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The Daily Skirmish
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"If you're still alive after this post I am shocked.
Democrats will not put up with your rational thinking. You will be erased..." |
3/23/23 - The Rise and Fall of ERIC
Recent news shows it’s possible to undo the Democrats’ weaponization of our elections apparatus.
Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia joined Louisiana and Alabama in leaving ERIC, the voter registration data clearinghouse conservatives say is really a get-out-the-vote drive for Democrats. ERIC is the Electronic Registration Information Center, initially funded with George Soros money [more documentation here] and, until recently, overseen by a high-profile Democrat election lawyer. ERIC is supposed to help member states scrub their voter rolls of deceased and moved-away voters, but one of the complaints is that ERIC does a bad job, leaving the rolls bloated and elections vulnerable to fraud as a result.
Ohio and Iowa are the latest states to leave ERIC. Alaska and Texas may follow. States are leaving for many reasons. One of the reasons Louisiana gave was the overall Democrat tilt to the entire operation. Alabama was worried about a private group having access to voter data, among other things. Ohio had asked for changes and left when none were forthcoming. At this point, ERIC only serves the interests of the Democrats, Ohio’s Secretary of State said in a letter.
These are not the only problems with ERIC. It recently came to light ERIC has been sharing data with a left-wing nonprofit - the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) - run by the very same high-profile Democrat election lawyer mentioned earlier (David Becker) who founded and only recently departed ERIC. The data pinpointed likely Democrat voters who had not yet registered to vote so they could be targeted for partisan registration drives.
As if illicit data sharing were not enough, ERIC also restricts states from acting against noncitizens registered to vote and tells states to keep their list maintenance data secret even though federal law requires it be made public. Other critics point out states are legally obligated to maintain their voter rolls and nothing in law allows them to outsource that function to outside private third parties, to begin with. In addition, according to an election integrity activist in my network, ERIC also requires member states to move to "online only" voter registration to eliminate signed voter registration documents. This completely frustrates signature verification requirements between registration documents and mail-in ballots in those states that require such verification. Still other critics reinforce the perception, stated at the outset, that ERIC is far more effective at identifying potential voters for the Democrats than keeping the voter rolls up to date.
States are scrambling for alternatives. Texas is developing an interstate crosscheck system to eliminate duplicate registrations. There used to be such a system, but the left-wing ACLU sued it out of existence, clearing the field for ERIC. Activists in Maryland point to one piece of the puzzle, a free service from the Post Office that standardizes addresses and tells you whether mail is deliverable there. Then there is the Omega4America operation that hopes to be in 15 or 20 states in 2024. It checks voter rolls against publicly available information to sniff out problem addresses in the records like hotels, RV parks, and prisons where felons are not supposed to vote. It can also ferret out fraud by elections officials if, for example, they change inactive voters to active status in the records wholesale, mail them ballots that get intercepted, then change the records back to inactive status.
ERIC is just one way the Democrats have weaponized elections. I’ll show you more when I return to the subject of election integrity next week.
3/22/23 - Cry Me an Atmospheric River
Republican attorneys general from 16 states sent a letter warning the Biden administration against continuing climate change policies they say contributed to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The letter described how the Bank invested heavily in climate-related projects because federal regulators pushed banks in this direction as part of the Biden administration’s ‘whole of government’ approach to fighting climate change. This converted regulators into environmental activists, and led them to chase the chimera of climate-related risk while ignoring true financial risks as traditionally understood.
Where were the regulators? Lost in green fantasies and daydreams. Thus, rescuing the Bank’s depositors was a sacrifice offered on the altar of climate change, “an attempt to provide financial support to an important constituency.” The constituents bailed out were people who had bought into and actively promoted by their words and deeds the government’s phony narrative on climate change. The focus on expensive green energy sources raised inflation and increased financial risk throughout the system, the letter said.
Once again, we find money at the heart of the climate change narrative. This is why I have trouble taking what green energy and climate advocates say seriously. I know they’re being paid to say it, one way or another. So, cry me an atmospheric river about climate change, I don’t believe a word of it.
The money flows from several directions, starting with Uncle Sugar, the federal government. We can begin with the Inflation Reduction Act which, in actuality, implements the Left’s radical green agenda and pours billions of taxpayer dollars into green initiatives. The Act’s $370 billion comes on top of another $100 billion the federal government has spent on climate initiatives over the last 20 years. The EPA has announced a billion dollars in climate grants already this year.
Where’s it all going? Green energy companies, for starters. An infrastructure bill in 2021 provided $9 billion in incentives for electric school buses and other no-emission vehicles. Electric bus company Proterra and others stood to benefit. There is a revolving door of government officials who leave their posts to cash in by going to work for the same green energy companies they once oversaw.
Billionaires are also in on the action. Michael Bloomberg had a hand in crafting climate risk disclosure rules for business, rules that will grow his $10 billion Bloomberg Terminal business. Investors use Bloomberg Terminals to get global investment data and information about investment risks. Just a little conflict of interest, wouldn’t you say?
But the poster child for green moguls is Al Gore. He amassed a $330 million fortune scaring everybody half to death with his crazy and dead-wrong predictions about climate change. Then he laughed all the way to the bank making green investments through his $36 billion investment firm, Generation Investment Management.
He’s not alone. Bill Gates and other left-wing billionaires provided seed money for two electric battery companies and benefit from rising stock prices. These billionaires are big donors to the Democrat Party and reap windfall profits when Democrats push through green policies. They even have a group called Clean Energy for Biden which raised millions for his campaign, then lobbied for passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. See how this works? Buy the policies, make the money. Once again, I find myself saying ‘follow the money’ - it’s all financial self-interest and has absolutely nothing to do with the environment. Net-zero.
Schemes like this have been called ‘legal plunder’ and ‘the greatest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history’. Bill Gates wrote a book telling you to eat fake meat and oh, by the way, he has a stake in a company that sells fake meat. Elon Musk makes twice as much money from selling carbon credits than he does from electric vehicles.
If you still believe all of this is about the environment, all I can say is ‘there’s a sucker born every minute.’
Green energy companies and billionaires are not the only ones cashing in on climate mania. I’ll tell you who else is benefitting when I return to this subject next week.
3/21/23 - Rediscovering the Equal Protection Clause, The Hard Way
Sorry, Social Justice Warriors, there’s still an Equal Protection Clause, plus lots of federal anti-discrimination laws. They trump all your Woke nonsense demanding special rights for privileged groups, and rightly so. Ignore equal protection of the law at your peril - you will get sued, and you will lose.
Comcast settled a discrimination lawsuit over its small business grant program limited to companies 51 percent owned by someone who is “Black, indigenous, a person of color, or female.”
Pfizer altered a fellowship program after it got sued for “blatant racial discrimination” against white and Asian American applicants.
Boston got sued after imposing a fee on restaurants in an Italian neighborhood seeking to offer outdoor dining, but no fee anywhere else. The lawsuit referred to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s comment that she is used to dealing with problems that are “expensive, disruptive, and white.”
Federal authorities are investigating a Massachusetts high school for civil rights violations after holding a ‘no whites need apply’ audition for a school play entitled ‘Our Stories as People of Color’. The play was intended as a safe space and support vehicle for minority students. Sorry, no dice, not allowed, not when the government of all the people is involved.
Another federal civil rights investigation is underway at USC’s medical school over its visiting clerkships offered exclusively to minorities. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race.
You can expect more of these legal challenges ahead. There is a move on the political Right to get rid of all racial preferences, including debt relief for black farmers, financial stipends for minority entrepreneurs, federal subsidies for minority and women-owned restaurants, and school admissions affirmative action policies designed to reduce the number of white and Asian students. One effort, called the Equal Protection Project, is scrutinizing exclusionary events for non-white educators in Rhode Island. The Project objects to the Woke notion that the remedy for past discrimination is more discrimination.
That’s a clear thought that sticks like a hatchet in the brain. I hope the legal warriors wielding it look at some other cases that cry out for equal protection litigation. White students are barred from applying for a research fellowship and other exclusionary scholarships at the University of North Carolina. A white student at the University of South Florida was denied access to group therapy mental health services because he is white.
Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia has a discriminatory college prep program offering counseling and other special assistance to students who are not Asian or white. An elementary school in Olympia started a student club that won’t allow white kids to join. A public school in Charlottesville hosted a black-only catered dinner event for parents. San Francisco is giving $1,200 a month in guaranteed income to transgender residents. “Black young adults” and “Black and Pacific Islander mothers” are guaranteed lesser amounts. How is that constitutional?
It’s not. The drafters of the 14th Amendment and Martin Luther King had a dream, and it wasn’t special rights for privileged groups. It was racial integration and equality under the law. The thinking in civil rights circles no longer finds that adequate. Too bad. Until you succeed in getting the 14th Amendment off the books, you’re stuck with racial equality under the law and the simple justice it affords to every individual fortunate enough to live under its jurisdiction.
3/20/23 - The Truth Is Out There, But You Can’t Have It
More details are emerging about the federal government’s wide-ranging censorship enterprise. The 19th release of Twitter files shows the federal government conspired with outside actors to censor information about COVID, the vaccines, and natural immunity. The files document an effort by the Stanford Virality Project, federal agencies, and a number of organizations often with taxpayer funding to monitor and suppress billions of social media posts with COVID-related content. At least six social media platforms participated, sending millions of posts to the enterprise every day for review. “Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging,” an observer said.
The enterprise attempted to control what was to be considered true and not true for all - which the government is not supposed to do. Even worse, it concocted and pushed narratives - phony stories - disregarding the truth and the facts which were cast aside. They didn’t follow the science; they followed their inner lights about what citizens should be allowed to hear. They suppressed “true stories that could fuel hesitancy” like “celebrity deaths after vaccine” or the closing of a school because COVID vaccination did not prevent illness. These true stories were considered “misinformation” that shouldn’t be allowed out there. It is truly stunning to read about these censors openly discussing how the truth is “misinformation”. The federal government didn’t want you to have the truth, so it shelled out a billion dollars to media outlets and social media companies to try to make sure you didn’t get it and to give grief to anyone trying to bring you the truth. The truth about natural immunity, lab leaks, and failures of vaccines to stop illness was suppressed. The enterprisers also suppressed information about COVID really not being very lethal (relatively speaking) and criticism of vaccine mandates and passports. Instead, they pushed the phony narrative about the vaccines being ‘safe and effective’ on us any way they could. In this alternate universe, true stories of vaccine side effects were deemed “actionable’ by a federal government determined to suppress the truth.
This Stanford-led effort was only a part of the federal government’s wide-ranging censorship enterprise. I’ve described other parts in previous commentaries, like the Global Engagement Center, a State Department-led censorship exercise involving the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, DHS, and other agencies. Now comes news that “NewsGuard”, an Internet so-called fact-checking service, was getting Defense Department dough to harass conservative news outlets, sending inquiries demanding the outlets justify their reporting. NewsGuard is the Left in action, having been founded by Steve Brill, a longtime Democrat operative and campaign donor. NewsGuard issued unfavorable ratings that damaged the outlets’ ability to get ad revenue. See how the game is played?
There’s more. Other new stories describe the 18th release of Twitter files giving more details about how Twitter and other social media platforms regularly met with the FBI and DHS. They also set up a system to receive thousands of reports from government agencies about accounts and posts the agencies deemed objectionable. Numerous accounts were deleted upon receipt of these reports. Some were not accused of misinformation; they just ran afoul of government narratives about the war in Ukraine and other matters. Again, taxpayer-funded outside groups played a large part in the scheme. They saw themselves as the anointed ones, a self-appointed Truth Squad that would save humanity from itself. The groups recommended the tech companies be forced to turn over all their data, that speech the groups deemed offensive be placed in a “holding area”, and the government root out disinformation even if it costs us our freedom. Gee whiz!
One more little story to show you just how bad things have gotten. Two FBI agents showed up at a person’s job in New York to interrogate the person about the person’s Tweets criticizing Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that sells one of the COVID vaccines. Apparently, the FBI doesn’t have anything better to do these days than terrorize ordinary citizens about not conforming to phony government narratives.
This is fascism - the unholy merger of Big Government and Big Business in a previously unimaginable concentration of power to deny you your rights. Where is Antifa when we need them? We sure could use some fascism-busters right about now.
3/17/23 - Silicon Valley Bank: The Woke Democrat Cesspool Is Deep And Wide
We’re learning new details about just how big a Woke Democrat cesspool Silicon Valley Bank really was.
The Bank’s political action committee donated primarily to Democrats for 20 years. One hundred percent of the PAC’s donations went to Democrats in 2020, as well as in 2021-2022. Last year, the PAC donated to Senators Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner, as well as other Democrat lawmakers. Chuck Schumer and Maxine Waters said they would return the donations to the PAC or give them to charity.
California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom and his wife were closely tied to the Bank. In 2021, the Bank gave the Newsom’s nonprofit - California Partners Project - $100,000 at the request, suggestion, or solicitation of Gavin Newsom. The president of SVB’s investment banking arm was a founding board member of the Newsom nonprofit, so the ties go way back. That president is still on the nonprofit’s board. The $100,000 gift was to support the nonprofit’s campaign for California’s gender quota law for corporate boards, a Woke cause if ever there was one. The Bank tweeted in support of the nonprofit’s effort and proclaimed the Bank and the nonprofit were aligned on getting more women in the boardroom. The law was later struck down as discriminatory, completely unconstitutional. No word on whether the Newsoms will return the gift.
The Bank supported another Woke cause, the trained Marxists of Black Lives Matter. This wasn’t just a pittance - the Bank gave over $70 million dollars to promote the burning of American cities in the summer of 2020, the destruction of the nuclear family as openly declared on BLM’s website, and the promotion of world communism through the global network of offices BLM opened with the generous financial support of Silicon Valley Bank and corporate America. Black Lives Matter called the report about the $70 million “white supremacy” and distanced itself from the Bank saying it’s just run by “white people”. Oh, and it also said ending the “gruesome exploitation” of black people will stop further bank failures. Sure, and I’m the tooth fairy.
The Bank also pledged $5 billion dollars to fund green energy companies. The Bank’s depositors were bailed out. Critics called this a “gift to wealthy Democrat donors in the tech sector.” The critics said there is no way depositors would have been made whole if they had been MAGA Republicans. The critics also note the Democrat depositors could have purchased additional deposit insurance beyond the FDIC’s $250,000 limit on their own, but chose not to. Evidently, being in tight with ruling Democrats WAS the insurance plan. It’s also been noted Chinese firms are among the depositors being bailed out, something Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has confirmed. One Chinese company had $175 million in uninsured cash deposits at the Bank, which was just fine with the Democrats who ran the place, which will now be underwritten by higher fees imposed on all American banks for the federal deposit insurance program going forward.
SVB’s board was populated with dyed-in-the-wool Democrats - Hillary, Biden, Obama donors and only one had investment banking experience. All you needed for the job was to be a good Democrat and to check the right diversity boxes. What could possibly go wrong? One board member went to a Shinto shrine to pray after Trump was elected, to get over her grief and shock after Hillary’s defeat. The Bank crowed it had women, one black, one LGBTQ, and two veterans on the board - check, check, check, and double check.
The Bank’s alignment with Democrats was grand strategy. "Everyone knew it was the go-to bank for woke CEOs," one source told the New York Post. "They knew they were aligned politically. The companies SVB loaned money to all had a woke agenda," the source said. I can’t wait for one of them to say the strategy is still a perfectly good idea, it just wasn’t implemented correctly at SVB. ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, so we’ll do it better the next time.’ Isn’t that what they always say about socialism which has failed everywhere it’s been tried?
But that’s the Democrats, for you - corrupt to the core and congenitally unable to align with reality. Tell me again why they deserve to govern?
3/16/23 - How the Democrats Bake Systemic Fraud Into Our Elections
Last week, I told you about individual wrongdoers - mostly Democrats - who were arrested and sent to jail for voter fraud. But criminal wrongdoing in our elections is also perpetrated - again, mostly by Democrats - by election officials, Democrat and left-wing advocacy groups, and other systemic players engaged in wholesale fraud.
Starting with election officials, a Republican county elections commissioner in New York was charged with 12 felony counts of using other people’s identifications to request, complete, and submit absentee ballots. A Democrat township clerk in Michigan who was also a candidate was convicted of felony ballot tampering for opening a sealed ballot canister, invalidating the votes inside. The Democrat New Mexico Secretary of State is accused of unlawfully receiving county election totals before counties certify results and using an uncertified software program to add up the totals. Elections officials in Oakland, California are accused of ignoring a court order, unsealing ballot boxes without public observation, and making it impossible for citizen observers to monitor and understand the vote tallying process.
Lawless election officials are not the only source of systemic wrongdoing in our elections. Left-wing and Democrat advocacy groups are major sources, as well. The Virginia Democratic Party ballot harvesting manual instructs party activists to include dead people and bad addresses when compiling voter contact lists. This information goes into a party database which is used to target likely Democrat voters. The Democrat Party did not respond when asked about this.
Left-leaning nonprofits like the Center for Voter Information and the Voter Participation Center are abusing their 501(c)(3) tax status by registering likely Democrat voters. Targeting particular demographic groups likely to vote Democrat skirts IRS rules preventing tax-exempt organizations from engaging in partisan activity.
In Wisconsin, a leftist group paid voters $250 if they succeeded in persuading their friends to vote for the Leftist candidate in the state Supreme Court race. Under state law, it is felony bribery to give anything of value to any person for inducing others to vote or not vote for or against particular candidates.
The Federal Election Commission received but has ignored information about campaign ‘money mules’ operating in Missouri, Georgia, and elsewhere. Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia was the top beneficiary identified in the scheme. To give you some idea of how the scheme works, ‘Steven in Missouri’ was somehow able to make over 14,000 campaign donations totaling $180,000 in two years despite being unemployed. Something’s not right with this picture.
Yet more systemic election fraud is found in a Florida county where felons vote illegally, dead voters are sent mail-in ballots, voter addresses are changed without request, and individuals are putting multiple ballots into drop boxes despite being limited under state law to two. This information came from a whistleblower inside an elections office who was upset these problems were not being addressed. The office is run by a Democrat and would not respond to questions.
Here is one more way systemic fraud can occur: County officials can change the zip code of tens of thousands of voters all at once. Mail ballots go out, but the ones with the wrong zip code are undeliverable. Someone scoops them up, then the elections office changes the zip codes back. Voters go to the polls, only to be told they already voted, their ballot has already been cast by somebody else. A new data company uncovered this kind of fraud in Wisconsin and Florida, including one county where more than 31,000 zip codes were changed this way. The company bought daily voter rolls and tracked zip code changes, discovering how the game is played.
We are supposed to have representative government in this country. But we cannot be assured of true representation unless systemic fraud, perpetrated mostly by Democrats, is rooted out from the elections process.
3/15/23 - Being a Democrat Means Eventually Having to Say You’re Sorry
Last week, a former advisor to Democrats Al Gore and Bill Clinton made an extraordinary confession and apologized to conservatives and Republicans for being so wrong about so many things.
Naomi Wolf issued a “formal letter of apology” for believing the Democrats’ “lies” about the January 6th attack on the Capitol:
She also apologized for lots of other things she wrongly believed:
Nonsense. In the Right’s terms, Naomi Wolf got red-pilled, hit with undeniable doses of reality. It really only takes five minutes with someone to rip apart the Left’s phony narratives and deprogram people out of the Democrat cult. This is why the Democrats are afraid of people like me and do their darndest to shut us up. Twitter and Facebook censored me. It didn’t work. The traffic on my website where this commentary appears is quadruple what it was when I was banned. I’m on several TV stations in the West and lots of websites repost my work. I’m doing just fine without Facebook and Twitter, and I’m just getting started.
Naomi Wolf is not the only liberal to apologize to conservatives, recently. Others apostatizing from the Democrat faith include a former Reuters editor who admitted he was misled on climate change. “The idea climate change threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people worldwide is an assertion, not a fact,” he wrote. Moreover, there is no scientific consensus CO2 is to blame for the planet’s warming in the last 10,000 years. Scientists he asked backed away from making any such claim.
Then there’s the abortion doctor and the abortion clinic business developer who both confessed recently they knew abortion was the taking of innocent human life. The abortionist confessed to murdering countless children, but pro-life outreach changed the abortionist’s mind. For his part, the developer is now pro-life and fighting to end abortion.
For a Democrat mom in Pennsylvania, it was the Democrats’ appalling COVID lockdowns leading to learning loss in school that led her away from the Democrat Party. A New York City councilman switched to the Republican Party because the Democrats are too soft on crime and making everyone unsafe. For another former liberal, it wasn’t any one thing. It was a 30-year process of watching the Left’s pronouncements not match up with reality, helped along by the insufferable “arrogance and snobbery” of Leftist elites. The #WalkAway movement of former Democrats from a few years ago, is still going strong. Their testimonies contain all kinds of reasons to leave the Democrat fold.
But my favorite apostasy story is the young woman who told me some years ago that, for her, it was the blue dress - Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. Like I said, it only takes minutes to sweep the fairy dust off people and get them to realize the Democrats have a lot to be sorry about and apologize for.
3/13/23 - Silicon Valley Bank: Another Woke Democrat Cesspool
Dennis Prager likes to say the Left destroys everything it touches. Now it’s destroying banking.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the nation’s 16th largest, went belly up and was taken over by regulators. The story starts with Joe Biden’s inflationary spending, which led to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to fight inflation. SVB had way more money in deposits than it could lend, so it bought fixed-rate securities, betting heavily interest rates wouldn’t rise. These securities were more than half the bank’s assets and the bank blew up when the value of these holdings went down after interest rates went up.
But that’s only part of the story. The bank lent heavily to Chinese tech start-ups, China figuring heavily in scandalous Biden family business dealings. Employees at the bank were big Democrat donors. Almost all their political contributions went to Democrat politicians, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Raphael Warnock. A PAC affiliated with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also benefitted.
These Democrat donors sold off their stock in Silicon Valley Bank before the trouble was made public. They also paid themselves annual bonuses just hours before the roof caved in.
SVB bankers were all in for pet left-wing causes, such as environmental, social, and governance investing (ESG). In 2022, the bank trumpeted it “Commits to $5 Billion in Sustainable Finance and Carbon Neutral Operations to Support a Healthier Planet.” The bank’s CEO said, “Our ability to make a meaningful difference for people and the planet, and to address the systemic risk that climate change presents, is magnified by the outsized impact our innovative clients make.” Studies show ESG investing underperforms standard investing which is why sensible states are pulling their retirement money out of firms that traffic in ESG.
Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, blamed banks getting into ESG investing on the Biden administration. “I think that the system [and] the administration has pushed many of these banks into [being] more concerned about global warming than they do about shareholder return,” he said.
You might recall, it was the Democrat Clinton administration’s pushing banks into making unsound housing loans to minorities they couldn’t afford that produced the ‘mother of all financial crises’ in 2008. Another triumph of social factors over sound investing, of important values being sacrificed on the altar of diversity.
Bernie Marcus also said, “these banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is shareholder returns.” That was certainly true at SVB. There was no chief risk officer at SVB from last April until January. The bank’s European risk officer prioritized diversity initiatives over risk compliance. Jay Ersapah self-describes as a 'queer person of color from a working-class background.’ That’s a lot of diversity boxes checked by one person, no wonder they hired her. Too bad Woke Identity has nothing to do with qualifications and competency. This person spent her time cooking up diversity initiatives for the bank. She organized LGBTQ programs like Lesbian Visibility Day, Trans Awareness Week, a month-long gay pride celebration, and safe spaces for staff. She was featured in a corporate video that burnished the bank’s LGBTQ credentials.
Go Woke, Go Broke, as the saying goes. The only thing missing from this picture is Sam Bankman-Fried, the Democrat toady and corruptocrat who destroyed cryptocurrency because he was preoccupied with being a top donor to the Democrat Party and left-wing causes. A pattern is starting to emerge, the joining of Democrat Left-wing ideology with financial corruption producing disastrous results. We have two dots to connect now - SVB and SBF. There are more out there, I guarantee it. We just don’t know about them yet. And these people want power over us - no way!
3/10/23 - Democrats’ January 6th Shenanigans Symptomatic of Deeper Rot
We’re finding out the Democrats’ phony January 6th narrative isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. According to the Democrats, there was an insurrection at the Capitol that day, but they had to doctor video - adding screams and crowd mayhem sounds - to make their case. Moreover, just released video the Democrats kept hidden clearly shows police escorting peaceful protesters around the Capitol building. Some insurrection. What a crock. The Democrats’ insurrection case is as phony as a three-dollar bill and now the House Republicans have launched an investigation into what the Democrats’ January 6th Committee left out of its report and why.
The Democrats’ January 6th shenanigans are symptomatic of a deeper rot inside the Democrat Party and leadership. They want power and they mean to seize it by any means necessary.
They say one thing and do another. Failed Ohio Democrat U.S. senate candidate Tim Ryan claimed he opposed abortions up to birth but, in effect, voted for them as a state legislator.
They rewrite history. Biden claimed inflation was rampant when he took office, but it was just above 1 percent at the time. They claim the U.S. prospered in the ‘50s and ‘60s with tax rates as high as 91 percent, but the effective rate for top earners after deductions and credits was only 16 percent.
They lie. Biden said he produced the biggest increase in Social Security checks in history, but the benefit formula is tied to inflation. Biden had nothing to do with it. He said the Trump tax cuts only benefitted the rich but a study found they benefitted all income groups. Left-wing CNN debunked both these claims and a half a dozen more, concluding Biden had given false or misleading information in each case.
They bamboozle you with statistics. Biden claimed he cut the deficit, and by the largest amount in history. But this was only after gargantuan COVID spending the year before, and Biden’s deficit still remained higher than Trump’s non-COVID deficit. Biden claimed he added a half a million new jobs in January, but the numbers were actually down when seasonally adjusted.
They misuse government resources to leverage advantages for themselves. Ousted Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had urged public school students to campaign on her behalf for extra credit. A new Biden rule pushes retirement money managers to pressure companies to reduce their carbon emissions and establish racial hiring quotas. A previous Biden order directs federal agencies to register new voters in public housing and wherever else likely Democrats are to be found.
They sabotage enemies. They went to the 30 top advertisers on Twitter after Elon Musk took over and got 14 of them to stop advertising on the platform. They are spending millions of dollars to undermine House Republicans who are investigating the Biden crime family’s financial dealings and other government wrongdoing.
And when they get caught, they just say it’s old news. When it was revealed Twitter censored social media posts on behalf of the Democrat National Committee and the Biden campaign, the White House pooh-poohed the whole thing and said it was just “old news”.
