In one of those periodic, inexplicable outbreaks of a U.S. Representative deciding that he needs to run for President, former Texas Congressman Will Hurd has announced he’s running for President.
Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd announced Thursday that he’s throwing his hat in the ring for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Hurd, who was first elected to his congressional seat in 2014 and did not run for reelection in 2020, now enters the crowded presidential field of 13 other candidates as a major underdog.
The former congressman has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump and said last month that a race between President Joe Biden and Trump would be a “rematch from hell.”
“Someone like me, right, a dark horse candidate, can pull this off,” Hurd, 45, told “CBS Mornings” Thursday. “One, you can’t be afraid of Donald Trump. Too many of these candidates in this race are afraid of Donald Trump. But we also have to articulate a different vision.”
In a video announcing his candidacy, Hurd listed illegal immigration and inflation as chief among his motivations to run.
“Our enemies plot, create chaos, and threaten the American dream. At home, illegal immigration and fentanyl stream into our country. Inflation, still out of control. Crime and homelessness growing in our cities,” Hurd says in the video.
The big question, of course, is “why?”
2020 saw no shortage of former or current House members running for President. Names like “Joe Sestak,” “John Delaney,” “Seth Moulton,” and “Tim Ryan,” were introduced to the voting public and promptly forgotten, garnering neither fame nor delegates. Eric Swalwell made no impression on the race, and promptly returned to being known for irritating people and screwing Chinese spies. Former three-term Texas congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was already famous for raising a lot of money by not being Ted Cruz, losing to Ted Cruz, and then raising a lot of money to run for President, only to drop out before the first votes were cast. Objectively the most successful was Tulsi Gabbard, who earned two whole delegates by being photogenic, moderately heterodox, and the candidate not named “Biden” or “Sanders” to stay in the race longest. The “heterodox” part would cause her to leave the party that openly loathed her.
The three-term Texas congressman bit would make O’Rourke the obvious point of comparison for Hurd’s run, but there are two problems. The first is that Hurd objectively pulled off a more difficult feat than O’Rourke in winning three very tight races in TX-23, the only true 2012-2020 swing-district in Texas. By contrast, O’Rourke was running in a safe Democratic district backed up by scads of in-law money. The second is that Hurd doesn’t have the huge, high-profile, big money race to draw on a network of contributors like O’Rourke had. I also suspect that he’ll get an order of magnitude less fawning glossy magazine profiles than O’Rourke got, assuming he gets any. (He may get a few, as he’s just the sort of soft, no-hope Republican the national media loves to pump up.)
Hurd was a squishy three-term congressmen from a squishy swing district, and in terms of accomplishments, that’s not chicken feed. It’s an open question whether a more conservative Republican could have captured and held the seat at the time (though Hurd was a border control squish, and Texas Hispanics have very much taken a hard right turn on the issue since, so, maybe). But that a national political figure does not one make.
So that brings us back to the central question: Why is Will Hurd deluding himself into running for President? He seems to be running as the Trump Derangement Syndrome candidate (the Liz Cheney Lane, if you will), and that’s good for, oh, maybe 2% of the Republican base (and 50% of “conservative” D.C. pundits). That’s the land of has-beens and never-beens like John Kasich and Evan McMullin. Looking at the current 2024 field, there’s no-shortage of “Not Trump” candidates. I see Hurd possibly doing better than Vivek Ramaswamy (running in the Andrew Yang Outsider With Ideas Slot), and running about even with Miami mayor Francis Saurez for the “Who?” slot. And at this point, being an unknown, he’s less loathed than Chris Christie. He’s not even doing as well as Doug Burgum, and no one’s heard of him.
As I’ve written before, there is practically zero appetite for squishy moderates in the Republican primary, and less than that for someone running on the “I Hate Trump” platform. Hurd’s chances essentially amount to “Maybe if everyone else gets hit by a bus.”
My suspicion is that Hurd has been recruited to run by the same sort of left-leaning special interests that fund things like The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project to generate soundbites for an MSM that will inflate his campaign’s profile solely to go “Look! Republicans hate Trump too!”
Then there’s this little tidbit: “Before his career in politics, Hurd was an undercover CIA officer working in counterterrorism.”
There was a time that would have been considered a plus in Republican politics. That was before the Russiagate hoax and Hunter Biden’s laptop (among many others) showed how the deep was willing to meddle in domestic politics. Now it’s a giant red flag.
Expect Will Hurd’s run to be every bit as successful as Tim Ryan or Seth Moulton’s attempts.
Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, did not describe what kind of weaponry had been requested, or whether they know how China responded.
The development comes as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan plans to travel to Rome on Monday to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi.
Sullivan told CNN that the administration was “communicating directly, privately to Beijing, that there will absolutely be consequences” for any Chinese efforts to assist Russia in evading sanctions.”
Do you see the problem? It’s right there in the first sentence.
Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
“Officials familiar with the matter.”
Remember that phrase?
Remember that phrase (and similar ones) a lot from those endless “sources say” hit pieces on President Trump that turned out to be complete garbage made up out of whole cloth?
Because of that, we can never take anonymously sourced pieces that promotes the latest Democratic Media Complex line at face value ever again. How can we be sure you’re not making things up again?
We can’t.
We can never take any anonymously sourced piece in the Washington Post at face value. So we have no idea if Russia sought military aid from China or not.
That’s the problem with institutional trust. Once it’s gone, it can’t easily be replaced.
Any time you read “source says” in a piece in an MSM outlet, you should read that as “just trust me, bro!”
And we don’t.
And absent a clean sweep in management and a complete turnover of current staff, we never will again.
The redpilling of Joe Rogan continues apace, and here are three video clips from his interview with independent journalist Matt Taibbi about things that just don’t add up.
First up: The obvious Fed false flag “Patriot Font” march.
One correction to Rogan and Taibbi. The bias itself isn’t new. You could start to see the outlines of media bias against Republicans in the 1980s. However, Trump Derangement Syndrome made them drop even the pretense of objectivity.
Greetings, and welcome to a Good Friday LinkSwarm! I had the day off, so I slept ridiculously late, which is why you’re getting this in the late afternoon evening.
1. $10 Billion to Create a ‘Civilian Climate Corp’
The Biden administration proposes spending $10 billion to create a “Civilian Climate Corp.” The White House claims that “This $10 billion investment will put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice through a new Civilian Climate Corps.”
2. $20 Billion to ‘Advance Racial Equity and Environmental Justice’
The proposal sets aside a whopping $20 billion—more than the latest COVID package spent on vaccines—for “a new program that will reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access.”
3. $175 Billion in Subsidies for Electric Vehicles
Electric vehicles: A technological novelty so good it won’t catch on without hundreds of billions in subsidies. At least, that’s apparently what the Biden administration thinks, as its infrastructure proposal earmarks a “$174 billion investment to win the electric vehicle market.”
