won’t be satisfied until nobody has a gun. I’m sorry, but they are precisely the kind of people - unapologetic power-hungry authoritarians - that the Second Amendment is meant to protect us from.
3/24/21 - Mao’s Plan for World Domination is Alive and Kicking
While many in the United States are preoccupied with the seeming importance of Wokitude, so-called climate change, and other fairy tales of the Left, here’s what they’re thinking in communist China:
A top Chinese Communist Party strategist gave a speech in 2016, building on Mao Zedong’s plans for world domination announced in the 1950s. China’s goal, the strategist said is to surpass the United Kingdom, catch up with the U.S., and “become the No. 1 boss.” “The task of our next generation is to put the U.S. under our jurisdiction ... too,” the strategist said.
He laid out a number of devious means by which China intends to reach its goal. “First, create conditions for [the U.S.] to make mistakes... Second, we keep [the U.S.] busy so that it will suffer from depression and want to quit the job itself.” In other words, keep the U.S. fatigued and demoralized, so it will no longer want to be a superpower. “Third, we should get ourselves mixed together with the U.S., so that it cannot fight us. We should create such a situation where you have me inside you, and I have you inside me.” China and the U.S. are now each other’s largest trading partners, so the strategy seems to have worked. Having our pharmaceuticals and medical devices made in China looks like part of the plan, too.
China’s deviousness doesn’t stop there. China waited until the U.S. got militarily involved in Syria and distracted by the Ukraine to build islands in the South China Sea. “We only built the islands then. When the U.S. found that we had built such large islands ..., we immediately said to it, Oh, my dear boss, we will stop it,’ ... we are not building it anymore. The United States was very happy for a few months. They thought, after all, [the U.S. is] still the boss.”
The speech also laid out how China would get its hooks into U.S. politicians and go “deeper” into the U.S. Chinese capital would flow into U.S. investment projects. “We in the Chinese government hope that in the end, every U.S. Congressman's district will have Chinese investment, and China will be able to control one thousand or several thousand votes, and then we can influence (the congressman’s) attitude.” You can add to this the entanglements of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in Chinese companies and largesse.
If all of the above is not enough to corrupt the ruling class and bring America down, the strategist has another way to do it: “Of course we can also have other evil tricks, such as throwing the world into further chaos.... If there are three external enemies outside the United States, I reckon it will start to feel dizzy. If it has four enemies, it will completely get lost. So China's strategic task is to ensure that there are four enemies [for the U.S.], terrorists are certainly one.” This will keep the U.S. confused and inert, and enable China to dominate the world with all its wonderful values like forced sterilization of minorities and reeducation camps for anyone who thinks the wrong way or resists the Dragon.
This is how China plans to turn America into a wholly owned subsidiary of China and take control of the world without fighting a war with the U.S.
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of making statements about how they intend to target the U.S. and achieve world domination, starting with Mao in 1956. In 2005, a Chinese official said they had developed a plan to depopulate the United States and replace all current residents with Han Chinese. So you see, there are other things to think about aside from how to pay proper respect to each of the 57 genders. Time to get serious, people.
3/22/21 - Hate Crimes Against Asians: A Little Perspective, Please
All of a sudden, stories about hate crimes against Asians are everywhere. I get suspicious whenever I see an orchestrated campaign like this.
My suspicions are informed by Bernard Goldberg’s books. He is a former CBS newsman who wrote entire books about special interest groups concocting phony statistics and the press slurping them up to advance a narrative. They did it with the homeless and heterosexual AIDS, misportraying both problems as far bigger than they actually were. Now the same thing is apparently happening with hate crimes against Asians.
A politician in Georgia is citing statistics the Stop AAPI Hate advocacy group put out to the effect that 3,795 hate incidents against Asians were recorded in the last year, a 30-fold increase. Stop and ask yourself: a 30-fold increase in one year, does that sound plausible to you? Not to me, so let’s take a closer look at these so-called statistics this special interest group provided.
The special interest group inflated its statistics by including incidents that were not actual attacks, like discrimination, harassment, and child bullying. Another problem is that this is all self-reported and accepted at face value without any vetting. Here we go again, and the press just eats it up without any questions because it fits the narrative that America is a horrible rotten place and getting worse ever since Donald Trump talked about the China virus.
According to official FBI statistics for 2019, the most recent year available, almost half of all hate crime incidents based on race or ethnicity were against blacks. Hate crimes against whites were next most frequent, followed by those against Hispanics. Trailing far behind in fourth place were hate crimes against Asians. The numbers work out to about one hate crime against Asians every other day, so it’s not surprising the media can keep finding fresh stories of hate crimes against Asians to write about on a daily basis. And it may be that hate crimes against Asians really are increasing in recent months, but the point remains the same. There are far more hate crimes against blacks, whites, and Hispanics. Why isn’t anyone up in arms about that?
Meanwhile, here’s the good news about race that doesn’t get widely reported because it doesn’t fit the narrative:
Only in America.
Remember these things when you see Joe Biden and Kamala Harris rushing down to Atlanta to capitalize on the shootings and moan about how horrible hate crimes against Asians are. They must not have heard FBI Director Christopher Wray say there does not appear to be anything racially motivated about those crimes. NPR Kamala the Kameleon is back to being Asian for a few days instead of black. Their trip to Atlanta was a higher priority than the crisis their administration caused at the border, where Joe says he might visit ‘at some point’. Thanks, Joe, you’re a big help.
All this is, is opportunism and political theater, fed by a phony narrative backed by phony statistics.
Am I in favor of hate crimes and murder? No, and don’t try to twist my words. All I’m saying is let’s not lose our perspective. And let’s not get sucked in by orchestrated special interest campaigns or political theater as performed by people who have been winning Academy Awards for it for years.
3/19/21 - Single Payer Has Not Gone Away
Joe Biden is busy expanding Obamacare, but single payer has not gone away. The Left has been salivating for socialized medicine for a hundred years, and they’re not about to quit now. Far from it.
House Democrats just reintroduced their Medicare for All bill, with 109 co-sponsors. Physicians for a National Health Program, a group with communist roots, endorses the legislation. If you think communism is cute, we’ll start that conversation with the 100 million corpses communism has piled up in the last hundred years and go from there, OK?
Xavier Becerra, a long-time supporter of single payer, was just confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary.
The Rhode Island Senate adopted a resolution calling on Congress to create a single payer healthcare system.
A Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin announced support for Medicare for All and declined to say whether he wants to eliminate all private insurance.
An Illinois House committee voted up a single payer plan for the state.
A single payer bill has been proposed again in the California Assembly. A 2017 bill failed when people realized it would cost twice the state’s budget.
Activists in Washington state are lobbying their city council to support single payer legislation for the state.
As you can see, there’s still a lot of activity on single payer. In Florida, the activity is going the other way. A proposal to require a two-third’s supermajority of both houses and a ballot referendum before adopting single payer is advancing in the state legislature.
What’s wrong with single payer, you ask? Let’s do something the Left never does and talk about the problems their proposals would cause. Here are just some of the problems from recent stories. Single payer involves price controls, meaning the government will set prices for all healthcare services. History shows price controls lead to shortages in healthcare and unacceptably long wait times, among other problems. New York’s single payer bill would triple state taxes, and cause residents to flee to lower-tax jurisdictions. It’s often said that single payer will eliminate inequality in healthcare. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The rich will always find a way to get the healthcare they want and everybody else will get substandard treatment.
Here’s how single payer works in the real world. VA doctors harvested liver tissue from veterans without their consent, putting them at serious risk, a watchdog agency said. The Veterans Administration runs a single payer health system for the nation’s military veterans. Active duty troops are also finding out single payer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. $900 million in malpractice claims against military hospitals have racked up since Congress allowed them a year ago, and lawmakers are angry the Pentagon is taking so long to pay.
That’s just a taste of the problems I’ve seen in years of reading about single payer. It’s time to drop the pom-poms, stop the cheerleading, and get real. The next time you run into a single payer fanatic, ask them to explain how they will deal with the problems their proposal will create. Watch them ignore the question, give you some flim-flam, or attack you for asking it. The one thing they won’t do, I’m sure, is give you satisfactory answers - because they can’t.
3/18/21 - ‘Biden Didn’t Cause the Border Crisis’ - Nice Try, Not Even Close
Democrats are doing cartwheels to try to convince you Joe Biden’s immigration policies didn’t cause the crisis at the border.
Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, asserted through questioning in a hearing yesterday that border crises are cyclical, regardless of who is in the White House. (Watch here at 3:23:54.)
Trump had a border crisis in 2019 and Obama had the border surge of 2014. However, Trump’s crisis was artificially manufactured by left-wing agitators forming and financing migrant caravans from Central America. Obama’s border surge was caused by policies similar to Biden’s that welcomed unaccompanied alien children and bent over backwards to shelter them and accommodate their every need with $75 a day food and soccer balls.
Torres also asserted Trump cut funding to address the root causes of migration in Central America. The reasoning is disputed, but even if true, that doesn’t explain why Biden decided to open the border first before addressing root causes. It also doesn’t explain why there wasn’t a crisis at the border in Trump’s final year in office. The difference obviously is Trump’s policies were working and the current crisis arose when Biden threw those policies in the trash can.
Torres also asserted Trump cut the Central American Minors Program which allowed children to apply for asylum from their home countries, and now they have to crash the border to do it. This assertion presumes that people from other countries just have a right to live in the United States if they darn well please, a presumption that is manifestly untrue. It also presumes that children from Central America have no choice but to try to gain entry into the United States. That’s absurd, given the fact that most people in Central America are staying put. There are 50 million people in Central America. Only a tiny fraction is trying to crash the border.
Torres also asserted a governmental memo in the Trump administration made families too fearful to claim their children being detained in federal custody, so the seeds of the present border crisis were planted at that time. No, we have NEW children crashing the border, so that explanation doesn’t hold any water at all.
So Representative Torres was wrong about everything. Texas Governor Greg Abbott was right when he said the Biden administration opened the immigration floodgates enticing alien children into the country, but was completely “unprepared” for the aftermath. Dallas Morning News At least the Obama administration lined up new shelter space before opening up the floodgates to the 2014 child border surge. The Biden people were tripping over their own ideology and couldn’t wait. So now we have kids in containers and behind barbed wire again. Biden doesn’t want you to see that, so now immigration officials are being told not to talk to the press and no pictures are allowed.
Representative Torres is a day late and a dollar short. The Biden White House has already admitted its policies caused the crisis. Not only that, the Biden administration is doubling down. It plans to loosen immigration restrictions further. DHS announced new plans to expand immigration by speeding up asylum claims, flying migrants into the country, and making several other policy changes. Breitbart Joe Biden is telling migrants not to set out just yet, because the U.S. is still in the process of getting set up to receive them, but receive them we will. And White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said yesterday any child who manages to set foot on U.S. soil will not be sent back.
All of which leads me back to my question which nobody has answered yet: how is all of this untrammeled illegal immigration, which nobody ever voted for, good for the country? I’m still waiting for an answer. That’s the issue as I see it. Maybe Representative Torres can enlighten us.
3/17/21 - Obamacare: New Lipstick, Same Pig
The failures of Obamacare are legendary. Millions of people lost their doctors and their plans, despite President Obama’s repeated promises to the contrary. The price of health insurance more than doubled. People with preexisting conditions, whom Obamacare was supposed to protect, found themselves without the best care, paying stiff drug costs, or being denied coverage altogether.
Despite all this, Joe Biden and the latest COVID relief package doubled down on Obamacare. The Democrats decided to bribe away the remaining opposition with bigger subsidies. Now, Obamacare subsidies are available to people making 400 percent of the federal poverty level, about $100,000 for a family of four. This means that people with six-figure incomes qualify for help from Uncle Sam. I’m sorry, but there’s something wrong when people making that kind of money can’t function without the assistance of the federal government.