So, you see, the Democrats’ January 6th shenanigans are no accident. They are part of a pattern, stemming from a deep rot produced by a mastery of trickery and deceit carefully and systematically honed over decades. They may call people like me the ‘Deplorables’, but I call them the ‘Despicables’, a title they so richly deserve.
3/9/23 - ‘There Is No Voter Fraud’
Democrats like to claim there is no voter fraud, but there’s still plenty wrong with our elections, as you’re about to see.
A Staten Island grand jury reported rampant ballot harvesting fraud in connection with a city council race in 2021. The vote of a deceased person and others were harvested, dozens through signature fraud on absentee ballots. The situation was called “the poster child for the necessity of voter ID laws.” Sources say the report was about a Republican candidate in a primary election.
That story was about a Republican but, for every story about a Republican committing voter fraud, I see many more about Democrats.
Let’s start with Democrat politicians. Two Democrat politicians in Louisiana were sentenced to 12 months in prison for their part in a vote-buying scheme. The two hired others to show sample ballots to voters with the desired candidates marked, then offered payment and transported voters to the polls. A Democrat city council member in Lodi was arrested for election fraud after allegedly stashing dozens of mail-in ballots at his home, filing multiple false voter registration documents, and pressuring people into voting for him. A Democrat county commissioner in Alabama was charged with illegally harvesting hundreds of ballots and stuffing them into a voting machine in favor of his preferred candidates in two elections. A Democrat Party chair in Stamford received a suspended sentence for forging absentee ballots in a 2015 city election.
The Brooklyn D.A. is investigating local Democrats for adding people’s names to petitions they didn’t sign and demanding bribes. One resident who tried to get a job as a poll worker was told she had to gather petition signatures supporting Democrat Party leaders. This calls to mind the James O’Keefe undercover sting video of a New York City elections commissioner discussing rampant voter fraud in 2016, with people being bused around to vote.
I also see lots of voter fraud stories where party affiliation is not mentioned, but which show just how deep the problems with our elections are. A Georgia man was sentenced to 25 years for voting twice and forging election documents in connection with absentee balloting. There’s that absentee balloting problem again - a real weakness in our elections when not carefully controlled. Two Florida men went to prison for registering dead people to vote and forging names on voter registration forms and ballot petitions. In all, 20 people have been charged with election-related crimes in Florida since an elections crimes unit was established last year, although not all were convicted.
The Heritage Foundation recently added ten new proven cases of election fraud to more than 1,400 others in the Foundation’s Election Fraud Database. Three of the new cases involved felons voting when they were not allowed. In another case, a Florida man was convicted of requesting, filling out, and submitting a ballot in the name of his son who had moved away to New Mexico. The son reported someone had voted in his name, leading to the man’s arrest. Talk about karma.
Elections officials and left-wing groups are also engaged in election fraud. I’ll tell you about that when I come back to this subject next week.
3/8/23 - How Jackbooted Censors Get Up and Get Dressed
Yesterday, I described to you a number of government censorship schemes violating the First Amendment and called the government officials perpetrating them “jackbooted authoritarian government thugs”. You might have thought my language was too harsh. But after seeing the news on this subject in the last 24 hours, I humbly suggest to you my language is not harsh enough.
The Federal Trade Commission demanded Elon Musk “identify all journalists” given access to the Twitter Files, company records showing how Twitter under previous ownership conspired with the government to suppress free speech. The FTC further demanded he explain why he granted them access. Musk responded right away in a tweet: “A shameful case of weaponization of a government agency for political purposes and suppression of the truth!” Got that right. The Twitter Files revealed how the government created blacklists of disfavored accounts, maneuvered to shut down criticism of COVID vaccines, propagate the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, involve intelligence agencies in the suppression of information like Hunter Biden’s laptop, and more.
Identifying journalists was just one of more than 350 demands the FTC made on Elon Musk in his first three months there. The House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee concluded in a report, “These demands have no basis in the FTC’s statutory mission and appear to be the result of partisan pressure to target Twitter and silence Musk.” The report went on to say, ““The FTC’s demands did not occur in a vacuum. They appear to be the result of loud voices on the left—including elected officials—urging the federal government to intervene in Musk’s acquisition and management of the company.... The FTC’s harassment of Twitter is likely due to one fact: Musk’s self-described ‘absolutist’ commitment to free expression in the digital town square.”
Meanwhile, it came to light in the Missouri and Louisiana censorship case that congressional Democrats and the White House threatened social media platforms with loss of their liability shield if they refused to comply with government censorship demands. The demands spanned a range of topics including COVID policies, elections, and Hunter Biden. The shield comes from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and its removal would be an “existential threat” to the company, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has said. Joe Biden said on the campaign trail Zuckerberg should face criminal charges for not censoring campaign ads critical of Biden. After the election, a Biden White House aide slammed Facebook for not moving fast enough to censor. Facebook copiously documented its censorship of supposed ‘misinformation’ for the White House after that. Pressure from the Democrat-controlled House and Senate Intelligence committees led to quick action to take down flagged accounts in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. A deposition in the lawsuit showed the FBI deliberately gave misleading information to Twitter and others so they would censor stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Still more was revealed yesterday. The Biden White House went to work to censor the COVID revelations of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other activists just three days after taking power. Within a month, a White House official was badgering Facebook to remove disfavored information about COVID and to describe its removal policies so they could be maximized to remove as much disfavored information as possible. The official chastised Facebook for letting unwanted information go viral and not stopping the accounts making it happen. The official expressed frustration over how Facebook was not removing so-called “bad information” from search results. “Pinterest doesn’t even show you any results other than official information when you search for ‘vaccines.’ I don’t know why you guys can’t figure it out,” the official chided. Another White House official blasted Facebook for not being “straightforward” and only doing the minimum. Then came this warning: “Internally we have been considering our options on what to do about it.” ‘We have ways of making you talk.’ The White House also warned Google to play ball and do something about COVID vaccine hesitancy - the Big Guy was watching.
This story’s not over. We’re going to learn more about the authoritarian jackbooted thugs of the federal government who have been working to silence dissent in this country. The Missouri-Louisiana case is cranking up and the House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed the head of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board at DHS to testify.
The colonies were reluctant to ratify the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was added explicitly protecting, among other things, the right to free speech. Until the jackbooted thugs succeed in taking the First Amendment off the books, let’s use it to the max and show them they’re not going to get away with silencing dissent. Who the hell do they think they are? This is America.
3/7/23 - I’m From the Government, And I’m Here to Shut You Up
Your federal government is trying to shut you up. That’s very twisted, considering the purpose of government is to protect your rights, including your right to free speech.
During a congressional hearing last month, it came to light the federal government communicated through a private cloud server called JIRA with social media companies and leftist nonprofits to censor American voices in violation of the First Amendment. The federal agencies involved include DHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The leftist nonprofits included the National Association of Secretaries of State, the National Association of State Election Directors, and the Election Integrity Partnership whose partners include centers at Stanford University and the University of Washington. Twitter censor Yoel Roth said he could not recall being involved in JIRA, but documentary evidence showed he was. His actions converted Twitter from a private company into a state actor, an extension of the government willingly engaged in censorship.
Separately, the 17th release of Twitter files shows a government-funded entity and government officials asked Twitter to take action against 40,000 accounts, many of which were ordinary conservatives. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab made the request. The Lab is funded by the U.S. government, specifically, the Global Engagement Center which is an interagency group led by the State Department. Center members include the FBI, DHS, NSA, and the CIA. Its stated mission is to expose foreign disinformation. It secretly engaged subcontractors who embarked on blacklisting accounts that merely cited foreign news sources. In this case, Twitter wasn’t buying it, but media outlets were brought in to pressure Twitter in the name of stopping foreign disinformation. This was reminiscent of another government-sponsored guilt-by-association scheme targeting Americans, the Hamilton-68 dashboard revealed in Twitter file release #15. The Global Engagement Center was throwing government money around - tens of millions of dollars - giving the subcontractors every incentive to come through with phony allegations.
The Biden administration threw more tens of millions at something called the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM). It partnered with Samantha Powers’ agency, USAID, to censor Americans and free speech around the world. This information appeared in a USAID press release that has since been taken off the agency’s website. One of IFPIM’s founders is BBC Media Action. The BBC also founded the Trusted News Initiative which includes such media outlets as the Associated Press, Washington Post, and Reuters. The Initiative appears to have been an extension of government engaged in suppressing truthful information about COVID around the world.
That’s four really big government censorship schemes you can stack on top of the wide-ranging government censorship enterprise being investigated in federal court by the Missouri and Louisiana state attorneys general. But there’s more. Another State Department official asked Twitter to delete accounts the official claimed were controlled by the Russians when they were not. The State Department also gave money to a radical Leftist group based in London, the Global Disinformation Index, which attempted to steer advertising dollars away from conservative news outlets in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere in the name of fighting disinformation. The New York Post was among the conservative outlets targeted.
And don’t forget DHS had started up a Disinformation Governance Board before it was found out and shut down.
Connect the dots and what do you get? A picture of a rogue, out-of-control federal government that is, not only not protecting your rights, but is actively engaged in trying to take them away. All in the name of the truth, of course. But there are very good reasons we don’t want the government in the business of deciding for others what is true and what is not. One of those reasons is that the government can be dead wrong, the most recent example being how spectacularly wrong the federal government was in its bone-headed COVID masking and lockdown policies. Think about that the next time jack-booted authoritarian government thugs say they need to suppress information to save you.
3/6/23 - The Transgender Tide is Turning
Transgenderism has made many inroads into U.S. society, politics, and culture, but the tide is finally turning. Tennessee just passed a law banning transgender drugs and surgery for minors and prohibiting drag shows where they could be seen by children. That makes Tennessee the eighth state to restrict sex change procedures for minors. Legislation is pending in at least 25 other states. No more free ride.
Another indication the tide is turning is the spate of lawsuits being filed against transgender service providers. Everyone who is part of the Transgender Industrial Complex is in legal jeopardy, whether they realize it yet or not. The grounds for legal liability are many.
An 18-year-old detransitioner is suing the Kaiser companies for ignoring her mental health condition and putting her on sex change drugs when she was 13. Doctors performed a double mastectomy on her when she was 15. "I was 15 when you cut into my body, ripped out my breasts, and stitched me back up like I was your rag doll," she said. "You are on the wrong side of history and will always be remembered as child butchers." She is the victim of "ideological and profit-driven medical abuse," her lawyers said in announcing the suit.
Doctors aren’t the only ones facing legal liability. A New York school district is being sued because a teacher tried to manipulate a 9-year-old girl into becoming transgender by calling her ‘Leo’ and using male pronouns to address her. The girl became confused and contemplated suicide. The teacher pushed transgender and gay agendas on the entire class, providing her students graphic books on these subjects, going into detail about transitioning, surgery, and hormones. The school district didn’t tell the parents anything about the child’s condition until after she had developed suicidal ideation.
Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate reintroduced a bill to allow people who received transgender drugs and surgery as minors to sue their doctors with a 30-year statute of limitations. "Unfortunately, radical doctors in the United States perform dangerous, experimental, and even sterilizing gender-transition procedures on young kids, who cannot even provide informed consent," Senator Tom Cotton said. Consent also figures in the civil and possibly criminal investigation by state authorities of a transgender clinic in Missouri. Whether the Republicans’ bill passes or not, it is foreseeable a flood of litigation is coming. Live by social contagion, die by social contagion.
Expect to see more lawsuits arising from injuries from the administration of transgender drugs. A new study shows those taking transgender hormone treatments are significantly more prone to stroke, heart attack, and blood clots. Stroke - seven times more likely. Heart problems - six times more likely. Pulmonary embolism - five times more likely. Lawsuits for drugging and mutilating kids who can’t possibly understand the long-term ramifications of transgender treatment - getting more likely all the time.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is warning about the “unknown and unknowable long-term risks” inherent in so-called “gender-affirming care” in minors. Surgery is irreversible and highly likely to cause sterilization. The best that transitioners can hope for is a “lifelong need for medical, surgical, and psychological care.” Sign me up!
A new one-sided story from the Associated Press minimizes the number of transitioners who express regret or seek to detransition. The story cites studies saying the number is small - one percent - and declining as treatment ‘improves’. But the latest studies cited are from 2021. I wonder what the numbers are now, after the Transgender Industrial Complex has gone hog wild pushing gender transitioning on confused kids without telling their parents. I would bet you will start seeing the numbers of those expressing regret and seeking to detransition grow exponentially. Moreover, the AP story cites research suggesting psychological counseling before starting treatment can reduce the chances for regret and detransitioning. But that’s the whole point of the Missouri investigation and the first lawsuit I described earlier - there was no counseling. Drugs and surgery were the default position, with no counseling and no thought given to the mental health status of the child. There will be suicides. You can bet on it. I can’t wait for the wrongful death suits to start.
3/3/23 - Islam: In Their Own Words
A friend of mine said last week he didn’t see how Islam is much of a threat in America. I said in response you can’t properly judge a situation if you don’t follow the news on it. We’ll see what you think after I bring you up to date about Islam in the United States. Everything I’m about to tell you is from their own words and deeds and, primarily, from Muslims right here at home.
Let’s start with Jew hatred. A Muslim cleric in California called Jews a “bigoted and arrogant breed of people opposed by all living creatures.” He talked about killing Jews on Judgment Day by any means available. He quoted a hadith - Islamic holy scripture - while doing so. The Muslim mayor of Muslim-controlled Hamtramck, Michigan said Jews are “monkeys” who tax “the air we breathe.” For good measure, he approved of a social media post calling black people “animal” and “inhuman”.
Jews aren’t Islam’s only target. Women and children are also at risk. An imam in Miami disparaged women’s rights, saying women in Afghanistan are doing just fine and we should worry about our own women. Women’s rights make women vulnerable to sexual assault, he implied. A Muslim lecturer born in Houston said in a speech wife-beating is acceptable because the Quran permits it. Another Muslim preacher based in the U.S. justified Muslim men taking women as spoils of war and turning them into sex slaves, citing chapter and verse from the Quran for doing so. I don’t know what American woman in her right mind could possibly think Islam is cute or want to get anywhere near it after hearing this.
Speaking of sex slaves, literature found in a mosque in Dearborn Heights, Michigan justified child brides and temporary marriage for sex. You might recall the mosque in Philadelphia that became notorious in 2019 for facilitating child marriages.
Before you men think you’re safe, you should know that an imam in Minnesota preaches, “Non-Muslims are worse than animals.” Muslims should hate non-Muslims, according to a Muslim cleric in New York.
Then there’s the crazytalk. An imam in New York blamed the COVID pandemic on American women showing too much ankle. He’s like the imam in Iran who blamed a drought on women not wearing the hijab. Women can’t possibly have caused the pandemic because everybody knows gay marriage caused the pandemic, right? That’s according to an Islamic political leader in Iraq.
Islamic crazytalk might be humorous, but it’s certainly not harmless. A man in Seattle who killed four people later admitted he was “misguided” by the instructions of Islamic jihad. A prominent American imam said, “If [Christians and Jews] don’t [convert to Islam,] their life and property are halal [free for the taking] for the Muslims.” A Muslim professor in Ohio defended the death fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie. An imam in Nigeria endorsed putting former Muslims to death for apostasy in a sermon based on the Quran which, therefore, could have been delivered anywhere in the world.
It may seem crazy to us, but Islam’s endgame is world domination under sharia law, with violent jihad as the means to achieve it. Several recent news stories serve to remind us this is Islam’s unwavering goal. The man called ‘America’s most popular imam’ met with a leading Islamic televangelist living in exile in Malaysia who has said “every Muslim should be a terrorist.” He has also said he is in solidarity with the ideology of Osama Bin Laden. A Muslim leader in Illinois said Muslims will inherit the earth and a caliphate is coming. Another Muslim cleric, also in Illinois, said, “We all have a higher goal… that is bigger than us, and that is the establishment of the caliphate.” A guest imam at a Philadelphia mosque called for the imposition of sharia on the entire world.
Just because we’re not seeing a lot of violent jihad attacks in America at the moment doesn’t mean they’re not coming or that Muslims have given up their goal of world domination. We’re not seeing a lot of violent attacks because Muslims are steadily making progress in politics and cultural acceptance. They don’t need to be violent at the moment. They have, for the most part, switched to dawah - advancing Islam through non-violent means. But remember this: Muslims have a religious duty to lie to outsiders if it will further the cause of Islam. This is called ‘taqiyah’. Dawah works in a pincer movement with jihad toward the same goal - world domination. In Germany, Muslims admitted deliberately speaking the language of peace and love to the infidels while conspiring to conquer Germany amongst themselves.
Follow the news and you will get a completely different picture of what Muslims in America are up to. You have been warned.
3/2/23 - Stupid Voter Roll Tricks
Election integrity activists are placing renewed emphasis on cleaning up the voter rolls, and here’s why: no matter what scheme the Democrats come up with to steal elections, at the end of the day they still have to find enough records of voters who haven’t voted to put in enough fake votes to change the results of the election. This accounts for the puzzling behavior of Democrats who resist at every turn, in defiance of common sense, removing dead voters and people who have moved out of state from the rolls. About 8 percent of the population moves any given year. That’s a lot of voter records just waiting to be picked. The more voters on the rolls who are guaranteed not to vote, the easier it is for the Democrats to commit election fraud, plain and simple.
But we’re on to their tricks. Judicial Watch sued Democrat-run New York City and got a settlement requiring the city to remove over 440,000 ineligible names from the voter rolls and to maintain the rolls in the future. The city had only removed 22 names in the previous six years which is preposterous for a city of five and a half million people. Federal law requires elections officials to remove ineligible voters from the rolls and the good Democrats of New York City obviously weren’t doing it. Tammany Hall would be proud.
Judicial Watch and another group filed another lawsuit to clean up the rolls in Los Angeles. The suit concluded successfully with Democrat-controlled L.A. County removing 1.2 million ineligible voters from the rolls. The County sent notices to 1.6 million inactive voters who had not voted in two successive federal elections. The County revealed that 643,000 voters stayed on the rolls despite not voting for at least ten years, more inactive voters than anywhere else in the country. Yet, there they were, just waiting for the Democrats to make it look like they voted.
There’s more work to do. Six million Americans are registered to vote in two states, three percent of all voters. An estimated 60,000 of them illegally voted twice in 2020. Others just neglect to get off the rolls when they move, but some of this is strategic with many voters choosing where to cast a single vote where it will make the biggest difference for their side. It is estimated there were 317,000 such strategic voters with dual registrations in the 2020 presidential election. The study looking at this concluded, “Democrats outnumber Republicans 2:1 among double registrants.” Funny how that works. More Democrat fun and games.
More work needs to be done but some unfortunate features of federal law stand in the way and need to be fixed. A provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) prevents states from cleaning their voter rolls less than 90 days before a federal election. When you stack early voting for the general election on top of primaries, that’s a big chunk of the year. Another problem in federal law is the requirement election officials must wait two election cycles before taking people who move off the rolls. In addition, they must first send a notification which, if not done promptly, can result in people who move not being scrubbed from the rolls for six years. If you’re a Democrat, you’re saying ‘Goody! More voters who are pretty much guaranteed not to vote that we Democrats can use to cast fake votes and steal elections.’ You see the problem.
New tools have been created which could crack the nut of bloated voter rolls. One is a new interactive database available free to citizens and election integrity groups around the country to help them find deceased voters, people who vote more than once, and moved-away voters still on the rolls. Another is fractal technology now in use in 12 states that can spot fake voter registrations with hotels, post office boxes, skating rinks, and other bogus addresses. The technology can also ferret out other ruses like elections officials changing zip codes on voter records when mail ballots are sent out, making them undeliverable. The zip codes are changed back later, but the maneuver creates a huge stockpile of mailed ballots floating around out there that can be captured and voted illicitly.
Don’t fail to notice how many times today I’ve mentioned that Democrats are responsible for election fraud and the bloated voter rolls that enable it. Democrats call people like me the Deplorables. But what I’ve told you today about the Democrats and their election fraud schemes should make it easy for you to understand why I call the Democrats the Despicables.
3/1/23 - The Incredible ‘Green Transition’ That Can’t
Joe Biden campaigned on getting rid of fossil fuels. He said he would ban fracking and his Green New Deal proposal would completely replace fossil fuels with clean energy by 2035. He is also on record saying he plans “an incredible transition” of the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels, openly admitting that pain at the pump from high gas prices is part of the plan. His administration is rushing pell-mell into a green energy future, by, among other things, drawing on the $27 billion green energy slush fund in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
There’s just one problem: the green energy future envisioned by the administration and other wild-eyed climate change fanatics is totally impossible and won’t ever happen.
There aren’t enough minerals on earth to make a green transition a reality. Copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt are limiting factors, especially if you think about sustaining all-green energy into the future.
Converting all big trucks, ships, and railroads to electric - even if such a thing were possible - would require 10 times the number of power plants we have now.
To deliver reliable power from unreliable solar and wind, and avoid blackouts, would require more electrical storage capacity than is physically feasible or economically viable. Before we transition everything to green energy, wouldn’t it make sense to demand to see a demonstration project succeed, first? Of course it would. It’s also not too much to ask for a “comprehensive quantitative system-engineering life-cycle analysis of an all-renewable energy system” before we jump into it sight unseen. Such an analysis would include the costs of materials, construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning, and disposal. And let’s see an environmental impact statement, while we’re at it. Green energy is incredibly damaging to the environment, as some on the Left are beginning to recognize. Life-cycle and environmental analysis would undoubtedly show a green transition is not physically or economically feasible.
Green energy fanatics have blinders on that don’t let them see beyond the east and west coasts. The fact is, regardless of what the U.S. does, worldwide use of coal set a record last year and is expected to increase further this year. The U.S. could do somersaults and cartwheels for green energy, but it wouldn’t make one bit of difference to global climate change computer models.
The fanatics want to leave fossil fuels in the ground and stop all oil & gas projects now, but the fact is fossil fuels will still be needed for decades if we are to avoid energy shortages, supply disruptions, and wild price swings.
Another problem is toxic waste. What are we going to do with all the obsolete wind turbines, defunct solar panels, and dead batteries a green transition would entail? No one has figured this out yet. Put them in landfills and toxic minerals will leach into groundwater. Burn them and it will all go into the air.
What happens to electricity prices if you get rid of all natural gas stoves, furnaces, and appliances and require everything to run on green energy? What happens to electricity prices if you get rid of the internal combustion engine and require all vehicles to run on batteries? Parts of Australia where gas drilling and fracking have been all but banned are already seeing double-digit increases. Consumers in U.S. states with renewable energy quotas pay higher energy prices than they otherwise would. Call it the ‘green tax’.
Vegetables are being rationed in Britain because soaring energy costs from overreliance on renewables is causing farmers to switch off their greenhouses before they go bankrupt. That’s just one consequence that flows from unchecked green mania - not enough greens to eat.
Not only would a green transition place upward pressure on electricity prices, there’s another problem, as identified in E.M. Forster’s magnificent short story The Machine Stops: once you centralize everything into one system, everything comes to a grinding halt when the system fails. A single point of failure - like an exclusively all-electric energy system - is a fundamental error well-known to anyone who has studied strategic planning. Move everything to electricity and everything will stop if electricity becomes unavailable or unreliable. That doesn’t happen now with energy sources for power and transportation diversified among coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear, and renewables. There’s a lot to be said for keeping energy diversity and not letting green energy mania put the blinders on. Our food, economic, and national security depend on it.
Recent news shows it’s possible to undo the Democrats’ weaponization of our elections apparatus.
Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia joined Louisiana and Alabama in leaving ERIC, the voter registration data clearinghouse conservatives say is really a get-out-the-vote drive for Democrats. ERIC is the Electronic Registration Information Center, initially funded with George Soros money [more documentation here] and, until recently, overseen by a high-profile Democrat election lawyer. ERIC is supposed to help member states scrub their voter rolls of deceased and moved-away voters, but one of the complaints is that ERIC does a bad job, leaving the rolls bloated and elections vulnerable to fraud as a result.
Ohio and Iowa are the latest states to leave ERIC. Alaska and Texas may follow. States are leaving for many reasons. One of the reasons Louisiana gave was the overall Democrat tilt to the entire operation. Alabama was worried about a private group having access to voter data, among other things. Ohio had asked for changes and left when none were forthcoming. At this point, ERIC only serves the interests of the Democrats, Ohio’s Secretary of State said in a letter.
These are not the only problems with ERIC. It recently came to light ERIC has been sharing data with a left-wing nonprofit - the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) - run by the very same high-profile Democrat election lawyer mentioned earlier (David Becker) who founded and only recently departed ERIC. The data pinpointed likely Democrat voters who had not yet registered to vote so they could be targeted for partisan registration drives.
As if illicit data sharing were not enough, ERIC also restricts states from acting against noncitizens registered to vote and tells states to keep their list maintenance data secret even though federal law requires it be made public. Other critics point out states are legally obligated to maintain their voter rolls and nothing in law allows them to outsource that function to outside private third parties, to begin with. In addition, according to an election integrity activist in my network, ERIC also requires member states to move to "online only" voter registration to eliminate signed voter registration documents. This completely frustrates signature verification requirements between registration documents and mail-in ballots in those states that require such verification. Still other critics reinforce the perception, stated at the outset, that ERIC is far more effective at identifying potential voters for the Democrats than keeping the voter rolls up to date.
States are scrambling for alternatives. Texas is developing an interstate crosscheck system to eliminate duplicate registrations. There used to be such a system, but the left-wing ACLU sued it out of existence, clearing the field for ERIC. Activists in Maryland point to one piece of the puzzle, a free service from the Post Office that standardizes addresses and tells you whether mail is deliverable there. Then there is the Omega4America operation that hopes to be in 15 or 20 states in 2024. It checks voter rolls against publicly available information to sniff out problem addresses in the records like hotels, RV parks, and prisons where felons are not supposed to vote. It can also ferret out fraud by elections officials if, for example, they change inactive voters to active status in the records wholesale, mail them ballots that get intercepted, then change the records back to inactive status.
ERIC is just one way the Democrats have weaponized elections. I’ll show you more when I return to the subject of election integrity next week.
3/22/23 - Cry Me an Atmospheric River
Republican attorneys general from 16 states sent a letter warning the Biden administration against continuing climate change policies they say contributed to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The letter described how the Bank invested heavily in climate-related projects because federal regulators pushed banks in this direction as part of the Biden administration’s ‘whole of government’ approach to fighting climate change. This converted regulators into environmental activists, and led them to chase the chimera of climate-related risk while ignoring true financial risks as traditionally understood.