The spending will take the form of manufacturing subsidies and consumer tax credits, which historically have benefitted wealthy families most. For comparison, the proposal carves out more for green energy goodies than it does on the total $115 billion to “modernize the bridges, highways, roads, and main streets that are in most critical need of repair.”
After Joe Biden’s performance last Thursday, every American should be demanding to talk to the manager. That’s because while President Joe Biden’s pathetic display during his “matinee” presser showed clearly that he is not in charge of our country, it also begged the obvious follow-up question not being asked by the 25 reporters in the room: If Joe Biden isn’t in charge of running our government, who is?
If you didn’t actually watch the press conference—and every American should-especially those who voted against Trump by voting for Biden because they’d thought he was an improvement—by now, you have doubtless read the accounts of the President’s cliff notes that included scripted talking points and photos of the journalists upon whom he was directed to call. His staff treated him in much the same way as does the family of someone in the early stages of dementia, where they put pictures on doors and cabinets as a reminder of what goes where.
If Joe Biden were my next-door neighbor, his condition could be described as sad, and he would be afforded every consideration and allowance possible for someone entering the final stage of the aging process. He is not, however, my next-door neighbor. He is supposed to be the President of the United States. His performance was mortifying. This is one of the most powerful men in the world. He controls our budget. He controls our military. He controls our nuclear weapons. What he clearly does not control is himself.
And if he isn’t in control of himself, then who is? Who is in charge?
Matt Taibbi: “Master List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus”:
Update 3/21/21 “All 17 intelligence agencies,” October 19, 2016. Before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton and others publicly stated that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies backed an assessment that cyberattacks in 2016 came from the “highest levels of the Kremlin.” That was later corrected in congressional testimony to four agencies. It was actually a hand-picked team from three agencies, and the chief conclusion from that group came mainly from CIA chief John Brennan, who in his own book, “Undaunted,” published in 2020, revealed that he had overlooked dissenting analysis from two members of the working group. Brennan said he believed “the quality of the sources justified the high confidence,” but the Times and other outlets reported that Brennan was basing much of his confidence on a single human source in Russia whose information was allowed to bypass the normal vetting process….
So a story that began as an assessment on Russian interference agreed upon by “all seventeen agencies,” became four agencies, then it was a hand-picked group from three agencies dominated by the CIA director, who overrode dissenting analysts within the group, likely because of confidence in one human source.
There are twenty five entries on the list, and Taibbi admits he could have gone “on and on.”
The goal was to destroy dissidents and potential dissidents socially and emotionally without resorting to arrest and imprisonment. The Stasi collected information about the victim's private life, and proceeded to "disintegrate" their careers and their family and private life.
The goal was to destroy the reputation of the target and make him so preoccupied with his personal difficulties and emotional turmoil that he had no will to question the government of the DDR. It was done covertly, and often victims weren't believed even if they discovered it.
The results are in—and they overwhelmingly vindicate the free states over the authoritarian experiments. First, we saw that states with the harshest restrictions didn’t necessarily achieve the best COVID-19 death outcomes. Florida has fared far better than New York and New Jersey, for example, and multiple studies have found no correlation between lockdown stringency and death rates.
Yet lockdowns have come at an enormous economic and human cost. We’ve seen mental health problems and child suicide spikes, an increase in domestic violence, an uptick in drug overdoses, and much, much more. And, of course, the economic toll of shutting down businesses and criminalizing “non-essential” livelihoods has been devastating.
The national unemployment rate was a poor if not disastrous 6.2 percent in February. Yet the just-released state-level unemployment rates for last month show that the devastation hasn’t been equal across the board. New Labor Department data reveal that many free states have returned to nearly their pre-pandemic unemployment rates—while lockdown states dominate the wrong end of the list.
Why isn’t everyone in Texas dying? “The lockdowns have had no statistically observable effect on the virus trajectory and resulting severe outcomes. The open states have generally performed better, perhaps not because they are open but simply for reasons of demographics and seasonality. The closed states seem not to have achieved anything in terms of mitigation.”
Try to contain your shock, but Cruz Noguez, the mano owned the SUV involved in the carash that killed 13 illegal aliens, was a coyote.
Related: “Austin Resident Faces Life in Prison for Alleged Smuggling That Killed 8 Illegal Aliens.”
Prosecutors have also charged Austin resident Sebastian Tovar, age 24, with transporting illegal aliens resulting in death for an incident that killed eight people on March 15.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a press release that a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officer tried to stop Tovar, who led police on a 50-mile car chase.
“Traveling north into the southbound lane on Highway 277, Tovar collided with another vehicle head-on, resulting in the death of eight illegal aliens that had been in Tovar’s pickup truck,” the DOJ said. “The driver and passenger of the vehicle into which Tovar collided are hospitalized and in stable condition.”
The DOJ said that, after the incident, border patrol agents apprehended 12 illegal aliens, two of whom confessed to being connected to Tovar’s alleged smuggling activities.
The defendants in the March 4 incident are 28-year-old Isidro Rodriguez Jr. and 18-year-old Bianca Michelle Trujillo-Lopez. They face the possibility of life in federal prison if convicted.
The indictment charges Rodriguez and Trujillo-Lopez with illegal alien transportation resulting in death, illegal alien transportation resulting in serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy, and two counts of conspiracy.
“Court records allege that on March 4, 2021, the defendants were traveling on FM 2523 near Del Rio when a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper attempted to stop them for speeding,” the DOJ said in a press release.
“The driver, Trujillo-Lopez, tried to outrun the trooper, at times reaching speeds over 120 miles per hour. She ultimately lost control of her vehicle and rolled it multiple times after missing a curve on the road.”
“Conservative Humorist Chad Prather Launches Campaign for Texas Governor.” He’s running against incumbent Governor Greg Abbott in the Republican primary. I can’t say that I’ve actually heard of Prather before (which would tend to bode ill for his chances), but he starts out with 196,000, which is more than a goodly number of Democratic Presidential candidates started out with. Of course, all of them lost too…
Dwight covers stopping the bleed, with a side order of Julia Child’s liver and a nice Chianti.
Review of Kong: Skull Island in advance of seeing Godzilla vs. Kong this weekend.
Regular readers know that Austin has been climbing out of a once in a century winter storm that froze our roads and wrecked our power grid. Right now it’s still 19°F, but it’s supposed to warm up to a balmy 39°F this afternoon…
Could be worse: ERCOT says that their quick thinking to impose rotating blackouts prevented the physical destruction of the Texas Interconnect Grid. That may even be true, but it’s sort of like a teenager saying “Thanks to my quick thinking, I only managed to burn down the garage and not the entire house!”