This is part of a destructive pattern deployed time and again by the Democrats and the Left. First, they screw up the system and make something enormously expensive. Then they turn around and say, ‘oh, but we’ll HELP you,’ like they were the good guys. They did it with college tuition - making it soar out of sight, then federalizing student loans and doling out more tuition assistance. And they did it with healthcare - Obamacare’s guaranteed issue and community rating regulations made insurance much more expensive, but the Democrats handed out subsidies to dull the pain they themselves caused. Now, the subsidies are even bigger, targeting the self-employed and small business owners who were hit with higher premiums from Obamacare but did not qualify for subsidies before the latest COVID relief package. These people typically disfavored Obamacare, but now they are being bought off.
Try as the Democrats might, the bigger subsidies will not make the problems with Obamacare go away. The subsidies will only make Obamacare more expensive and place upward pressure on insurance premiums. The price tag is expected to be $34 billion dollars over two years, which works out to $34,000 of federal assistance for every new policyholder. This is nuts. We don’t have this kind of money to throw around. This is only possible in a country that thinks it can go on deficit spending forever and the bill will never come due.
Meanwhile, the Democrats won’t talk about the bad stuff in Obamacare - the narrow networks or the fact that the program has never come close to signing up 21 million people as promised. More bad stuff came to light, recently. The government authorized hundreds of millions of dollars in Obamacare subsidies to keep people insured even though they should have been dropped for not paying their premiums. A father and son from California were sentenced to prison recently in a $27 million scheme to defraud the Obamacare program in 12 states.
And here’s my favorite one from recent news: Health insurers are inflating the claims they report paying in order to escape hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates Obamacare requires they pay consumers. Rube Goldberg strikes again! If Obamacare weren’t so cockamamie, this wouldn’t be happening.
If you want to reduce premiums and deductibles or give policyholders access to more doctors and hospitals, you don’t do it by increasing subsidies. You do it by repealing Obamacare’s expensive regulations and getting the government out of healthcare. Obamacare was the wrong direction for the country when it was passed, and it’s still the wrong direction no matter how much the Democrats make us pay to paper over the problems.
3/16/21 - Crisis at the Border: ‘Joe Told Us to Come’
The news from the southern border keeps getting worse. It is a full-blown policy disaster and humanitarian crisis.
First, we have the spectacle of White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s fancy dancing about the situation not being a disaster, just a ‘challenge’, despite the numbers being, in her words, “enormous”. She was specifically asked if sending the disaster agency FEMA to the border means the situation is now a ‘disaster’. Psaki pirouetted away, performing a graceful arabesque and never answering the question.
Next, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy led a Republican delegation to assess the crisis at the border which, McCarthy correctly said, was caused by Joe Biden stopping construction on the wall, halting deportations, and promising citizenship to illegal aliens. OAN The Democrat-controlled House is aiding and abetting the Biden administration crisis-making border policies. The House is expected to vote this week on bills to give a pathway to citizenship to DREAMERS and farm workers here in the country illegally. Reuters Before you get all misty-eyed about the DREAMERS, remember that some in that group are 35 years old and others lost their eligibility because of criminal activity. As for the farm workers, there’s a great case to be made for a noncitizen guest worker program like the one we had in the 1940s through ‘60s, but not a case for open borders.
The current influx of unaccompanied alien children is so bad, not only has the disaster and emergency agency FEMA been called in, but they’re having to open up the Dallas convention center to house 3,000 of them.
The crisis is not confined to the young. Six illegal aliens are dead after a high-speed chase and head-on collision near the border in Texas. Earlier this month, a crash of an SUV killed 13 suspected illegal aliens near the border in California. Human smuggling was suspected. Yahoo Daily Mail
Biden’s moves to open up the immigration floodgates have put the cartels back in control of the border, a Congressman observed. Not only that, but people on the terrorist watch list have been caught coming across the border in recent days. Aliens from Islamic countries like Iran and Yemen have been apprehended. In case you haven’t heard, standard Islamic doctrine teaches the world domination of sharia law and jihad as the means to achieve it. We need more people in the country who think like that? I don’t think so.
What the Biden administration has done at the border is not only a policy disaster and a humanitarian crisis, it is a national security threat. With terrorists coming across the border again, I hope we don’t find that out the hard way.
3/15/21 - White House Admits It Caused the Border Crisis
A White House official admitted a Biden policy change created the unaccompanied alien child crisis at the southern border. Almost three times as many unaccompanied minors were detained at the border last month as a year ago. There have been reports of children going without showers or sunlight for days and not being allowed to communicate with their families. FEMA has been deployed to keep up with the influx. UPI The Blaze CNN
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also admitted Biden policy changes caused the crisis. She said she recognizes it was a policy decision that caused children to flow across the border in such numbers.
Of course it was a policy decision. Compare these admissions from the White House to the fabrications of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Pelosi blamed Donald Trump and climate change for the surge. She and Schumer claimed Biden inherited a broken immigration system. Pelosi also said people are leaving Central American because of a drought she attributed to climate change. She’s delusional. If these explanations hold water, why wasn’t there a surge two months ago, or two years ago, when Donald Trump was in office? Why did the surge only begin AFTER Biden took over? Because Trump’s policies to minimize illegal immigration were working, that’s why. Biden opened up the border, said ‘come on up and, oh by the way, we’ll let your parents in later, you can all be reunited.’ Of course, parents sent their children to stampede the border.
One last point, the Biden administration says it wants to help Central American countries stop the drivers of migration. OK, but why didn’t Biden do that first instead of opening up the border first? The answer is that this administration is completely driven and blinded by radical left-wing ideology regardless of the real-world consequences. If families are separated and kids are in cages, that’s perfectly fine because we Democrats are on our way to building a one-party state and, if little children get hurt in the process, it doesn’t matter. If you’re going to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs, right? Until someone can show me otherwise, I’m going to assume this is why the Democrats have opened the border and don’t care who gets hurt.
3/12/21 - More Whiffs of Corruption in the Biden Administration
Today, we return to the theme of corruption, a theme that has the power to bring down governments.
William Burns, Joe Biden’s pick for CIA director, quarterbacked Hillary Clinton’s suspect Uranium One deal when Burns worked under Clinton at the State Department. The deal resulted in the sale of one-fifth of the U.S. uranium supply to Russia. The Russian bank financing the deal paid $500,000 to Bill Clinton, raising the appearance that Hillary Clinton sold her public office for personal gain without regard to the national interest. Burns downplayed the national security threat from Russia during his confirmation hearings.
Deb Haaland, Joe Biden’s nominee for the Interior Department, gave conflicting financial statements to House ethics officials. The latest statement eliminated $40,000 in income in 2018, the year she first won her congressional seat. She now claims she only earned $4,000 that year. She dropped income previously reported from a tribal casino and added a previously undeclared retirement account. Sources on Capitol Hill are wondering how she could possibly live on $4,000 a year and how all this squares with her tax returns.
Xavier Becerra, who appears headed for confirmation as HHS secretary, falsely claimed in his confirmation hearings he never sued any nuns. Maybe not directly, but as California Attorney General he sued the Trump administration twice to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees. The Little Sisters of the Poor prevailed at the Supreme Court, but Joe Biden promised on the campaign trail to force the issue again. Becerra’s just the right guy for the job, given his experience suing nuns.
The ability to tell lies convincingly might just be a prerequisite for a job in the Biden administration. Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan falsely accused Michael Flynn in 2017 of conspiring with Russia. In addition, government emails show Sullivan and Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes bragging about how the two were “lying footsoldiers” for the Obama administration.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris continues to have her own problems telling the truth. She falsely claimed, "There was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations.... And so in many ways, we're starting from scratch on something that's been raging for almost an entire year." That was a whopper and even the left-wing Washington Post had to admit it. Military planes lined up on runways to distribute the vaccine around the country the minute it was available, as part of the Trump administration’s vaccination plans.
Put it all together and it won’t bring down a government - yet. But in the interest of good government, we should not be complacent about corruption in the Biden administration or let it pass without comment.
3/11/21 - Take Your State Religion and Shove It!
There are at least three reasons not to buy the whole ‘Woke’ trip. The first is authoritarianism.
I’ve said many times the rise of the authoritarian Left is the central challenge of our times. A recent article describes how the ‘Woke’ movement is taking over the schools. Public and private schools in many places are segregating students by race, telling white students they are second-in-line to speak, and adopting ‘anti-racism’ plans to teach anti-colonialism and Marxist-derived Critical Race Theory. They also teach students capitalism is evil, America is a horrible racist place, and whites bear collective racial guilt. U.S. history class is mostly about marginalized groups - thank you Howard Zinn - and classic literature is no longer taught.
The indoctrination is so entrenched at this point, parents are afraid of speaking out against it publicly. They worry about losing their jobs, or their kids being blacklisted from all private schools or even physically assaulted. Any parent who speaks against the new orthodoxy in group chats is quickly and publicly shamed. The kids are afraid to speak up in class and even afraid to say what kind of music they like. So they lie to hide their true attitudes and get good grades.
Suffocating intolerance is the hallmark of authoritarianism. A lot of the early reports out of the #WalkAway movement were from people who left the Democrat Party because their friends kept ramming orthodoxy down their throats and would not let them speak their minds or express any disagreement.
‘Woke’ ideology comes from the same authoritarian Left that claims the power to force you to buy particular products and specify what those products must contain - Obamacare. This is the same authoritarian Left that is busy turning physician-assisted suicide into government-directed death to get rid of undesirable populations, like the mentally ill. And the same authoritarian Left that is telling us we must all live in caves to save the planet from climate change when articles appear literally every day in scientific journals disputing the science.
And so to the Woke movement and the authoritarian Left I say, take your state religion and shove it!
The second reason not to take the ‘Woke’ movement at face value is the hidden agenda - wealth and power for the leaders. Black Lives Matter has figured out a way to shake down corporate America for hundreds of millions of dollars. BLM chapters are complaining that the self-admitted trained Marxists at the top are keeping the millions for themselves and not spreading the wealth around. So the issue is never the issue; it’s all about wealth and power for the leaders. They rope people in with new orthodoxies and guilt trips. These are the same techniques cults use to recruit new members to Jonestown or wherever. The followers become useful idiots, but if they were told the real deal up front, they would never join, and that’s why the true agenda has to remain hidden. Viewed in this light, the whole ‘Woke’ movement is racketeering on a grand scale. Systemic race training pays very well. Beats working for a living.
The third reason to question the ‘Woke’ movement is because it’s completely unhinged. Segregated classrooms and dorms - wow. Didn’t this country go through an entire civil rights movement to get rid of these things? I can’t walk down certain blocks in Minneapolis today because I’m white, and barred from the new lawless autonomous zone there. This is not a healthy development. ‘Woke’ math is no longer about ‘2+2=4’ but identifying economic movements that have led to liberation, instilling collectivist thinking, and all kinds of other social justice nonsense that does not at all prepare students for life.
The ‘Woke’ movement will take you very far down the rabbit hole. It says you’re a racist unless you’re a 24/7 in-your-face anti-racist haranguing people constantly about race. That’s crazy.
But I have one last story that tops everything. An “ethnic studies” curriculum is being proposed in California calling for the “decolonization” of American society and a “counter-genocide” against white Christians. If the plan is approved, millions of California school kids will be chanting to the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Reconquista, baby.
Too ‘woke’ for me. Once again I say, take your state religion and shove it!
3/10/21 - Iowa Restores Important Election Safeguards
Lots of legislative proposals to promote election integrity have popped up in lots of states - 200 bills in 43 states, by one count - but it appears Iowa is first out of the gate with a new law signed on Monday.
The new law shortens early voting from 29 to 20 days. It requires most ballots to be received by Election Day, not noon the next Monday.
The new law also places restrictions on absentee voting. Election officials cannot send out absentee request forms unsolicited, and absentee ballots must now be returned by the voter, a family member, or a caregiver - not ballot harvesters hired by the Democrat Party or its minions.