Where were the regulators? Lost in green fantasies and daydreams. Thus, rescuing the Bank’s depositors was a sacrifice offered on the altar of climate change, “an attempt to provide financial support to an important constituency.” The constituents bailed out were people who had bought into and actively promoted by their words and deeds the government’s phony narrative on climate change. The focus on expensive green energy sources raised inflation and increased financial risk throughout the system, the letter said.
Once again, we find money at the heart of the climate change narrative. This is why I have trouble taking what green energy and climate advocates say seriously. I know they’re being paid to say it, one way or another. So, cry me an atmospheric river about climate change, I don’t believe a word of it.
The money flows from several directions, starting with Uncle Sugar, the federal government. We can begin with the Inflation Reduction Act which, in actuality, implements the Left’s radical green agenda and pours billions of taxpayer dollars into green initiatives. The Act’s $370 billion comes on top of another $100 billion the federal government has spent on climate initiatives over the last 20 years. The EPA has announced a billion dollars in climate grants already this year.
Where’s it all going? Green energy companies, for starters. An infrastructure bill in 2021 provided $9 billion in incentives for electric school buses and other no-emission vehicles. Electric bus company Proterra and others stood to benefit. There is a revolving door of government officials who leave their posts to cash in by going to work for the same green energy companies they once oversaw.
Billionaires are also in on the action. Michael Bloomberg had a hand in crafting climate risk disclosure rules for business, rules that will grow his $10 billion Bloomberg Terminal business. Investors use Bloomberg Terminals to get global investment data and information about investment risks. Just a little conflict of interest, wouldn’t you say?
But the poster child for green moguls is Al Gore. He amassed a $330 million fortune scaring everybody half to death with his crazy and dead-wrong predictions about climate change. Then he laughed all the way to the bank making green investments through his $36 billion investment firm, Generation Investment Management.
He’s not alone. Bill Gates and other left-wing billionaires provided seed money for two electric battery companies and benefit from rising stock prices. These billionaires are big donors to the Democrat Party and reap windfall profits when Democrats push through green policies. They even have a group called Clean Energy for Biden which raised millions for his campaign, then lobbied for passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. See how this works? Buy the policies, make the money. Once again, I find myself saying ‘follow the money’ - it’s all financial self-interest and has absolutely nothing to do with the environment. Net-zero.
Schemes like this have been called ‘legal plunder’ and ‘the greatest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history’. Bill Gates wrote a book telling you to eat fake meat and oh, by the way, he has a stake in a company that sells fake meat. Elon Musk makes twice as much money from selling carbon credits than he does from electric vehicles.
If you still believe all of this is about the environment, all I can say is ‘there’s a sucker born every minute.’
Green energy companies and billionaires are not the only ones cashing in on climate mania. I’ll tell you who else is benefitting when I return to this subject next week.
3/21/23 - Rediscovering the Equal Protection Clause, The Hard Way
Sorry, Social Justice Warriors, there’s still an Equal Protection Clause, plus lots of federal anti-discrimination laws. They trump all your Woke nonsense demanding special rights for privileged groups, and rightly so. Ignore equal protection of the law at your peril - you will get sued, and you will lose.
Comcast settled a discrimination lawsuit over its small business grant program limited to companies 51 percent owned by someone who is “Black, indigenous, a person of color, or female.”
Pfizer altered a fellowship program after it got sued for “blatant racial discrimination” against white and Asian American applicants.
Boston got sued after imposing a fee on restaurants in an Italian neighborhood seeking to offer outdoor dining, but no fee anywhere else. The lawsuit referred to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s comment that she is used to dealing with problems that are “expensive, disruptive, and white.”
Federal authorities are investigating a Massachusetts high school for civil rights violations after holding a ‘no whites need apply’ audition for a school play entitled ‘Our Stories as People of Color’. The play was intended as a safe space and support vehicle for minority students. Sorry, no dice, not allowed, not when the government of all the people is involved.
Another federal civil rights investigation is underway at USC’s medical school over its visiting clerkships offered exclusively to minorities. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race.
You can expect more of these legal challenges ahead. There is a move on the political Right to get rid of all racial preferences, including debt relief for black farmers, financial stipends for minority entrepreneurs, federal subsidies for minority and women-owned restaurants, and school admissions affirmative action policies designed to reduce the number of white and Asian students. One effort, called the Equal Protection Project, is scrutinizing exclusionary events for non-white educators in Rhode Island. The Project objects to the Woke notion that the remedy for past discrimination is more discrimination.
That’s a clear thought that sticks like a hatchet in the brain. I hope the legal warriors wielding it look at some other cases that cry out for equal protection litigation. White students are barred from applying for a research fellowship and other exclusionary scholarships at the University of North Carolina. A white student at the University of South Florida was denied access to group therapy mental health services because he is white.
Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia has a discriminatory college prep program offering counseling and other special assistance to students who are not Asian or white. An elementary school in Olympia started a student club that won’t allow white kids to join. A public school in Charlottesville hosted a black-only catered dinner event for parents. San Francisco is giving $1,200 a month in guaranteed income to transgender residents. “Black young adults” and “Black and Pacific Islander mothers” are guaranteed lesser amounts. How is that constitutional?
It’s not. The drafters of the 14th Amendment and Martin Luther King had a dream, and it wasn’t special rights for privileged groups. It was racial integration and equality under the law. The thinking in civil rights circles no longer finds that adequate. Too bad. Until you succeed in getting the 14th Amendment off the books, you’re stuck with racial equality under the law and the simple justice it affords to every individual fortunate enough to live under its jurisdiction.
3/20/23 - The Truth Is Out There, But You Can’t Have It
More details are emerging about the federal government’s wide-ranging censorship enterprise. The 19th release of Twitter files shows the federal government conspired with outside actors to censor information about COVID, the vaccines, and natural immunity. The files document an effort by the Stanford Virality Project, federal agencies, and a number of organizations often with taxpayer funding to monitor and suppress billions of social media posts with COVID-related content. At least six social media platforms participated, sending millions of posts to the enterprise every day for review. “Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging,” an observer said.
The enterprise attempted to control what was to be considered true and not true for all - which the government is not supposed to do. Even worse, it concocted and pushed narratives - phony stories - disregarding the truth and the facts which were cast aside. They didn’t follow the science; they followed their inner lights about what citizens should be allowed to hear. They suppressed “true stories that could fuel hesitancy” like “celebrity deaths after vaccine” or the closing of a school because COVID vaccination did not prevent illness. These true stories were considered “misinformation” that shouldn’t be allowed out there. It is truly stunning to read about these censors openly discussing how the truth is “misinformation”. The federal government didn’t want you to have the truth, so it shelled out a billion dollars to media outlets and social media companies to try to make sure you didn’t get it and to give grief to anyone trying to bring you the truth. The truth about natural immunity, lab leaks, and failures of vaccines to stop illness was suppressed. The enterprisers also suppressed information about COVID really not being very lethal (relatively speaking) and criticism of vaccine mandates and passports. Instead, they pushed the phony narrative about the vaccines being ‘safe and effective’ on us any way they could. In this alternate universe, true stories of vaccine side effects were deemed “actionable’ by a federal government determined to suppress the truth.
This Stanford-led effort was only a part of the federal government’s wide-ranging censorship enterprise. I’ve described other parts in previous commentaries, like the Global Engagement Center, a State Department-led censorship exercise involving the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, DHS, and other agencies. Now comes news that “NewsGuard”, an Internet so-called fact-checking service, was getting Defense Department dough to harass conservative news outlets, sending inquiries demanding the outlets justify their reporting. NewsGuard is the Left in action, having been founded by Steve Brill, a longtime Democrat operative and campaign donor. NewsGuard issued unfavorable ratings that damaged the outlets’ ability to get ad revenue. See how the game is played?
There’s more. Other new stories describe the 18th release of Twitter files giving more details about how Twitter and other social media platforms regularly met with the FBI and DHS. They also set up a system to receive thousands of reports from government agencies about accounts and posts the agencies deemed objectionable. Numerous accounts were deleted upon receipt of these reports. Some were not accused of misinformation; they just ran afoul of government narratives about the war in Ukraine and other matters. Again, taxpayer-funded outside groups played a large part in the scheme. They saw themselves as the anointed ones, a self-appointed Truth Squad that would save humanity from itself. The groups recommended the tech companies be forced to turn over all their data, that speech the groups deemed offensive be placed in a “holding area”, and the government root out disinformation even if it costs us our freedom. Gee whiz!
One more little story to show you just how bad things have gotten. Two FBI agents showed up at a person’s job in New York to interrogate the person about the person’s Tweets criticizing Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that sells one of the COVID vaccines. Apparently, the FBI doesn’t have anything better to do these days than terrorize ordinary citizens about not conforming to phony government narratives.
This is fascism - the unholy merger of Big Government and Big Business in a previously unimaginable concentration of power to deny you your rights. Where is Antifa when we need them? We sure could use some fascism-busters right about now.
3/17/23 - Silicon Valley Bank: The Woke Democrat Cesspool Is Deep And Wide
We’re learning new details about just how big a Woke Democrat cesspool Silicon Valley Bank really was.
The Bank’s political action committee donated primarily to Democrats for 20 years. One hundred percent of the PAC’s donations went to Democrats in 2020, as well as in 2021-2022. Last year, the PAC donated to Senators Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner, as well as other Democrat lawmakers. Chuck Schumer and Maxine Waters said they would return the donations to the PAC or give them to charity.
California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom and his wife were closely tied to the Bank. In 2021, the Bank gave the Newsom’s nonprofit - California Partners Project - $100,000 at the request, suggestion, or solicitation of Gavin Newsom. The president of SVB’s investment banking arm was a founding board member of the Newsom nonprofit, so the ties go way back. That president is still on the nonprofit’s board. The $100,000 gift was to support the nonprofit’s campaign for California’s gender quota law for corporate boards, a Woke cause if ever there was one. The Bank tweeted in support of the nonprofit’s effort and proclaimed the Bank and the nonprofit were aligned on getting more women in the boardroom. The law was later struck down as discriminatory, completely unconstitutional. No word on whether the Newsoms will return the gift.
The Bank supported another Woke cause, the trained Marxists of Black Lives Matter. This wasn’t just a pittance - the Bank gave over $70 million dollars to promote the burning of American cities in the summer of 2020, the destruction of the nuclear family as openly declared on BLM’s website, and the promotion of world communism through the global network of offices BLM opened with the generous financial support of Silicon Valley Bank and corporate America. Black Lives Matter called the report about the $70 million “white supremacy” and distanced itself from the Bank saying it’s just run by “white people”. Oh, and it also said ending the “gruesome exploitation” of black people will stop further bank failures. Sure, and I’m the tooth fairy.
The Bank also pledged $5 billion dollars to fund green energy companies. The Bank’s depositors were bailed out. Critics called this a “gift to wealthy Democrat donors in the tech sector.” The critics said there is no way depositors would have been made whole if they had been MAGA Republicans. The critics also note the Democrat depositors could have purchased additional deposit insurance beyond the FDIC’s $250,000 limit on their own, but chose not to. Evidently, being in tight with ruling Democrats WAS the insurance plan. It’s also been noted Chinese firms are among the depositors being bailed out, something Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has confirmed. One Chinese company had $175 million in uninsured cash deposits at the Bank, which was just fine with the Democrats who ran the place, which will now be underwritten by higher fees imposed on all American banks for the federal deposit insurance program going forward.
SVB’s board was populated with dyed-in-the-wool Democrats - Hillary, Biden, Obama donors and only one had investment banking experience. All you needed for the job was to be a good Democrat and to check the right diversity boxes. What could possibly go wrong? One board member went to a Shinto shrine to pray after Trump was elected, to get over her grief and shock after Hillary’s defeat. The Bank crowed it had women, one black, one LGBTQ, and two veterans on the board - check, check, check, and double check.
The Bank’s alignment with Democrats was grand strategy. "Everyone knew it was the go-to bank for woke CEOs," one source told the New York Post. "They knew they were aligned politically. The companies SVB loaned money to all had a woke agenda," the source said. I can’t wait for one of them to say the strategy is still a perfectly good idea, it just wasn’t implemented correctly at SVB. ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, so we’ll do it better the next time.’ Isn’t that what they always say about socialism which has failed everywhere it’s been tried?
But that’s the Democrats, for you - corrupt to the core and congenitally unable to align with reality. Tell me again why they deserve to govern?
3/16/23 - How the Democrats Bake Systemic Fraud Into Our Elections
Last week, I told you about individual wrongdoers - mostly Democrats - who were arrested and sent to jail for voter fraud. But criminal wrongdoing in our elections is also perpetrated - again, mostly by Democrats - by election officials, Democrat and left-wing advocacy groups, and other systemic players engaged in wholesale fraud.
Starting with election officials, a Republican county elections commissioner in New York was charged with 12 felony counts of using other people’s identifications to request, complete, and submit absentee ballots. A Democrat township clerk in Michigan who was also a candidate was convicted of felony ballot tampering for opening a sealed ballot canister, invalidating the votes inside. The Democrat New Mexico Secretary of State is accused of unlawfully receiving county election totals before counties certify results and using an uncertified software program to add up the totals. Elections officials in Oakland, California are accused of ignoring a court order, unsealing ballot boxes without public observation, and making it impossible for citizen observers to monitor and understand the vote tallying process.
Lawless election officials are not the only source of systemic wrongdoing in our elections. Left-wing and Democrat advocacy groups are major sources, as well. The Virginia Democratic Party ballot harvesting manual instructs party activists to include dead people and bad addresses when compiling voter contact lists. This information goes into a party database which is used to target likely Democrat voters. The Democrat Party did not respond when asked about this.
Left-leaning nonprofits like the Center for Voter Information and the Voter Participation Center are abusing their 501(c)(3) tax status by registering likely Democrat voters. Targeting particular demographic groups likely to vote Democrat skirts IRS rules preventing tax-exempt organizations from engaging in partisan activity.
In Wisconsin, a leftist group paid voters $250 if they succeeded in persuading their friends to vote for the Leftist candidate in the state Supreme Court race. Under state law, it is felony bribery to give anything of value to any person for inducing others to vote or not vote for or against particular candidates.
The Federal Election Commission received but has ignored information about campaign ‘money mules’ operating in Missouri, Georgia, and elsewhere. Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia was the top beneficiary identified in the scheme. To give you some idea of how the scheme works, ‘Steven in Missouri’ was somehow able to make over 14,000 campaign donations totaling $180,000 in two years despite being unemployed. Something’s not right with this picture.
Yet more systemic election fraud is found in a Florida county where felons vote illegally, dead voters are sent mail-in ballots, voter addresses are changed without request, and individuals are putting multiple ballots into drop boxes despite being limited under state law to two. This information came from a whistleblower inside an elections office who was upset these problems were not being addressed. The office is run by a Democrat and would not respond to questions.
Here is one more way systemic fraud can occur: County officials can change the zip code of tens of thousands of voters all at once. Mail ballots go out, but the ones with the wrong zip code are undeliverable. Someone scoops them up, then the elections office changes the zip codes back. Voters go to the polls, only to be told they already voted, their ballot has already been cast by somebody else. A new data company uncovered this kind of fraud in Wisconsin and Florida, including one county where more than 31,000 zip codes were changed this way. The company bought daily voter rolls and tracked zip code changes, discovering how the game is played.
We are supposed to have representative government in this country. But we cannot be assured of true representation unless systemic fraud, perpetrated mostly by Democrats, is rooted out from the elections process.
3/15/23 - Being a Democrat Means Eventually Having to Say You’re Sorry
Last week, a former advisor to Democrats Al Gore and Bill Clinton made an extraordinary confession and apologized to conservatives and Republicans for being so wrong about so many things.
Naomi Wolf issued a “formal letter of apology” for believing the Democrats’ “lies” about the January 6th attack on the Capitol:
- I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.... I believed that Pres Trump instigated the riot at the Capitol — because I did not know that his admonition to his supporters to assemble “peacefully and patriotically” had been deleted from all of the news coverage that I read.... I owe you a full-throated apology.
She also apologized for lots of other things she wrongly believed:
- I also believed wholesale so much else that has since turned out not to be as I was told it was by NPR, MSNBC and The New York Times.
- I believed that stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian propaganda... til it was debunked.
- I believed that President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia — until that assertion was dropped.
- I believed that President Trump was a Russian asset, because the legacy media I read, said so
- I believed in the entire Steele dossier, until I didn’t, because it all fell apart.
Nonsense. In the Right’s terms, Naomi Wolf got red-pilled, hit with undeniable doses of reality. It really only takes five minutes with someone to rip apart the Left’s phony narratives and deprogram people out of the Democrat cult. This is why the Democrats are afraid of people like me and do their darndest to shut us up. Twitter and Facebook censored me. It didn’t work. The traffic on my website where this commentary appears is quadruple what it was when I was banned. I’m on several TV stations in the West and lots of websites repost my work. I’m doing just fine without Facebook and Twitter, and I’m just getting started.
Naomi Wolf is not the only liberal to apologize to conservatives, recently. Others apostatizing from the Democrat faith include a former Reuters editor who admitted he was misled on climate change. “The idea climate change threatens the health, safety and economic well-being of people worldwide is an assertion, not a fact,” he wrote. Moreover, there is no scientific consensus CO2 is to blame for the planet’s warming in the last 10,000 years. Scientists he asked backed away from making any such claim.
Then there’s the abortion doctor and the abortion clinic business developer who both confessed recently they knew abortion was the taking of innocent human life. The abortionist confessed to murdering countless children, but pro-life outreach changed the abortionist’s mind. For his part, the developer is now pro-life and fighting to end abortion.
For a Democrat mom in Pennsylvania, it was the Democrats’ appalling COVID lockdowns leading to learning loss in school that led her away from the Democrat Party. A New York City councilman switched to the Republican Party because the Democrats are too soft on crime and making everyone unsafe. For another former liberal, it wasn’t any one thing. It was a 30-year process of watching the Left’s pronouncements not match up with reality, helped along by the insufferable “arrogance and snobbery” of Leftist elites. The #WalkAway movement of former Democrats from a few years ago, is still going strong. Their testimonies contain all kinds of reasons to leave the Democrat fold.
But my favorite apostasy story is the young woman who told me some years ago that, for her, it was the blue dress - Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. Like I said, it only takes minutes to sweep the fairy dust off people and get them to realize the Democrats have a lot to be sorry about and apologize for.
3/13/23 - Silicon Valley Bank: Another Woke Democrat Cesspool
Dennis Prager likes to say the Left destroys everything it touches. Now it’s destroying banking.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the nation’s 16th largest, went belly up and was taken over by regulators. The story starts with Joe Biden’s inflationary spending, which led to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to fight inflation. SVB had way more money in deposits than it could lend, so it bought fixed-rate securities, betting heavily interest rates wouldn’t rise. These securities were more than half the bank’s assets and the bank blew up when the value of these holdings went down after interest rates went up.
But that’s only part of the story. The bank lent heavily to Chinese tech start-ups, China figuring heavily in scandalous Biden family business dealings. Employees at the bank were big Democrat donors. Almost all their political contributions went to Democrat politicians, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Raphael Warnock. A PAC affiliated with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also benefitted.
These Democrat donors sold off their stock in Silicon Valley Bank before the trouble was made public. They also paid themselves annual bonuses just hours before the roof caved in.
SVB bankers were all in for pet left-wing causes, such as environmental, social, and governance investing (ESG). In 2022, the bank trumpeted it “Commits to $5 Billion in Sustainable Finance and Carbon Neutral Operations to Support a Healthier Planet.” The bank’s CEO said, “Our ability to make a meaningful difference for people and the planet, and to address the systemic risk that climate change presents, is magnified by the outsized impact our innovative clients make.” Studies show ESG investing underperforms standard investing which is why sensible states are pulling their retirement money out of firms that traffic in ESG.
Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, blamed banks getting into ESG investing on the Biden administration. “I think that the system [and] the administration has pushed many of these banks into [being] more concerned about global warming than they do about shareholder return,” he said.
You might recall, it was the Democrat Clinton administration’s pushing banks into making unsound housing loans to minorities they couldn’t afford that produced the ‘mother of all financial crises’ in 2008. Another triumph of social factors over sound investing, of important values being sacrificed on the altar of diversity.
Bernie Marcus also said, “these banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues and not concentrating on the one thing they should, which is shareholder returns.” That was certainly true at SVB. There was no chief risk officer at SVB from last April until January. The bank’s European risk officer prioritized diversity initiatives over risk compliance. Jay Ersapah self-describes as a 'queer person of color from a working-class background.’ That’s a lot of diversity boxes checked by one person, no wonder they hired her. Too bad Woke Identity has nothing to do with qualifications and competency. This person spent her time cooking up diversity initiatives for the bank. She organized LGBTQ programs like Lesbian Visibility Day, Trans Awareness Week, a month-long gay pride celebration, and safe spaces for staff. She was featured in a corporate video that burnished the bank’s LGBTQ credentials.
Go Woke, Go Broke, as the saying goes. The only thing missing from this picture is Sam Bankman-Fried, the Democrat toady and corruptocrat who destroyed cryptocurrency because he was preoccupied with being a top donor to the Democrat Party and left-wing causes. A pattern is starting to emerge, the joining of Democrat Left-wing ideology with financial corruption producing disastrous results. We have two dots to connect now - SVB and SBF. There are more out there, I guarantee it. We just don’t know about them yet. And these people want power over us - no way!
3/10/23 - Democrats’ January 6th Shenanigans Symptomatic of Deeper Rot
We’re finding out the Democrats’ phony January 6th narrative isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. According to the Democrats, there was an insurrection at the Capitol that day, but they had to doctor video - adding screams and crowd mayhem sounds - to make their case. Moreover, just released video the Democrats kept hidden clearly shows police escorting peaceful protesters around the Capitol building. Some insurrection. What a crock. The Democrats’ insurrection case is as phony as a three-dollar bill and now the House Republicans have launched an investigation into what the Democrats’ January 6th Committee left out of its report and why.
The Democrats’ January 6th shenanigans are symptomatic of a deeper rot inside the Democrat Party and leadership. They want power and they mean to seize it by any means necessary.
They say one thing and do another. Failed Ohio Democrat U.S. senate candidate Tim Ryan claimed he opposed abortions up to birth but, in effect, voted for them as a state legislator.
They rewrite history. Biden claimed inflation was rampant when he took office, but it was just above 1 percent at the time. They claim the U.S. prospered in the ‘50s and ‘60s with tax rates as high as 91 percent, but the effective rate for top earners after deductions and credits was only 16 percent.
They lie. Biden said he produced the biggest increase in Social Security checks in history, but the benefit formula is tied to inflation. Biden had nothing to do with it. He said the Trump tax cuts only benefitted the rich but a study found they benefitted all income groups. Left-wing CNN debunked both these claims and a half a dozen more, concluding Biden had given false or misleading information in each case.
They bamboozle you with statistics. Biden claimed he cut the deficit, and by the largest amount in history. But this was only after gargantuan COVID spending the year before, and Biden’s deficit still remained higher than Trump’s non-COVID deficit. Biden claimed he added a half a million new jobs in January, but the numbers were actually down when seasonally adjusted.
They misuse government resources to leverage advantages for themselves. Ousted Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had urged public school students to campaign on her behalf for extra credit. A new Biden rule pushes retirement money managers to pressure companies to reduce their carbon emissions and establish racial hiring quotas. A previous Biden order directs federal agencies to register new voters in public housing and wherever else likely Democrats are to be found.
They sabotage enemies. They went to the 30 top advertisers on Twitter after Elon Musk took over and got 14 of them to stop advertising on the platform. They are spending millions of dollars to undermine House Republicans who are investigating the Biden crime family’s financial dealings and other government wrongdoing.
And when they get caught, they just say it’s old news. When it was revealed Twitter censored social media posts on behalf of the Democrat National Committee and the Biden campaign, the White House pooh-poohed the whole thing and said it was just “old news”.
So, you see, the Democrats’ January 6th shenanigans are no accident. They are part of a pattern, stemming from a deep rot produced by a mastery of trickery and deceit carefully and systematically honed over decades. They may call people like me the ‘Deplorables’, but I call them the ‘Despicables’, a title they so richly deserve.
3/9/23 - ‘There Is No Voter Fraud’
Democrats like to claim there is no voter fraud, but there’s still plenty wrong with our elections, as you’re about to see.
A Staten Island grand jury reported rampant ballot harvesting fraud in connection with a city council race in 2021. The vote of a deceased person and others were harvested, dozens through signature fraud on absentee ballots. The situation was called “the poster child for the necessity of voter ID laws.” Sources say the report was about a Republican candidate in a primary election.
That story was about a Republican but, for every story about a Republican committing voter fraud, I see many more about Democrats.
Let’s start with Democrat politicians. Two Democrat politicians in Louisiana were sentenced to 12 months in prison for their part in a vote-buying scheme. The two hired others to show sample ballots to voters with the desired candidates marked, then offered payment and transported voters to the polls. A Democrat city council member in Lodi was arrested for election fraud after allegedly stashing dozens of mail-in ballots at his home, filing multiple false voter registration documents, and pressuring people into voting for him. A Democrat county commissioner in Alabama was charged with illegally harvesting hundreds of ballots and stuffing them into a voting machine in favor of his preferred candidates in two elections. A Democrat Party chair in Stamford received a suspended sentence for forging absentee ballots in a 2015 city election.
The Brooklyn D.A. is investigating local Democrats for adding people’s names to petitions they didn’t sign and demanding bribes. One resident who tried to get a job as a poll worker was told she had to gather petition signatures supporting Democrat Party leaders. This calls to mind the James O’Keefe undercover sting video of a New York City elections commissioner discussing rampant voter fraud in 2016, with people being bused around to vote.
I also see lots of voter fraud stories where party affiliation is not mentioned, but which show just how deep the problems with our elections are. A Georgia man was sentenced to 25 years for voting twice and forging election documents in connection with absentee balloting. There’s that absentee balloting problem again - a real weakness in our elections when not carefully controlled. Two Florida men went to prison for registering dead people to vote and forging names on voter registration forms and ballot petitions. In all, 20 people have been charged with election-related crimes in Florida since an elections crimes unit was established last year, although not all were convicted.
The Heritage Foundation recently added ten new proven cases of election fraud to more than 1,400 others in the Foundation’s Election Fraud Database. Three of the new cases involved felons voting when they were not allowed. In another case, a Florida man was convicted of requesting, filling out, and submitting a ballot in the name of his son who had moved away to New Mexico. The son reported someone had voted in his name, leading to the man’s arrest. Talk about karma.