Passage of this bill this year would lead to job losses and higher use of labor-reducing equipment and technology,” said Sean Kennedy, executive vice president for public affairs for the National Restaurant Association. “Nearly all restaurant operators say they will increase menu prices. But what is clear is that raising prices for consumers will not be enough for restaurants to absorb higher labor costs.”
But for the fact that he’s president — given his track record of having been wrong on every defense and foreign policy issue for almost five decades — it would be easy to ignore his assessment of China. This is a man who said in 2019, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.” He added, “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” Despite the difficulty of being wrong on both occasions Biden managed it.
Focus for a moment on what he said about the conversation with Xi. It is natural that China would be spending billions on transportation given the size of the country and the billions who inhabit it. Whether it is true that China is spending billions on climate change is another matter. It has, for decades, been spending billions on coal-fired electricity generation plants and has only recently made noises about reducing pollution.
But “climate change” is probably the last priority for China while it is spending far greater sums on its military and cyberwar capabilities. Xi was clearly trying to gull Biden into some sort of race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that we could strangle our economy while China doesn’t do the same to its own. China may well be trying to reduce pollution — Beijing is infamous for its barely breathable brown air — but how much it is really doing remains to be seen.
Biden apparently wants to be known as the “climate change president.” If Xi can increase Biden’s desire to make climate change his top priority for legislation and regulation (which seems altogether likely in any event) China will be greatly advantaged by Biden’s concomitant reductions in spending on the U.S. military and intelligence communities.
To say that Biden is soft on China only proves the speaker’s command of the obvious.
What Tenev did not say, or explain, is why his company – which is merely a client-facing front of Citadel, which buys the bulk of Robinhood’s orderflow to use it perfectly legally in any way it sees fit – was so massively undercapitalized that the DTCC required several billion more in collateral to protect Robinhood’s own investors against the company’s predatory ways of seeking to capitalize on the gamification of investing making it nothing more (or less) than a trivial pursuit to millions of GenZ and millennial investors, a point which Michael Burry made so vividly.
The #mainstreetrevolution is a myth. Zero commissions and gamified apps were designed to feed flows to the two most influential WS trading houses. A few HFs got hurt, but if retail is moving toward more trading and away from fundamentals, WS owns that game. #Stonks by design. https://t.co/Y4raF0jiM3
— Cassandra (@michaeljburry) February 9, 2021
Incidentally we know why Tenev did not mention it: it’s because Robinhood’s back office is a shambles of a shoestring operation, one which never anticipated either such a surge in trading not a multi-billion collateral requirement; had Robinhood been a true brokerage instead of pretending to be one, and run merely to open as many retail accounts as it could in the shortest amount of time, thus generating the most profit in the quickest amount of time to allow its sponsors a quick and profitable exit, it would actually have been on top of this.
SpaceX wants to bring fast satellite broadband internet to the world — and in particular, to internet users in far-flung, rural locations, where download speeds are low and prices are high.
One of the first places in America to get SpaceX Starlink service was Alaska, the state with the lowest population density in the country — just one person per square mile. The company next extended service into Canada (population density: three people per square mile), followed last month by service in the UK — a big jump in concentration, with 650 people per square mile. (Even in the UK, there are plenty of isolated locations where internet service is expensive, slow — or both).
SpaceX’s globe-spanning satellite constellation should be capable of providing 100 megabit-per-second internet service to anywhere by the end of this year. You can expect that a lot of countries, no matter how urbanized they are (or not), will be lining up to sign up for Starlink service. And the more countries Starlink signs up as customers, the better the prospects for the SpaceX subsidiary’s promised IPO.
One country that most definitely does not want Starlink, however, is Russia.
Snip.
As Ars points out, “Russia is planning its own satellite Internet constellation, known as ‘Sphere.'” And in contrast to SpaceX’s Starlink, which is a privately funded and privately built communications system, the 600-satellite Sphere constellation will be a project built and run by the Russian state under the aegis of its Roscosmos space agency. And that could be a problem.
Sphere, you see, is rumored to cost $20 billion to build, may not begin launching until 2024, and won’t be completed before 2030.
Those numbers alone tell you Sphere will never be built, Starlink or no Starlink. Russia is a profoundly broke and profoundly broken country. Sphere is just the sort of prestige project Putin loves to announce to much fanfare, national greatness vaporware that either never gets built or else creeps out into the real world years (or even decades) late and in much-reduced form, like only ordering 100 T-14 Armata tanks.
Iranian fuel tanker convoy to Afghanistan goes boom.
The media want you to know that it’s Trump’s fault they couldn’t investigate such trivial scandals as Lincoln Project pedophiles, because how would they have time when Orange Man Bad?
Speaking of the Lincoln Project, founder Rick Wilson managed to pay off his mortgage early just as the John Weaver pedophilia scandal was breaking. How fortuitous!
Back in The Before Time, The Long Long Ago, newspapers actually defended free speech.
Back in 1977, the New York Times maintained that as long as Nazis did not engage in any illegality, they were “entitled” to the protection of the law, and then put the onus of maintaining peace on the Skokie residents:
The argument that they will provoke violence simply by appearing on the streets of Skokie only emphasizes the obligation of the police to keep the peace—and gives an opportunity the people of Skokie to demonstrate their respect for the law.
These days, the Times board will chase you out of the building for allowing anyone to voice an opinion that chafes against the brittle sensitivities of its writers. The paper employs full-time speech monitors to vet wrongthink.
The cancel mob comes for Baen Books. Book editors and writers kindly tell them to get stuffed.
Special for Black History Month:
Here are the names of the 200+ slaves owned by Kamala Harris’ ancestor Hamilton Brown in Jamaica in 1817. One of the largest planters in Jamaica, Brown now has a town named after him, Brown’s Town pic.twitter.com/6QnBpEQyez
Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg told employees they need to “inflict pain” on Apple because Apple won’t let Facebook steal every single bit of personal data from Apple devices.
“Bill Gates Bankrolling Educational Organization That Says Math is Racist.” “A conglomerate of 25 educational organizations called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction asserts that asking students to find the correct answer is an ‘inherently racist practice.’ The organization’s website lists the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its only donor.” How many fingers, Winston?
A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical made from fossil fuels onto a wind turbine made with fossils fuels during an ice storm is awesome. pic.twitter.com/3HInc2qKb9
“Man Asks That You Respect His Preferred Adjectives.” “‘Here are the adjectives I identify with,’ Becker put on social media. ‘Cool, witty, handsome, innovative, fun.’ Please use one of these adjectives when describing me. It distresses me when people use adjectives I don’t identify as,’ Becker later explained. ‘Like “creepy,” “weird,” or “off-putting.” That’s basically denying my existence and trying to genocide me.'”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Looks like I may have to start doing BidenWatch again, given all the stupid things the newly ensconced Biden Administration has been up to…
US government debt now stands at $20 trillion, or roughly 100% of GDP. This should be a concern, but Democratic economists are not worried. A much-discussed November 30 paper by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Jason Furman suggests that Democratic thinking has veered into the paranormal, with an emphasis on levitation. Governments will be able to borrow and spend as much as they want for whatever purpose they want, the authors argue in so many words, and interest rates will remain low forever.