The new law also removes voters from the voter rolls if they miss an election or don’t report a change in address.
The Democrats’ canned response to common sense election safeguards is ‘voter suppression’ - provisions like these make it harder for people to vote. To which my answer is, well, duh! Of course we want to make it harder for people who are not qualified to vote in our elections. There are good reasons for each and every one of the safeguards commonly used to secure elections. Requiring an ID makes it harder for people to buy beer, but we don’t want 12-year-olds buying beer. Requiring a Real ID makes it harder for people to get on an airplane, but we don’t want to raise the risk of terrorism by allowing people who are not who they say they are to fly. Requiring voter ID makes it harder to vote, but we don’t want dead people or noncitizens voting.
There’s only one reason the Democrats want to strip away all the safeguards - they want to steal elections and impose one-party rule forever. There’s only one reason Democrats want to make mail-in voting permanent everywhere - they want to cheat and are trying to exploit the pandemic to get their way. The Democrats want their ballot harvesters to be able to return absentee ballots, not because it will help minority voters, but because it will help the Democrats steal elections.
Loosey-goosey mail-in voting is no longer acceptable. Allowing Democrat ballot harvesters to traffic in absentee ballots is no longer acceptable. Leaving dead voters on the rolls is no longer acceptable. Each and every one of these things is a vector for election fraud.
If working to restore common sense safeguards to elections is voter suppression, I’ll eat my hat. Election integrity is a good message for everybody. Iowa just plugged some of the holes in its voting system, but there are lot’s more, there and everywhere. But if we’re going to restore confidence in our elections, this is the direction we need to be headed. Thank you, Iowa, for showing the way.
3/9/21 - Work for State Antifa Laws
Joe Biden was completely wrong when he said Antifa is ‘just an idea’. It wasn’t just an idea that rioted a hundred straight nights and attacked federal buildings in Portland last summer. Antifa is half-anarchist and half Marxist. Some say Antifa is not organized, but it is highly organized. Antifa groups are tightly networked into a cell structure, and well-funded, to boot. They can project power nationally and their tactics are highly evolved and continually changing. All these are hallmarks of a sophisticated effort that should be taken seriously when it says its goal is to bring down the U.S. government. Despite what you hear from the corrupt Washington establishment and the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, it is Antifa - not white supremacy - that poses a major threat to our constitutional order.
Some states know all this and are fighting back with new legislation to counter Antifa. Viewed broadly, the legislation raises criminal penalties, addresses Antifa’s funding, and holds elected officials accountable for allowing far-left radicals to run amok in their cities with impunity, as in Seattle and Portland.
ln Florida, among other things, the legislation increases the penalties for violent assemblies, holds organizers and funders of such assemblies liable for racketeering, and allows local governments to be sued for money damages if they fail to protect persons or property during violent assemblies. Rioters will no longer be eligible for state benefits or employment.
A bill in Utah contains similar provisions, and goes on to stipulate rioters who are arrested can be denied bail. Rioters are also prohibited from throwing “saliva, blood, urine, or fecal material.”
A bill in Kentucky also shares some of the features of the Florida legislation, buts adds strong prohibitions against ‘camping’ which would prevent rioters from taking over territory and setting up lawless autonomous zones on state property.
A resolution in Montana calls for “groups and organizations across the United States who act under the banner of Antifa to be designated as domestic terrorist organizations.”
I hope the bold actions of these states will encourage you to work for laws to counter Antifa in your state. A pro-Constitution group got the ball rolling in Utah, so ordinary people can change things for the better. I have more information and access to a counterinsurgency expert to help you get started. Contact me at tips@liberato.us.
3/8/21 - United States Losing Its Economic Freedom and Why That’s a Problem
There is a clear correlation between the amount of economic freedom a country has and its overall level of prosperity. Not only does more economic freedom mean a higher standard of living, it also means better health, education, environmental quality, upward mobility, and social progress. Thus, it is with great sadness I must report to you that the United States received its lowest score and lowest ranking ever in the Heritage Foundation’s latest Index of Economic Freedom.
The United States now ranks 20th among all countries in the world, still “mostly free” but declining because the government is accounting for a larger portion of the economy, government debt is becoming unsustainable, and government regulation is increasing in health care and the financial sector. What this means is the U.S. will have less prosperity and social progress in the future than it otherwise could have had, if the previous level of economic freedom had been maintained.
Singapore sits on top the rankings, the economically freest country in the world with a high standard of living. It is no accident that the socialist basket cases of Cuba, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe are at the bottom of the rankings, with the most government intervention in their economies and the worst economic results. Socialists always claim they can produce more prosperity by imposing more government strictures, but it’s never true. Cuba and Venezuela have made noises recently about liberalizing their economies to some degree, showing, once again, that turning in the direction of market forces - not socialism - is what produces prosperity.
Hong Kong was taken off the list entirely this year, because it is no longer independent enough of China to deserve a listing of its own. You don’t have to be a genius to predict less economic freedom there will mean the people will be less well-off in the future. Not to mention all the pain that goes with being locked up in a communist police state.
There is hope for the United States, though. New Zealand was once in the throes of heavy government regulation and statist policies. It reversed course in the 1980s, moving in the direction of market forces and economic freedom. It is now the second-most economically free country in the world. Until the pandemic, its economy had steadily been expanding for 10 years. The Left likes to make fun of people who say ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ but they really have no constructive alternative to offer. Seizing the means of production doesn’t get you anywhere economically, just the opposite. All it does is enrich and empower a tiny elite. Just ask the five million refugees who have fled Venezuela since 2016 for countries with more economic freedom, they’ll tell you.
3/5/21 - Crisis at the Border
There’s no denying it any longer: there’s a full-blown crisis at the southern border. The number of unaccompanied illegal alien children crossing the border every day is up 600 percent since early January, and the shelter system will reach full capacity this month. Axios In addition, thousands of asylum seekers have started entering the U.S. who had been waiting in Mexico under Trump administration policies. BBC
That’s just today’s news. In February, the number of unaccompanied alien children hit a record high. The government expects that record to be shattered in May, when 13,000 more children will enter the U.S. unaccompanied in that month alone. The Trump administration got criticized for putting ‘kids in cages’, but we now know the practice started in the Obama administration. And we also know the Biden administration is doing much the same thing by putting kids in gated compounds and shipping containers.
The gusher at the border doesn’t stop with kids. The Biden administration is taking steps to reunite families separated at the southern border. This includes allowing parents who are not currently in the U.S. to enter the country to settle with their children who are here illegally. Politico Politico You can then expect those numbers to ultimately quadruple through chain immigration, where an average of four extended family members show up for every immigrant resettled here.
In addition, the Biden administration has loosened immigration policies in other ways. It reversed the Trump administration’s move to discourage people more likely to need welfare from coming here. Biden is also taking refugee admissions to the highest numbers in 30 years.
Put it all together and you’ve got a situation where border agents are being overwhelmed and describe how illegal aliens run right past them.
None of this is a mystery. It’s a direct result of the Biden administration reversing Trump policies and going back to the policies of the Obama administration that produced waves of unaccompanied alien children crossing the border. This was especially true in the border surge of 2014, when it was reported that government shelter workers were engaging in child sex abuse with the minors entrusted to them.
The kids themselves were not all little angels. Government records show them fighting, lying, stealing, and using drugs. This time, young gang members who got deported in the Trump years for shaking down businesses are coming back to get their revenge.
So tell me why all this is a good idea. What’s the benefit to the country? I haven’t heard anybody make that case yet. All I see so far is Biden’s policies hurting people. Kids are back in cages, a mayor in Texas said his border town can’t handle the influx, and the rule of law is being shredded before our very eyes.
So why are we doing it? Some say it’s because the Democrats are trying to achieve a permanent political majority by replacing the citizens of the country. Others say it’s because we have a rescue fantasy and think we can save the entire world. You also hear we need the cheap labor, there are jobs Americans just aren’t willing to do. Maybe so, but those jobs won’t be filled by 7-year-olds. Besides, that’s an argument for a guest worker program like we had in the 1950s, not open borders.
Whatever the reason, it’s bad policy all around and the repercussions will be felt for decades to come.
3/4/21 - The Hydra-Headed Unconstitutional Monster of H.R. 1
Twenty Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to House and Senate leaders yesterday warning states will sue if Congress passes H.R. 1, the Democrats’ elections modifications bill. H.R. 1 would federalize state elections, violate the Constitution in numerous ways, and strip away existing safeguards leaving elections more vulnerable to fraud.
The Constitution gives exclusive responsibility to specify the manner of holding presidential elections to the states. Congress only has power to “determine the Time of chusing the Electors.” The framers set things up this way so presidents would not be dependent on Congress for their authority. Because states have exclusive power to prescribe the method of choosing electors, legislation would be unconstitutional if it forces states to permanently adopt presidential voting by mail.
The Constitution gives primary responsibility for specifying the manner of holding congressional elections to the states, giving lesser authority to the federal government. H.R. 1 is unconstitutional because it would make the federal government the primary regulator.
H.R. 1 is also unconstitutional, the signers say, because it tells the states what to do and forces them to devote resources and personnel to implementing federal mandates. States are not supposed to be commandeered in this way.
The mandates in H.R. 1 are objectionable, the letter goes on to say. Doing away with voter ID and allowing voters to self-certify they are eligible to vote strips away any assurance voters are who they say they are. Nationwide automatic voter registration and same-day registration open up too many avenues for fraud by noncitizens and others ineligible to vote. Preventing states from cleaning up their voter rolls - removing dead voters and the like - by requiring mountains of proof in every individual case before a single person can be removed, effectively means voter lists cannot be maintained at all. Putting congressional redistricting in the hands of independent commissions may sound good, but it would mean state lawmakers could not be held accountable for the inherently political decisions the so-called experts would make.
The letter closes with the problems caused by requiring any group expressing political opinions to disclose their donor lists. As others have noted, this would open up individuals and groups to harassment, doxing, and retribution. A lot of people would simply pull out of the political process altogether to avoid these problems, and we would have a lot less free speech and information about issues and candidates, as a result. Critics have also noted H.R. 1 would make the Federal Election Commission hyper-partisan and turn it into a weapon the party in power could use against its political opponents. There would also be new year-round rules limiting what almost every group of citizens - not just super PACs in election season - could say about politics and public issues through radio, TV, newspapers, and the Internet.
H.R. 1 is a hydra-headed monster, another power grab, another overreach by Washington. Let’s hope it dies in the Senate. If it does become law, let’s hope the 20 state attorneys general prevail in court for that is, surely, where they will go.
3/3/21 - Dick Durbin’s Dubious Declarations (Capitol Riot)
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress yesterday Antifa did not play a role in the January 6th Capitol riot. This was despite the arrest of a prominent Antifa leader and the fact that an FBI agent reported the arrival of a busload of Antifa insurgents. Gateway Pundit
Senator Dick Durbin opened the hearing with a reference to the Ku Klux Klan, but he neglected to mention that the Klan functioned as the armed wing of his own Democrat Party. This was the beginning of Durbin’s unsuccessful attempt to frame the entire Capitol riot in the white supremacist mold, the riot being just the ‘latest incarnation’ of a movement to terrorize Americans based on their race.
Huh? I thought the Democrat line was that the riot was Donald Trump’s attempt to destroy democracy. Oh, well. Never let a first narrative get in the way of a good second narrative. On with the show. White supremacy is a growing menace, don’t you know. Never mind the Islamic jihadist attacks at the Pensacola and Corpus Christi naval stations. Allahu Akbar! Durbin’s examples of white supremacist atrocities were all from years ago, but we’re supposed to believe this is a growing menace. Nice try, not even close.
Trump’s efforts to name the far Left as the real domestic terrorist threat were “baseless”, Durbin declared. “Let’s stop pretending that the threat of Antifa is equivalent to the white supremacist threat,” he said. This is despite one hundred straight nights of far-Left rioting in Portland, far-Left autonomous zones in several cities, and city blocks burned to the ground in Minneapolis and elsewhere in last summer’s far-Left rampages that continue to this very day. Durbin’s memory is purposefully selective. Can’t make your case if you let yourself be confused by the facts.