Elections officials and left-wing groups are also engaged in election fraud. I’ll tell you about that when I come back to this subject next week.
3/8/23 - How Jackbooted Censors Get Up and Get Dressed
Yesterday, I described to you a number of government censorship schemes violating the First Amendment and called the government officials perpetrating them “jackbooted authoritarian government thugs”. You might have thought my language was too harsh. But after seeing the news on this subject in the last 24 hours, I humbly suggest to you my language is not harsh enough.
The Federal Trade Commission demanded Elon Musk “identify all journalists” given access to the Twitter Files, company records showing how Twitter under previous ownership conspired with the government to suppress free speech. The FTC further demanded he explain why he granted them access. Musk responded right away in a tweet: “A shameful case of weaponization of a government agency for political purposes and suppression of the truth!” Got that right. The Twitter Files revealed how the government created blacklists of disfavored accounts, maneuvered to shut down criticism of COVID vaccines, propagate the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, involve intelligence agencies in the suppression of information like Hunter Biden’s laptop, and more.
Identifying journalists was just one of more than 350 demands the FTC made on Elon Musk in his first three months there. The House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee concluded in a report, “These demands have no basis in the FTC’s statutory mission and appear to be the result of partisan pressure to target Twitter and silence Musk.” The report went on to say, ““The FTC’s demands did not occur in a vacuum. They appear to be the result of loud voices on the left—including elected officials—urging the federal government to intervene in Musk’s acquisition and management of the company.... The FTC’s harassment of Twitter is likely due to one fact: Musk’s self-described ‘absolutist’ commitment to free expression in the digital town square.”
Meanwhile, it came to light in the Missouri and Louisiana censorship case that congressional Democrats and the White House threatened social media platforms with loss of their liability shield if they refused to comply with government censorship demands. The demands spanned a range of topics including COVID policies, elections, and Hunter Biden. The shield comes from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and its removal would be an “existential threat” to the company, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has said. Joe Biden said on the campaign trail Zuckerberg should face criminal charges for not censoring campaign ads critical of Biden. After the election, a Biden White House aide slammed Facebook for not moving fast enough to censor. Facebook copiously documented its censorship of supposed ‘misinformation’ for the White House after that. Pressure from the Democrat-controlled House and Senate Intelligence committees led to quick action to take down flagged accounts in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. A deposition in the lawsuit showed the FBI deliberately gave misleading information to Twitter and others so they would censor stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Still more was revealed yesterday. The Biden White House went to work to censor the COVID revelations of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other activists just three days after taking power. Within a month, a White House official was badgering Facebook to remove disfavored information about COVID and to describe its removal policies so they could be maximized to remove as much disfavored information as possible. The official chastised Facebook for letting unwanted information go viral and not stopping the accounts making it happen. The official expressed frustration over how Facebook was not removing so-called “bad information” from search results. “Pinterest doesn’t even show you any results other than official information when you search for ‘vaccines.’ I don’t know why you guys can’t figure it out,” the official chided. Another White House official blasted Facebook for not being “straightforward” and only doing the minimum. Then came this warning: “Internally we have been considering our options on what to do about it.” ‘We have ways of making you talk.’ The White House also warned Google to play ball and do something about COVID vaccine hesitancy - the Big Guy was watching.
This story’s not over. We’re going to learn more about the authoritarian jackbooted thugs of the federal government who have been working to silence dissent in this country. The Missouri-Louisiana case is cranking up and the House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed the head of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board at DHS to testify.
The colonies were reluctant to ratify the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was added explicitly protecting, among other things, the right to free speech. Until the jackbooted thugs succeed in taking the First Amendment off the books, let’s use it to the max and show them they’re not going to get away with silencing dissent. Who the hell do they think they are? This is America.
3/7/23 - I’m From the Government, And I’m Here to Shut You Up
Your federal government is trying to shut you up. That’s very twisted, considering the purpose of government is to protect your rights, including your right to free speech.
During a congressional hearing last month, it came to light the federal government communicated through a private cloud server called JIRA with social media companies and leftist nonprofits to censor American voices in violation of the First Amendment. The federal agencies involved include DHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The leftist nonprofits included the National Association of Secretaries of State, the National Association of State Election Directors, and the Election Integrity Partnership whose partners include centers at Stanford University and the University of Washington. Twitter censor Yoel Roth said he could not recall being involved in JIRA, but documentary evidence showed he was. His actions converted Twitter from a private company into a state actor, an extension of the government willingly engaged in censorship.
Separately, the 17th release of Twitter files shows a government-funded entity and government officials asked Twitter to take action against 40,000 accounts, many of which were ordinary conservatives. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab made the request. The Lab is funded by the U.S. government, specifically, the Global Engagement Center which is an interagency group led by the State Department. Center members include the FBI, DHS, NSA, and the CIA. Its stated mission is to expose foreign disinformation. It secretly engaged subcontractors who embarked on blacklisting accounts that merely cited foreign news sources. In this case, Twitter wasn’t buying it, but media outlets were brought in to pressure Twitter in the name of stopping foreign disinformation. This was reminiscent of another government-sponsored guilt-by-association scheme targeting Americans, the Hamilton-68 dashboard revealed in Twitter file release #15. The Global Engagement Center was throwing government money around - tens of millions of dollars - giving the subcontractors every incentive to come through with phony allegations.
The Biden administration threw more tens of millions at something called the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM). It partnered with Samantha Powers’ agency, USAID, to censor Americans and free speech around the world. This information appeared in a USAID press release that has since been taken off the agency’s website. One of IFPIM’s founders is BBC Media Action. The BBC also founded the Trusted News Initiative which includes such media outlets as the Associated Press, Washington Post, and Reuters. The Initiative appears to have been an extension of government engaged in suppressing truthful information about COVID around the world.
That’s four really big government censorship schemes you can stack on top of the wide-ranging government censorship enterprise being investigated in federal court by the Missouri and Louisiana state attorneys general. But there’s more. Another State Department official asked Twitter to delete accounts the official claimed were controlled by the Russians when they were not. The State Department also gave money to a radical Leftist group based in London, the Global Disinformation Index, which attempted to steer advertising dollars away from conservative news outlets in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere in the name of fighting disinformation. The New York Post was among the conservative outlets targeted.
And don’t forget DHS had started up a Disinformation Governance Board before it was found out and shut down.
Connect the dots and what do you get? A picture of a rogue, out-of-control federal government that is, not only not protecting your rights, but is actively engaged in trying to take them away. All in the name of the truth, of course. But there are very good reasons we don’t want the government in the business of deciding for others what is true and what is not. One of those reasons is that the government can be dead wrong, the most recent example being how spectacularly wrong the federal government was in its bone-headed COVID masking and lockdown policies. Think about that the next time jack-booted authoritarian government thugs say they need to suppress information to save you.
3/6/23 - The Transgender Tide is Turning
Transgenderism has made many inroads into U.S. society, politics, and culture, but the tide is finally turning. Tennessee just passed a law banning transgender drugs and surgery for minors and prohibiting drag shows where they could be seen by children. That makes Tennessee the eighth state to restrict sex change procedures for minors. Legislation is pending in at least 25 other states. No more free ride.
Another indication the tide is turning is the spate of lawsuits being filed against transgender service providers. Everyone who is part of the Transgender Industrial Complex is in legal jeopardy, whether they realize it yet or not. The grounds for legal liability are many.
An 18-year-old detransitioner is suing the Kaiser companies for ignoring her mental health condition and putting her on sex change drugs when she was 13. Doctors performed a double mastectomy on her when she was 15. "I was 15 when you cut into my body, ripped out my breasts, and stitched me back up like I was your rag doll," she said. "You are on the wrong side of history and will always be remembered as child butchers." She is the victim of "ideological and profit-driven medical abuse," her lawyers said in announcing the suit.
Doctors aren’t the only ones facing legal liability. A New York school district is being sued because a teacher tried to manipulate a 9-year-old girl into becoming transgender by calling her ‘Leo’ and using male pronouns to address her. The girl became confused and contemplated suicide. The teacher pushed transgender and gay agendas on the entire class, providing her students graphic books on these subjects, going into detail about transitioning, surgery, and hormones. The school district didn’t tell the parents anything about the child’s condition until after she had developed suicidal ideation.
Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate reintroduced a bill to allow people who received transgender drugs and surgery as minors to sue their doctors with a 30-year statute of limitations. "Unfortunately, radical doctors in the United States perform dangerous, experimental, and even sterilizing gender-transition procedures on young kids, who cannot even provide informed consent," Senator Tom Cotton said. Consent also figures in the civil and possibly criminal investigation by state authorities of a transgender clinic in Missouri. Whether the Republicans’ bill passes or not, it is foreseeable a flood of litigation is coming. Live by social contagion, die by social contagion.
Expect to see more lawsuits arising from injuries from the administration of transgender drugs. A new study shows those taking transgender hormone treatments are significantly more prone to stroke, heart attack, and blood clots. Stroke - seven times more likely. Heart problems - six times more likely. Pulmonary embolism - five times more likely. Lawsuits for drugging and mutilating kids who can’t possibly understand the long-term ramifications of transgender treatment - getting more likely all the time.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is warning about the “unknown and unknowable long-term risks” inherent in so-called “gender-affirming care” in minors. Surgery is irreversible and highly likely to cause sterilization. The best that transitioners can hope for is a “lifelong need for medical, surgical, and psychological care.” Sign me up!
A new one-sided story from the Associated Press minimizes the number of transitioners who express regret or seek to detransition. The story cites studies saying the number is small - one percent - and declining as treatment ‘improves’. But the latest studies cited are from 2021. I wonder what the numbers are now, after the Transgender Industrial Complex has gone hog wild pushing gender transitioning on confused kids without telling their parents. I would bet you will start seeing the numbers of those expressing regret and seeking to detransition grow exponentially. Moreover, the AP story cites research suggesting psychological counseling before starting treatment can reduce the chances for regret and detransitioning. But that’s the whole point of the Missouri investigation and the first lawsuit I described earlier - there was no counseling. Drugs and surgery were the default position, with no counseling and no thought given to the mental health status of the child. There will be suicides. You can bet on it. I can’t wait for the wrongful death suits to start.
3/3/23 - Islam: In Their Own Words
A friend of mine said last week he didn’t see how Islam is much of a threat in America. I said in response you can’t properly judge a situation if you don’t follow the news on it. We’ll see what you think after I bring you up to date about Islam in the United States. Everything I’m about to tell you is from their own words and deeds and, primarily, from Muslims right here at home.
Let’s start with Jew hatred. A Muslim cleric in California called Jews a “bigoted and arrogant breed of people opposed by all living creatures.” He talked about killing Jews on Judgment Day by any means available. He quoted a hadith - Islamic holy scripture - while doing so. The Muslim mayor of Muslim-controlled Hamtramck, Michigan said Jews are “monkeys” who tax “the air we breathe.” For good measure, he approved of a social media post calling black people “animal” and “inhuman”.
Jews aren’t Islam’s only target. Women and children are also at risk. An imam in Miami disparaged women’s rights, saying women in Afghanistan are doing just fine and we should worry about our own women. Women’s rights make women vulnerable to sexual assault, he implied. A Muslim lecturer born in Houston said in a speech wife-beating is acceptable because the Quran permits it. Another Muslim preacher based in the U.S. justified Muslim men taking women as spoils of war and turning them into sex slaves, citing chapter and verse from the Quran for doing so. I don’t know what American woman in her right mind could possibly think Islam is cute or want to get anywhere near it after hearing this.
Speaking of sex slaves, literature found in a mosque in Dearborn Heights, Michigan justified child brides and temporary marriage for sex. You might recall the mosque in Philadelphia that became notorious in 2019 for facilitating child marriages.
Before you men think you’re safe, you should know that an imam in Minnesota preaches, “Non-Muslims are worse than animals.” Muslims should hate non-Muslims, according to a Muslim cleric in New York.
Then there’s the crazytalk. An imam in New York blamed the COVID pandemic on American women showing too much ankle. He’s like the imam in Iran who blamed a drought on women not wearing the hijab. Women can’t possibly have caused the pandemic because everybody knows gay marriage caused the pandemic, right? That’s according to an Islamic political leader in Iraq.
Islamic crazytalk might be humorous, but it’s certainly not harmless. A man in Seattle who killed four people later admitted he was “misguided” by the instructions of Islamic jihad. A prominent American imam said, “If [Christians and Jews] don’t [convert to Islam,] their life and property are halal [free for the taking] for the Muslims.” A Muslim professor in Ohio defended the death fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie. An imam in Nigeria endorsed putting former Muslims to death for apostasy in a sermon based on the Quran which, therefore, could have been delivered anywhere in the world.
It may seem crazy to us, but Islam’s endgame is world domination under sharia law, with violent jihad as the means to achieve it. Several recent news stories serve to remind us this is Islam’s unwavering goal. The man called ‘America’s most popular imam’ met with a leading Islamic televangelist living in exile in Malaysia who has said “every Muslim should be a terrorist.” He has also said he is in solidarity with the ideology of Osama Bin Laden. A Muslim leader in Illinois said Muslims will inherit the earth and a caliphate is coming. Another Muslim cleric, also in Illinois, said, “We all have a higher goal… that is bigger than us, and that is the establishment of the caliphate.” A guest imam at a Philadelphia mosque called for the imposition of sharia on the entire world.
Just because we’re not seeing a lot of violent jihad attacks in America at the moment doesn’t mean they’re not coming or that Muslims have given up their goal of world domination. We’re not seeing a lot of violent attacks because Muslims are steadily making progress in politics and cultural acceptance. They don’t need to be violent at the moment. They have, for the most part, switched to dawah - advancing Islam through non-violent means. But remember this: Muslims have a religious duty to lie to outsiders if it will further the cause of Islam. This is called ‘taqiyah’. Dawah works in a pincer movement with jihad toward the same goal - world domination. In Germany, Muslims admitted deliberately speaking the language of peace and love to the infidels while conspiring to conquer Germany amongst themselves.
Follow the news and you will get a completely different picture of what Muslims in America are up to. You have been warned.
3/2/23 - Stupid Voter Roll Tricks
Election integrity activists are placing renewed emphasis on cleaning up the voter rolls, and here’s why: no matter what scheme the Democrats come up with to steal elections, at the end of the day they still have to find enough records of voters who haven’t voted to put in enough fake votes to change the results of the election. This accounts for the puzzling behavior of Democrats who resist at every turn, in defiance of common sense, removing dead voters and people who have moved out of state from the rolls. About 8 percent of the population moves any given year. That’s a lot of voter records just waiting to be picked. The more voters on the rolls who are guaranteed not to vote, the easier it is for the Democrats to commit election fraud, plain and simple.
But we’re on to their tricks. Judicial Watch sued Democrat-run New York City and got a settlement requiring the city to remove over 440,000 ineligible names from the voter rolls and to maintain the rolls in the future. The city had only removed 22 names in the previous six years which is preposterous for a city of five and a half million people. Federal law requires elections officials to remove ineligible voters from the rolls and the good Democrats of New York City obviously weren’t doing it. Tammany Hall would be proud.
Judicial Watch and another group filed another lawsuit to clean up the rolls in Los Angeles. The suit concluded successfully with Democrat-controlled L.A. County removing 1.2 million ineligible voters from the rolls. The County sent notices to 1.6 million inactive voters who had not voted in two successive federal elections. The County revealed that 643,000 voters stayed on the rolls despite not voting for at least ten years, more inactive voters than anywhere else in the country. Yet, there they were, just waiting for the Democrats to make it look like they voted.
There’s more work to do. Six million Americans are registered to vote in two states, three percent of all voters. An estimated 60,000 of them illegally voted twice in 2020. Others just neglect to get off the rolls when they move, but some of this is strategic with many voters choosing where to cast a single vote where it will make the biggest difference for their side. It is estimated there were 317,000 such strategic voters with dual registrations in the 2020 presidential election. The study looking at this concluded, “Democrats outnumber Republicans 2:1 among double registrants.” Funny how that works. More Democrat fun and games.
More work needs to be done but some unfortunate features of federal law stand in the way and need to be fixed. A provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) prevents states from cleaning their voter rolls less than 90 days before a federal election. When you stack early voting for the general election on top of primaries, that’s a big chunk of the year. Another problem in federal law is the requirement election officials must wait two election cycles before taking people who move off the rolls. In addition, they must first send a notification which, if not done promptly, can result in people who move not being scrubbed from the rolls for six years. If you’re a Democrat, you’re saying ‘Goody! More voters who are pretty much guaranteed not to vote that we Democrats can use to cast fake votes and steal elections.’ You see the problem.
New tools have been created which could crack the nut of bloated voter rolls. One is a new interactive database available free to citizens and election integrity groups around the country to help them find deceased voters, people who vote more than once, and moved-away voters still on the rolls. Another is fractal technology now in use in 12 states that can spot fake voter registrations with hotels, post office boxes, skating rinks, and other bogus addresses. The technology can also ferret out other ruses like elections officials changing zip codes on voter records when mail ballots are sent out, making them undeliverable. The zip codes are changed back later, but the maneuver creates a huge stockpile of mailed ballots floating around out there that can be captured and voted illicitly.
Don’t fail to notice how many times today I’ve mentioned that Democrats are responsible for election fraud and the bloated voter rolls that enable it. Democrats call people like me the Deplorables. But what I’ve told you today about the Democrats and their election fraud schemes should make it easy for you to understand why I call the Democrats the Despicables.
3/1/23 - The Incredible ‘Green Transition’ That Can’t
Joe Biden campaigned on getting rid of fossil fuels. He said he would ban fracking and his Green New Deal proposal would completely replace fossil fuels with clean energy by 2035. He is also on record saying he plans “an incredible transition” of the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels, openly admitting that pain at the pump from high gas prices is part of the plan. His administration is rushing pell-mell into a green energy future, by, among other things, drawing on the $27 billion green energy slush fund in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
There’s just one problem: the green energy future envisioned by the administration and other wild-eyed climate change fanatics is totally impossible and won’t ever happen.
There aren’t enough minerals on earth to make a green transition a reality. Copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt are limiting factors, especially if you think about sustaining all-green energy into the future.
Converting all big trucks, ships, and railroads to electric - even if such a thing were possible - would require 10 times the number of power plants we have now.
To deliver reliable power from unreliable solar and wind, and avoid blackouts, would require more electrical storage capacity than is physically feasible or economically viable. Before we transition everything to green energy, wouldn’t it make sense to demand to see a demonstration project succeed, first? Of course it would. It’s also not too much to ask for a “comprehensive quantitative system-engineering life-cycle analysis of an all-renewable energy system” before we jump into it sight unseen. Such an analysis would include the costs of materials, construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning, and disposal. And let’s see an environmental impact statement, while we’re at it. Green energy is incredibly damaging to the environment, as some on the Left are beginning to recognize. Life-cycle and environmental analysis would undoubtedly show a green transition is not physically or economically feasible.
Green energy fanatics have blinders on that don’t let them see beyond the east and west coasts. The fact is, regardless of what the U.S. does, worldwide use of coal set a record last year and is expected to increase further this year. The U.S. could do somersaults and cartwheels for green energy, but it wouldn’t make one bit of difference to global climate change computer models.
The fanatics want to leave fossil fuels in the ground and stop all oil & gas projects now, but the fact is fossil fuels will still be needed for decades if we are to avoid energy shortages, supply disruptions, and wild price swings.
Another problem is toxic waste. What are we going to do with all the obsolete wind turbines, defunct solar panels, and dead batteries a green transition would entail? No one has figured this out yet. Put them in landfills and toxic minerals will leach into groundwater. Burn them and it will all go into the air.
What happens to electricity prices if you get rid of all natural gas stoves, furnaces, and appliances and require everything to run on green energy? What happens to electricity prices if you get rid of the internal combustion engine and require all vehicles to run on batteries? Parts of Australia where gas drilling and fracking have been all but banned are already seeing double-digit increases. Consumers in U.S. states with renewable energy quotas pay higher energy prices than they otherwise would. Call it the ‘green tax’.
Vegetables are being rationed in Britain because soaring energy costs from overreliance on renewables is causing farmers to switch off their greenhouses before they go bankrupt. That’s just one consequence that flows from unchecked green mania - not enough greens to eat.
Not only would a green transition place upward pressure on electricity prices, there’s another problem, as identified in E.M. Forster’s magnificent short story The Machine Stops: once you centralize everything into one system, everything comes to a grinding halt when the system fails. A single point of failure - like an exclusively all-electric energy system - is a fundamental error well-known to anyone who has studied strategic planning. Move everything to electricity and everything will stop if electricity becomes unavailable or unreliable. That doesn’t happen now with energy sources for power and transportation diversified among coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear, and renewables. There’s a lot to be said for keeping energy diversity and not letting green energy mania put the blinders on. Our food, economic, and national security depend on it.
2/28/23 - Phony Climate Change Narrative: Follow the Evidence
It’s been a bad month for the climate change crowd. More evidence came in that the Left’s phony climate change narrative is a complete crock. NASA satellite data shows there has been no global warming for eight years and five months. One ramification of this truth is that the United Nation’s IPCC predictions of global warming made in 1990 are completely wrong. That’s despite 475 billion tons of CO2 emissions. Moreover, major hurricanes hit a near-record low last year and there’s record cold in the Northeast this year. There’s temperature data going back 350 years and it shows the earth started warming after the Little Ice Age completely due to natural causes. Nobody can claim CO2 emissions were a problem in 1659 when the warming started. Supporters of the modern climate change narrative have never proven CO2 emissions cause the earth to warm up. The also ignore the obvious fact the earth’s temperature varies with the amount of sun activity and how close the earth’s orbit to the sun is at any given time.
Evidence also came in this month that many things the climate change crowd believes just ain’t so. The Left wants you to believe the seas are rising and coastal catastrophes are right around the corner. But NOAA’s coastal sea level tide gauge data continue to show no evidence of accelerating sea level rise. The Climatistas also want you to believe the polar bears are disappearing and wildlife in general is vanishing. Not true. Polar bear populations are increasing, up maybe 6,000 in the last six years. And animal populations are expanding. This includes antelope, elk, mountain lions, and bears, among other species. The recovery of the grizzly bear is so profound that the Fish & Wildlife service might accept Montana’s petition to remove grizzlies from the endangered species list.
Evidence is accumulating that renewable energy sources have problems and adverse consequences of their own. Nearly 80 rural communities rejected or restricted solar projects last year. They’re pushing back against big solar farms gobbling up their land. The Inflation Reduction Act earmarked oodles of cash for wind and solar, but the amount of land needed to build it all out is equivalent to the size of the state of Tennessee. The locals affected aren’t going to stand for it.
Wind power has a number of problems of its own. Four wind turbines have collapsed since 2021, and the blades fall off. Experts are worried the problems are accelerating in newer models. Wind turbines have to be hooked up to diesel generators to keep them warm in cold climates in the winter and the generators leak thousands of gallons of hydraulic oil on to the land. Where do you think it goes from there? There is concern putting wind turbines offshore kills the whales. Also, it’s been known since 2009 that living close to wind turbines has adverse health consequences for humans. The turbines can cause heart disease, tinnitus, vertigo, panic attacks, migraine headaches, and sleep deprivation, according to scientific evidence.
It’s clear renewable energy is not the nirvana the climate crowd makes it out to be. Evidence is also piling up that the Biden administration’s vaunted ‘green transition’ is a pipedream, not Shangri-La, and can’t ever happen. I’ll pick up with that tomorrow.
2/27/23 - Mayorkas’ Border Dream Becomes a Nightmare
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban immigrant, said in 2021: “I came to this country as an infant, brought by parents who understood the hope and promise of America. Today, young children are arriving at our border with that same hope. We can do this.”
But Mayorkas’ dream has become a nightmare for many unaccompanied alien children in the U.S. today. When he was making his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Mayorkas also talked about ending the Trump administration’s policy of returning unaccompanied children to their home countries, one of more than three dozen policy changes the Biden administration has made to open the border. Now, the U.S. government has lost track of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors, leaving them in the clutches of sex traffickers and exploitative employers. These children work at jobs producing brand-name products you probably consume on a regular basis, products sold by Walmart, Target, J. Crew, Ben & Jerry’s, Fruit of the Loom, Ford, General Motors, the list goes on. They help make your Cheerios and your Cheetos. In the process, some have lost limbs in factories, had their spines crushed on construction sites, and a dozen have died on the job since 2017. The lucky ones just have to work a long shift after their school day, with no end in sight.
Mayorkas’ dream is also a nightmare for towns along the southern border. The House Judiciary Committee took testimony at the border on millions of dollars of unpaid hospital bills and the other ravaging effects of illegal immigration on nearby communities. The federal government leaves the hospital bills unpaid. Meanwhile, healthcare for U.S. citizens is delayed or only available in big cities far away. Separately, it was reported a Yuma official said the strain illegal immigration has put on city services has brought the city to the brink of collapse.
Mayorkas’ dream brought death to 70,000 Americans who died of fentanyl overdoses in 2021. The cartels like dealing in fentanyl because it’s easy to produce and doesn’t depend on the weather, like opium. Cartel influence inside the U.S. is growing, with the Sinaloa cartel hiring so many drug smugglers and human traffickers it is now the largest employer in Cochise County, Arizona. Arizona troopers recently seized enough fentanyl in one pick-up truck to kill almost 800,000 people. This problem is not staying at the border. Butler County PA near Pittsburgh formally ended its sanctuary status because of the role illegal immigration is playing in the fentanyl crisis.
Mayorkas’ dream is also killing migrants in unprecedented numbers. The border patrol recorded 880 illegal migrant deaths in the last fiscal year alone, the highest number ever. People trying to cross the border and not making it. And these are only the ones we know about. Who knows how many corpses are still out in the desert somewhere, their bones picked clean by scavengers. On top of their tragedies, we can pile the lives shattered by illegal alien criminals who would have been deported under any sane administration. Mayorkas’ DHS freed more than 1,100 of them in December alone. Who knows how many more future murderers and drunk drivers are among them?
Added costs in the billions, higher taxes, overloaded emergency rooms, increased crime, overcrowded classrooms, destruction of property - Mayorkas dreams and people suffer, in every state and congressional district in the land. Just remember that when you’re eating your Cheetos.