As Washington Post editorialist Charles Lane commented Dec. 7, “Far from burdening future generations, governments have a golden opportunity to fund long-standing needs by borrowing for investments in future prosperity—the list includes child care, early education, job training and clean water.”
The argument so easily refuted by casual reference to the facts that it takes a doctorate from Harvard (which both Summers and Furman hold) to suspend disbelief in the obvious. The authors aver:
We note that with massive increases in budget deficits and government debt, expansions in social insurance, and sharp reductions in capital tax rates, one would have expected to see increasing real rates if private sector behavior had remained constant. We suggest that changes in the supply of saving associated with lengthening life expectancy, rising uncertainty and increased inequality along with reductions in the demand for capital associated with demographic changes, demassification of the economy, and perhaps changes in corporate behavior have driven real interest rates down. This characterization is rather like Hamlet without the Ghost, for the ghost in the interest machine during the past decade has been the Federal Reserve Board’s multi-trillion-dollar purchases of Treasury and agency securities. Summers and Furman do not mention this in their 50-page excursus.
Today, President Biden doubled-down on critical race theory in the federal government.
In response, I am announcing a new coalition of legal foundations and private attorneys that will wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America's institutions.
Thomas Zimmerman, who will serve as a Special Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel under Joe Biden, formerly served as a visiting scholar at what the FBI has called a “front group for Chinese intelligence collection and overseas spy recruitment,” The National Pulse can reveal.
While at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, Zimmerman also served as a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security.
The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), which the FBI views as a “front group for Chinese intelligence collection and overseas spy recruitment,” was involved in a 2019 criminal case involving a retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative selling classified U.S. defense documents to China.
The operative, Kevin Mallory, was contacted by a SASS official via LinkedIn to begin the relationship that culminated in a 20-year prison sentence for Mallory.
It must be understood that Critical Social Justice is an administrative and bureaucratic ideology by its very design. It was formulated by activist academics to train not just activists but, very specifically, either people who will go on to produce the culture industry (like in media and arts) or who will become administrative bureaucrats where they can produce a kind of unaccountable policy that we find in HR departments, where pushback is irrelevant unless it’s from the top down. These sorts of people dream of positions not specifically of power and influence, like the presidency, but of training and administrative roles where they will receive relatively little scrutiny or opposition while they engage in their favorite activity of all: telling other people what to do, not directly, but through a shield of very official and institutionally binding paper.
For any of his late and thin comments about the violence that has rocked our streets for the last half of this year, Biden has given us absolutely no indication that he’s going to resist any of this bureaucratic totalitarianism. In fact, he’s done the opposite, using the language of the ideology, like saying he has a “mandate” from the voters (in an election that hasn’t yet even been decided, two weeks later) to take on “systemic racism,” and tapping individuals like Mehrsa Baradaran (who believes in full reparations) for the Treasury Department and Margaret Salazar (whose focus is on “cultural responsiveness”) for Housing and Urban Development. These come among roughly 500 more appointments to his administrative bureaucracy—so far—who allegedly express a commitment to racial justice, in line with precisely the racial equity programs touted by Biden and Harris on their campaign and now transition websites. In few domains has it been signaled that this will be more powerfully considered than in public health and the Covid-19 response, which Biden has already indicated will lead to a permanent position: “At the end of this health crisis, it will transition to a permanent Infectious Disease Racial Disparities Task Force,” we’re told on the Covid-19 priorities page on Biden’s “Build Back Better” transition site.
This renders Biden and, perhaps, Harris largely irrelevant to the “Woke” impacts of their election. They are, if you’ll accept the metaphor, “not the room.” These administrators are the room. Biden (and Harris, maybe) can be as moderate as moderate gets, and if even a modest fraction of the administrators in key departments favor the Critical Social Justice style of policy, that’s most of what we’ll get. So far, we have reason to suspect that at least an eighth of Biden’s administrative apparatus will be in that vein, including in key and powerful sectors like public health—to say nothing of apparatuses like the FBI.
Tulsi Gabbard reveals why congress won’t attempt to reign in Big Tech:
"It goes to money… Google will have a big reception, members of Congress will go, and then they'll pick up their checks."@TulsiGabbard explains why Congress has failed to act on big tech censorship pic.twitter.com/i7TOJYQ7lv
He was made a martyr. Yes, die-hard anti-Trump Democrats always would hate him, and die-hard pro-Trump Republicans would love him no matter what. But the great American center, comprised of reasonable Democrats and Independents, flocked towards Trump during and after the prior impeachment. They saw he was being railroaded.
He now is being railroaded again. We still all are trees inside the forest, lacking the broader perspective that time will afford. Right now tensions are too high for people to step back a moment and to gauge objectively. But that is only today. The Democrats irresponsibly have just done something that perhaps is all but unprecedented in American history: they charged, tried, and convicted a person — the impeachment phase of the political drama — in less than a day. If impeachments are meant to be fit in during a coffee break, why did the last one drag on so long? Why did Clinton’s and Johnson’s? Last year’s annual Trump impeachment took weeks of testimony from witnesses all over the place. Remember their names — all your favorites — from last time? Kurt Volker. Marie Yovanovitch. Fiona Hill. George Kent. Gordon Sondland. Bill Taylor. Laura Cooper. Alex Vindman. His medals. Catherine Croft. It went on and on and on. If they had not shut it down for Christmas, Kato Kaelin would have been next.
But this time it was Darkness at Noon: instead of pretending honesty, Pelosi and her Democrats did the impeachment as Josef Stalin conducted his show trials in the Soviet Union: first declare the guilt, then type up some charges, and then vote to convict without so much as a meaningful hearing. She did not even bother with the souvenir pens — presumably just ink-refill cartridges this time.
“City councilman in Louisiana arrested for election fraud.” “Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin Thursday morning announced their offices have arrested an Amite City Councilman on eight counts of election fraud. Emanuel Zanders, III is accused of submitting voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent.” I know you’ll be shocked to learn he’s a Democrat.
As COVID-19 settled into its new home in NYC, my local coffee shop closed, my gym shuttered, I lost my job at SUNY, and everything I loved was temporarily put “on pause.” A term that nine months later now feels like a cruel joke. None of us knew what we were facing back in March, or how long it would last. The streets became quiet, the city became still. All the sounds, the familiar faces, the busy restaurants, the daily rituals, the very pace of our existence slowed to a full stop. The silence was deafening.