To cap it all off, Durbin declared we did not have a peaceful transition of power for the first time in history. Nice sleight of hand there, Dick, redefining ‘peaceful transition of power’. As in every other hand-over in our history, the military did not have to drag the current occupant of the White House out kicking and screaming.
Senator Grassley made some good points in response to Durbin’s declarations, referring to the 700 police officers blinded by lasers or otherwise injured in the recent far-Left rioting, and the 67 Secret Service officers injured protecting the White House during a three-day siege by far-Left rioters not so long ago. Grassley said we need to address all threats, regardless of ideology, and anything less would be intellectually dishonest.
The Left-leaning Washington establishment - DHS, the FBI, Senator Durbin, and others - may have closed ranks around the white supremacy narrative, but it doesn’t make the narrative true, or the all-consuming importance now attached to it justified. There’s no shortage of threats out there. While the establishment is deliberately distracting us with white supremacy, Antifa insurgents grow more powerful by the day and continue to evolve their capabilities and tactics. In terms of organized threats, nothing white supremacist yahoos can put together even comes close to Antifa’s well-funded and well-designed nationwide operational capabilities. That will become more and more apparent as time goes on, making the white supremacy narrative harder and harder for the establishment to sustain. Already, Christopher Wray has to go to Congress and do back-flips to keep lawmakers from focusing on the terrorist threat from the Left. Good luck with that, going forward.
3/2/21 - The Left’s Push for Euthanasia Is a Worldwide Scourge
The Left’s push for assisted suicide laws and euthanasia is a worldwide scourge that must be fought at every turn. Through lies and deceit, the Left has expanded the notion the government should help people kill themselves way beyond assisted suicide’s original rationale - ‘intractable pain’ which advances in pain medicine has all but wiped out.
Take Xavier Becerra, for example, Biden’s nominee for Secretary of HHS. He is a strong supporter of assisted suicide, because it supposedly provides relief to families. Not because it relieves the intractable pain of the patient, but because it makes life easier for family members.
He is not the only one to slip the bonds of the original rationale. Late last year, the Netherlands changed its rules to allow doctors to surreptitiously sedate dementia patients who signed a consent form at some point in the past, but might become agitated during euthanasia. This story illustrates a second shift in rationale: from something that patients want, to government-supported murder to get rid of undesirable populations. The push for euthanasia for dementia patients is ongoing in the U.S. Canada is currently debating bill C-7 which would allow getting rid of another undesirable population, the mentally ill who would start to be killed 24 months after the bill is passed. Tell me this: if the mentally ill cannot legally consent to a car loan, how can they consent to being euthanized? We’re a long way from consent and intractable pain.
Euthanasia is getting out of control in other ways, as well. Legal safeguards are being ignored in Belgium, where the number of euthanasia deaths is steadily increasing. Euthanasia has been expanded in the Netherlands to include children. Some doctors are salivating at the prospect of harvesting the organs of people who die from assisted suicide, and are therefore actively pushing it. A bill in Hawaii would expand assisted suicide to allow nurses to prescribe lethal drugs. The bill would also allow practitioners to phone in death approvals through telemedicine.
The rationales and methods of euthanasia keep expanding for no good reason. Opposition is spotty and not well-organized. Debate is ongoing in Spain, Australia, and many other countries. It is expected to be debated in more than 20 U.S. states this year. If you haven’t thought about the subject in awhile, you need to get caught up to date and realize the Left is busy expanding euthanasia left and right, hoodwinking you for its own nefarious purposes. What better way for the authoritarian Left to achieve its goal of ‘controlling the people’ than by telling them when they have to die. Government-directed death - that’s where all this is headed. Hopefully, you’ll begin to catch on to that fact and oppose euthanasia in your state.
3/1/21 - The Voter Suppression Narrative Has Run Its Course
NPR ran a story over the weekend about how Republicans are trying to pass laws in several states to make it harder to vote. The story is a masterpiece of left-wing propaganda, but is easily deconstructed.
The story cites how those mean Republicans want to reduce early voting, limit voting by mail, change the rules for drop boxes, and strengthen voter ID requirements for absentee ballots. Oh, the horror! The story goes on to impugn the motives of anyone who wants election integrity: they must be racist or afraid because the nation is becoming non-white.
There’s always something artificial in the arguments the Left makes. They hope you will overlook the obvious. In this case, it’s obvious that things like mail-in balloting, drop boxes, and early voting only came about because of the pandemic. Many of the reforms being sought merely seek to restore the status quo ante before these emergency election procedures were adopted, emergency procedures the Democrats are now trying to make permanent.
Here’s how the story should have been written: Republicans in many states are attempting to restore confidence in the elections. They seek to reverse emergency voting measures adopted in the pandemic that raised many questions about election integrity, such as chaotic mail-in balloting and unmonitored drop boxes.
There’s only one reason the Democrats want to strip away election safeguards permanently - they want to steal elections. They place the race card to silence anyone who dares to talk about election integrity - another favorite parlor trick of the Left. It’s funny how Democrats dismiss voter fraud, until it happens to them. There are plenty of examples of Democrat-on-Democrat voter fraud and the losing Democrat candidate screaming bloody murder about it.
The Left’s voter suppression narrative - out there doing its thing for the last 10 years - has just about run its course. It’s no longer acceptable not to require an ID to vote. It’s no longer acceptable not to match signatures on absentee ballots. It’s no longer acceptable not to have numbered ballots, so middle-of-the-night ballot dumps from out of state or China are no longer possible. It’s no longer acceptable to have voting machines that are deliberately designed to generate 68 percent error rates that elections officials can fill in any way they want, as happened in Antrim County, Michigan. It’s no longer acceptable to shut out Republicans from observing the election process. And it’s no longer acceptable to smear as racist half the country that wants the election safeguards stripped away in the pandemic to be restored.
These things are no longer acceptable. The Democrats are on notice. The Right is mobilizing to restore election integrity. There must be a hundred new election integrity projects that have sprung up around the country. We will not stop until safeguards have been restored and American citizens can have confidence in their elections once again. As for being afraid of the changing demographics of the country, the only color important here is gray, as in gray matter - how people think and whether the American Idea of freedom and individual rights will endure, and whether our Republic will endure regardless of who’s living here. Election integrity is a good message for everybody.
There’s lots more wrong with the Left’s phony inequality narrative, but I’ll leave that for another day.
One last thought: the Democrats are talking about new death taxes. Yet, they complain minorities are disadvantaged because they don’t benefit from intergenerational wealth accumulation like whites do. I can’t think of a quicker way to kill wealth accumulation for blacks, not to mention everybody else, than death taxes. The National Black Chamber of Commerce agrees with me. Didn’t we just give black farmers a whole bunch of money in the COVID relief bill? Democrats, you are hopelessly confused and completely mixed up.
3/30/21 - The Left’s Phony Voter Suppression Narrative is Wearing Thin
It’s nice to see people on the political Right finally taking on the Left’s phony voter suppression narrative. The narrative has been out there for at least ten years and it’s making less and less sense by the day.
Senator Pat Toomey pointed out it’s a false narrative to say black people are not capable of getting voter ID. They get ID to drive a car and get on airplanes. “We’re not going to be cowed by being called racist over policy that has nothing to do with race,” he said.
Radio host Mark Levin observed the people calling for a vaccine passport are the same people who oppose voter ID. (3/29/21 show)
Congressman Mo Brooks said it’s racist to suggest whites, Asians, and Hispanics have no problem getting IDs, but somehow blacks need to be protected in this regard. The attitude “that somehow or another African Americans are inferior and unable to do what other races are doing” is racist, he said.
Black civil rights attorney Leo Terrell agrees. “I’m offended by anyone who tries to play the race card to protect me because I’m black,” he said. Anyone who tries to compare Georgia’s new voter ID requirement for absentee balloting to Jim Crow laws is way off base, he said. Jim Crow does not exist and voter ID requirements do not segregate by race. “I find it offensive for anyone to say that black people have a problem getting an identification card, a driver’s license, voter ID. You look at every demographic, everyone supports voter ID because we want to make sure that the people are the right person. Election integrity is to make sure we don’t have fraudulent voting,” Terrell said. He also pointed out that the long voting lines the Democrats complain about are in Democrat districts and the new Georgia law addresses them.
Phill Kline, director of the Amistad election integrity project, said private financing of elections by Mark Zuckerberg and others amounts to the government trying to increase the turnout of particular demographics, which is every bit as objectionable as targeting blacks to suppress their votes would be.
If these arguments don’t convince you, maybe facts will.
A watchdog report found that private money mixed up in administering public elections drove up Democrat turnout and may have swung Arizona to Biden. This is one reason a lot of people want to prohibit state and local governments from taking private money to administer elections.
The heavily Democratic town of Missoula, Montana had all mail-in balloting in the 2020 election. An audit showed that 7 percent were counted illegally because they were missing the envelope, signature, or dates, or had some other irregularity. That’s what happens when you strip away election safeguards for supposedly good reasons.
A court in Michigan ruled last week that 177,000 voter registrations were outdated and ordered them removed from the voter rolls. Too bad this didn’t happen before the 2020 election like it was supposed to.
Another court in Michigan ruled the Secretary of State unlawfully directed city clerks to ignore signature matching requirements on absentee ballots in the 2020 election.
Trying to keep ineligible voters on the rolls, ignoring signature requirements, and counting defective mail-in ballots - these things are being done, not to help minorities, but to help the Democrats steal elections and grab power, plain and simple. To deny this is reality suppression.
3/29/21 - The Jack-Booted Thugs of the Democrat Party
It must be very exciting to get up every morning and believe you are ushering in Utopia, heaven on earth. What Democrats and other Leftists won’t tell you, though, is that their Utopia is fenced and gated, and topped with razor wire and guard towers.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at some of the stories in the news, lately, about the authoritarian Left.
A former federal prosecutor, a Democrat, has started a campaign to have companies sign a loyalty oath that Joe Biden won the election fair and square and not to donate to any politician who thinks otherwise. “What we’re trying to do is force companies’ hands so they can’t be agnostic,” the Democrat said. “Force” - an interesting choice of words, don’t you think?
A bill to expand assisted suicide in California would force doctors who refuse to provide such services to refer people elsewhere for lethal drugs against their conscience.
The Democrats’ so-called Equality Act legislation would trample religious freedom, force females to compete against biological males in school sports, and bring a flood of lawsuits against anyone who refuses to go along with the new gay and transgender orthodoxy.
A father in Canada was jailed and faces 5 years in prison for refusing to call his gender-dysphoric daughter a boy after a court ordered the father to use gender-affirming pronouns. Before you shrug this one off because it’s just Canada, you should know New York City has a gender pronoun rule on the books.
In another attack on free speech, House Democrats sent a letter to cable and streaming companies urging them not to air certain news networks the Democrats don’t like.
Illinois teachers are being forced into racial and social justice classes, on pain of losing their license to teach if they refuse. They are expected to carry the indoctrination into their classrooms.
North Carolina’s largest school district has started an anti-whiteness campaign calling for teachers to “override families” if parents object to their children being indoctrinated in anti-colonial and antiracist theory. “You can’t let parents deter you from the work,” it was said.
Teachers in Loudon County, Virginia went farther, compiling enemies lists of parents suspected of disagreeing with their teaching of critical race theory and calling for the parents to be “silenced” and publicly exposed.
If this is heaven on earth, count me out. It’s time to tell the truth about the jack-booted thugs of the Democrat Party. They and other Leftists control freaks are hell-bent on suing churches out of existence, separating children from their parents, and steamrolling anyone who gets in their way. They’ve already told us what they have planned for people who won’t walk into their Utopian cages willingly - enemies lists, reeducation camps, Maoist-style public humiliation sessions, and mass executions. This is what they have planned for you, if you cross them.