2/24/23 - The Soros DAs: Bad People Up to No Good
Missouri’s Attorney General just fired St. Louis progressive prosecutor Kim Gardner for failing to prosecute violent crimes and for other reasons. Gardner is a Democrat whose campaign was bankrolled by left-wing superhero George Soros. She admitted to prosecutorial misconduct in the case she brought against former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. Also, she was barred from prosecuting Mark McCloskey on gun charges after a judge found she was using the case to fundraise for her reelection campaign. She has a backlog of 3,000 cases she has not brought.
The immediate precipitating factor for her firing was an incident in St. Louis last week in which a high school volleyball player visiting the city was struck by a speeding car, pinned against another car, and lost her legs. The driver of the speeding car was free pending trial for armed robbery after Kim Gardner’s office failed to show up for his first trial and failed to respond when the defendant’s GPS monitor went off 40 times before the crash - meaning they didn’t know where he was half the time.
The volleyball player is not the only victim the Soros DAs have claimed.
Soros DA George Gascon in Los Angeles cut loose a Vietnamese man who had a history of making death threats against Jews. After his release, the man went on to shoot two Jews who were leaving their synagogues.
The Michigan State University shooter who killed three this month had previous felony gun charges dropped to a misdemeanor by a progressive prosecutor. A felony conviction would have barred the shooter from owning firearms. The prosecutor retired in November after her soft-on-crime policies, including her gun charging policy, were widely criticized.
The man who killed a subway employee in Washington three weeks ago had assault charges against him dismissed by a Soros prosecutor in Virginia last year.
Kim Foxx, the notorious Soros prosecutor in Chicago, let a man escape murder charges who had been involved in a shootout with another man. They both had drawn their guns in an altercation, but the prosecutor called the resulting death of one an act of ‘self-defense’.
Back in St. Louis, three teens were released and sent home after they fired shots at police officers.
These are not the only bad results Soros DAs around the country are producing. The Soros DA in Philadelphia is overseeing the deadliest murder wave in the city since the 1990s, with more than 500 murders two years running. Similarly, the murder rate in L.A. under the previously mentioned George Gascon is at a 15-year high. Child sex crimes, domestic violence, and sexual assault have doubled on his watch, according to members of his own office. Crime is spiking in city after city where Soros prosecutors are at the helm of the criminal justice system.
What’s it going to take to get people to realize these Soros prosecutors are bad people and progressive criminal justice reform is a very bad idea? Their thinking is crazy: All black people, including criminals, are Marxist class heroes and are always right no matter what. White people are class enemies and always wrong. Black people are downtrodden and oppressed and, therefore entitled to shoplift. Theft is OK because insurance companies will just keep paying the losses - which is not true, by the way. Get rid of cash bail. Defund the police. Abolish all courts and prisons. All of this is nuttier than a fruitcake but, if you were trying to create chaos and bring down the country - like many suspect George Soros of wanting to do - you couldn’t start in a better place.
2/23/23 - ERIC: The Worm That Got Inside Our Elections
Grassroots activists continue to raise questions about ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, and authorities are beginning to respond.
On the face of things, ERIC is a private organization that helps its 32 member states clean up and maintain their voter rolls. It compares state voter registration data against motor vehicle licensing information and the Social Security master death file. Then it tells states which voters are dead, have moved out of state, or are registered to vote in more than one state. Critics say ERIC is, at root, nothing more than a partisan get-out-the-vote drive for Democrats.
Louisiana withdrew from ERIC last month, citing “concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports about potential questionable funding sources and that possibly partisan actors may have access to ERIC network data for political purposes.”
More recently, Alabama left ERIC. The new Secretary of State said he did not want a private group having access to voter data, including driver’s license numbers, contact information, and partial social security numbers including those of minors.
In addition to partisan connections and privacy concerns, critics also say ERIC does a bad job, producing bloated voter rolls in member states. Florida, for example, is a member of ERIC but has more than 100 percent of all possible citizens of voting age on its rolls.
Critics point to ERIC’s initial funding which was provided by leftist super-hero George Soros. They also point to an interlocking directorate in the person of David Becker, a high-profile Democrat election lawyer who is the architect of ERIC. Becker started at the left-wing group People for the American Way and was part of the Obama Justice Department. He is described as a “hardcore Leftist” who “couldn’t stand conservatives.” He went on to create the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) which distributed almost $70 million in private Zuckerberg money through official election offices to reach voters primarily in Democrat counties in the 2020 presidential election. Becker is still a member of ERIC’s board.
Lawsuits have been filed against four jurisdictions for allowing ERIC to block public inspection of voter registration records. ERIC’s contract with states requires them to hide the information from the public, in violation of federal law, the suits allege.
ERIC is also the subject of other lawsuits for sharing valuable and detailed voter registration data like phone numbers from four states with at least one outside leftist group, a practice not authorized in federal law. ERIC requires members to identify and register unregistered voters and - this is the heart of the matter - they all turn out to be likely Democrat voters: minorities, students, etc. According to the lawsuits, ERIC is shipping voter data to - this will sound familiar - CEIR, the leftist group I mentioned earlier involved in goosing Democrat voter registration with Zuckerbucks. Critics say ERIC data, developed with taxpayer money, is helping the Democrats microtarget their most likely supporters who are not yet registered to vote.
Conservative activists continue to campaign against ERIC in Michigan, Virginia, and elsewhere. However, there is a practical problem: finding a good substitute. People suggest different things, but an obvious alternative has yet to emerge. When ERIC was created, it displaced a then-new state-run interstate cross-check system for maintaining voter rolls. State-run systems will be more expensive, but will pay big dividends in terms of election integrity, so they just might be the way to go.
2/22/23 - Abortion Pills: Risky Business
New battlegrounds are taking shape after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. One is abortion pills, which now account for more than half of all abortions. Abortion advocates are determined to turn the nation’s 27,000 pharmacies into new abortion clinics. Conservatives are working to keep that from happening.
Twenty Republican state Attorneys General warned Walgreens and CVS sending abortion pills by mail violates federal law despite Biden administration claims to the contrary. Walgreens said it would not dispense the abortion pill mifepristone in Kansas after receiving a warning from the state’s Attorney General. Texas filed a lawsuit to block a Biden administration rule requiring pharmacies to fill abortion pill prescriptions nationwide, even in states where abortion is illegal. A conservative legal group sued the FDA for approving abortion pills on the pretext pregnancy is an ‘illness’ and without studying their safety. Abortion activists have answered with a litigation trump card of their own, arguing in a case filed in West Virginia that states can’t ban drugs approved by the FDA.
The Biden administration has refused to divulge information about its decision to expand the use of the abortion drug mifepristone. A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has been filed to pry it loose, in the belief the administration did not appropriately review the evidence of the safety risks before moving ahead.
Advocates claim abortion pills are safe - “safer than Tylenol” they say - but that’s a typical Leftist con job. The fact of the matter is abortion pills can kill you. A 19-year-old woman died from septic shock after taking an abortion pill. In the U.S., at least 28 deaths have been linked to abortion pills, so it’s Russian roulette when you pull the trigger. Moreover, one in 17 women who take abortion pills end up needing hospitalization.
Death and injury are not the only risks of abortion pills. There are reports of women being coerced into taking them against their will. Boyfriends can slip abortion pills into a woman’s drink. Women often misjudge how far along their pregnancy is, resulting in late-term babies being born alive at home after an abortion pill is taken. Then there’s the trauma of seeing your aborted baby’s body after the abortion pill does its damage. The psychological effects of chemical abortions are just beginning to be studied, but it’s already clear grief, shame, regret, and remorse can persist for years.
The Left doesn’t make full disclosure of these risks, because they don’t want you to know about them. They don’t care if you die in the process, they just want you to push the ‘easy’ button and thank them with your vote for the privilege. Not only do abortion advocates not talk about the risks of abortion pills, they go out of their way to perfect the art of the con. They gladly sell abortion pills to girls as young as 15 through the mail without a medical exam that would determine how far along they are, and will do so without the parents’ knowledge or consent. Heaven forbid anyone stop and think about the risks. Abortionistas also leverage their control of government to expand the use of abortion pills without discussing the risks. New York City gives them away for free. The law in New York also requires health insurers to provide them as part of maternity coverage.
Here’s another thing abortion supporters don’t want you to know: Women who take an abortion pill and experience regret right away can get help reversing a chemical abortion. Over 4,000 babies have been saved this way in the last ten years. The Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN) has 1,200 medical professionals who are committed to helping women and saving lives. Why isn’t the Left talking about that? So much for “choice” and “control over your own body”.
2/21/23 - It’s About Time: Transgender Clinic Investigated for Child Abuse
Missouri’s Attorney General gave new details about his investigation into the St. Louis gender clinic where a trans whistleblower alleged medical providers are going way too far in pushing sex change drugs and surgery on kids.
The investigation is quite wide-ranging. It involves multiple state agencies and promises to leave no stone unturned. Investigators are looking for consumer protection infractions, professional license violations, Medicaid fraud, parental consent fraud, and crimes. The validity of parental consent is at issue because parents were falsely told their children would commit suicide unless they were allowed to transition. Coercion is not consent. Valid parental consent was also lacking because clinicians did not make full disclosure about the long-term adverse health consequences of sex change drugs and surgery. As for the criminal aspects of the investigation, the clinicians involved could end up facing child abuse charges. School officials, who have a legal duty to report child abuse, may be complicit, instead. The investigation will determine whether they conspired with clinicians to form a school-to-clinic pipeline of steady business for the clinic. I hope the Attorney General looks at whether bribe money changed hands in that corrupt transaction.
Several other aspects of Missouri’s investigation are worth noting. Children are getting confusing information about gender from Chinese-owned TikTok, advice that is overriding their own life’s experience with their own bodies. The clinic pushes sex change drugs and surgery as a first resort without any thought to psychological assessments in individual cases. The clinic does not follow transitioners long-term to see what the adverse consequences of clinic-prescribed treatment might be. Puberty blockers are addictive and the clinic moves children into cross-sex hormones virtually a hundred percent of the time.
Other countries have pulled back from the gender affirmation model now ascendant in the U.S. for children. These countries have restricted or banned dangerous treatments and now employ psychological evaluation as the first resort for minors presenting gender dysphoria.
Missouri’s investigation is an indication the tide may be turning but, for the moment, the phony transgender narrative just keeps getting crazier. Social workers in Pennsylvania must now report whether newborns within their purview self-identify as ‘nonbinary’. Huh? You heard that right: "I have to ask clients, 'Is your 10-day-old male, female, or nonbinary?,'" one social worker said. Another crazy parent pushing transitioning on their kids came to light in recent days. A mother is transitioning her 4-year-old boy because he likes to dress up and doesn’t want to play tee ball. The story revealed the child’s daycare center may have been planting confusing thoughts about gender in the child’s mind. In any event, this parent is engaged in child abuse because most children grow out of such temporary phases.
There are reasons to hope public sentiment on this issue will flip soon. The New York Times finally had to admit gender transitioning is dangerous. A long story cited other countries pulling back, doctors who won’t engage in the practice, increasing numbers of transitioners expressing regrets, and the pressure on government authorities coming from activists to approve sex change drugs and surgery for children before the ramifications were understood. Another media outlet published a story on adverse consequences of vaginoplasty surgery including severe pain, difficulty urinating, and sexual dysfunction.
South Dakota just banned sex change drugs and surgery for youth. Other recent moves to challenge the status quo have come from conservative activist groups who are gathering information, mounting publicity campaigns, and supporting litigation against schools for secret transitioning, as well as against medical providers and the Biden administration’s expansive gender identity rules. A schoolteacher in California got fired for refusing to lie to parents to keep their child’s professed gender identity secret from them. This teacher courageously stood up for her personal beliefs at the cost of her job. More like her, please.
This story illustrates how the Left spreads its bad ideas under the radar using coercion, scare tactics, and pressure to adopt policies before anyone takes a close look at them. We can only hope that everyone roped into the Left’s enterprise of gender transitioning for children will have second thoughts now that legal jeopardy is starting to attach. Nothing like lawsuits and criminal charges to focus the mind.
2/20/23 - Diversity Narrative Fall Down and Go Boom
It was an embarrassing moment for the Left’s phony diversity narrative. I’ve commented previously on the narrative’s many faults, one of which is the deliberate attempt to lower standards of performance throughout society.
Last month, Finland chose a transgender to represent the country at the opening ceremonies of the European Figure Skating Championships. It was an amateur performance during which this person, a biological male dressed like a woman, fell on the ice and was helped up. [video here] This person was not chosen for merit or competence. This person was chosen to check the diversity, equity, and inclusion box. I feel sorry he had to be humiliated in front of a worldwide audience. He was exploited by virtue-signaling leftists who ride identity politics to their own personal wealth and power.
Too bad the consequences of lower standards don’t stay on the ice. One commentator goes so far as to blame the recent rash of airline incidents to the aviation industry’s new racial and gender quotas for pilot training programs. When you look at the dumbing down of medical school in the name of promoting equity and inclusion, you have to wonder whether a single-minded focus on diversity kills. The question came up in connection with the recent death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five black police officers in Memphis. News accounts painted a picture of a short-handed police department desperate to fill slots and lowering hiring standards in order to get enough officers on the force. They hired recruits with less work experience and even criminal records. They also lowered physical fitness standards and dropped the running test entirely because too many people were failing.
But you don’t have to believe the diversity narrative kills to recognize standards are deteriorating in a number of areas, and the problems that’s causing. A large county in Virginia has implemented “equitable grading” to eliminate racial disparities in grade outcomes - no penalties for late assignments, standing permission to retake tests, and everybody gets points even if they never turn in assignments.
Not exactly the best preparation for high school, where the work gets tougher. But it doesn’t matter because a number of states have dropped graduation tests to graduate high school. Instead of working to bring poor and minority students up to standard, places like Oregon and New Mexico have done away with a testing requirement to get a high school diploma. Other states like New Jersey are considering the move.
Critics say lowering expectations in high school guarantees students will have trouble handling college courses. But not to worry. Colleges are now firing professors whose courses are too hard. A professor in California found another solution - just give every student an ‘A’ to decolonize the classroom. That’s right, high standards are just another bad idea imposed on you by your colonialist oppressors.
So is it any wonder med students at the University of Minnesota now pledge to fight "white supremacy” and study indigenous medicine?
Critics have warned lower standards are now infecting a number of professions, including science, accounting, firefighting, and the military. How this will come back to bite people is a story yet to be written, but you can start to imagine the fallout.
But let me conclude by suggesting one other ramification of lowering standards: Psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden wrote books arguing that competence - the ability to do things well - is the indispensable key to good mental health. If all you know how to do is hold a participation trophy, not only are you being robbed of a full human experience, you are on the road to mental illness, no matter what identity group the Left wants to put you in.
2/17/23 - Liberal Policies Hurt People (Again)
Well, well, well. A crack in the edifice and a realization that liberal policies hurt people.
I’m talking about San Francisco, where a city council member introduced a measure to exclude illegal aliens who get arrested for dealing fentanyl from the protection of the city’s no-deportation sanctuary policy. Roughly 70,000 people died from fentanyl and other opioid overdoses in America last year. San Francisco officials believe illegal aliens make up the vast majority of fentanyl distributors in the city.
Sanctuary protection is not the only liberal policy that hurts people. Here are some more:
California’s population is down 500,000 in the last two years. People fled California cities plagued with homelessness, high crime, high housing costs, and lingering COVID restrictions. Every single one of these things has roots in liberal policies, policies that hurt people. Businesses are also fleeing California because of liberal policies. Elon Musk called California the “land of overregulation, overlitigation, and overtaxation” on his way out the door. All preventable human-caused disasters.
It’s much the same story in Portland, which has lost population three years in a row. “In Portland, many liberals are dodging stray bullets, losing catalytic converters to thieves, and sidestepping tents. Then they open their tax bills,” one news outlet wrote. Even liberal media are calling Portland “broken” and saying everybody hates it. “Portland has switched from attracting new arrivals to repelling its current citizens,” a left-wing alternative weekly candidly admitted. What do you expect when Democrat politicians let Antifa run riot without consequence and business owners get robbed so many times their insurance companies stop paying off? Liberal policies hurt people.
Not convinced yet? I’m loaded for bear today:
High taxes, not only in California, but in New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts have caused residents to pick up and move to low-tax states in recent years.
Family and medical leave laws in the U.S. have resulted in lower wages for women and kept their pay lower than men’s.
Government race preferences that give special benefits to companies owned and controlled by minorities discourage business formation with people of another race and discriminate against interracial couples.
Affirmative action puts minorities in elite colleges they can’t handle, whereas they might have thrived somewhere else.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want a wealth tax on billionaires. ‘Eat the Rich’ may sound good to you, but you should know that, of the wealth taxes in 12 European countries in 1990, only three remain. Why? Because people flee. According to the OECD, the wealth tax “was expensive to administer, it was hard on people with lots of assets but little cash, it distorted saving and investment decisions, it pushed the rich and their money out of the taxing countries—and, perhaps worst of all, it didn't raise much revenue.”
More schools are teaching phonics because the liberals’ favored whole sight reading method doesn’t work for most students and actually cripples some for life. Even the New York Times has had to admit phonics works.
Liberal policies have been in the ascendancy for decades despite evidence right in front of our noses they don’t work and they actually hurt people. Three generations of insanity is enough. It’s time to stop demonizing the political Right which has the best ideas and return to common sense solutions for what ails America.
2/16/23 - Private Financing of Elections: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come
The private financing of government election offices sparked controversy in the 2020 election and prompted bans on the practice in 24 states. Such financing came to be called ‘Zuckerbucks’ after Mark Zuckerberg gave $350 million to a nonprofit named CTCL (Center for Technology and Civic Life) to distribute to election offices around the country, ostensibly to help them cope with the COVID emergency. Critics rightly say the resulting election office activities ended up being thinly disguised voter registration drives to benefit Democrats. It is true some of the money went to Republican-leaning counties, but that was just a fig leaf. The preponderance of the grants went to Democrat areas. The Texas Attorney General launched an investigation into whether the stated desire to protect voters from COVID was just a pretext to disguise private electioneering efforts through government instrumentalities.
So it is with great sadness I must report to you Zuckerbucks didn’t die in the jurisdictions they were banned. There are moves to repeal the ban in Virginia and elsewhere and, of more immediate concern, Democrats are finding ways to get around the bans.
In 2022, CTCL launched the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence with $80 million. The Alliance is a coalition of left-wing funders and advocacy groups that support more mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day registration - all vectors of election fraud. The Alliance acts as a “support system” for local election offices, giving them coaching, guidance, training, consulting services, and other resources. All in the name of good government, you see. A think tank took a look at these activities and concluded they are designed to “systematically influence” election offices and push progressive voting policies.
Georgia is one of the states banning Zuckerbucks, but the law is weak. The Alliance was able to give a $2 million grant to DeKalb County, Georgia - in Atlanta’s metropolitan area. The law only prohibited private money from going directly to election offices, so the Alliance proposed to send money for election purposes to the county finance department and the county council voted to accept it. This is a loophole in the law you could drive a truck through, and they did. Nothing in Georgia law prevents a local government from accepting private money and allocating it to election administration. Voila! Zuckbucks 2.0.
That’s one dodge. Here’s another: OK, so 24 states banned private financing going directly to local election offices. How about we give election offices paper ‘credits’ which they can then redeem for election-related services from Alliance partners? Another loophole - the Alliance pays the partners, not the election offices, but the effect is the same. Pretty slick, don’t you think?
CTCL announced its first cohort of election offices wishing to become local ‘centers of election excellence’. They’re in seven states, including states where private financing of elections is officially banned. A county in one of the states - North Carolina where a ban was vetoed - has already taken private money to defend itself against the flak it was getting for taking private money. CTCL’s contract requires local election offices to submit an ‘improvement’ plan showing it will change the way it operates to please CTCL. This gives CTCL a window on internal operations which it will presumably use to maximize advantage for Democrats in future elections.
This is insidious. The Democrats hold out a bag of gold and worm their way into official election administration, giving people even less reason to trust our elections in the future. None dare call it a ‘threat to democracy’.
2/15/23 - Government Agencies Covering Up COVID Vaccine Injuries
A whistleblower report, originally provided to Congress in January of last year, accused the military of ignoring or failing to take seriously accounts of COVID vaccine injuries among service members. You will recall the Defense Department mandated the vaccine for all service members and denied most claims for exemptions.
COVID vaccine injuries reported by military personnel included vertigo, chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, and tinnitus. An Air Force reservist had a stroke after being vaccinated and suffered career-ending eye problems after a second dose. An Air Force fighter pilot instructor was diagnosed with heart inflammation. The instructor had applied for an exemption due to previous adverse reactions to other vaccines, but was told no. Another service member was told, “The chief medical doc on base literally told me, ‘While you’re the perfect candidate for an exemption, we’ve been directed to deny all medical requests.'” Others were told “there’s no way the vax caused their symptoms.” The military even harassed soldiers who refused to get vaccinated.
The military stuck its head in the sand despite a June 2021 DOD study finding high rates of heart inflammation among previously healthy male service members who were vaccinated. Also, an Army medical officer noticed big increases in a military medical database of cancers, tumors, blood clots, male infertility, and other problems coinciding with COVID vaccination in 2021. The Defense Department went back and changed the numbers in earlier years in the database to make 2021 look normal, the whistleblower alleged.
Critics accuse the military of minimizing and covering up COVID vaccine injuries to protect the Biden administration’s phony narrative the vaccines are ‘safe and effective’.
The military is not the only agency pushing the ‘safe and effective’ narrative while covering up contrary information.
The CDC knew adverse event reports were flooding in, but waited 15 months before doing its first safety signal studies on the data.
The FDA found possible heart problems with a COVID vaccine in early 2021, but waited five months to reveal the information to the public and ten more months to submit a study for publication.
The FAA loosened its standards for acceptable heart performance among pilots, but refused to release the data behind its decision when a media outlet asked for it.
The CDC found a safety signal for stroke in the elderly receiving the Pfizer vaccine, but then unidentified officials said the signal disappeared after the agency used a different statistical test. A medical professor criticized the CDC’s flip-flop, saying “you can't just run different stat tests until you get the result you want." A CDC official then offered the excuse the agency didn’t want to publicize the stroke signal because it could "fuel anti-vaccine sentiment....” Ya think? The CDC won’t respond further or explain why it’s withholding the safety signal data.
The FDA also performs safety signal studies, using a different statistical formula. It won’t release records showing the results of their data mining, claiming the results are just preliminary deliberative discussions and, therefore, not disclosable - a common agency argument in Freedom of Information Act cases.
These agencies are hiding behind statistical hogwash when a published critique put them on notice their methodologies were flawed and failing to show obvious safety problems with the COVID vaccines. The critique was brought to the CDC’s attention, but the agency ignored it.
Which brings me to my own FOIA suit in federal court. I want the records showing what decisions officials high up in the CDC, FDA, and overall HHS leadership - including the cabinet secretary - made about whether or not to study the obvious safety problems with COVID vaccines. The Justice Department is fighting me tooth and nail, but I will stay on the case until I get the records I want or the court decides I can’t have them.
2/14/23 - The China Threat
The Chinese spy balloon is a good reminder we cannot take our national security for granted. Among the many threats we face is an increasingly assertive China which gives every appearance of preparing for war.
While America still leads in nuclear missiles and warheads, it was recently announced China now has more land-based fixed and mobile ICBM launchers than the U.S. does.
China claims it has become the third country - after the U.S. and Canada - to build a quantum computer. It also claims it is breaking some tough encryption schemes and will have the ability to break them all once it builds a big enough quantum machine. That’s a worry for the world financial system and U.S. national security.
The chief of U.S. naval intelligence warns China’s military is building up in every area for war. He says the buildup is one of the fastest in human history and goes far beyond what China needs for its own defense. He cited China’s new capabilities in missiles, long-range weapons, and electronic warfare. He also cited China’s navy which now has a global reach and is pressing for control in parts of the Pacific. This comes at a time when the U.S. is reducing air power in the Pacific because we no longer devote the resources necessary to sustain the effort. “Weakness is provocative,” as former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used to say.
Concern is growing over Chinese purchases of U.S. farmland and food production assets like Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the U.S. Steps are being taken to block China from purchasing 370 acres to build a corn processing plant near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, but Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis remains concerned about Chinese ownership of farmland, especially near military bases, given that China is a hostile nations whose interests are opposed to ours.
Chinese ownership of farmland has gotten a fair amount of attention but Chinese ownership of private American high school military academies with officer training programs has not. Chinese interests now own the New York Military Academy, Donald Trump’s alma mater. They also own the Florida Preparatory Academy. The New York school is getting federal contracts. You have to wonder how these future military officers in these schools are being taught to regard China.
Lastly, China’s military poses an increasing threat in space. China has developed reusable spacecraft, allowing it to build up its capabilities in space quickly. According to a Pentagon report, China is deploying anti-satellite missiles, orbiting killer robots, lasers, and jammers which it will use to “blind and deafen” enemy forces - not only in space - but on the ground.
As you can see, Chinese spy balloons may be the least of our worries. And worried we should be, given that Chinese officials have openly talked about world domination from Mao on down.
2/13/23 - Blowing the Lid Off the Transgender Lobby’s Pack of Lies
The Missouri Attorney General is investigating a transgender clinic in St. Louis for allegedly harming hundreds of children after a whistleblower published an account of shocking revelations there. The whistleblower, who worked at the clinic in question, self-describes as “a queer woman ... politically to the left of Bernie Sanders... married to a transman.....”
The whistleblower provided a sworn affidavit alleging children are being given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without an individualized assessment of their particular cases, while telling parents such assessments are being done. Children, in some cases, are being given these drugs without parental consent or even after consent has been revoked. Drugs continue even after patients report adverse effects from taking them. An unstudied pancreatic cancer drug is being prescribed because it can grow breasts, even though it can and does poison the liver. In some cases, the clinic proceeds with transitioning even where it is clear the parents are pressuring the child into it. The whistleblower provided documentation the clinic has been billing state healthcare programs unlawfully.
Clinic personnel told parents their children would probably commit suicide if not allowed to transition. “We lied to them all the time,” the whistleblower said. “These doctors would push, and push, and push … and somehow the doctors thought that was a true good consent.” True consent was also lacking because the clinic failed to inform kids about the foreseeable adverse consequences of transgender drugs and surgery. There are words in the law for these actions, words like ‘undue influence’ and ‘fraud’. To show you the kids didn’t really understand what they were getting into, the whistleblower recalls one girl who had her breasts removed and then, three months later, asked for them to be put back on.
The clinic’s actions actually made impressionable mixed-up kids more suicidal. “I have seen puberty blockers worsen the mental health outcomes of children,” the whistleblower said. “Children who have not contemplated suicide before being put on puberty blockers have attempted suicide after.” The clinic doesn’t track negative outcomes so they don’t have to report them to new patients, the whistleblower believes. How convenient.