The homeless and mentally ill flourished in my Chelsea neighborhood overnight. Many residents fled our beloved city to safer suburbs and second homes. After a night in the West Village where I saw men looting cars, and a gunpoint robbery happen by the West 4th train station, I no longer felt comfortable here. I decided that I couldn’t abide the lawlessness and my first pandemic at the same time, so I spent the first wave of the pandemic upstate in a guest room at my family’s house, where at least I didn’t have to worry about the crime.
After spending three months in quarantine upstate, I decided it was time to start putting my NYC life back together. The idea of suffering through this time with my closest friends felt like a step in the right direction. Even if we didn’t have our bars and restaurants for an undetermined amount of time, at least we’d have each other.
I imagined my summer would be filled with long walks, bike rides on the West Side Highway, and small gatherings on rooftops. I imagined we’d get over COVID and that the energy of the city would come back slowly over the next six months. I was optimistic, loved my city and loved my life here with all my heart. I hopefully assumed most New Yorkers had the same feelings I did. And then the riots happened.
The dark tone of daily life here now seems permanent. For months after the riots, stores in my area were still being burglarized. The helicopters were so close they would shake my top-floor apartment all night. In peak summer there were always two or three homeless people on both sides of every street in my area. Every aspect of my life became about avoiding them and staying far enough away from anyone who might attack me. Someone broke into my building one night but fled when they accidentally set off the alarm on the roof. The whole summer felt like living in a war zone.
Dating used to be a pleasure for me, but during my summer in Chelsea there were so many stabbings and robberies within one block of my apartment, I no longer felt comfortable making plans that involved meeting anywhere. I’d walk to get coffee in the morning and get harassed and threatened by homeless people every day.
Six months after NYC’s first wave of riots, I was clearly wrong about my hopes of returning to the fast-paced yet wonderful life that I once loved.
The City of Houston wants to regulate your homes for looks. “Everything from what color you paint your home, to whether you put shutters on your windows, would be subject to government control.” Nuts to that.
In the end, it was not the British deep state, Darwinists, Jews, Freemasons or any of the sinister cabals that Adnan Oktar long railed against that defeated him. It was the Turkish judiciary.
On Monday, the notorious 64-year-old preacher, often referred to in salacious headlines as a “sex cult leader,” was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail for crimes including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, fraud, and attempted political and military espionage.
It marks the end of a long and bizarre career for the preacher, television host, author and filmmaker.
Beginning his career in the 80s as a firebrand orator, railing against Jews, Freemasons and Charles Darwin, he later became (in)famous for his shows on Turkish TV, in which he would discuss Islamic principles while scantily clad women with bleached blonde hair danced around him to popular music. These women Oktar referred to as his “kittens”.
Skipping over a lot, including the bit where he went from being a Holocaust denier to being a supporter of building the Third Temple in Jerusalem.
In July 2018, Oktar was arrested on a number of charges, including forming a criminal organisation, sexual abuse of children and sexual assault.
According to the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office, he was caught while attempting to run away from the arresting officers. As he was led away, he told journalists that the charges were a conspiracy by the British deep state.
“They are thinking of covering the whole region with Christianity. They targeted me because they saw me as the effective inhibitor of this game,” he would later say in court.
Though “the British deep state” has yet to officially comment on the case, many have questioned the timing of Oktar’s arrest, considering accusations against him dated back decades.
In 1999, Oktar and a number of associates were arrested and charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organisation with the intent to commit a crime. A Turkish prosecutor listed a number of companies tied to BAV, which was accused of using blackmail and sex traps to generate revenue. The legal process against Oktar and BAV lasted two years, during which the majority of the complainants retracted their claims.
In the case file during his most recent trial, prosecutors presented an array of photos depicting sexual acts involving members of the organisation purportedly taken secretly at Oktar-owned properties for the purpose of blackmail. It also revealed WhatsApp messages involving male and female members of the group, in which they were given instructions to get used to anal sex.
Yuksel told MEE that he was aware of a number of senior politicians who had been involved with (or had relatives involved with) Oktar and were compromised by their association with him. However, he declined to offer any names.
In October 2017, the University of Texas at Austin announced that it had signed a new memorandum of understanding with the China University of Petroleum, a school directly affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education.
According to a statement released at the time by the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, the agreement would “encourage academic cooperation through research and study in furtherance of the advancement of learning.”
But in October 2020, the U.S. Department of Education released a report critical of such foreign entanglements, specifically deeming contracts with China University of Petroleum a security risk.
“Academic research regarding oil and gas extraction should not be considered separate from the Chinese government’s geopolitical ambitions,” the Education Department report reads, adding, “China’s largest oil companies are state owned and dominate China’s oil market, so this could cross paths with Chinese government endeavors.”
I couldn’t post to Twitter yesterday, and briefly thought they’d finally banned me for spreading Disapproved Hunter Biden News. Sadly, it was down for everyone, not just me.
Perhaps the selective enforcement of content which is politically harmful to Democrats can be explained by recent hires by the Biden transition team.
According to Breitbart, Twitter Public Policy Director Carlos Monje left the social media giant to join Biden’s transition team in September. He will reportedly serve as co-chair of Biden’s infrastructure policy committee, and helped organize a fundraiser for the former VP this week, according to an invitation from Politico.
Meanwhile in October, Biden’s transition team hired Facebook executive Jessica Hertz to its general counsel to deal with ‘ethics’ issues. Notably, Facebook was the first platform to ban the Post article – with former Democrat staffer and Facebook communications team member Andy Stone tweeting that the company would be ‘reducing its distribution.’
Trump is back and this is a real race. I think we will win it.
Except all the polls are telling us Grandpa Badfinger is up +37, right? Weird how four years ago right now, we were hearing the exact same thing. Ignore the spinners who are solemnly informing you that your lying eyes are lying again and the 2016 polls were akshually very accurate. Baloney. A key component of effective gaslighting is plausibility, and I was there. You were there. All we heard in 2016 was how Trump was going down to a landslide defeat. Instead, everyone in the smart set got blindsided by the Trump Train.
And it can happen again.
Now, it doesn’t have to happen again. Nothing is written, and we have to fight for our victory. There are a lot of stupid people around – my district regularly re-e-elects Ted Lieu – and Oldfinger could build a Coalition of the Drooling to put him in the White House. But I think the Trump lightning will strike again.
Remember, the polls are the only data point in Biden’s favor. The only one. And as we have seen they screwed up last time and their proponents have an interest in them being bad for Trump.