This is why, for me, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the authoritarianism of the Left - how much freedom are they trying to take away from people, supposedly for our own good. The whole situation is getting out of hand and it’s time for everyone who loves their freedom to challenge every single policy proposal from the Left and refuse to discuss its merits until a thorough airing is had on how the proposal will destroy liberty and make life unlivable. Democrats and the Left - nice smile, teeth of iron.
3/26/21 - Here’s What Happened While You Were Dreaming About Free Community College
National security experts have been warning for some time that our nuclear deterrent is deteriorating. The subject made news this week when Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee criticized Joe Biden for not taking action to modernize America’s aging nuclear stockpile at a time when China and Russia are aggressively building up theirs.
Part of the problem is that we import 90 percent of our uranium and no longer have the capability to enrich it. We are drawing down our stockpiles which are expected to run out in 2040.
An aging nuclear deterrent is not the only national security challenge the U.S. faces at this time.
The Pentagon’s decisions to put climate change and social justice at the center of its decision making shows a bureaucracy confused about its mission. This leftward ideological tilt poses risks to America’s war-fighting capabilities.
China has the largest navy in the world and has passed the U.S. in missile development and the number of air defense systems.
China is still dominant in rare earth minerals needed for nuclear subs, F-35s, and other military applications. Former President Trump’s plan to stockpile rare earths has not been implemented.
War game simulations show the Air Force needs 75 more squadrons to win a conventional war with China or Russia.
Russia tested a weapon in space, firing a projectile that could be used to kill satellites in orbit. People laughed when Donald Trump started the U.S. Space Force, but the threat is real.
North Korea is now believed to have 60 nuclear weapons and the third-largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world.
Islamic State is resurgent and recruiting a new generation of jihadi fighters, which spells trouble long-term. Despite losing territory, it remains capable of small terrorist attacks and making mischief by allying with others, as in Afghanistan.
Iran’s first successful launch of a military satellite a year ago brought it a few steps closer to developing ICBM capability.
These are just a few of the national security challenges we face. So you see, there’s more to think about than free community college and racial centralism. Time to get serious, folks.
3/25/21 - Predictable Calls for Gun Control
The Democrats predictably called for more gun control after the Atlanta and Boulder shootings, like they always do. But their proposals, by and large, would not prevent future mass shootings.
Let’s look at the Boulder case. Gun control starting ramping up in Colorado after Columbine, but it’s as useless there as it’s proven to be in Chicago where wholesale slaughter still occurs on a weekly basis. Colorado already has universal background checks, large-capacity magazine bans, and a ‘red flag’ law. But none of these restrictions stopped the Boulder attack. The ‘red flag’ law had no effect in this case, despite the fact the family knew he had the rifle and his older brother said the suspect was mentally ill. “Colorado has every gun law known to this country … but that didn’t prevent this incident,” a former FBI official told Fox News. More gun control measures already under consideration in Colorado before the shooting would tighten gun-storage rules and require reporting of lost or stolen firearms. Based on what we know so far, neither of these proposals would have had any bearing on the shooting.
The shooter had an AR-15 style rifle and a semiautomatic pistol. He bought them on March 16th despite a juvenile guilty plea to assault in 2017. Juvenile records are typically sealed, and for good reasons. Boulder had an assault weapons ban until March 12th when it was temporarily blocked by a judge in a gun rights case. Some say keeping the ban in place would have stopped the shooting, but the suspect didn’t live in Boulder; he drove in from another town. Moreover, Boulder apparently wasn’t enforcing its assault weapons ban, anyway.
Gun control is an invitation to endless whack-a-mole. Whenever a law doesn’t work as advertised, there are calls for more laws. If the laws aren’t enforced, well then maybe we need to force officials to enforce the unenforced laws more. If shootings continue after all that , then we need a federal universal background check, even though a study showed the vast majority of the guns used in almost 20 mass shootings were purchased with a federal background check. The shooters in Orlando and Las Vegas passed their background checks. All these laws can be evaded by straw purchases, where individuals ask other people to buy guns for them. Even if you were to write an entire Napoleonic Code to cover every conceivable situation, you would still have knife attacks with multiple victims as occurred on the London Bridge in 2019. It’s a fool’s errand; the problem needs to be solved some other way.
It’s being argued that a federal assault weapons ban would put a stop to all mass shootings like the one in Boulder. Maybe, but ask yourself some questions: How authoritarian do you want to get? How does taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens reduce crime? Why take away rights from all Americans when only a tiny handful poses any problem?
H.R. 127, introduced in Congress in January, would, among other things, mandate a federal gun license, start up a national gun registry, require a mental health exam for ALL gun owners, and require every gun owner to purchase liability insurance. This flips the Constitution on its head. Instead of being born with a right to bear arms, everyone would have to petition the government to grant them the privilege of gun ownership. There are good reasons not to turn our rights into privileges the government can take away at any time. Think about free speech, for example. What if you had to get a federal license before you could post on social media, and the government official handling your request didn’t like your politics? Natural unalienable rights or government privileges - to me, the choice is clear.
The people in government predictably calling for more gun control at the moment are authoritarians to their fingertips. They want ALL my rights, so I’m not willing to give them ANY of my rights. They won’t stop with a federal assault weapons ban or a gun registry, just ask them. They won’t be satisfied until nobody has a gun. I’m sorry, but they are precisely the kind of people - unapologetic power-hungry authoritarians - that the Second Amendment is meant to protect us from.
3/24/21 - Mao’s Plan for World Domination is Alive and Kicking
While many in the United States are preoccupied with the seeming importance of Wokitude, so-called climate change, and other fairy tales of the Left, here’s what they’re thinking in communist China:
A top Chinese Communist Party strategist gave a speech in 2016, building on Mao Zedong’s plans for world domination announced in the 1950s. China’s goal, the strategist said is to surpass the United Kingdom, catch up with the U.S., and “become the No. 1 boss.” “The task of our next generation is to put the U.S. under our jurisdiction ... too,” the strategist said.
He laid out a number of devious means by which China intends to reach its goal. “First, create conditions for [the U.S.] to make mistakes... Second, we keep [the U.S.] busy so that it will suffer from depression and want to quit the job itself.” In other words, keep the U.S. fatigued and demoralized, so it will no longer want to be a superpower. “Third, we should get ourselves mixed together with the U.S., so that it cannot fight us. We should create such a situation where you have me inside you, and I have you inside me.” China and the U.S. are now each other’s largest trading partners, so the strategy seems to have worked. Having our pharmaceuticals and medical devices made in China looks like part of the plan, too.
China’s deviousness doesn’t stop there. China waited until the U.S. got militarily involved in Syria and distracted by the Ukraine to build islands in the South China Sea. “We only built the islands then. When the U.S. found that we had built such large islands ..., we immediately said to it, Oh, my dear boss, we will stop it,’ ... we are not building it anymore. The United States was very happy for a few months. They thought, after all, [the U.S. is] still the boss.”
The speech also laid out how China would get its hooks into U.S. politicians and go “deeper” into the U.S. Chinese capital would flow into U.S. investment projects. “We in the Chinese government hope that in the end, every U.S. Congressman's district will have Chinese investment, and China will be able to control one thousand or several thousand votes, and then we can influence (the congressman’s) attitude.” You can add to this the entanglements of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in Chinese companies and largesse.
If all of the above is not enough to corrupt the ruling class and bring America down, the strategist has another way to do it: “Of course we can also have other evil tricks, such as throwing the world into further chaos.... If there are three external enemies outside the United States, I reckon it will start to feel dizzy. If it has four enemies, it will completely get lost. So China's strategic task is to ensure that there are four enemies [for the U.S.], terrorists are certainly one.” This will keep the U.S. confused and inert, and enable China to dominate the world with all its wonderful values like forced sterilization of minorities and reeducation camps for anyone who thinks the wrong way or resists the Dragon.
This is how China plans to turn America into a wholly owned subsidiary of China and take control of the world without fighting a war with the U.S.
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of making statements about how they intend to target the U.S. and achieve world domination, starting with Mao in 1956. In 2005, a Chinese official said they had developed a plan to depopulate the United States and replace all current residents with Han Chinese. So you see, there are other things to think about aside from how to pay proper respect to each of the 57 genders. Time to get serious, people.
3/22/21 - Hate Crimes Against Asians: A Little Perspective, Please
All of a sudden, stories about hate crimes against Asians are everywhere. I get suspicious whenever I see an orchestrated campaign like this.
My suspicions are informed by Bernard Goldberg’s books. He is a former CBS newsman who wrote entire books about special interest groups concocting phony statistics and the press slurping them up to advance a narrative. They did it with the homeless and heterosexual AIDS, misportraying both problems as far bigger than they actually were. Now the same thing is apparently happening with hate crimes against Asians.
A politician in Georgia is citing statistics the Stop AAPI Hate advocacy group put out to the effect that 3,795 hate incidents against Asians were recorded in the last year, a 30-fold increase. Stop and ask yourself: a 30-fold increase in one year, does that sound plausible to you? Not to me, so let’s take a closer look at these so-called statistics this special interest group provided.
The special interest group inflated its statistics by including incidents that were not actual attacks, like discrimination, harassment, and child bullying. Another problem is that this is all self-reported and accepted at face value without any vetting. Here we go again, and the press just eats it up without any questions because it fits the narrative that America is a horrible rotten place and getting worse ever since Donald Trump talked about the China virus.
According to official FBI statistics for 2019, the most recent year available, almost half of all hate crime incidents based on race or ethnicity were against blacks. Hate crimes against whites were next most frequent, followed by those against Hispanics. Trailing far behind in fourth place were hate crimes against Asians. The numbers work out to about one hate crime against Asians every other day, so it’s not surprising the media can keep finding fresh stories of hate crimes against Asians to write about on a daily basis. And it may be that hate crimes against Asians really are increasing in recent months, but the point remains the same. There are far more hate crimes against blacks, whites, and Hispanics. Why isn’t anyone up in arms about that?
Meanwhile, here’s the good news about race that doesn’t get widely reported because it doesn’t fit the narrative:
- “Seven of the wealthiest eight ethnic groups in the U.S. today are populations of color”
- “Indian Americans have almost double the median white household income” (Asians, got it?)
- Black immigrant groups like Nigerians, Ghanaians, and Guyanese are well above the white median income.
Only in America.
Remember these things when you see Joe Biden and Kamala Harris rushing down to Atlanta to capitalize on the shootings and moan about how horrible hate crimes against Asians are. They must not have heard FBI Director Christopher Wray say there does not appear to be anything racially motivated about those crimes. NPR Kamala the Kameleon is back to being Asian for a few days instead of black. Their trip to Atlanta was a higher priority than the crisis their administration caused at the border, where Joe says he might visit ‘at some point’. Thanks, Joe, you’re a big help.
All this is, is opportunism and political theater, fed by a phony narrative backed by phony statistics.
Am I in favor of hate crimes and murder? No, and don’t try to twist my words. All I’m saying is let’s not lose our perspective. And let’s not get sucked in by orchestrated special interest campaigns or political theater as performed by people who have been winning Academy Awards for it for years.
3/19/21 - Single Payer Has Not Gone Away
Joe Biden is busy expanding Obamacare, but single payer has not gone away. The Left has been salivating for socialized medicine for a hundred years, and they’re not about to quit now. Far from it.
House Democrats just reintroduced their Medicare for All bill, with 109 co-sponsors. Physicians for a National Health Program, a group with communist roots, endorses the legislation. If you think communism is cute, we’ll start that conversation with the 100 million corpses communism has piled up in the last hundred years and go from there, OK?
Xavier Becerra, a long-time supporter of single payer, was just confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary.
The Rhode Island Senate adopted a resolution calling on Congress to create a single payer healthcare system.
A Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin announced support for Medicare for All and declined to say whether he wants to eliminate all private insurance.