The whistleblower described the atmosphere as “cult-like”, with doctors hell-bent on transitioning kids and unwilling to listen to contrary facts. It’s a good bet the same mentality and unethical practices prevail in other gender clinics, so the whistleblower is calling for a nationwide halt to the procedures. Britain ordered its only transgender clinic closed last year after similar allegations were documented there.
The word ‘cult’ was also used by a lesbian mother who led her 4-year-old son to transition into a girl and ended up regretting it. The whole phony transgender narrative began to unravel for her when her other son, who previously showed no signs of confusion, started asking to be a girl, too. The mother questioned her own assumptions and ended up raising her sons as boys. "This experience for me has felt like leaving a cult, a cult that would have me sacrifice my child to the gods of gender ideology, in the name of social justice and collective liberation," the woman wrote. "I have left this cult, and I am never turning back."
She might be out, but the transgender lobby is still working to rope more people in. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is fighting state bills banning sex change drugs and surgery for minors. There’s big money at stake: the market for transgender surgery grew to over $2 billion last year.
So there are powerful forces at work, but they can be beaten. A university health system in South Carolina shut down its gender clinic after government records requests exposed the fact the clinic was treating children as young as four.
Four-year-olds? This is sick. All so that some people can make a buck and pursue their left-wing political agendas. The Left is in a very dark place. And, as far as the Left’s phony narratives go, transgenderism is a particularly weak one, but it’s having ruinous consequences, consequences we should not allow.
2/10/23 - Obamacare Ropes More Into Government Dependency
The Biden administration is crowing about the record number of sign-ups for Obamacare this year. They shouldn’t be.
A record 16.3 million people signed up in the latest enrollment period. Supporters trumpet the notion this is double the number who signed up when Obamacare first became available. Sounds great, right? Not so fast. When they were selling us the Obamacare legislation, they promised 21 million people would sign up right away. That’s never happened, and they’re still 30 percent short of the goal they set for themselves ten years ago.
Besides, it’s no mystery why enrollment went up this year. Obamacare subsidies have been jumbo-sized and the jumbo subsidies have been extended through 2025. Now, some people don’t have to pay for it at all. They get zero-dollar premiums. If you give it away for free, of course more people will sign up. No mystery there. So now they’re practically giving it away and they’re still 30 percent short of where they thought they would be a decade ago. That’s not a triumph. It’s an utter abysmal failure. The failure is not unexpected; only half of Americans approve of Obamacare and, now as we’ve seen, most people don’t want it, unless it’s handed to them on a silver platter.
It’s not hard to see why people don’t want it. First of all, lots of the best hospitals and doctors won’t take Obamacare. Obamacare patients don’t have access to top-tier care. Doctors hate Obamacare because it adds layers of paperwork to their burdens.
Second, Obamacare has led to concentration in the individual insurance market. Prior to Obamacare, there were lots of insurers competing on price and features. Obamacare standardized many of those features and, in addition, caused lots of insurers to drop out. I read one article crowing about how most of the country now has three insurers in their state Obamacare exchange. Only three? Here’s what happens when the market becomes concentrated and you only have three companies competing for business, according to a recent GAO report:
So what’s being covered up by the jumbo subsidies is the fact that premiums are rising behind the scenes, because of Obamacare. Insurers can hike prices because federal subsidies ensure consumers don’t feel the pain. By the way, the overall price tag for those subsidies is a lot higher than originally estimated.
Obamacare is also causing overall healthcare costs to go up. The insurance taxes in Obamacare get passed along to consumers. Obamacare was supposed to keep people out of expensive emergency rooms, but ERs are more crowded than ever.
But the most insidious effect of Obamacare is increasing dependency on government. People are being trained to rely on government as the answer for everything instead of relying on themselves and looking to the private sphere for solutions to what they need. The law putting jumbo Obamacare subsidies in place also pushed welfare spending further into the middle class. A family of four that makes $111,000 a year is now eligible for subsidized health insurance. That’s crazy. Most people who take the subsidies already had health insurance, so government dependency is crowding out private insurance.
There’s been commentary recently that we’re turning into a nation of welfare moochers. People can make $80,000 to $100,000 a year in Obamacare subsidies and other government benefits for sitting around doing nothing. That’s not normal, healthy, or sustainable. As the economists like to say, things will continue until they can’t.
2/9/23 - Democracy Gets Lost in the Mail
There are still plenty of problems with our elections process. Today, I look at one of them - mail-in voting. It was expanded in the COVID era, and Democrats want to cement it in place even though the COVID emergency rationale for it has disappeared.
In 2021, California passed a law to send every registered voter a ballot in the mail, automatically, for every election. In the 2022 election in California, election officials rejected over 226,000 mail-in ballots, primarily because they arrived too late to be counted. These people thought their vote would count when they put their ballot in the mail, but they were wrong. They were disenfranchised by the system California put in place. How is a system that foreseeably disenfranchises so many people not a threat to democracy?
There are other problems with California’s mail-in system. Some people forgot to sign their mail-in ballots. They were disenfranchised, too. Dead people are sent ballots in such a system when voter rolls are not kept up to date. Seven other states joined California in mailing ballots to every voter in the pandemic so, undoubtedly, the same problems can be found elsewhere. Ideally, mass mail-in voting should be abolished but, in states where it’s here to stay, a driver’s license or other documentation should be required and all ballots arriving after election day should not be counted, an elections expert says.
Mail-in voting presents additional problems in states that allow ballot harvesting. Political operatives can collect mail ballots at people’s homes, then fill them out, alter them, or simply fail to deliver them if the vote is not what the operatives want.
The best election security is at a polling place under bipartisan supervision. The voter’s identity can be verified, the ballots are put in locked and sealed boxes, and the possibility of voters being pressured to vote a certain way by family members or party operatives cannot enter in. And nothing gets lost in the mail, or stolen, altered, or forged. This might not seem like a big deal to you but, remember, 20 million mail ballots went missing in the 2020 election. In the 2022 mid-term elections in Nevada, three out of every four ballots mailed to every voter in the state were not mailed back. What happened to all these missing ballots? Who got ahold of them and for what purpose? Now you can start to see the scale of the problem. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court recently turned away a challenge to mail-in voting in Pennsylvania that could have invalidated similar laws elsewhere.
I plan to come back next week and tell you about the continuing problem of private financing of our elections by left-wing groups. Despite new laws passed in several states, the problem has not gone away and you’ll want to know how your vote is affected.
2/8/23 - Democrats Crazy Like a Fox on Crime
I don’t know about the State of the Union, but the state of Seattle is abysmal and rapidly deteriorating under Democrat rule. Crime is at a 15-year high after the city moved to defund the police. Homicides increased 24 percent in 2022 over 2021. Overall crime is up 4 percent over an all-time high in 2021. Aggravated assault and car theft contributed heavily to the statistics. The city’s underfunded police force is down 130 officers. In 2020, the crazy far-Left Democrat Woke mayor said she wanted to ‘reimagine policing’ and now the results are plain for all to see.
Seattle’s mayor is not the only Democrat who has produced such abysmal results. Eleven U.S. cities - all run by Democrats - are among the 50 most dangerous cities in the world. The list includes the “robbery capital” of the U.S. - Baltimore, and Detroit where 220 police officers left the force last year. Chicago’s wackadoodle Democrat mayor now openly admits she can’t fix the high crime rate in her city, so people need to stop using cash in order to bring crime down. D.C.’s Democrat city council recently voted to reduce penalties for carjacking, robbery, and gun-related felonies. This is after a wave of carjackings in the city. How nuts can you get?
California is right up there in bringing the crazy. Governor Newsom signed a law ending loitering arrests for prostitution. Now prostitutes solicit sex work in front of a Catholic grade school in Oakland all day every day. Other California laws have brought about the early release of pedophiles from prison. A former D.A. warns more children will be harmed as a result. Felonies are being dismissed in Riverside, California near L.A. for lack of a speedy trial because there’s a judge shortage. One reason there’s a judge shortage is because crime is way up.
Other Democrat-controlled jurisdictions are not far behind in craziness. In Democrat-controlled St. Louis, 149 cars were stolen in just one recent week. The Democrat mayor ran on an anti-police platform and the Democrat circuit attorney is one of those progressive prosecutors who won’t prosecute. In Democrat-controlled New York, children under 12 will no longer be arrested or prosecuted for most crimes. They’ll go to social services for treatment, instead. The one exception is homicide, but a former police chief warned violent juvenile offenders are getting younger and younger.
I’m sorry, but things going in this direction is no accident. This is not just the ordinary ‘soft-on-crime, tough-on-crime’ argument we’ve been having for decades. This is the far-Left and its willing accomplices in the Democrat Party deliberately creating chaos and pushing the U.S. off a cliff. George Soros has spent $40 million to elect 75 progressive prosecutors around the country who won’t prosecute. A bail fund of the kind championed by Kamala Harris received $33 million in donations in 2021. Similar bail funds are currently operating in 37 states. The criminals being bailed out have gone on to commit murder and other serious crimes.
Once again, I find myself saying ‘follow the money’. The far-Left desires these outcomes and is putting up money to make them happen. Chaos is a weapon; it’s political warfare. The Democrats want chaos to soften people up for big government solutions that further empower Democrats. Stop this ride, I wanna get off.
2/7/23 - COVID Vaccines: Authoritarian Jabberwocky
Yesterday, I told you about a slew of experts calling for a halt to COVID vaccinations because of the unprecedented huge number of adverse reaction reports coming in from the U.S. and around the world. In the U.S. alone, more than 34,000 people have died shortly after getting vaccinated. I’m seeing lots of stories about people dying suddenly and more stories about ‘excess deaths’ among the vaccinated above normal rates. But today I want to focus on other medical problems the vaccines may be causing. The list is as long as your arm.
CDC records show more than 18 million people were so injured by their Pfizer or Moderna shot, they ended up in the hospital. We’re talking hospitalization rates of 8 percent compared to 2.1 percent for the total population from COVID itself. The CDC withheld this information until a court forced the agency to release it.
Heart problems have received the most publicity. I will only note here the FAA lowered its standards late last year for acceptable heart performance among pilots because, apparently, heart damage from the COVID vaccines is now so widespread.
You might also have heard about massive blood clots being linked to the vaccines. FDA researchers have linked the Pfizer vaccine to blood clots affecting the lungs in older people. The FDA said it was not taking action on the findings, preferring to study the problem further. I’m sure they’ll study it to death and never do anything about it.
A number of other conditions linked to the vaccines have not received nearly the same kind of publicity as blood clots and heart problems.
The CDC and FDA identified a higher risk of stroke in elderly people from the Pfizer bivalent booster.
There is now evidence the vaccines impair the immune system and trigger aggressive cancers. The vaccinated are getting aggressive cancers at a far higher rate than the unvaccinated.
A Pfizer executive admitted mRNA COVID vaccines are causing irregular menstrual cycles in women. Adverse reaction reports to the government show a 4,000 percent increase in miscarriages and stillbirths among vaccinated women.
Several new papers link the vaccines to new onset type 1 diabetes in adults.
An FDA study found elevated Bell’s palsy facial paralysis among the elderly from a Pfizer COVID booster no longer in use in the U.S.
The vaccines have also been linked to shingles, blindness, and autoimmune diseases like Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.
The problems with the vaccines are so serious, some suffering adverse reactions are choosing suicide as the way out.
Public health authorities keep saying the benefits of the vaccines outweigh the risks arising from the vaccines or from getting COVID itself. That assessment may not look so good in hindsight, and I doubt this type of dithering entered into the decision of U.S. regulators to pull the swine flu vaccine from the market in 1976 after it was linked to just 25 deaths. My suspicion is there was no cost-benefit analysis then. Regulators saw an obvious problem and they dealt with it.
Not this time, and you have to wonder why. You have to wonder why all the phony narratives started flowing, why the government paid media outlets a billion dollars to push the COVID vaccines on us, and why government officials went to such great lengths to suppress troubling information about the vaccines from coming out. If I had to guess, I’d say the country has become much more authoritarian and we're just supposed to jump when politicians and bureaucrats tell us to, instead of weighing the risks for ourselves and making our own decisions. People being in charge of their own lives and taking responsibility for their own welfare is much less highly prized than it once was, and we’re worse off for it.
2/6/23 - COVID Vaccines: The Truth Will Out
I first warned you about adverse reactions and deaths linked to the COVID vaccines in July of 2021. [Daily Skirmish - 7/20/21] I took heat at the time for bringing the problem to the public’s attention. [Daily Skirmish - 11/10/21] It’s nice to know lots of people have woken up and are now issuing warnings of their own.
When I first started reporting on this, roughly 18,000 people in the U.S. had died shortly after receiving a COVID vaccine. That number now surpasses 34,000, according to official government numbers. The government has not investigated these deaths in any serious way and the two so-called mortality studies that have been done tell you not to worry, the overall benefit of the vaccines exceeds the harms. That is a mere conclusory declaration, devoid of any analysis or objective standards. The purpose of the declaration is to keep the government’s phony narrative that the vaccines are safe and effective going.
But it’s getting harder for people to believe that narrative with each passing day, given the caliber of the people issuing new warnings.
An MIT professor called for the immediate suspension of the COVID vaccines. “This is not a theory anymore,” the professor said, pointing to the link between the vaccines and myocarditis heart problems. “These are proven facts that basically undermine any sense of safety about these vaccines.”
A military doctor testified in court a superior ordered her to cover up COVID vaccine injuries. She further testified the data shows that deaths of military members from the vaccines exceed the number of deaths from COVID itself.
Florida’s Surgeon General recommended 18- to 39-year-old males not get COVID vaccines after finding an 84 percent increase in the number of cardiac-related deaths within 28 days of vaccination.
A doctor who is the lead author on peer-reviewed research re-analyzing the initial clinical trials called for suspending the vaccines. He pointed to multiple autopsy studies finding conclusive evidence the vaccines are inducing sudden cardiac deaths. He said the Omicron variant is less deadly and evades the vaccines, reducing their benefit. He also said the FDA has found a high number of serious adverse events, but has failed to inform the public about them. Good point. The government has spent a billion dollars telling us the vaccines are safe and effective and probably zero dollars telling us about adverse reactions.
A doctor in Louisiana said the COVID vaccines should be taken off the market until new clinical trials can prove the assertion the benefits outweigh the harms. He co-authored a peer-reviewed study showing the vaccinated are at higher risk of serious adverse events.
Japan is officially investigating the high number of people dying after receiving COVID vaccinations. A team of researchers is suing the Japanese government for covering up the side effects of COVID vaccines.
Doctors in the U.K. are asking the government to investigate the vaccines given the high number of adverse reaction reports.
The World Health Organization now admits the vaccines have serious side effects, a whole list of them.
Word is finally getting out there’s a huge problem here. In Canada - where the government has paid out on 50 claims of COVID vaccine injuries and must deal with 1,200 more - the “You Are Not Alone” campaign has launched to build public awareness about vaccine injuries. The campaign started by putting big signs on trucks rolling on city streets. Protests were held at the BBC in the U.K. and the largest news agency in the Netherlands where the buildings were covered with posters, placards, and photos of people who died from COVID vaccines. The protesters accused the media of covering it all up.
Everyone responsible for this disaster can stonewall all they want, but the truth will out and justice for the victims of COVID vaccine injuries and deaths will eventually be done.
2/3/23 - The Press In This Country Stinks
The media lied to you about the Trump/Russia collusion hoax for more than two years, and now they’re being called to account for it in, of all places, the liberal Columbia Journalism Review. Let’s be clear: there is no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to get elected in 2016. Adam Schiff claimed he had evidence, but never produced it. The Mueller report ended with no impeachment of Trump for Russia collusion because Bob Mueller knew - 40 FBI agents and $40 million later - he had failed to come up with the goods. The Trump/Russia collusion hoax was bogus from start to finish, but lack of evidence didn’t stop the media from incessantly pounding this non-story. The debunked Steele dossier, the FBI lying to the FISA court - the media fed all this garbage to you knowing all the while there was no ‘there’ there.
This is why the assessment of the Columbia Journalism Review is that the press behaved abominably throughout the entire affair, breaching journalistic ethics left and right. The assessment spoke of “the erosion of journalistic norms,” starting with the failure to report facts that were contrary to the narrative the press was pumping out. The fact that the FBI’s lead investigator didn’t think, after some months, the collusion case could be made went unreported. Another journalistic norm breached was the failure to ask people accused of wrongdoing for comment. The result of another norm being trampled on was the indiscriminate use of anonymous sources and identifying them in misleading ways.
Very telling is the fact that media outlets would not cooperate with the Columbia Journalism Review’s assessment process. The author of the assessment asked 60 journalists for interviews and didn’t get very many takers. The media has clammed up about this. Their lack of transparency tells you everything you need to know about them. If they were proud of their performance, they wouldn’t stop telling you about it. As things stand, you were cheated out of the truth about the Trump/Russia collusion hoax and cheated a second time because the media won’t come clean about the hoax they deliberately perpetrated on you in order to manipulate your opinion.
The Trump/Russia collusion hoax is not the only media outrage to draw fire in recent months. Here are a few more:
The press routinely fails to disclose its conflicts of interests while reporting to you with a straight face. Members of a left-wing journalists’ union report favorably on left-wing legislation without telling you their union urges them to support it. The union gives millions to Democrat politicians, but you won’t find that disclosed in any of the stories union members write about Democrat politicians.
A communications director for the Washington Post is on the board of a racial justice nonprofit funded by a left-wing dark money group the Post won’t report on. When asked if the communications director would recuse herself from stories about the dark money group, the Post said she is not a writer. But that doesn’t even begin to address whether she will be steering coverage and for what purposes.
CBS let a historian comment favorably on Joe Biden’s election message before the midterms without disclosing the fact the historian is an advisor to Joe Biden and works on Joe Biden’s speeches. Another CBS apparatchik was out there dutifully saying the FBI did not seize President Trump’s passports in the raid on Mar-a-Lago, but later said the passports would be returned, in complete contradiction to what she said earlier. Egg on face - that’s what you get for parroting the administration line. ABC’s ‘The View’ linked Turning Point USA to neo-Nazis on air, backtracking only when Turning Point threated to sue.
The press in this country stinks. That’s because they’ve chosen sides. They are no longer honest brokers of the news. They are part of the Evil Empire trying to take this country where the political Left wants it to go. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to this: A news director at CNN was caught on undercover video saying CNN engaged in propaganda to get Trump out of office and the director came to CNN to be part of that exciting mission. He was also caught saying CNN will milk climate change for years, now that COVID is winding down. “Climate change is going to be the next COVID thing for CNN..,” he said. “Fear sells.”
Fear sells. Remember that the next time some stinking journalist - probably paid by the greens and not disclosing it - tries to tell you the planet is burning up and climate change is all your fault - you need to change your wicked ways. No. You need to turn off the Evil Empire and get some truth in your life.
2/2/23 - Problems with Voting Machines Continue to Pile Up
A county in Arkansas and a borough in Alaska just got rid of their electronic voting machines. After you hear some of the problems machines are causing around the country, you will understand why there is such distrust.
The move in Arkansas came in part because the machines have proprietary software the public cannot examine and, therefore, the public cannot be assured their votes are being properly counted. The thinking in the Alaska borough is that hand-counting in the precincts before ballots are transported reduces the chances for fraud.
Machine errors were discovered two months after elections, flipping a local race in New Jersey. A USB flash drive had been read twice, producing the wrong results. The manufacturer insisted there are fail-safes in the system to prevent this kind of thing from happening, but it was the county that found the error later, during an audit. And Democrats resist audits, imagine.
A similar problem flipped a city council race in Georgia. The results changed after uncounted ballots were found on a memory card.
A hand recount flipped another race in Iowa. A machine recount showed the Democrat won a race for state House. After reports of machines jamming during counting, a hand recount was ordered, and the Republican was certified the winner.
An expert testified in Kari Lake’s lawsuit in Arizona he was able to hack Dominion and ES&S machines in minutes. He also said the testing the machines are put through is a joke.
Another problem with Dominion machines was found in Tennessee and Georgia. An election worker noticed hundreds of ballots removed from a machine did not get counted. The machine did not signal it was having a problem. The same problem was found on six other machines in Tennessee and, later, in 64 counties in Georgia. The state could not find the cause. The feds couldn’t, either, and the manufacturer couldn’t figure it out. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it?
Another expert found a privacy flaw in Dominion machines affecting 21 states. “Under some circumstances, the flaw could allow members of the public to identify other peoples’ ballots and learn how they voted.”
A county in Pennsylvania sued Dominion after finding a variety of anomalies and vulnerabilities, including foreign databases and unauthorized scripts on the machines. They also found the machines could be hacked and malicious software installed. The machines should never have been certified, the suit alleges.
Finally, they keep telling us these machines don’t have modems and can’t connect to the Internet, but a watchdog group in Wisconsin found this is a complete lie. Machines used in the 2020 elections were connected to a nongovernmental IP address called WiscNet in three separate elections, including November 3, 2020. A Wisconsin lawmaker is asking some very pointed questions:
1. Who programmed the tabulators to connect to an unauthorized NGO? And for what purpose?
2. Why didn’t the firewall detect the devices?
3. Which public officials knew of the connection?
4. What took place via the connection?
5. How many other machines are connected to WiscNet or other NGO?
Good questions. Why don’t government officials answer them instead of patting us on the head and telling us we have most secure elections ever.
2/1/23 - Ilhan Omar Unfit for Foreign Affairs Committee
The House could vote as early as today on whether to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee. The stated reason is that she cannot be an objective decisionmaker in foreign affairs given her anti-Semitism and her bias against Israel. Omar doesn’t defend on the merits, as far as I can see from news accounts, but instead claims she is the victim of Islamophobia. I checked her official website. There’s nothing on there addressing her bias against Israel, so playing the Islamophobia card is her whole case.
Sorry, Representative Omar, not good enough, not even close. The main voice for Islam in America - the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently came out with a statement that accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ require proof of bigoted intent. CAIR said people should not be lightly accused of ‘Islamophobia’ without evidence they are bigots. CAIR confirmed this position in a press release.
Where’s your proof, Representative Omar, that everyone who is set to vote against you today harbors bigoted intent? Where’s your proof this is about bigoted intent and not your inability to be impartial toward an important U.S. ally, Israel? She has no proof, so her claims of ‘Islamophobia’ can be thrown in the trash where they belong.
It’s not surprising she’s playing the ‘Islamophobia’ card on this. She has a one-track mind about Islamophobia. She sponsored a bill to monitor and combat Islamophobia that passed the House in 2021. The bill did not attempt to define ‘Islamophobia’, but that’s where the rub is.
CAIR is currently promoting a bill in New Jersey that would define ‘Islamophobia’ for purposes of establishing intent for hate crimes or violations of any anti-discrimination law, policy, or regulation. It’s a bad idea, starting with the free speech problems it would create. An anti-sharia activist I know wrote a letter to a New Jersey state senator stating, among other things:
And members of Congress should reject Ilhan Omar’s Islamophobia bill, should she offer it again, for the same reasons.
I have another problem with Ilhan Omar. She is the one who famously dismissed 9/11 as merely “some people did something.” Until she owns up to the fact this was an Islamic jihad attack, carried out under standard Islamic doctrine found in the Quran, and squarely condemns the attack for killing 3,000 people, she should not be serving on ANY congressional committee. In fact, she shouldn’t be in Congress at all.
It’s been a bad month for the climate change crowd. More evidence came in that the Left’s phony climate change narrative is a complete crock. NASA satellite data shows there has been no global warming for eight years and five months. One ramification of this truth is that the United Nation’s IPCC predictions of global warming made in 1990 are completely wrong. That’s despite 475 billion tons of CO2 emissions. Moreover, major hurricanes hit a near-record low last year and there’s record cold in the Northeast this year. There’s temperature data going back 350 years and it shows the earth started warming after the Little Ice Age completely due to natural causes. Nobody can claim CO2 emissions were a problem in 1659 when the warming started. Supporters of the modern climate change narrative have never proven CO2 emissions cause the earth to warm up. The also ignore the obvious fact the earth’s temperature varies with the amount of sun activity and how close the earth’s orbit to the sun is at any given time.
Evidence also came in this month that many things the climate change crowd believes just ain’t so. The Left wants you to believe the seas are rising and coastal catastrophes are right around the corner. But NOAA’s coastal sea level tide gauge data continue to show no evidence of accelerating sea level rise. The Climatistas also want you to believe the polar bears are disappearing and wildlife in general is vanishing. Not true. Polar bear populations are increasing, up maybe 6,000 in the last six years. And animal populations are expanding. This includes antelope, elk, mountain lions, and bears, among other species. The recovery of the grizzly bear is so profound that the Fish & Wildlife service might accept Montana’s petition to remove grizzlies from the endangered species list.
Evidence is accumulating that renewable energy sources have problems and adverse consequences of their own. Nearly 80 rural communities rejected or restricted solar projects last year. They’re pushing back against big solar farms gobbling up their land. The Inflation Reduction Act earmarked oodles of cash for wind and solar, but the amount of land needed to build it all out is equivalent to the size of the state of Tennessee. The locals affected aren’t going to stand for it.
Wind power has a number of problems of its own. Four wind turbines have collapsed since 2021, and the blades fall off. Experts are worried the problems are accelerating in newer models. Wind turbines have to be hooked up to diesel generators to keep them warm in cold climates in the winter and the generators leak thousands of gallons of hydraulic oil on to the land. Where do you think it goes from there? There is concern putting wind turbines offshore kills the whales. Also, it’s been known since 2009 that living close to wind turbines has adverse health consequences for humans. The turbines can cause heart disease, tinnitus, vertigo, panic attacks, migraine headaches, and sleep deprivation, according to scientific evidence.
It’s clear renewable energy is not the nirvana the climate crowd makes it out to be. Evidence is also piling up that the Biden administration’s vaunted ‘green transition’ is a pipedream, not Shangri-La, and can’t ever happen. I’ll pick up with that tomorrow.
2/27/23 - Mayorkas’ Border Dream Becomes a Nightmare
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban immigrant, said in 2021: “I came to this country as an infant, brought by parents who understood the hope and promise of America. Today, young children are arriving at our border with that same hope. We can do this.”