But Kurt, the libs say, “You must hate science because the science of polling cannot be wrong! It’s science.” Yeah, but so is phrenology. The fact is that not only do the polls have a track record of failure with regard to populists like Trump – remember that they also missed a number of Senate seats that were supposed to spin down the drain with The Donald – but many of the pollsters are retained by media outlets with an anti-Trump agenda. If these very fine people in the media lie about everything, like the “very fine people” quote, why would you buy the notion that there’s some line they won’t cross when it comes to faking polls?
Am I saying they will push bullSchiff poll results to try to demoralize patriots? Yes, yes I am. You don’t have to just make up numbers – though I would not put it past them. You just tweak the turnout model and fiddle with the cross-tabs and voila! – CNN has its narrative. After all, it’s not like in the editorial offices they are saying “Sure, we’ll lie about Trump/ Russia, Trump/COVID, and Trump/Nickelback, and hey, there’s no way we’ll fake a poll! We have scruples.” They would sacrifice their babies to Baal if A) they hadn’t hit Planned Parenthood, and B) they thought it would ensure Trump loses.
Also: “Biden rallies look like the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead, which is apt since the guy handling his media events is apparently George Romero. Only the flesh-eating zombies had more pep than the Delaware Dementite’s fans.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Democrats Were Awful Filth Questioning ACB.” Kamala Harris looked sad, but Mazie Hirono of Hawaii was probably the biggest loon.
Why do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refuse to give a straightforward yes or no answer when asked whether they intend to “pack the Court” and expand it to a number larger than the nine justices that have been on the Court for the past 150 years?
Because a considerable portion of the Democratic Party wants to expand the Court beyond nine. In a recent YouGov survey, 47 percent of registered voters opposed expanding the size of the Supreme Court, 34 percent supported it, and 19 percent responded they didn’t know how they felt. But self-identified Democrats were much more supportive: 60 percent wanted to expand the Court, 18 percent opposed the idea, and 22 percent didn’t know.
It quickly became clear that in their attempts to strangle the Hunter Biden story, two social media giants left themselves gasping for air.
Twitter and Facebook took major steps to squelch the New York Post piece, but wound up giving it far more attention than if they had done nothing and let their millions of users share it freely.
For Twitter in particular, if you had to come up with a plan to reinforce conservative complaints about its liberal bias, you could hardly do better than for the tech giant to lock the Trump campaign’s account. Not to mention that of press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as well.
Hashtag: #Fail
In fact, Twitter chief Jack Dorsey admitted in a tweet that the company’s conduct–censoring stories and locking accounts with little public explanation–was “unacceptable.” You got that right, Jack. But then he didn’t do anything to fix it, apparently viewing the self-inflicted wound as just a PR problem. Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans plan to subpoena Dorsey next week.
After a few years of shoeing horses, briefly interrupted by a temporary job mining silver, I ran a brush-clearing and landscaping company as a side hustle. During this scramble for meaningful independence, the leftist tendencies I’d absorbed at college dropped off bit by bit. Life as a capitalist entrepreneur brought out the best in me, even when I was flirting with homelessness. Moreover, being in the real working world pushed me into contact with people, ideas, and situations that challenged me in all sorts of ways. After a few near-fatal incidents with horses (one of which left my skull and jaw shattered), I began pursuing my own business full time in 2016.
Now in my early 20s, I still had a soft spot for socialist ideas, including a lingering resentment toward the wealthy. And so, from a progressive politician’s perspective, I was hardly a lost cause. But I also was becoming aware that the Left didn’t really have much interest in the challenges I was facing, being far more concerned with issues of race and gender identity. As a straight white male, I was supposedly luxuriating in a life of privilege—a stereotype that had nothing to do with my experience as a blue-collar worker who’d faced debilitating family traumas.
Speaking of crazy leftwing city councils, thanks to the SUPERgenius police defunding policies of Mayor Adler and the Austin City Council, some 911 calls have waits of between 2-6 hours.
(1) If he wins, Biden will almost certainly sign off on ending the filibuster to pack the courts and add two new states for a permanent Democrat majority that will leave the Constitution behind.
(2) Trump may have announced that he’s about to reveal that the Democrats, from Obama on down, engaged in a coup against an American president.
France has accused Turkey of sending Syrian jihadists there to fight for Muslim Azerbaijan. Remember that Turkey killed over 1.5 million Armenians during the rise of the Young Turks as part of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, so the bad blood there goes back a long ways.
Quick conclusion: Relative to the number of infections fewer people have died in the US than in Australia. So for all the talk about not letting us have a US style health system, it has performed relatively better than ours did. True, Australian base levels of health are higher than US levels. Relatively fewer people got infected here than in the US. (We can argue about why that happened in the comments – probably policy errors in themselves at the State level in the US). Once infected, however, it looks like the chances of survival was higher in the US.
“Clare Bronfman Becomes First NXIVM Sex-Slave Trafficker to Get Jail Time.” Namely six years and nine months. You know it’s a crazy year when you don’t have time to pay attention rich, powerful weirdos being tried for running a sex cult…
Coinbase SJW babies: We have to be woke! Coinbase CEO: There’s the door.
The Texas House District 148 battle features a fight between a Hispanic Republican against a Democratic candidate with even more ties than usual to communism. “During a July 2018 presentation, “The Art and Science of Building the Communist Party,” Chairman of the Houston chapter of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Bernard Sampson boasted that his club had placed four communist party members on the Texas ballot, including Morales-Shaw who he specifically identified as a member of his group.”
I think the explanation for plummeting viewership is fairly obvious, even if Strauss would rather not talk about it. Conservative America is disgusted with the NBA, and therefore is tuning it out. We’re disgusted with the way the league kowtows to China and even more disgusted with the embrace of the radical BLM movement by the league and its players.
I didn’t watch a minute of the playoffs this year and rarely even checked the scores. Not because of what many of the players think about the police and about America, in general, as slanderous as those views are. And not even because players made pro-BLM gestures before the games began.
My problem was what was allowed, indeed encouraged, during the games. I will not watch any sports event during which the preaching of politics or ideology occurs.
I guess I’m not alone.
Conservative America’s divorce from the NBA is a sign, I think, of things to come. Unless corporate America steps back from its embrace of woke leftism, we are going to have to divorce ourselves from large swathes of it. To the extent feasible, we may have to divorce ourselves from many of America’s public schools. And so forth.
New South Korean mini nuclear reactor that can’t melt down approved for use in the United States. First plant is scheduled to come online in Utah, but not until 2029. Faster, please.
And here’s the post I was tempted to write: “Fuck You WordPress, Yet Again (Block Editor).”
Ireland’s Supreme Court rules that Subway bread isn’t. You would think that if it used that much sugar it would taste better. Then again, I’m not sure I’ve bought a Subway sandwich since the heyday of the $5 Footlong era…
Greetings regular readers! I’m so glad you survived yesterday’s tragic mass die-off! Plus Biden campaign troubles, fundraising updates, the “Harris Administration,” and the Burisma report looms. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Biden says 200 million people will die from the Wuhan coronavirus by the time he finishes his speech.