An Illinois House committee voted up a single payer plan for the state.
A single payer bill has been proposed again in the California Assembly. A 2017 bill failed when people realized it would cost twice the state’s budget.
Activists in Washington state are lobbying their city council to support single payer legislation for the state.
As you can see, there’s still a lot of activity on single payer. In Florida, the activity is going the other way. A proposal to require a two-third’s supermajority of both houses and a ballot referendum before adopting single payer is advancing in the state legislature.
What’s wrong with single payer, you ask? Let’s do something the Left never does and talk about the problems their proposals would cause. Here are just some of the problems from recent stories. Single payer involves price controls, meaning the government will set prices for all healthcare services. History shows price controls lead to shortages in healthcare and unacceptably long wait times, among other problems. New York’s single payer bill would triple state taxes, and cause residents to flee to lower-tax jurisdictions. It’s often said that single payer will eliminate inequality in healthcare. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The rich will always find a way to get the healthcare they want and everybody else will get substandard treatment.
Here’s how single payer works in the real world. VA doctors harvested liver tissue from veterans without their consent, putting them at serious risk, a watchdog agency said. The Veterans Administration runs a single payer health system for the nation’s military veterans. Active duty troops are also finding out single payer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. $900 million in malpractice claims against military hospitals have racked up since Congress allowed them a year ago, and lawmakers are angry the Pentagon is taking so long to pay.
That’s just a taste of the problems I’ve seen in years of reading about single payer. It’s time to drop the pom-poms, stop the cheerleading, and get real. The next time you run into a single payer fanatic, ask them to explain how they will deal with the problems their proposal will create. Watch them ignore the question, give you some flim-flam, or attack you for asking it. The one thing they won’t do, I’m sure, is give you satisfactory answers - because they can’t.
3/18/21 - ‘Biden Didn’t Cause the Border Crisis’ - Nice Try, Not Even Close
Democrats are doing cartwheels to try to convince you Joe Biden’s immigration policies didn’t cause the crisis at the border.
Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, asserted through questioning in a hearing yesterday that border crises are cyclical, regardless of who is in the White House. (Watch here at 3:23:54.)
Trump had a border crisis in 2019 and Obama had the border surge of 2014. However, Trump’s crisis was artificially manufactured by left-wing agitators forming and financing migrant caravans from Central America. Obama’s border surge was caused by policies similar to Biden’s that welcomed unaccompanied alien children and bent over backwards to shelter them and accommodate their every need with $75 a day food and soccer balls.
Torres also asserted Trump cut funding to address the root causes of migration in Central America. The reasoning is disputed, but even if true, that doesn’t explain why Biden decided to open the border first before addressing root causes. It also doesn’t explain why there wasn’t a crisis at the border in Trump’s final year in office. The difference obviously is Trump’s policies were working and the current crisis arose when Biden threw those policies in the trash can.
Torres also asserted Trump cut the Central American Minors Program which allowed children to apply for asylum from their home countries, and now they have to crash the border to do it. This assertion presumes that people from other countries just have a right to live in the United States if they darn well please, a presumption that is manifestly untrue. It also presumes that children from Central America have no choice but to try to gain entry into the United States. That’s absurd, given the fact that most people in Central America are staying put. There are 50 million people in Central America. Only a tiny fraction is trying to crash the border.
Torres also asserted a governmental memo in the Trump administration made families too fearful to claim their children being detained in federal custody, so the seeds of the present border crisis were planted at that time. No, we have NEW children crashing the border, so that explanation doesn’t hold any water at all.
So Representative Torres was wrong about everything. Texas Governor Greg Abbott was right when he said the Biden administration opened the immigration floodgates enticing alien children into the country, but was completely “unprepared” for the aftermath. Dallas Morning News At least the Obama administration lined up new shelter space before opening up the floodgates to the 2014 child border surge. The Biden people were tripping over their own ideology and couldn’t wait. So now we have kids in containers and behind barbed wire again. Biden doesn’t want you to see that, so now immigration officials are being told not to talk to the press and no pictures are allowed.
Representative Torres is a day late and a dollar short. The Biden White House has already admitted its policies caused the crisis. Not only that, the Biden administration is doubling down. It plans to loosen immigration restrictions further. DHS announced new plans to expand immigration by speeding up asylum claims, flying migrants into the country, and making several other policy changes. Breitbart Joe Biden is telling migrants not to set out just yet, because the U.S. is still in the process of getting set up to receive them, but receive them we will. And White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said yesterday any child who manages to set foot on U.S. soil will not be sent back.
All of which leads me back to my question which nobody has answered yet: how is all of this untrammeled illegal immigration, which nobody ever voted for, good for the country? I’m still waiting for an answer. That’s the issue as I see it. Maybe Representative Torres can enlighten us.
3/17/21 - Obamacare: New Lipstick, Same Pig
The failures of Obamacare are legendary. Millions of people lost their doctors and their plans, despite President Obama’s repeated promises to the contrary. The price of health insurance more than doubled. People with preexisting conditions, whom Obamacare was supposed to protect, found themselves without the best care, paying stiff drug costs, or being denied coverage altogether.
Despite all this, Joe Biden and the latest COVID relief package doubled down on Obamacare. The Democrats decided to bribe away the remaining opposition with bigger subsidies. Now, Obamacare subsidies are available to people making 400 percent of the federal poverty level, about $100,000 for a family of four. This means that people with six-figure incomes qualify for help from Uncle Sam. I’m sorry, but there’s something wrong when people making that kind of money can’t function without the assistance of the federal government.
This is part of a destructive pattern deployed time and again by the Democrats and the Left. First, they screw up the system and make something enormously expensive. Then they turn around and say, ‘oh, but we’ll HELP you,’ like they were the good guys. They did it with college tuition - making it soar out of sight, then federalizing student loans and doling out more tuition assistance. And they did it with healthcare - Obamacare’s guaranteed issue and community rating regulations made insurance much more expensive, but the Democrats handed out subsidies to dull the pain they themselves caused. Now, the subsidies are even bigger, targeting the self-employed and small business owners who were hit with higher premiums from Obamacare but did not qualify for subsidies before the latest COVID relief package. These people typically disfavored Obamacare, but now they are being bought off.
Try as the Democrats might, the bigger subsidies will not make the problems with Obamacare go away. The subsidies will only make Obamacare more expensive and place upward pressure on insurance premiums. The price tag is expected to be $34 billion dollars over two years, which works out to $34,000 of federal assistance for every new policyholder. This is nuts. We don’t have this kind of money to throw around. This is only possible in a country that thinks it can go on deficit spending forever and the bill will never come due.
Meanwhile, the Democrats won’t talk about the bad stuff in Obamacare - the narrow networks or the fact that the program has never come close to signing up 21 million people as promised. More bad stuff came to light, recently. The government authorized hundreds of millions of dollars in Obamacare subsidies to keep people insured even though they should have been dropped for not paying their premiums. A father and son from California were sentenced to prison recently in a $27 million scheme to defraud the Obamacare program in 12 states.
And here’s my favorite one from recent news: Health insurers are inflating the claims they report paying in order to escape hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates Obamacare requires they pay consumers. Rube Goldberg strikes again! If Obamacare weren’t so cockamamie, this wouldn’t be happening.
If you want to reduce premiums and deductibles or give policyholders access to more doctors and hospitals, you don’t do it by increasing subsidies. You do it by repealing Obamacare’s expensive regulations and getting the government out of healthcare. Obamacare was the wrong direction for the country when it was passed, and it’s still the wrong direction no matter how much the Democrats make us pay to paper over the problems.
3/16/21 - Crisis at the Border: ‘Joe Told Us to Come’
The news from the southern border keeps getting worse. It is a full-blown policy disaster and humanitarian crisis.
First, we have the spectacle of White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s fancy dancing about the situation not being a disaster, just a ‘challenge’, despite the numbers being, in her words, “enormous”. She was specifically asked if sending the disaster agency FEMA to the border means the situation is now a ‘disaster’. Psaki pirouetted away, performing a graceful arabesque and never answering the question.
Next, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy led a Republican delegation to assess the crisis at the border which, McCarthy correctly said, was caused by Joe Biden stopping construction on the wall, halting deportations, and promising citizenship to illegal aliens. OAN The Democrat-controlled House is aiding and abetting the Biden administration crisis-making border policies. The House is expected to vote this week on bills to give a pathway to citizenship to DREAMERS and farm workers here in the country illegally. Reuters Before you get all misty-eyed about the DREAMERS, remember that some in that group are 35 years old and others lost their eligibility because of criminal activity. As for the farm workers, there’s a great case to be made for a noncitizen guest worker program like the one we had in the 1940s through ‘60s, but not a case for open borders.
The current influx of unaccompanied alien children is so bad, not only has the disaster and emergency agency FEMA been called in, but they’re having to open up the Dallas convention center to house 3,000 of them.
The crisis is not confined to the young. Six illegal aliens are dead after a high-speed chase and head-on collision near the border in Texas. Earlier this month, a crash of an SUV killed 13 suspected illegal aliens near the border in California. Human smuggling was suspected. Yahoo Daily Mail
Biden’s moves to open up the immigration floodgates have put the cartels back in control of the border, a Congressman observed. Not only that, but people on the terrorist watch list have been caught coming across the border in recent days. Aliens from Islamic countries like Iran and Yemen have been apprehended. In case you haven’t heard, standard Islamic doctrine teaches the world domination of sharia law and jihad as the means to achieve it. We need more people in the country who think like that? I don’t think so.
What the Biden administration has done at the border is not only a policy disaster and a humanitarian crisis, it is a national security threat. With terrorists coming across the border again, I hope we don’t find that out the hard way.
3/15/21 - White House Admits It Caused the Border Crisis
A White House official admitted a Biden policy change created the unaccompanied alien child crisis at the southern border. Almost three times as many unaccompanied minors were detained at the border last month as a year ago. There have been reports of children going without showers or sunlight for days and not being allowed to communicate with their families. FEMA has been deployed to keep up with the influx. UPI The Blaze CNN
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also admitted Biden policy changes caused the crisis. She said she recognizes it was a policy decision that caused children to flow across the border in such numbers.
Of course it was a policy decision. Compare these admissions from the White House to the fabrications of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Pelosi blamed Donald Trump and climate change for the surge. She and Schumer claimed Biden inherited a broken immigration system. Pelosi also said people are leaving Central American because of a drought she attributed to climate change. She’s delusional. If these explanations hold water, why wasn’t there a surge two months ago, or two years ago, when Donald Trump was in office? Why did the surge only begin AFTER Biden took over? Because Trump’s policies to minimize illegal immigration were working, that’s why. Biden opened up the border, said ‘come on up and, oh by the way, we’ll let your parents in later, you can all be reunited.’ Of course, parents sent their children to stampede the border.
One last point, the Biden administration says it wants to help Central American countries stop the drivers of migration. OK, but why didn’t Biden do that first instead of opening up the border first? The answer is that this administration is completely driven and blinded by radical left-wing ideology regardless of the real-world consequences. If families are separated and kids are in cages, that’s perfectly fine because we Democrats are on our way to building a one-party state and, if little children get hurt in the process, it doesn’t matter. If you’re going to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs, right? Until someone can show me otherwise, I’m going to assume this is why the Democrats have opened the border and don’t care who gets hurt.
3/12/21 - More Whiffs of Corruption in the Biden Administration
Today, we return to the theme of corruption, a theme that has the power to bring down governments.
William Burns, Joe Biden’s pick for CIA director, quarterbacked Hillary Clinton’s suspect Uranium One deal when Burns worked under Clinton at the State Department. The deal resulted in the sale of one-fifth of the U.S. uranium supply to Russia. The Russian bank financing the deal paid $500,000 to Bill Clinton, raising the appearance that Hillary Clinton sold her public office for personal gain without regard to the national interest. Burns downplayed the national security threat from Russia during his confirmation hearings.