But Mayorkas’ dream has become a nightmare for many unaccompanied alien children in the U.S. today. When he was making his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Mayorkas also talked about ending the Trump administration’s policy of returning unaccompanied children to their home countries, one of more than three dozen policy changes the Biden administration has made to open the border. Now, the U.S. government has lost track of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors, leaving them in the clutches of sex traffickers and exploitative employers. These children work at jobs producing brand-name products you probably consume on a regular basis, products sold by Walmart, Target, J. Crew, Ben & Jerry’s, Fruit of the Loom, Ford, General Motors, the list goes on. They help make your Cheerios and your Cheetos. In the process, some have lost limbs in factories, had their spines crushed on construction sites, and a dozen have died on the job since 2017. The lucky ones just have to work a long shift after their school day, with no end in sight.
Mayorkas’ dream is also a nightmare for towns along the southern border. The House Judiciary Committee took testimony at the border on millions of dollars of unpaid hospital bills and the other ravaging effects of illegal immigration on nearby communities. The federal government leaves the hospital bills unpaid. Meanwhile, healthcare for U.S. citizens is delayed or only available in big cities far away. Separately, it was reported a Yuma official said the strain illegal immigration has put on city services has brought the city to the brink of collapse.
Mayorkas’ dream brought death to 70,000 Americans who died of fentanyl overdoses in 2021. The cartels like dealing in fentanyl because it’s easy to produce and doesn’t depend on the weather, like opium. Cartel influence inside the U.S. is growing, with the Sinaloa cartel hiring so many drug smugglers and human traffickers it is now the largest employer in Cochise County, Arizona. Arizona troopers recently seized enough fentanyl in one pick-up truck to kill almost 800,000 people. This problem is not staying at the border. Butler County PA near Pittsburgh formally ended its sanctuary status because of the role illegal immigration is playing in the fentanyl crisis.
Mayorkas’ dream is also killing migrants in unprecedented numbers. The border patrol recorded 880 illegal migrant deaths in the last fiscal year alone, the highest number ever. People trying to cross the border and not making it. And these are only the ones we know about. Who knows how many corpses are still out in the desert somewhere, their bones picked clean by scavengers. On top of their tragedies, we can pile the lives shattered by illegal alien criminals who would have been deported under any sane administration. Mayorkas’ DHS freed more than 1,100 of them in December alone. Who knows how many more future murderers and drunk drivers are among them?
Added costs in the billions, higher taxes, overloaded emergency rooms, increased crime, overcrowded classrooms, destruction of property - Mayorkas dreams and people suffer, in every state and congressional district in the land. Just remember that when you’re eating your Cheetos.
2/24/23 - The Soros DAs: Bad People Up to No Good
Missouri’s Attorney General just fired St. Louis progressive prosecutor Kim Gardner for failing to prosecute violent crimes and for other reasons. Gardner is a Democrat whose campaign was bankrolled by left-wing superhero George Soros. She admitted to prosecutorial misconduct in the case she brought against former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. Also, she was barred from prosecuting Mark McCloskey on gun charges after a judge found she was using the case to fundraise for her reelection campaign. She has a backlog of 3,000 cases she has not brought.
The immediate precipitating factor for her firing was an incident in St. Louis last week in which a high school volleyball player visiting the city was struck by a speeding car, pinned against another car, and lost her legs. The driver of the speeding car was free pending trial for armed robbery after Kim Gardner’s office failed to show up for his first trial and failed to respond when the defendant’s GPS monitor went off 40 times before the crash - meaning they didn’t know where he was half the time.
The volleyball player is not the only victim the Soros DAs have claimed.
Soros DA George Gascon in Los Angeles cut loose a Vietnamese man who had a history of making death threats against Jews. After his release, the man went on to shoot two Jews who were leaving their synagogues.
The Michigan State University shooter who killed three this month had previous felony gun charges dropped to a misdemeanor by a progressive prosecutor. A felony conviction would have barred the shooter from owning firearms. The prosecutor retired in November after her soft-on-crime policies, including her gun charging policy, were widely criticized.
The man who killed a subway employee in Washington three weeks ago had assault charges against him dismissed by a Soros prosecutor in Virginia last year.
Kim Foxx, the notorious Soros prosecutor in Chicago, let a man escape murder charges who had been involved in a shootout with another man. They both had drawn their guns in an altercation, but the prosecutor called the resulting death of one an act of ‘self-defense’.
Back in St. Louis, three teens were released and sent home after they fired shots at police officers.
These are not the only bad results Soros DAs around the country are producing. The Soros DA in Philadelphia is overseeing the deadliest murder wave in the city since the 1990s, with more than 500 murders two years running. Similarly, the murder rate in L.A. under the previously mentioned George Gascon is at a 15-year high. Child sex crimes, domestic violence, and sexual assault have doubled on his watch, according to members of his own office. Crime is spiking in city after city where Soros prosecutors are at the helm of the criminal justice system.
What’s it going to take to get people to realize these Soros prosecutors are bad people and progressive criminal justice reform is a very bad idea? Their thinking is crazy: All black people, including criminals, are Marxist class heroes and are always right no matter what. White people are class enemies and always wrong. Black people are downtrodden and oppressed and, therefore entitled to shoplift. Theft is OK because insurance companies will just keep paying the losses - which is not true, by the way. Get rid of cash bail. Defund the police. Abolish all courts and prisons. All of this is nuttier than a fruitcake but, if you were trying to create chaos and bring down the country - like many suspect George Soros of wanting to do - you couldn’t start in a better place.
2/23/23 - ERIC: The Worm That Got Inside Our Elections
Grassroots activists continue to raise questions about ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, and authorities are beginning to respond.
On the face of things, ERIC is a private organization that helps its 32 member states clean up and maintain their voter rolls. It compares state voter registration data against motor vehicle licensing information and the Social Security master death file. Then it tells states which voters are dead, have moved out of state, or are registered to vote in more than one state. Critics say ERIC is, at root, nothing more than a partisan get-out-the-vote drive for Democrats.
Louisiana withdrew from ERIC last month, citing “concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports about potential questionable funding sources and that possibly partisan actors may have access to ERIC network data for political purposes.”
More recently, Alabama left ERIC. The new Secretary of State said he did not want a private group having access to voter data, including driver’s license numbers, contact information, and partial social security numbers including those of minors.
In addition to partisan connections and privacy concerns, critics also say ERIC does a bad job, producing bloated voter rolls in member states. Florida, for example, is a member of ERIC but has more than 100 percent of all possible citizens of voting age on its rolls.
Critics point to ERIC’s initial funding which was provided by leftist super-hero George Soros. They also point to an interlocking directorate in the person of David Becker, a high-profile Democrat election lawyer who is the architect of ERIC. Becker started at the left-wing group People for the American Way and was part of the Obama Justice Department. He is described as a “hardcore Leftist” who “couldn’t stand conservatives.” He went on to create the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) which distributed almost $70 million in private Zuckerberg money through official election offices to reach voters primarily in Democrat counties in the 2020 presidential election. Becker is still a member of ERIC’s board.
Lawsuits have been filed against four jurisdictions for allowing ERIC to block public inspection of voter registration records. ERIC’s contract with states requires them to hide the information from the public, in violation of federal law, the suits allege.
ERIC is also the subject of other lawsuits for sharing valuable and detailed voter registration data like phone numbers from four states with at least one outside leftist group, a practice not authorized in federal law. ERIC requires members to identify and register unregistered voters and - this is the heart of the matter - they all turn out to be likely Democrat voters: minorities, students, etc. According to the lawsuits, ERIC is shipping voter data to - this will sound familiar - CEIR, the leftist group I mentioned earlier involved in goosing Democrat voter registration with Zuckerbucks. Critics say ERIC data, developed with taxpayer money, is helping the Democrats microtarget their most likely supporters who are not yet registered to vote.
Conservative activists continue to campaign against ERIC in Michigan, Virginia, and elsewhere. However, there is a practical problem: finding a good substitute. People suggest different things, but an obvious alternative has yet to emerge. When ERIC was created, it displaced a then-new state-run interstate cross-check system for maintaining voter rolls. State-run systems will be more expensive, but will pay big dividends in terms of election integrity, so they just might be the way to go.
2/22/23 - Abortion Pills: Risky Business
New battlegrounds are taking shape after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. One is abortion pills, which now account for more than half of all abortions. Abortion advocates are determined to turn the nation’s 27,000 pharmacies into new abortion clinics. Conservatives are working to keep that from happening.
Twenty Republican state Attorneys General warned Walgreens and CVS sending abortion pills by mail violates federal law despite Biden administration claims to the contrary. Walgreens said it would not dispense the abortion pill mifepristone in Kansas after receiving a warning from the state’s Attorney General. Texas filed a lawsuit to block a Biden administration rule requiring pharmacies to fill abortion pill prescriptions nationwide, even in states where abortion is illegal. A conservative legal group sued the FDA for approving abortion pills on the pretext pregnancy is an ‘illness’ and without studying their safety. Abortion activists have answered with a litigation trump card of their own, arguing in a case filed in West Virginia that states can’t ban drugs approved by the FDA.
The Biden administration has refused to divulge information about its decision to expand the use of the abortion drug mifepristone. A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has been filed to pry it loose, in the belief the administration did not appropriately review the evidence of the safety risks before moving ahead.
Advocates claim abortion pills are safe - “safer than Tylenol” they say - but that’s a typical Leftist con job. The fact of the matter is abortion pills can kill you. A 19-year-old woman died from septic shock after taking an abortion pill. In the U.S., at least 28 deaths have been linked to abortion pills, so it’s Russian roulette when you pull the trigger. Moreover, one in 17 women who take abortion pills end up needing hospitalization.
Death and injury are not the only risks of abortion pills. There are reports of women being coerced into taking them against their will. Boyfriends can slip abortion pills into a woman’s drink. Women often misjudge how far along their pregnancy is, resulting in late-term babies being born alive at home after an abortion pill is taken. Then there’s the trauma of seeing your aborted baby’s body after the abortion pill does its damage. The psychological effects of chemical abortions are just beginning to be studied, but it’s already clear grief, shame, regret, and remorse can persist for years.
The Left doesn’t make full disclosure of these risks, because they don’t want you to know about them. They don’t care if you die in the process, they just want you to push the ‘easy’ button and thank them with your vote for the privilege. Not only do abortion advocates not talk about the risks of abortion pills, they go out of their way to perfect the art of the con. They gladly sell abortion pills to girls as young as 15 through the mail without a medical exam that would determine how far along they are, and will do so without the parents’ knowledge or consent. Heaven forbid anyone stop and think about the risks. Abortionistas also leverage their control of government to expand the use of abortion pills without discussing the risks. New York City gives them away for free. The law in New York also requires health insurers to provide them as part of maternity coverage.
Here’s another thing abortion supporters don’t want you to know: Women who take an abortion pill and experience regret right away can get help reversing a chemical abortion. Over 4,000 babies have been saved this way in the last ten years. The Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN) has 1,200 medical professionals who are committed to helping women and saving lives. Why isn’t the Left talking about that? So much for “choice” and “control over your own body”.
2/21/23 - It’s About Time: Transgender Clinic Investigated for Child Abuse
Missouri’s Attorney General gave new details about his investigation into the St. Louis gender clinic where a trans whistleblower alleged medical providers are going way too far in pushing sex change drugs and surgery on kids.
The investigation is quite wide-ranging. It involves multiple state agencies and promises to leave no stone unturned. Investigators are looking for consumer protection infractions, professional license violations, Medicaid fraud, parental consent fraud, and crimes. The validity of parental consent is at issue because parents were falsely told their children would commit suicide unless they were allowed to transition. Coercion is not consent. Valid parental consent was also lacking because clinicians did not make full disclosure about the long-term adverse health consequences of sex change drugs and surgery. As for the criminal aspects of the investigation, the clinicians involved could end up facing child abuse charges. School officials, who have a legal duty to report child abuse, may be complicit, instead. The investigation will determine whether they conspired with clinicians to form a school-to-clinic pipeline of steady business for the clinic. I hope the Attorney General looks at whether bribe money changed hands in that corrupt transaction.
Several other aspects of Missouri’s investigation are worth noting. Children are getting confusing information about gender from Chinese-owned TikTok, advice that is overriding their own life’s experience with their own bodies. The clinic pushes sex change drugs and surgery as a first resort without any thought to psychological assessments in individual cases. The clinic does not follow transitioners long-term to see what the adverse consequences of clinic-prescribed treatment might be. Puberty blockers are addictive and the clinic moves children into cross-sex hormones virtually a hundred percent of the time.
Other countries have pulled back from the gender affirmation model now ascendant in the U.S. for children. These countries have restricted or banned dangerous treatments and now employ psychological evaluation as the first resort for minors presenting gender dysphoria.
Missouri’s investigation is an indication the tide may be turning but, for the moment, the phony transgender narrative just keeps getting crazier. Social workers in Pennsylvania must now report whether newborns within their purview self-identify as ‘nonbinary’. Huh? You heard that right: "I have to ask clients, 'Is your 10-day-old male, female, or nonbinary?,'" one social worker said. Another crazy parent pushing transitioning on their kids came to light in recent days. A mother is transitioning her 4-year-old boy because he likes to dress up and doesn’t want to play tee ball. The story revealed the child’s daycare center may have been planting confusing thoughts about gender in the child’s mind. In any event, this parent is engaged in child abuse because most children grow out of such temporary phases.
There are reasons to hope public sentiment on this issue will flip soon. The New York Times finally had to admit gender transitioning is dangerous. A long story cited other countries pulling back, doctors who won’t engage in the practice, increasing numbers of transitioners expressing regrets, and the pressure on government authorities coming from activists to approve sex change drugs and surgery for children before the ramifications were understood. Another media outlet published a story on adverse consequences of vaginoplasty surgery including severe pain, difficulty urinating, and sexual dysfunction.
South Dakota just banned sex change drugs and surgery for youth. Other recent moves to challenge the status quo have come from conservative activist groups who are gathering information, mounting publicity campaigns, and supporting litigation against schools for secret transitioning, as well as against medical providers and the Biden administration’s expansive gender identity rules. A schoolteacher in California got fired for refusing to lie to parents to keep their child’s professed gender identity secret from them. This teacher courageously stood up for her personal beliefs at the cost of her job. More like her, please.
This story illustrates how the Left spreads its bad ideas under the radar using coercion, scare tactics, and pressure to adopt policies before anyone takes a close look at them. We can only hope that everyone roped into the Left’s enterprise of gender transitioning for children will have second thoughts now that legal jeopardy is starting to attach. Nothing like lawsuits and criminal charges to focus the mind.
2/20/23 - Diversity Narrative Fall Down and Go Boom
It was an embarrassing moment for the Left’s phony diversity narrative. I’ve commented previously on the narrative’s many faults, one of which is the deliberate attempt to lower standards of performance throughout society.
Last month, Finland chose a transgender to represent the country at the opening ceremonies of the European Figure Skating Championships. It was an amateur performance during which this person, a biological male dressed like a woman, fell on the ice and was helped up. [video here] This person was not chosen for merit or competence. This person was chosen to check the diversity, equity, and inclusion box. I feel sorry he had to be humiliated in front of a worldwide audience. He was exploited by virtue-signaling leftists who ride identity politics to their own personal wealth and power.
Too bad the consequences of lower standards don’t stay on the ice. One commentator goes so far as to blame the recent rash of airline incidents to the aviation industry’s new racial and gender quotas for pilot training programs. When you look at the dumbing down of medical school in the name of promoting equity and inclusion, you have to wonder whether a single-minded focus on diversity kills. The question came up in connection with the recent death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five black police officers in Memphis. News accounts painted a picture of a short-handed police department desperate to fill slots and lowering hiring standards in order to get enough officers on the force. They hired recruits with less work experience and even criminal records. They also lowered physical fitness standards and dropped the running test entirely because too many people were failing.
But you don’t have to believe the diversity narrative kills to recognize standards are deteriorating in a number of areas, and the problems that’s causing. A large county in Virginia has implemented “equitable grading” to eliminate racial disparities in grade outcomes - no penalties for late assignments, standing permission to retake tests, and everybody gets points even if they never turn in assignments.
Not exactly the best preparation for high school, where the work gets tougher. But it doesn’t matter because a number of states have dropped graduation tests to graduate high school. Instead of working to bring poor and minority students up to standard, places like Oregon and New Mexico have done away with a testing requirement to get a high school diploma. Other states like New Jersey are considering the move.
Critics say lowering expectations in high school guarantees students will have trouble handling college courses. But not to worry. Colleges are now firing professors whose courses are too hard. A professor in California found another solution - just give every student an ‘A’ to decolonize the classroom. That’s right, high standards are just another bad idea imposed on you by your colonialist oppressors.
So is it any wonder med students at the University of Minnesota now pledge to fight "white supremacy” and study indigenous medicine?
Critics have warned lower standards are now infecting a number of professions, including science, accounting, firefighting, and the military. How this will come back to bite people is a story yet to be written, but you can start to imagine the fallout.
But let me conclude by suggesting one other ramification of lowering standards: Psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden wrote books arguing that competence - the ability to do things well - is the indispensable key to good mental health. If all you know how to do is hold a participation trophy, not only are you being robbed of a full human experience, you are on the road to mental illness, no matter what identity group the Left wants to put you in.
2/17/23 - Liberal Policies Hurt People (Again)
Well, well, well. A crack in the edifice and a realization that liberal policies hurt people.
I’m talking about San Francisco, where a city council member introduced a measure to exclude illegal aliens who get arrested for dealing fentanyl from the protection of the city’s no-deportation sanctuary policy. Roughly 70,000 people died from fentanyl and other opioid overdoses in America last year. San Francisco officials believe illegal aliens make up the vast majority of fentanyl distributors in the city.
Sanctuary protection is not the only liberal policy that hurts people. Here are some more:
California’s population is down 500,000 in the last two years. People fled California cities plagued with homelessness, high crime, high housing costs, and lingering COVID restrictions. Every single one of these things has roots in liberal policies, policies that hurt people. Businesses are also fleeing California because of liberal policies. Elon Musk called California the “land of overregulation, overlitigation, and overtaxation” on his way out the door. All preventable human-caused disasters.
It’s much the same story in Portland, which has lost population three years in a row. “In Portland, many liberals are dodging stray bullets, losing catalytic converters to thieves, and sidestepping tents. Then they open their tax bills,” one news outlet wrote. Even liberal media are calling Portland “broken” and saying everybody hates it. “Portland has switched from attracting new arrivals to repelling its current citizens,” a left-wing alternative weekly candidly admitted. What do you expect when Democrat politicians let Antifa run riot without consequence and business owners get robbed so many times their insurance companies stop paying off? Liberal policies hurt people.
Not convinced yet? I’m loaded for bear today:
High taxes, not only in California, but in New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts have caused residents to pick up and move to low-tax states in recent years.
Family and medical leave laws in the U.S. have resulted in lower wages for women and kept their pay lower than men’s.
Government race preferences that give special benefits to companies owned and controlled by minorities discourage business formation with people of another race and discriminate against interracial couples.
Affirmative action puts minorities in elite colleges they can’t handle, whereas they might have thrived somewhere else.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want a wealth tax on billionaires. ‘Eat the Rich’ may sound good to you, but you should know that, of the wealth taxes in 12 European countries in 1990, only three remain. Why? Because people flee. According to the OECD, the wealth tax “was expensive to administer, it was hard on people with lots of assets but little cash, it distorted saving and investment decisions, it pushed the rich and their money out of the taxing countries—and, perhaps worst of all, it didn't raise much revenue.”
More schools are teaching phonics because the liberals’ favored whole sight reading method doesn’t work for most students and actually cripples some for life. Even the New York Times has had to admit phonics works.
Liberal policies have been in the ascendancy for decades despite evidence right in front of our noses they don’t work and they actually hurt people. Three generations of insanity is enough. It’s time to stop demonizing the political Right which has the best ideas and return to common sense solutions for what ails America.
2/16/23 - Private Financing of Elections: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come
The private financing of government election offices sparked controversy in the 2020 election and prompted bans on the practice in 24 states. Such financing came to be called ‘Zuckerbucks’ after Mark Zuckerberg gave $350 million to a nonprofit named CTCL (Center for Technology and Civic Life) to distribute to election offices around the country, ostensibly to help them cope with the COVID emergency. Critics rightly say the resulting election office activities ended up being thinly disguised voter registration drives to benefit Democrats. It is true some of the money went to Republican-leaning counties, but that was just a fig leaf. The preponderance of the grants went to Democrat areas. The Texas Attorney General launched an investigation into whether the stated desire to protect voters from COVID was just a pretext to disguise private electioneering efforts through government instrumentalities.
So it is with great sadness I must report to you Zuckerbucks didn’t die in the jurisdictions they were banned. There are moves to repeal the ban in Virginia and elsewhere and, of more immediate concern, Democrats are finding ways to get around the bans.
In 2022, CTCL launched the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence with $80 million. The Alliance is a coalition of left-wing funders and advocacy groups that support more mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day registration - all vectors of election fraud. The Alliance acts as a “support system” for local election offices, giving them coaching, guidance, training, consulting services, and other resources. All in the name of good government, you see. A think tank took a look at these activities and concluded they are designed to “systematically influence” election offices and push progressive voting policies.
Georgia is one of the states banning Zuckerbucks, but the law is weak. The Alliance was able to give a $2 million grant to DeKalb County, Georgia - in Atlanta’s metropolitan area. The law only prohibited private money from going directly to election offices, so the Alliance proposed to send money for election purposes to the county finance department and the county council voted to accept it. This is a loophole in the law you could drive a truck through, and they did. Nothing in Georgia law prevents a local government from accepting private money and allocating it to election administration. Voila! Zuckbucks 2.0.
That’s one dodge. Here’s another: OK, so 24 states banned private financing going directly to local election offices. How about we give election offices paper ‘credits’ which they can then redeem for election-related services from Alliance partners? Another loophole - the Alliance pays the partners, not the election offices, but the effect is the same. Pretty slick, don’t you think?
CTCL announced its first cohort of election offices wishing to become local ‘centers of election excellence’. They’re in seven states, including states where private financing of elections is officially banned. A county in one of the states - North Carolina where a ban was vetoed - has already taken private money to defend itself against the flak it was getting for taking private money. CTCL’s contract requires local election offices to submit an ‘improvement’ plan showing it will change the way it operates to please CTCL. This gives CTCL a window on internal operations which it will presumably use to maximize advantage for Democrats in future elections.
This is insidious. The Democrats hold out a bag of gold and worm their way into official election administration, giving people even less reason to trust our elections in the future. None dare call it a ‘threat to democracy’.
2/15/23 - Government Agencies Covering Up COVID Vaccine Injuries
A whistleblower report, originally provided to Congress in January of last year, accused the military of ignoring or failing to take seriously accounts of COVID vaccine injuries among service members. You will recall the Defense Department mandated the vaccine for all service members and denied most claims for exemptions.
COVID vaccine injuries reported by military personnel included vertigo, chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, and tinnitus. An Air Force reservist had a stroke after being vaccinated and suffered career-ending eye problems after a second dose. An Air Force fighter pilot instructor was diagnosed with heart inflammation. The instructor had applied for an exemption due to previous adverse reactions to other vaccines, but was told no. Another service member was told, “The chief medical doc on base literally told me, ‘While you’re the perfect candidate for an exemption, we’ve been directed to deny all medical requests.'” Others were told “there’s no way the vax caused their symptoms.” The military even harassed soldiers who refused to get vaccinated.
The military stuck its head in the sand despite a June 2021 DOD study finding high rates of heart inflammation among previously healthy male service members who were vaccinated. Also, an Army medical officer noticed big increases in a military medical database of cancers, tumors, blood clots, male infertility, and other problems coinciding with COVID vaccination in 2021. The Defense Department went back and changed the numbers in earlier years in the database to make 2021 look normal, the whistleblower alleged.
Critics accuse the military of minimizing and covering up COVID vaccine injuries to protect the Biden administration’s phony narrative the vaccines are ‘safe and effective’.
The military is not the only agency pushing the ‘safe and effective’ narrative while covering up contrary information.
The CDC knew adverse event reports were flooding in, but waited 15 months before doing its first safety signal studies on the data.
The FDA found possible heart problems with a COVID vaccine in early 2021, but waited five months to reveal the information to the public and ten more months to submit a study for publication.
The FAA loosened its standards for acceptable heart performance among pilots, but refused to release the data behind its decision when a media outlet asked for it.
The CDC found a safety signal for stroke in the elderly receiving the Pfizer vaccine, but then unidentified officials said the signal disappeared after the agency used a different statistical test. A medical professor criticized the CDC’s flip-flop, saying “you can't just run different stat tests until you get the result you want." A CDC official then offered the excuse the agency didn’t want to publicize the stroke signal because it could "fuel anti-vaccine sentiment....” Ya think? The CDC won’t respond further or explain why it’s withholding the safety signal data.
The FDA also performs safety signal studies, using a different statistical formula. It won’t release records showing the results of their data mining, claiming the results are just preliminary deliberative discussions and, therefore, not disclosable - a common agency argument in Freedom of Information Act cases.
These agencies are hiding behind statistical hogwash when a published critique put them on notice their methodologies were flawed and failing to show obvious safety problems with the COVID vaccines. The critique was brought to the CDC’s attention, but the agency ignored it.
Which brings me to my own FOIA suit in federal court. I want the records showing what decisions officials high up in the CDC, FDA, and overall HHS leadership - including the cabinet secretary - made about whether or not to study the obvious safety problems with COVID vaccines. The Justice Department is fighting me tooth and nail, but I will stay on the case until I get the records I want or the court decides I can’t have them.
2/14/23 - The China Threat
The Chinese spy balloon is a good reminder we cannot take our national security for granted. Among the many threats we face is an increasingly assertive China which gives every appearance of preparing for war.
While America still leads in nuclear missiles and warheads, it was recently announced China now has more land-based fixed and mobile ICBM launchers than the U.S. does.
China claims it has become the third country - after the U.S. and Canada - to build a quantum computer. It also claims it is breaking some tough encryption schemes and will have the ability to break them all once it builds a big enough quantum machine. That’s a worry for the world financial system and U.S. national security.
The chief of U.S. naval intelligence warns China’s military is building up in every area for war. He says the buildup is one of the fastest in human history and goes far beyond what China needs for its own defense. He cited China’s new capabilities in missiles, long-range weapons, and electronic warfare. He also cited China’s navy which now has a global reach and is pressing for control in parts of the Pacific. This comes at a time when the U.S. is reducing air power in the Pacific because we no longer devote the resources necessary to sustain the effort. “Weakness is provocative,” as former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used to say.