One of the lessons of 2016 was that the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had all kinds of internal reports of problems, signs of insufficient support and enthusiasm in key states, and ominous indicators that they were nowhere nearly as strong and effective as most of the coverage suggested.
The problem was that only a few reporters knew about those, and the ones that did had pledged to keep what they were seeing and hearing secret until after the election for their campaign narrative books. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, “over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred subjects, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly.” Florida Democratic political consultants warned the campaign they were in danger of losing the Sunshine State. Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking. The Service Employees International Union wanted to send more volunteers to Michigan and the Clinton campaign told them to keep their people to Iowa instead.
If you had really good Democratic Party or liberal activist-group sources, you heard these portentous stories that look like really key indicators in hindsight. If you didn’t, you were dependent upon the polls and the dominant narrative in the media that the Clinton campaign was an experienced, well-oiled machine while the Trump campaign was a bunch of amateur stumblebums constantly beset by infighting.
Fast-forward to today, and it feels like these kinds of, “hey, the Democratic nominee’s campaign may not be as strong as it looks” stories are leaking out into the general news coverage much more frequently.
Earlier this week, the New York Times wondered aloud about Democratic strength in Nevada:
Nevada’s Democratic political machine was held up as a model for other states where neither party has consistently dominated. But it was a machine built for another era.
Its success relied on hundreds of people knocking on thousands of doors for face-to-face conversations with voters. Now, there are fewer than half as many people canvassing for Democratic voters as there were in September 2016. And some Democratic strategists warn that Nevada could be in 2020 what Wisconsin was in 2016 — a state that the Democrats assume is safely in their column but that slips away.
The Washington Post reported that Latino Democrats are worried about Biden having lackluster numbers among this demographic:
Top Latino Democrats are voicing growing concern about Joe Biden’s campaign, warning that lackluster efforts to win the support of their community could have devastating consequences in the November election.
Recent polls showing President Trump’s inroads with Latinos have set off a fresh round of frustration and finger-pointing among Democrats, confirming problems some say have simmered for months. Many Latino activists and officials said Biden is now playing catch-up, particularly in the pivotal state of Florida, where he will campaign Tuesday — the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month — for the first time as the presidential nominee. Reaching out to Latino voters will be a key focus on the visit, according to a person with knowledge of the trip. Biden’s campaign said he will be in Tampa and Kissimmee, two areas with large Puerto Rican populations.
Plus concerns about the campaigns in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“I can’t even find a sign,” [Don] Sabbe says outside a Kroger’s in Sterling Heights, where surrounding cars fly massive Donald Trump flags that say “No More Bullsh-t” and fellow shoppers wear Trump T-shirts for their weekend grocery runs. “I’m looking for one of those storefronts. I’m looking for a campaign office for Biden. And I’m not finding one.”
The reason Sabbe can’t find a dedicated Biden campaign field office is because there aren’t any around here. Not in Macomb County, the swing region where Sabbe lives. It’s not even clear Biden has opened any new dedicated field offices in the state; because of the pandemic, they’ve moved their field organizing effort online. The Biden campaign in Michigan refused to confirm the location of any physical field offices despite repeated requests; they say they have “supply centers” for handing out signs, but would not confirm those locations. The campaign also declined to say how many of their Michigan staff were physically located here. Biden’s field operation in this all-important state is being run through the Michigan Democratic Party’s One Campaign, which is also not doing physical canvassing or events at the moment. When I ask Biden campaign staffers and Democratic Party officials how many people they have on the ground in Michigan, one reply stuck out: “What do you mean by ‘on the ground?’”
Among all Wisconsin voters, 56 percent say Biden hasn’t done enough to denounce the rioting versus just 31 percent who say he has. (Even among Democrats, 28 percent think he hasn’t done enough.) The numbers are similar in Minnesota at 54/35. Biden has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want to defund the police and he’s made several on-camera statements condemning the violence over the past few weeks, but that message isn’t getting through. And it’s helping to keep Trump close.
Democrats are concerned that a groundswell of support for President Trump outside of Minnesota’s Twin Cities may be enough to win him the state over 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Biden, the former two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator, visited carpenter apprentices and other union workers near Duluth on Friday, his first trip to Minnesota in more than 1,000 days, according to the Trump campaign.
Yet, despite his team releasing scant details about his itinerary, even to the local press, Republicans outnumbered Democrats at Hermantown’s Jerry Alander Carpenter Training Center, worrying those who are opposed to Trump clinching a second term on Nov. 3.
The Republican National Committee and the Minnesota GOP organized roughly 300 people to line Miller Trunk Highway for Biden’s stop. Democrats had less than half that number and told the Washington Examiner they didn’t know one another. Some, though, had traveled more than two hours from Minneapolis to see their party’s standard-bearer.
Tommy Moe, a retired miner from Virginia, Minnesota, predicted that the presidential race in his state would be close again after 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by only 1.5 percentage points (or 45,000 ballots). Moe, 65, based his prediction on the number of union workers he knew who felt “an affinity” for Trump because of the China trade deal and his unorthodox approach to politics.
“We didn’t have a very good turnout,” he said. “If the Democrats don’t get their act together and start getting as fired up as the Republican side is … we need a turnout. Democrats win if they turn out.”
“I focus on early primaries and the way the candidates perform in those early contests,” Norpoth said in the press release. “It’s a very good predictor, and a leading indicator of what’s going to happen in November.”
The professor said he was unsurprised at the model’s prediction this year, citing Trump’s performance in the primaries earlier in the winter.
“When I looked at New Hampshire and I saw that Donald Trump got 85 percent of the votes … I was pretty sure what the model was going to predict,” he said in the release.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, pulled down only 8.4% in New Hampshire, Norpoth said, a number that is “unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of being president,” he stated.
Enjoy some “Oh God, how I hate Trump, but Democrats are insane” hand-wringing from American Enterprise Institute wonk Danielle Pletka:
[Three paragraphs of pro-forma #OrangeManBad snipped]
I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues. I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses — almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November — would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy. That could include the abolition of the filibuster, creating an executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power; an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority; passage of devastating economic measures such as the Green New Deal; nationalized health care; the dismantling of U.S. borders and the introduction of socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown.
I fear the grip of Manhattan-San Francisco progressive mores that increasingly permeate my daily newspapers, my children’s curriculums and my local government. I fear the virtue-signaling bullies who increasingly try to dominate or silence public discourse — and encourage my children to think that their being White is intrinsically evil, that America’s founding is akin to original sin. I fear the growing self-censorship that guides many people’s every utterance, and the leftist vigilantes who view every personal choice — from recipes to hairdos — through their twisted prisms of politics and culture. An entirely Democratic-run Washington, urged on by progressives’ media allies, would no doubt only accelerate these trends.