Deb Haaland, Joe Biden’s nominee for the Interior Department, gave conflicting financial statements to House ethics officials. The latest statement eliminated $40,000 in income in 2018, the year she first won her congressional seat. She now claims she only earned $4,000 that year. She dropped income previously reported from a tribal casino and added a previously undeclared retirement account. Sources on Capitol Hill are wondering how she could possibly live on $4,000 a year and how all this squares with her tax returns.
Xavier Becerra, who appears headed for confirmation as HHS secretary, falsely claimed in his confirmation hearings he never sued any nuns. Maybe not directly, but as California Attorney General he sued the Trump administration twice to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees. The Little Sisters of the Poor prevailed at the Supreme Court, but Joe Biden promised on the campaign trail to force the issue again. Becerra’s just the right guy for the job, given his experience suing nuns.
The ability to tell lies convincingly might just be a prerequisite for a job in the Biden administration. Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan falsely accused Michael Flynn in 2017 of conspiring with Russia. In addition, government emails show Sullivan and Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes bragging about how the two were “lying footsoldiers” for the Obama administration.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris continues to have her own problems telling the truth. She falsely claimed, "There was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations.... And so in many ways, we're starting from scratch on something that's been raging for almost an entire year." That was a whopper and even the left-wing Washington Post had to admit it. Military planes lined up on runways to distribute the vaccine around the country the minute it was available, as part of the Trump administration’s vaccination plans.
Put it all together and it won’t bring down a government - yet. But in the interest of good government, we should not be complacent about corruption in the Biden administration or let it pass without comment.
3/11/21 - Take Your State Religion and Shove It!
There are at least three reasons not to buy the whole ‘Woke’ trip. The first is authoritarianism.
I’ve said many times the rise of the authoritarian Left is the central challenge of our times. A recent article describes how the ‘Woke’ movement is taking over the schools. Public and private schools in many places are segregating students by race, telling white students they are second-in-line to speak, and adopting ‘anti-racism’ plans to teach anti-colonialism and Marxist-derived Critical Race Theory. They also teach students capitalism is evil, America is a horrible racist place, and whites bear collective racial guilt. U.S. history class is mostly about marginalized groups - thank you Howard Zinn - and classic literature is no longer taught.
The indoctrination is so entrenched at this point, parents are afraid of speaking out against it publicly. They worry about losing their jobs, or their kids being blacklisted from all private schools or even physically assaulted. Any parent who speaks against the new orthodoxy in group chats is quickly and publicly shamed. The kids are afraid to speak up in class and even afraid to say what kind of music they like. So they lie to hide their true attitudes and get good grades.
Suffocating intolerance is the hallmark of authoritarianism. A lot of the early reports out of the #WalkAway movement were from people who left the Democrat Party because their friends kept ramming orthodoxy down their throats and would not let them speak their minds or express any disagreement.
‘Woke’ ideology comes from the same authoritarian Left that claims the power to force you to buy particular products and specify what those products must contain - Obamacare. This is the same authoritarian Left that is busy turning physician-assisted suicide into government-directed death to get rid of undesirable populations, like the mentally ill. And the same authoritarian Left that is telling us we must all live in caves to save the planet from climate change when articles appear literally every day in scientific journals disputing the science.
And so to the Woke movement and the authoritarian Left I say, take your state religion and shove it!
The second reason not to take the ‘Woke’ movement at face value is the hidden agenda - wealth and power for the leaders. Black Lives Matter has figured out a way to shake down corporate America for hundreds of millions of dollars. BLM chapters are complaining that the self-admitted trained Marxists at the top are keeping the millions for themselves and not spreading the wealth around. So the issue is never the issue; it’s all about wealth and power for the leaders. They rope people in with new orthodoxies and guilt trips. These are the same techniques cults use to recruit new members to Jonestown or wherever. The followers become useful idiots, but if they were told the real deal up front, they would never join, and that’s why the true agenda has to remain hidden. Viewed in this light, the whole ‘Woke’ movement is racketeering on a grand scale. Systemic race training pays very well. Beats working for a living.
The third reason to question the ‘Woke’ movement is because it’s completely unhinged. Segregated classrooms and dorms - wow. Didn’t this country go through an entire civil rights movement to get rid of these things? I can’t walk down certain blocks in Minneapolis today because I’m white, and barred from the new lawless autonomous zone there. This is not a healthy development. ‘Woke’ math is no longer about ‘2+2=4’ but identifying economic movements that have led to liberation, instilling collectivist thinking, and all kinds of other social justice nonsense that does not at all prepare students for life.
The ‘Woke’ movement will take you very far down the rabbit hole. It says you’re a racist unless you’re a 24/7 in-your-face anti-racist haranguing people constantly about race. That’s crazy.
But I have one last story that tops everything. An “ethnic studies” curriculum is being proposed in California calling for the “decolonization” of American society and a “counter-genocide” against white Christians. If the plan is approved, millions of California school kids will be chanting to the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Reconquista, baby.
Too ‘woke’ for me. Once again I say, take your state religion and shove it!
3/10/21 - Iowa Restores Important Election Safeguards
Lots of legislative proposals to promote election integrity have popped up in lots of states - 200 bills in 43 states, by one count - but it appears Iowa is first out of the gate with a new law signed on Monday.
The new law shortens early voting from 29 to 20 days. It requires most ballots to be received by Election Day, not noon the next Monday.
The new law also places restrictions on absentee voting. Election officials cannot send out absentee request forms unsolicited, and absentee ballots must now be returned by the voter, a family member, or a caregiver - not ballot harvesters hired by the Democrat Party or its minions.
The new law also removes voters from the voter rolls if they miss an election or don’t report a change in address.
The Democrats’ canned response to common sense election safeguards is ‘voter suppression’ - provisions like these make it harder for people to vote. To which my answer is, well, duh! Of course we want to make it harder for people who are not qualified to vote in our elections. There are good reasons for each and every one of the safeguards commonly used to secure elections. Requiring an ID makes it harder for people to buy beer, but we don’t want 12-year-olds buying beer. Requiring a Real ID makes it harder for people to get on an airplane, but we don’t want to raise the risk of terrorism by allowing people who are not who they say they are to fly. Requiring voter ID makes it harder to vote, but we don’t want dead people or noncitizens voting.
There’s only one reason the Democrats want to strip away all the safeguards - they want to steal elections and impose one-party rule forever. There’s only one reason Democrats want to make mail-in voting permanent everywhere - they want to cheat and are trying to exploit the pandemic to get their way. The Democrats want their ballot harvesters to be able to return absentee ballots, not because it will help minority voters, but because it will help the Democrats steal elections.
Loosey-goosey mail-in voting is no longer acceptable. Allowing Democrat ballot harvesters to traffic in absentee ballots is no longer acceptable. Leaving dead voters on the rolls is no longer acceptable. Each and every one of these things is a vector for election fraud.
If working to restore common sense safeguards to elections is voter suppression, I’ll eat my hat. Election integrity is a good message for everybody. Iowa just plugged some of the holes in its voting system, but there are lot’s more, there and everywhere. But if we’re going to restore confidence in our elections, this is the direction we need to be headed. Thank you, Iowa, for showing the way.
3/9/21 - Work for State Antifa Laws
Joe Biden was completely wrong when he said Antifa is ‘just an idea’. It wasn’t just an idea that rioted a hundred straight nights and attacked federal buildings in Portland last summer. Antifa is half-anarchist and half Marxist. Some say Antifa is not organized, but it is highly organized. Antifa groups are tightly networked into a cell structure, and well-funded, to boot. They can project power nationally and their tactics are highly evolved and continually changing. All these are hallmarks of a sophisticated effort that should be taken seriously when it says its goal is to bring down the U.S. government. Despite what you hear from the corrupt Washington establishment and the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, it is Antifa - not white supremacy - that poses a major threat to our constitutional order.
Some states know all this and are fighting back with new legislation to counter Antifa. Viewed broadly, the legislation raises criminal penalties, addresses Antifa’s funding, and holds elected officials accountable for allowing far-left radicals to run amok in their cities with impunity, as in Seattle and Portland.
ln Florida, among other things, the legislation increases the penalties for violent assemblies, holds organizers and funders of such assemblies liable for racketeering, and allows local governments to be sued for money damages if they fail to protect persons or property during violent assemblies. Rioters will no longer be eligible for state benefits or employment.
A bill in Utah contains similar provisions, and goes on to stipulate rioters who are arrested can be denied bail. Rioters are also prohibited from throwing “saliva, blood, urine, or fecal material.”
A bill in Kentucky also shares some of the features of the Florida legislation, buts adds strong prohibitions against ‘camping’ which would prevent rioters from taking over territory and setting up lawless autonomous zones on state property.
A resolution in Montana calls for “groups and organizations across the United States who act under the banner of Antifa to be designated as domestic terrorist organizations.”
I hope the bold actions of these states will encourage you to work for laws to counter Antifa in your state. A pro-Constitution group got the ball rolling in Utah, so ordinary people can change things for the better. I have more information and access to a counterinsurgency expert to help you get started. Contact me at tips@liberato.us.
3/8/21 - United States Losing Its Economic Freedom and Why That’s a Problem
There is a clear correlation between the amount of economic freedom a country has and its overall level of prosperity. Not only does more economic freedom mean a higher standard of living, it also means better health, education, environmental quality, upward mobility, and social progress. Thus, it is with great sadness I must report to you that the United States received its lowest score and lowest ranking ever in the Heritage Foundation’s latest Index of Economic Freedom.
The United States now ranks 20th among all countries in the world, still “mostly free” but declining because the government is accounting for a larger portion of the economy, government debt is becoming unsustainable, and government regulation is increasing in health care and the financial sector. What this means is the U.S. will have less prosperity and social progress in the future than it otherwise could have had, if the previous level of economic freedom had been maintained.
Singapore sits on top the rankings, the economically freest country in the world with a high standard of living. It is no accident that the socialist basket cases of Cuba, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe are at the bottom of the rankings, with the most government intervention in their economies and the worst economic results. Socialists always claim they can produce more prosperity by imposing more government strictures, but it’s never true. Cuba and Venezuela have made noises recently about liberalizing their economies to some degree, showing, once again, that turning in the direction of market forces - not socialism - is what produces prosperity.
Hong Kong was taken off the list entirely this year, because it is no longer independent enough of China to deserve a listing of its own. You don’t have to be a genius to predict less economic freedom there will mean the people will be less well-off in the future. Not to mention all the pain that goes with being locked up in a communist police state.
There is hope for the United States, though. New Zealand was once in the throes of heavy government regulation and statist policies. It reversed course in the 1980s, moving in the direction of market forces and economic freedom. It is now the second-most economically free country in the world. Until the pandemic, its economy had steadily been expanding for 10 years. The Left likes to make fun of people who say ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ but they really have no constructive alternative to offer. Seizing the means of production doesn’t get you anywhere economically, just the opposite. All it does is enrich and empower a tiny elite. Just ask the five million refugees who have fled Venezuela since 2016 for countries with more economic freedom, they’ll tell you.
3/5/21 - Crisis at the Border
There’s no denying it any longer: there’s a full-blown crisis at the southern border. The number of unaccompanied illegal alien children crossing the border every day is up 600 percent since early January, and the shelter system will reach full capacity this month. Axios In addition, thousands of asylum seekers have started entering the U.S. who had been waiting in Mexico under Trump administration policies. BBC
That’s just today’s news. In February, the number of unaccompanied alien children hit a record high. The government expects that record to be shattered in May, when 13,000 more children will enter the U.S. unaccompanied in that month alone. The Trump administration got criticized for putting ‘kids in cages’, but we now know the practice started in the Obama administration. And we also know the Biden administration is doing much the same thing by putting kids in gated compounds and shipping containers.
The gusher at the border doesn’t stop with kids. The Biden administration is taking steps to reunite families separated at the southern border. This includes allowing parents who are not currently in the U.S. to enter the country to settle with their children who are here illegally. Politico Politico You can then expect those numbers to ultimately quadruple through chain immigration, where an average of four extended family members show up for every immigrant resettled here.