Concern is growing over Chinese purchases of U.S. farmland and food production assets like Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the U.S. Steps are being taken to block China from purchasing 370 acres to build a corn processing plant near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, but Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis remains concerned about Chinese ownership of farmland, especially near military bases, given that China is a hostile nations whose interests are opposed to ours.
Chinese ownership of farmland has gotten a fair amount of attention but Chinese ownership of private American high school military academies with officer training programs has not. Chinese interests now own the New York Military Academy, Donald Trump’s alma mater. They also own the Florida Preparatory Academy. The New York school is getting federal contracts. You have to wonder how these future military officers in these schools are being taught to regard China.
Lastly, China’s military poses an increasing threat in space. China has developed reusable spacecraft, allowing it to build up its capabilities in space quickly. According to a Pentagon report, China is deploying anti-satellite missiles, orbiting killer robots, lasers, and jammers which it will use to “blind and deafen” enemy forces - not only in space - but on the ground.
As you can see, Chinese spy balloons may be the least of our worries. And worried we should be, given that Chinese officials have openly talked about world domination from Mao on down.
2/13/23 - Blowing the Lid Off the Transgender Lobby’s Pack of Lies
The Missouri Attorney General is investigating a transgender clinic in St. Louis for allegedly harming hundreds of children after a whistleblower published an account of shocking revelations there. The whistleblower, who worked at the clinic in question, self-describes as “a queer woman ... politically to the left of Bernie Sanders... married to a transman.....”
The whistleblower provided a sworn affidavit alleging children are being given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without an individualized assessment of their particular cases, while telling parents such assessments are being done. Children, in some cases, are being given these drugs without parental consent or even after consent has been revoked. Drugs continue even after patients report adverse effects from taking them. An unstudied pancreatic cancer drug is being prescribed because it can grow breasts, even though it can and does poison the liver. In some cases, the clinic proceeds with transitioning even where it is clear the parents are pressuring the child into it. The whistleblower provided documentation the clinic has been billing state healthcare programs unlawfully.
Clinic personnel told parents their children would probably commit suicide if not allowed to transition. “We lied to them all the time,” the whistleblower said. “These doctors would push, and push, and push … and somehow the doctors thought that was a true good consent.” True consent was also lacking because the clinic failed to inform kids about the foreseeable adverse consequences of transgender drugs and surgery. There are words in the law for these actions, words like ‘undue influence’ and ‘fraud’. To show you the kids didn’t really understand what they were getting into, the whistleblower recalls one girl who had her breasts removed and then, three months later, asked for them to be put back on.
The clinic’s actions actually made impressionable mixed-up kids more suicidal. “I have seen puberty blockers worsen the mental health outcomes of children,” the whistleblower said. “Children who have not contemplated suicide before being put on puberty blockers have attempted suicide after.” The clinic doesn’t track negative outcomes so they don’t have to report them to new patients, the whistleblower believes. How convenient.
The whistleblower described the atmosphere as “cult-like”, with doctors hell-bent on transitioning kids and unwilling to listen to contrary facts. It’s a good bet the same mentality and unethical practices prevail in other gender clinics, so the whistleblower is calling for a nationwide halt to the procedures. Britain ordered its only transgender clinic closed last year after similar allegations were documented there.
The word ‘cult’ was also used by a lesbian mother who led her 4-year-old son to transition into a girl and ended up regretting it. The whole phony transgender narrative began to unravel for her when her other son, who previously showed no signs of confusion, started asking to be a girl, too. The mother questioned her own assumptions and ended up raising her sons as boys. "This experience for me has felt like leaving a cult, a cult that would have me sacrifice my child to the gods of gender ideology, in the name of social justice and collective liberation," the woman wrote. "I have left this cult, and I am never turning back."
She might be out, but the transgender lobby is still working to rope more people in. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is fighting state bills banning sex change drugs and surgery for minors. There’s big money at stake: the market for transgender surgery grew to over $2 billion last year.
So there are powerful forces at work, but they can be beaten. A university health system in South Carolina shut down its gender clinic after government records requests exposed the fact the clinic was treating children as young as four.
Four-year-olds? This is sick. All so that some people can make a buck and pursue their left-wing political agendas. The Left is in a very dark place. And, as far as the Left’s phony narratives go, transgenderism is a particularly weak one, but it’s having ruinous consequences, consequences we should not allow.
2/10/23 - Obamacare Ropes More Into Government Dependency
The Biden administration is crowing about the record number of sign-ups for Obamacare this year. They shouldn’t be.
A record 16.3 million people signed up in the latest enrollment period. Supporters trumpet the notion this is double the number who signed up when Obamacare first became available. Sounds great, right? Not so fast. When they were selling us the Obamacare legislation, they promised 21 million people would sign up right away. That’s never happened, and they’re still 30 percent short of the goal they set for themselves ten years ago.
Besides, it’s no mystery why enrollment went up this year. Obamacare subsidies have been jumbo-sized and the jumbo subsidies have been extended through 2025. Now, some people don’t have to pay for it at all. They get zero-dollar premiums. If you give it away for free, of course more people will sign up. No mystery there. So now they’re practically giving it away and they’re still 30 percent short of where they thought they would be a decade ago. That’s not a triumph. It’s an utter abysmal failure. The failure is not unexpected; only half of Americans approve of Obamacare and, now as we’ve seen, most people don’t want it, unless it’s handed to them on a silver platter.
It’s not hard to see why people don’t want it. First of all, lots of the best hospitals and doctors won’t take Obamacare. Obamacare patients don’t have access to top-tier care. Doctors hate Obamacare because it adds layers of paperwork to their burdens.
Second, Obamacare has led to concentration in the individual insurance market. Prior to Obamacare, there were lots of insurers competing on price and features. Obamacare standardized many of those features and, in addition, caused lots of insurers to drop out. I read one article crowing about how most of the country now has three insurers in their state Obamacare exchange. Only three? Here’s what happens when the market becomes concentrated and you only have three companies competing for business, according to a recent GAO report:
- From 2015 through 2020, most states' exchanges were concentrated and became more concentrated over time.... In 2020, the exchanges were concentrated in all states.... [M]arket concentration ... can result in higher premiums due to less competition in the market.”
So what’s being covered up by the jumbo subsidies is the fact that premiums are rising behind the scenes, because of Obamacare. Insurers can hike prices because federal subsidies ensure consumers don’t feel the pain. By the way, the overall price tag for those subsidies is a lot higher than originally estimated.
Obamacare is also causing overall healthcare costs to go up. The insurance taxes in Obamacare get passed along to consumers. Obamacare was supposed to keep people out of expensive emergency rooms, but ERs are more crowded than ever.
But the most insidious effect of Obamacare is increasing dependency on government. People are being trained to rely on government as the answer for everything instead of relying on themselves and looking to the private sphere for solutions to what they need. The law putting jumbo Obamacare subsidies in place also pushed welfare spending further into the middle class. A family of four that makes $111,000 a year is now eligible for subsidized health insurance. That’s crazy. Most people who take the subsidies already had health insurance, so government dependency is crowding out private insurance.
There’s been commentary recently that we’re turning into a nation of welfare moochers. People can make $80,000 to $100,000 a year in Obamacare subsidies and other government benefits for sitting around doing nothing. That’s not normal, healthy, or sustainable. As the economists like to say, things will continue until they can’t.
2/9/23 - Democracy Gets Lost in the Mail
There are still plenty of problems with our elections process. Today, I look at one of them - mail-in voting. It was expanded in the COVID era, and Democrats want to cement it in place even though the COVID emergency rationale for it has disappeared.
In 2021, California passed a law to send every registered voter a ballot in the mail, automatically, for every election. In the 2022 election in California, election officials rejected over 226,000 mail-in ballots, primarily because they arrived too late to be counted. These people thought their vote would count when they put their ballot in the mail, but they were wrong. They were disenfranchised by the system California put in place. How is a system that foreseeably disenfranchises so many people not a threat to democracy?
There are other problems with California’s mail-in system. Some people forgot to sign their mail-in ballots. They were disenfranchised, too. Dead people are sent ballots in such a system when voter rolls are not kept up to date. Seven other states joined California in mailing ballots to every voter in the pandemic so, undoubtedly, the same problems can be found elsewhere. Ideally, mass mail-in voting should be abolished but, in states where it’s here to stay, a driver’s license or other documentation should be required and all ballots arriving after election day should not be counted, an elections expert says.
Mail-in voting presents additional problems in states that allow ballot harvesting. Political operatives can collect mail ballots at people’s homes, then fill them out, alter them, or simply fail to deliver them if the vote is not what the operatives want.
The best election security is at a polling place under bipartisan supervision. The voter’s identity can be verified, the ballots are put in locked and sealed boxes, and the possibility of voters being pressured to vote a certain way by family members or party operatives cannot enter in. And nothing gets lost in the mail, or stolen, altered, or forged. This might not seem like a big deal to you but, remember, 20 million mail ballots went missing in the 2020 election. In the 2022 mid-term elections in Nevada, three out of every four ballots mailed to every voter in the state were not mailed back. What happened to all these missing ballots? Who got ahold of them and for what purpose? Now you can start to see the scale of the problem. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court recently turned away a challenge to mail-in voting in Pennsylvania that could have invalidated similar laws elsewhere.
I plan to come back next week and tell you about the continuing problem of private financing of our elections by left-wing groups. Despite new laws passed in several states, the problem has not gone away and you’ll want to know how your vote is affected.
2/8/23 - Democrats Crazy Like a Fox on Crime
I don’t know about the State of the Union, but the state of Seattle is abysmal and rapidly deteriorating under Democrat rule. Crime is at a 15-year high after the city moved to defund the police. Homicides increased 24 percent in 2022 over 2021. Overall crime is up 4 percent over an all-time high in 2021. Aggravated assault and car theft contributed heavily to the statistics. The city’s underfunded police force is down 130 officers. In 2020, the crazy far-Left Democrat Woke mayor said she wanted to ‘reimagine policing’ and now the results are plain for all to see.
Seattle’s mayor is not the only Democrat who has produced such abysmal results. Eleven U.S. cities - all run by Democrats - are among the 50 most dangerous cities in the world. The list includes the “robbery capital” of the U.S. - Baltimore, and Detroit where 220 police officers left the force last year. Chicago’s wackadoodle Democrat mayor now openly admits she can’t fix the high crime rate in her city, so people need to stop using cash in order to bring crime down. D.C.’s Democrat city council recently voted to reduce penalties for carjacking, robbery, and gun-related felonies. This is after a wave of carjackings in the city. How nuts can you get?
California is right up there in bringing the crazy. Governor Newsom signed a law ending loitering arrests for prostitution. Now prostitutes solicit sex work in front of a Catholic grade school in Oakland all day every day. Other California laws have brought about the early release of pedophiles from prison. A former D.A. warns more children will be harmed as a result. Felonies are being dismissed in Riverside, California near L.A. for lack of a speedy trial because there’s a judge shortage. One reason there’s a judge shortage is because crime is way up.
Other Democrat-controlled jurisdictions are not far behind in craziness. In Democrat-controlled St. Louis, 149 cars were stolen in just one recent week. The Democrat mayor ran on an anti-police platform and the Democrat circuit attorney is one of those progressive prosecutors who won’t prosecute. In Democrat-controlled New York, children under 12 will no longer be arrested or prosecuted for most crimes. They’ll go to social services for treatment, instead. The one exception is homicide, but a former police chief warned violent juvenile offenders are getting younger and younger.
I’m sorry, but things going in this direction is no accident. This is not just the ordinary ‘soft-on-crime, tough-on-crime’ argument we’ve been having for decades. This is the far-Left and its willing accomplices in the Democrat Party deliberately creating chaos and pushing the U.S. off a cliff. George Soros has spent $40 million to elect 75 progressive prosecutors around the country who won’t prosecute. A bail fund of the kind championed by Kamala Harris received $33 million in donations in 2021. Similar bail funds are currently operating in 37 states. The criminals being bailed out have gone on to commit murder and other serious crimes.
Once again, I find myself saying ‘follow the money’. The far-Left desires these outcomes and is putting up money to make them happen. Chaos is a weapon; it’s political warfare. The Democrats want chaos to soften people up for big government solutions that further empower Democrats. Stop this ride, I wanna get off.
2/7/23 - COVID Vaccines: Authoritarian Jabberwocky
Yesterday, I told you about a slew of experts calling for a halt to COVID vaccinations because of the unprecedented huge number of adverse reaction reports coming in from the U.S. and around the world. In the U.S. alone, more than 34,000 people have died shortly after getting vaccinated. I’m seeing lots of stories about people dying suddenly and more stories about ‘excess deaths’ among the vaccinated above normal rates. But today I want to focus on other medical problems the vaccines may be causing. The list is as long as your arm.
CDC records show more than 18 million people were so injured by their Pfizer or Moderna shot, they ended up in the hospital. We’re talking hospitalization rates of 8 percent compared to 2.1 percent for the total population from COVID itself. The CDC withheld this information until a court forced the agency to release it.
Heart problems have received the most publicity. I will only note here the FAA lowered its standards late last year for acceptable heart performance among pilots because, apparently, heart damage from the COVID vaccines is now so widespread.
You might also have heard about massive blood clots being linked to the vaccines. FDA researchers have linked the Pfizer vaccine to blood clots affecting the lungs in older people. The FDA said it was not taking action on the findings, preferring to study the problem further. I’m sure they’ll study it to death and never do anything about it.
A number of other conditions linked to the vaccines have not received nearly the same kind of publicity as blood clots and heart problems.
The CDC and FDA identified a higher risk of stroke in elderly people from the Pfizer bivalent booster.
There is now evidence the vaccines impair the immune system and trigger aggressive cancers. The vaccinated are getting aggressive cancers at a far higher rate than the unvaccinated.
A Pfizer executive admitted mRNA COVID vaccines are causing irregular menstrual cycles in women. Adverse reaction reports to the government show a 4,000 percent increase in miscarriages and stillbirths among vaccinated women.
Several new papers link the vaccines to new onset type 1 diabetes in adults.
An FDA study found elevated Bell’s palsy facial paralysis among the elderly from a Pfizer COVID booster no longer in use in the U.S.
The vaccines have also been linked to shingles, blindness, and autoimmune diseases like Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.
The problems with the vaccines are so serious, some suffering adverse reactions are choosing suicide as the way out.
Public health authorities keep saying the benefits of the vaccines outweigh the risks arising from the vaccines or from getting COVID itself. That assessment may not look so good in hindsight, and I doubt this type of dithering entered into the decision of U.S. regulators to pull the swine flu vaccine from the market in 1976 after it was linked to just 25 deaths. My suspicion is there was no cost-benefit analysis then. Regulators saw an obvious problem and they dealt with it.
Not this time, and you have to wonder why. You have to wonder why all the phony narratives started flowing, why the government paid media outlets a billion dollars to push the COVID vaccines on us, and why government officials went to such great lengths to suppress troubling information about the vaccines from coming out. If I had to guess, I’d say the country has become much more authoritarian and we're just supposed to jump when politicians and bureaucrats tell us to, instead of weighing the risks for ourselves and making our own decisions. People being in charge of their own lives and taking responsibility for their own welfare is much less highly prized than it once was, and we’re worse off for it.
2/6/23 - COVID Vaccines: The Truth Will Out
I first warned you about adverse reactions and deaths linked to the COVID vaccines in July of 2021. [Daily Skirmish - 7/20/21] I took heat at the time for bringing the problem to the public’s attention. [Daily Skirmish - 11/10/21] It’s nice to know lots of people have woken up and are now issuing warnings of their own.
When I first started reporting on this, roughly 18,000 people in the U.S. had died shortly after receiving a COVID vaccine. That number now surpasses 34,000, according to official government numbers. The government has not investigated these deaths in any serious way and the two so-called mortality studies that have been done tell you not to worry, the overall benefit of the vaccines exceeds the harms. That is a mere conclusory declaration, devoid of any analysis or objective standards. The purpose of the declaration is to keep the government’s phony narrative that the vaccines are safe and effective going.
But it’s getting harder for people to believe that narrative with each passing day, given the caliber of the people issuing new warnings.
An MIT professor called for the immediate suspension of the COVID vaccines. “This is not a theory anymore,” the professor said, pointing to the link between the vaccines and myocarditis heart problems. “These are proven facts that basically undermine any sense of safety about these vaccines.”
A military doctor testified in court a superior ordered her to cover up COVID vaccine injuries. She further testified the data shows that deaths of military members from the vaccines exceed the number of deaths from COVID itself.
Florida’s Surgeon General recommended 18- to 39-year-old males not get COVID vaccines after finding an 84 percent increase in the number of cardiac-related deaths within 28 days of vaccination.
A doctor who is the lead author on peer-reviewed research re-analyzing the initial clinical trials called for suspending the vaccines. He pointed to multiple autopsy studies finding conclusive evidence the vaccines are inducing sudden cardiac deaths. He said the Omicron variant is less deadly and evades the vaccines, reducing their benefit. He also said the FDA has found a high number of serious adverse events, but has failed to inform the public about them. Good point. The government has spent a billion dollars telling us the vaccines are safe and effective and probably zero dollars telling us about adverse reactions.
A doctor in Louisiana said the COVID vaccines should be taken off the market until new clinical trials can prove the assertion the benefits outweigh the harms. He co-authored a peer-reviewed study showing the vaccinated are at higher risk of serious adverse events.
Japan is officially investigating the high number of people dying after receiving COVID vaccinations. A team of researchers is suing the Japanese government for covering up the side effects of COVID vaccines.
Doctors in the U.K. are asking the government to investigate the vaccines given the high number of adverse reaction reports.
The World Health Organization now admits the vaccines have serious side effects, a whole list of them.
Word is finally getting out there’s a huge problem here. In Canada - where the government has paid out on 50 claims of COVID vaccine injuries and must deal with 1,200 more - the “You Are Not Alone” campaign has launched to build public awareness about vaccine injuries. The campaign started by putting big signs on trucks rolling on city streets. Protests were held at the BBC in the U.K. and the largest news agency in the Netherlands where the buildings were covered with posters, placards, and photos of people who died from COVID vaccines. The protesters accused the media of covering it all up.
Everyone responsible for this disaster can stonewall all they want, but the truth will out and justice for the victims of COVID vaccine injuries and deaths will eventually be done.
2/3/23 - The Press In This Country Stinks
The media lied to you about the Trump/Russia collusion hoax for more than two years, and now they’re being called to account for it in, of all places, the liberal Columbia Journalism Review. Let’s be clear: there is no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to get elected in 2016. Adam Schiff claimed he had evidence, but never produced it. The Mueller report ended with no impeachment of Trump for Russia collusion because Bob Mueller knew - 40 FBI agents and $40 million later - he had failed to come up with the goods. The Trump/Russia collusion hoax was bogus from start to finish, but lack of evidence didn’t stop the media from incessantly pounding this non-story. The debunked Steele dossier, the FBI lying to the FISA court - the media fed all this garbage to you knowing all the while there was no ‘there’ there.
This is why the assessment of the Columbia Journalism Review is that the press behaved abominably throughout the entire affair, breaching journalistic ethics left and right. The assessment spoke of “the erosion of journalistic norms,” starting with the failure to report facts that were contrary to the narrative the press was pumping out. The fact that the FBI’s lead investigator didn’t think, after some months, the collusion case could be made went unreported. Another journalistic norm breached was the failure to ask people accused of wrongdoing for comment. The result of another norm being trampled on was the indiscriminate use of anonymous sources and identifying them in misleading ways.
Very telling is the fact that media outlets would not cooperate with the Columbia Journalism Review’s assessment process. The author of the assessment asked 60 journalists for interviews and didn’t get very many takers. The media has clammed up about this. Their lack of transparency tells you everything you need to know about them. If they were proud of their performance, they wouldn’t stop telling you about it. As things stand, you were cheated out of the truth about the Trump/Russia collusion hoax and cheated a second time because the media won’t come clean about the hoax they deliberately perpetrated on you in order to manipulate your opinion.
The Trump/Russia collusion hoax is not the only media outrage to draw fire in recent months. Here are a few more:
The press routinely fails to disclose its conflicts of interests while reporting to you with a straight face. Members of a left-wing journalists’ union report favorably on left-wing legislation without telling you their union urges them to support it. The union gives millions to Democrat politicians, but you won’t find that disclosed in any of the stories union members write about Democrat politicians.
A communications director for the Washington Post is on the board of a racial justice nonprofit funded by a left-wing dark money group the Post won’t report on. When asked if the communications director would recuse herself from stories about the dark money group, the Post said she is not a writer. But that doesn’t even begin to address whether she will be steering coverage and for what purposes.
CBS let a historian comment favorably on Joe Biden’s election message before the midterms without disclosing the fact the historian is an advisor to Joe Biden and works on Joe Biden’s speeches. Another CBS apparatchik was out there dutifully saying the FBI did not seize President Trump’s passports in the raid on Mar-a-Lago, but later said the passports would be returned, in complete contradiction to what she said earlier. Egg on face - that’s what you get for parroting the administration line. ABC’s ‘The View’ linked Turning Point USA to neo-Nazis on air, backtracking only when Turning Point threated to sue.
The press in this country stinks. That’s because they’ve chosen sides. They are no longer honest brokers of the news. They are part of the Evil Empire trying to take this country where the political Left wants it to go. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to this: A news director at CNN was caught on undercover video saying CNN engaged in propaganda to get Trump out of office and the director came to CNN to be part of that exciting mission. He was also caught saying CNN will milk climate change for years, now that COVID is winding down. “Climate change is going to be the next COVID thing for CNN..,” he said. “Fear sells.”
Fear sells. Remember that the next time some stinking journalist - probably paid by the greens and not disclosing it - tries to tell you the planet is burning up and climate change is all your fault - you need to change your wicked ways. No. You need to turn off the Evil Empire and get some truth in your life.
2/2/23 - Problems with Voting Machines Continue to Pile Up
A county in Arkansas and a borough in Alaska just got rid of their electronic voting machines. After you hear some of the problems machines are causing around the country, you will understand why there is such distrust.
The move in Arkansas came in part because the machines have proprietary software the public cannot examine and, therefore, the public cannot be assured their votes are being properly counted. The thinking in the Alaska borough is that hand-counting in the precincts before ballots are transported reduces the chances for fraud.
Machine errors were discovered two months after elections, flipping a local race in New Jersey. A USB flash drive had been read twice, producing the wrong results. The manufacturer insisted there are fail-safes in the system to prevent this kind of thing from happening, but it was the county that found the error later, during an audit. And Democrats resist audits, imagine.
A similar problem flipped a city council race in Georgia. The results changed after uncounted ballots were found on a memory card.
A hand recount flipped another race in Iowa. A machine recount showed the Democrat won a race for state House. After reports of machines jamming during counting, a hand recount was ordered, and the Republican was certified the winner.
An expert testified in Kari Lake’s lawsuit in Arizona he was able to hack Dominion and ES&S machines in minutes. He also said the testing the machines are put through is a joke.
Another problem with Dominion machines was found in Tennessee and Georgia. An election worker noticed hundreds of ballots removed from a machine did not get counted. The machine did not signal it was having a problem. The same problem was found on six other machines in Tennessee and, later, in 64 counties in Georgia. The state could not find the cause. The feds couldn’t, either, and the manufacturer couldn’t figure it out. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it?
Another expert found a privacy flaw in Dominion machines affecting 21 states. “Under some circumstances, the flaw could allow members of the public to identify other peoples’ ballots and learn how they voted.”
A county in Pennsylvania sued Dominion after finding a variety of anomalies and vulnerabilities, including foreign databases and unauthorized scripts on the machines. They also found the machines could be hacked and malicious software installed. The machines should never have been certified, the suit alleges.
Finally, they keep telling us these machines don’t have modems and can’t connect to the Internet, but a watchdog group in Wisconsin found this is a complete lie. Machines used in the 2020 elections were connected to a nongovernmental IP address called WiscNet in three separate elections, including November 3, 2020. A Wisconsin lawmaker is asking some very pointed questions:
1. Who programmed the tabulators to connect to an unauthorized NGO? And for what purpose?
2. Why didn’t the firewall detect the devices?
3. Which public officials knew of the connection?
4. What took place via the connection?
5. How many other machines are connected to WiscNet or other NGO?
Good questions. Why don’t government officials answer them instead of patting us on the head and telling us we have most secure elections ever.
2/1/23 - Ilhan Omar Unfit for Foreign Affairs Committee
The House could vote as early as today on whether to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee. The stated reason is that she cannot be an objective decisionmaker in foreign affairs given her anti-Semitism and her bias against Israel. Omar doesn’t defend on the merits, as far as I can see from news accounts, but instead claims she is the victim of Islamophobia. I checked her official website. There’s nothing on there addressing her bias against Israel, so playing the Islamophobia card is her whole case.
Sorry, Representative Omar, not good enough, not even close. The main voice for Islam in America - the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently came out with a statement that accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ require proof of bigoted intent. CAIR said people should not be lightly accused of ‘Islamophobia’ without evidence they are bigots. CAIR confirmed this position in a press release.
Where’s your proof, Representative Omar, that everyone who is set to vote against you today harbors bigoted intent? Where’s your proof this is about bigoted intent and not your inability to be impartial toward an important U.S. ally, Israel? She has no proof, so her claims of ‘Islamophobia’ can be thrown in the trash where they belong.
It’s not surprising she’s playing the ‘Islamophobia’ card on this. She has a one-track mind about Islamophobia. She sponsored a bill to monitor and combat Islamophobia that passed the House in 2021. The bill did not attempt to define ‘Islamophobia’, but that’s where the rub is.
CAIR is currently promoting a bill in New Jersey that would define ‘Islamophobia’ for purposes of establishing intent for hate crimes or violations of any anti-discrimination law, policy, or regulation. It’s a bad idea, starting with the free speech problems it would create. An anti-sharia activist I know wrote a letter to a New Jersey state senator stating, among other things:
- This legislation would criminalize University cultural studies, political science, and criminal justice studies textbooks, discussions, research papers, theses, and dissertations. For example, see page 11, 38, and 93 of the attached text for World View discussions that would run afoul of Para 11 and 13....This legislation criminalizes scholarship and public debate.
And members of Congress should reject Ilhan Omar’s Islamophobia bill, should she offer it again, for the same reasons.
I have another problem with Ilhan Omar. She is the one who famously dismissed 9/11 as merely “some people did something.” Until she owns up to the fact this was an Islamic jihad attack, carried out under standard Islamic doctrine found in the Quran, and squarely condemns the attack for killing 3,000 people, she should not be serving on ANY congressional committee. In fact, she shouldn’t be in Congress at all.