In addition, the Biden administration has loosened immigration policies in other ways. It reversed the Trump administration’s move to discourage people more likely to need welfare from coming here. Biden is also taking refugee admissions to the highest numbers in 30 years.
Put it all together and you’ve got a situation where border agents are being overwhelmed and describe how illegal aliens run right past them.
None of this is a mystery. It’s a direct result of the Biden administration reversing Trump policies and going back to the policies of the Obama administration that produced waves of unaccompanied alien children crossing the border. This was especially true in the border surge of 2014, when it was reported that government shelter workers were engaging in child sex abuse with the minors entrusted to them.
The kids themselves were not all little angels. Government records show them fighting, lying, stealing, and using drugs. This time, young gang members who got deported in the Trump years for shaking down businesses are coming back to get their revenge.
So tell me why all this is a good idea. What’s the benefit to the country? I haven’t heard anybody make that case yet. All I see so far is Biden’s policies hurting people. Kids are back in cages, a mayor in Texas said his border town can’t handle the influx, and the rule of law is being shredded before our very eyes.
So why are we doing it? Some say it’s because the Democrats are trying to achieve a permanent political majority by replacing the citizens of the country. Others say it’s because we have a rescue fantasy and think we can save the entire world. You also hear we need the cheap labor, there are jobs Americans just aren’t willing to do. Maybe so, but those jobs won’t be filled by 7-year-olds. Besides, that’s an argument for a guest worker program like we had in the 1950s, not open borders.
Whatever the reason, it’s bad policy all around and the repercussions will be felt for decades to come.
3/4/21 - The Hydra-Headed Unconstitutional Monster of H.R. 1
Twenty Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to House and Senate leaders yesterday warning states will sue if Congress passes H.R. 1, the Democrats’ elections modifications bill. H.R. 1 would federalize state elections, violate the Constitution in numerous ways, and strip away existing safeguards leaving elections more vulnerable to fraud.
The Constitution gives exclusive responsibility to specify the manner of holding presidential elections to the states. Congress only has power to “determine the Time of chusing the Electors.” The framers set things up this way so presidents would not be dependent on Congress for their authority. Because states have exclusive power to prescribe the method of choosing electors, legislation would be unconstitutional if it forces states to permanently adopt presidential voting by mail.
The Constitution gives primary responsibility for specifying the manner of holding congressional elections to the states, giving lesser authority to the federal government. H.R. 1 is unconstitutional because it would make the federal government the primary regulator.
H.R. 1 is also unconstitutional, the signers say, because it tells the states what to do and forces them to devote resources and personnel to implementing federal mandates. States are not supposed to be commandeered in this way.
The mandates in H.R. 1 are objectionable, the letter goes on to say. Doing away with voter ID and allowing voters to self-certify they are eligible to vote strips away any assurance voters are who they say they are. Nationwide automatic voter registration and same-day registration open up too many avenues for fraud by noncitizens and others ineligible to vote. Preventing states from cleaning up their voter rolls - removing dead voters and the like - by requiring mountains of proof in every individual case before a single person can be removed, effectively means voter lists cannot be maintained at all. Putting congressional redistricting in the hands of independent commissions may sound good, but it would mean state lawmakers could not be held accountable for the inherently political decisions the so-called experts would make.
The letter closes with the problems caused by requiring any group expressing political opinions to disclose their donor lists. As others have noted, this would open up individuals and groups to harassment, doxing, and retribution. A lot of people would simply pull out of the political process altogether to avoid these problems, and we would have a lot less free speech and information about issues and candidates, as a result. Critics have also noted H.R. 1 would make the Federal Election Commission hyper-partisan and turn it into a weapon the party in power could use against its political opponents. There would also be new year-round rules limiting what almost every group of citizens - not just super PACs in election season - could say about politics and public issues through radio, TV, newspapers, and the Internet.
H.R. 1 is a hydra-headed monster, another power grab, another overreach by Washington. Let’s hope it dies in the Senate. If it does become law, let’s hope the 20 state attorneys general prevail in court for that is, surely, where they will go.
3/3/21 - Dick Durbin’s Dubious Declarations (Capitol Riot)
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress yesterday Antifa did not play a role in the January 6th Capitol riot. This was despite the arrest of a prominent Antifa leader and the fact that an FBI agent reported the arrival of a busload of Antifa insurgents. Gateway Pundit
Senator Dick Durbin opened the hearing with a reference to the Ku Klux Klan, but he neglected to mention that the Klan functioned as the armed wing of his own Democrat Party. This was the beginning of Durbin’s unsuccessful attempt to frame the entire Capitol riot in the white supremacist mold, the riot being just the ‘latest incarnation’ of a movement to terrorize Americans based on their race.
Huh? I thought the Democrat line was that the riot was Donald Trump’s attempt to destroy democracy. Oh, well. Never let a first narrative get in the way of a good second narrative. On with the show. White supremacy is a growing menace, don’t you know. Never mind the Islamic jihadist attacks at the Pensacola and Corpus Christi naval stations. Allahu Akbar! Durbin’s examples of white supremacist atrocities were all from years ago, but we’re supposed to believe this is a growing menace. Nice try, not even close.
Trump’s efforts to name the far Left as the real domestic terrorist threat were “baseless”, Durbin declared. “Let’s stop pretending that the threat of Antifa is equivalent to the white supremacist threat,” he said. This is despite one hundred straight nights of far-Left rioting in Portland, far-Left autonomous zones in several cities, and city blocks burned to the ground in Minneapolis and elsewhere in last summer’s far-Left rampages that continue to this very day. Durbin’s memory is purposefully selective. Can’t make your case if you let yourself be confused by the facts.
To cap it all off, Durbin declared we did not have a peaceful transition of power for the first time in history. Nice sleight of hand there, Dick, redefining ‘peaceful transition of power’. As in every other hand-over in our history, the military did not have to drag the current occupant of the White House out kicking and screaming.
Senator Grassley made some good points in response to Durbin’s declarations, referring to the 700 police officers blinded by lasers or otherwise injured in the recent far-Left rioting, and the 67 Secret Service officers injured protecting the White House during a three-day siege by far-Left rioters not so long ago. Grassley said we need to address all threats, regardless of ideology, and anything less would be intellectually dishonest.
The Left-leaning Washington establishment - DHS, the FBI, Senator Durbin, and others - may have closed ranks around the white supremacy narrative, but it doesn’t make the narrative true, or the all-consuming importance now attached to it justified. There’s no shortage of threats out there. While the establishment is deliberately distracting us with white supremacy, Antifa insurgents grow more powerful by the day and continue to evolve their capabilities and tactics. In terms of organized threats, nothing white supremacist yahoos can put together even comes close to Antifa’s well-funded and well-designed nationwide operational capabilities. That will become more and more apparent as time goes on, making the white supremacy narrative harder and harder for the establishment to sustain. Already, Christopher Wray has to go to Congress and do back-flips to keep lawmakers from focusing on the terrorist threat from the Left. Good luck with that, going forward.
3/2/21 - The Left’s Push for Euthanasia Is a Worldwide Scourge
The Left’s push for assisted suicide laws and euthanasia is a worldwide scourge that must be fought at every turn. Through lies and deceit, the Left has expanded the notion the government should help people kill themselves way beyond assisted suicide’s original rationale - ‘intractable pain’ which advances in pain medicine has all but wiped out.
Take Xavier Becerra, for example, Biden’s nominee for Secretary of HHS. He is a strong supporter of assisted suicide, because it supposedly provides relief to families. Not because it relieves the intractable pain of the patient, but because it makes life easier for family members.
He is not the only one to slip the bonds of the original rationale. Late last year, the Netherlands changed its rules to allow doctors to surreptitiously sedate dementia patients who signed a consent form at some point in the past, but might become agitated during euthanasia. This story illustrates a second shift in rationale: from something that patients want, to government-supported murder to get rid of undesirable populations. The push for euthanasia for dementia patients is ongoing in the U.S. Canada is currently debating bill C-7 which would allow getting rid of another undesirable population, the mentally ill who would start to be killed 24 months after the bill is passed. Tell me this: if the mentally ill cannot legally consent to a car loan, how can they consent to being euthanized? We’re a long way from consent and intractable pain.
Euthanasia is getting out of control in other ways, as well. Legal safeguards are being ignored in Belgium, where the number of euthanasia deaths is steadily increasing. Euthanasia has been expanded in the Netherlands to include children. Some doctors are salivating at the prospect of harvesting the organs of people who die from assisted suicide, and are therefore actively pushing it. A bill in Hawaii would expand assisted suicide to allow nurses to prescribe lethal drugs. The bill would also allow practitioners to phone in death approvals through telemedicine.
The rationales and methods of euthanasia keep expanding for no good reason. Opposition is spotty and not well-organized. Debate is ongoing in Spain, Australia, and many other countries. It is expected to be debated in more than 20 U.S. states this year. If you haven’t thought about the subject in awhile, you need to get caught up to date and realize the Left is busy expanding euthanasia left and right, hoodwinking you for its own nefarious purposes. What better way for the authoritarian Left to achieve its goal of ‘controlling the people’ than by telling them when they have to die. Government-directed death - that’s where all this is headed. Hopefully, you’ll begin to catch on to that fact and oppose euthanasia in your state.
3/1/21 - The Voter Suppression Narrative Has Run Its Course
NPR ran a story over the weekend about how Republicans are trying to pass laws in several states to make it harder to vote. The story is a masterpiece of left-wing propaganda, but is easily deconstructed.
The story cites how those mean Republicans want to reduce early voting, limit voting by mail, change the rules for drop boxes, and strengthen voter ID requirements for absentee ballots. Oh, the horror! The story goes on to impugn the motives of anyone who wants election integrity: they must be racist or afraid because the nation is becoming non-white.
There’s always something artificial in the arguments the Left makes. They hope you will overlook the obvious. In this case, it’s obvious that things like mail-in balloting, drop boxes, and early voting only came about because of the pandemic. Many of the reforms being sought merely seek to restore the status quo ante before these emergency election procedures were adopted, emergency procedures the Democrats are now trying to make permanent.
Here’s how the story should have been written: Republicans in many states are attempting to restore confidence in the elections. They seek to reverse emergency voting measures adopted in the pandemic that raised many questions about election integrity, such as chaotic mail-in balloting and unmonitored drop boxes.
There’s only one reason the Democrats want to strip away election safeguards permanently - they want to steal elections. They place the race card to silence anyone who dares to talk about election integrity - another favorite parlor trick of the Left. It’s funny how Democrats dismiss voter fraud, until it happens to them. There are plenty of examples of Democrat-on-Democrat voter fraud and the losing Democrat candidate screaming bloody murder about it.
The Left’s voter suppression narrative - out there doing its thing for the last 10 years - has just about run its course. It’s no longer acceptable not to require an ID to vote. It’s no longer acceptable not to match signatures on absentee ballots. It’s no longer acceptable not to have numbered ballots, so middle-of-the-night ballot dumps from out of state or China are no longer possible. It’s no longer acceptable to have voting machines that are deliberately designed to generate 68 percent error rates that elections officials can fill in any way they want, as happened in Antrim County, Michigan. It’s no longer acceptable to shut out Republicans from observing the election process. And it’s no longer acceptable to smear as racist half the country that wants the election safeguards stripped away in the pandemic to be restored.
These things are no longer acceptable. The Democrats are on notice. The Right is mobilizing to restore election integrity. There must be a hundred new election integrity projects that have sprung up around the country. We will not stop until safeguards have been restored and American citizens can have confidence in their elections once again. As for being afraid of the changing demographics of the country, the only color important here is gray, as in gray matter - how people think and whether the American Idea of freedom and individual rights will endure, and whether our Republic will endure regardless of who’s living here. Election integrity is a good message for everybody.