Nor do Biden’s national-security positions reassure me. While he promises a welcome change in style and a renewed respect for U.S. alliances, Biden would, like Trump, pull our troops from the Middle East and South Asia. Worse yet, he would slash defense spending and likely renew the Obama administration’s misbegotten love affair with Iran’s tyrants. Then there is the Democratic Party’s hostility to the state of Israel. Biden supporters will clamor that the candidate’s history is very pro-Israel, but as president would he be strong enough to stand up to the new Democratic Party’s less-than-ardent support for the Jewish state?
To which I can only reply: What the hell took you so long to figure this out? (And then, to prove the extent of her Beltway Blinders, she turns out a paragraph on “execrable gun-toting racists.”)
“The former vice president’s campaign reported on Sunday that it and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) began September with $466 million in the bank – roughly $141 million more than the cash on hand for the president and the Republican National Committee (RNC).” Snip. “The infusion of cash allowed the Biden campaign to vastly outspend Trump’s team to run TV ads in August and September.” Big ad spends and no ground game? Sounds like Team Biden is trying to rerun the Jeb! strategy…
Republicans are preparing to release a report in a matter of days on their investigation focused on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, a move they hope will put fresh scrutiny on the Democratic nominee just weeks from the election.
The controversial probe, spearheaded by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is focused broadly on Obama-era policy and Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.
The GOP report, which is set to be released this week, is expected to argue that Hunter Biden’s work impacted Obama-era Ukraine policy and created a conflict of interest given then-Vice President Joe Biden’s work in the area.
Trump, Biden claims, “could not rally a single one of America’s closest allies” to support the extension of the [arms] embargo. What he neglects to mention is that the expiration date on the embargo was set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration and described by Biden as “a policy that was working to keep America safe.” That policy was, per Biden, discarded by Trump in favor of one “that has worsened the threat.” So which is it: Did the Obama-Biden Iran policy keep America safe? Or is the best argument against the Trump administration that they have failed to successfully roll back Obama-era policies?
Snip.
He fails entirely, in his op-ed ostensibly addressing the Iranian threat, to come even close to describing the full extent of how its regime has targeted U.S. forces in the Middle East, committed grievous human-rights violations against its own people, and funded terrorist organizations and plots around the globe. His failure to reckon fully with the evil of Ayatollah Khamenei seems indicative of not only his less serious estimation of the Iranian threat, but also the fact that he has made his peace with the current regime staying in power over the long term. He makes this belief explicit when he calls “Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’” strategy “a boon to the regime in Iran.” He again avoids explaining how, probably because this claim is untrue by every available metric.
Maximum pressure has effectively choked the Iranian economy. The JCPOA had helped Iran achieve GDP growth rates of 12.5 percent in 2016 and 3.7 percent in 2017. In 2018 — the same year the U.S. exited the deal — Iran’s economy contracted by 5.4 percent. 2019 was even worse, at -7.6 percent. Notably, this economic disaster has led to Iranians flooding into the streets many times over the last two years to protest not only pocketbook issues, but the regime’s restriction of basic freedoms. While Biden may be content to leave the ayatollahs in power, the Iranian people appear to be far less willing. Furthermore, Iran’s regional position has been undermined by the Trump administration’s successful efforts to strengthen Israel’s relationships with Arab nations, including the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.
Instead of backing maximum pressure, Biden supports what he calls a “smart way to be tough on Iran.” Ignoring Iran’s flagrant violations of the JCPOA even before the U.S.’s withdrawal, the sunset provisions on the agreement, and Israel’s discovery of documents detailing Iran’s nuclear program, Biden falsely asserts that the JCPOA had “verifiably block[ed] Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.”
College professors give seven times as much to Biden as Trump. That’s quite shocking. I would have expected the ratio to be more like 20-1 or 50-1. Biden must have remarkably poor fundraisers. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
” Democrats’ new strategy for winning the White House: Threaten riots if they lose.” The public doesn’t seem so hoit on the idea…
“CNN Forum Throws Nothing But Softballs and Pathetic Biden Strikes Out Anyway.” “A real low point came when the declining Biden couldn’t remember what to call the place where the mail goes.”
Segregation, what a blast from the past! I remember when I was already a full-grown man in the year 1960 and me and the boys would gather outside the soda shop to make sure only the white folks got in. Maybe those jeans and that jacket I wore are back in style again too. Jill? Where’s that trunk with all my old clothes?”
Here’s an interesting talk between two Trump-hostile liberals (director of Thiel Capital Eric Weinstein and novelist Bret Easton Ellis) who nonetheless have figured out how badly Trump Derangement Syndrome and Social Justice has screwed their side.
A few interesting points, most from Weinstein:
A mention of Weinstein’s essay on Kayfabe, professional wrestling’s shared fake reality. From that essay:
Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called “a promotion”) sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which “breaks Kayfabe” is called “shooting” to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called “working”.
Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between “freshwater” Chicago macro economists and Ivy league “Saltwater” theorists could be best understood as happening within a single “orthodox promotion” given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. The decades old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the “string” and “loop” camps would seem to be an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intra-promotion rivalry given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity.
What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.
Mention of preference falsification. “You needed to say how horrible [Trump] was if you were part of the institutional milieu, or if you needed to keep a job or weren’t on the wrong side or your clients.”
Here’s a long money quote:
The dominant idealism of a time is usually a false narrative about how people can make money during that time. ‘We Are The World'” as a portrayal of concern about Africa, the poor in Asia, what can we do to uplift people. But really it was a story about if we don’t break our bonds to our fellow countrymen, if we don’t make sure that we can not have to take care of Appalachia and the poor in the South and the downtrodden in our inner cities, we’re not going to be able to make money. The way to make money is to move operations overseas, to keep [your] headquarters wherever it’s tax advantaged. There was some process by which globalization was the betrayal of your countrymen. And that thing was portrayed as the Davos idealism. And the Davos idealism is cratering. Because it was a wealth transfer program posing as a philanthropic effort. And so the reason that nobody wants the Clintons, nobody wants the Democratic Party. Nobody wants the sanctimonious nonsense about, you know, our thirst for justice in our hatred of oppression is, is that this is a search for a constituency. That’s large enough to get people elected who can continue to keep people making money.
“He knows what the inference patterns of the left are.”
“The institutional left [forcibly] transfuse one group to supply blood to another.”
Reservoir Dogs: “Mr. Blonde is the psychopath who has shot up the jewelry store. They can’t figure out who they can trust. The only person you can trust is the psychopath, because the psychopath isn’t under control. Well, Trump came through as Mr. Blonde. The one person we know isn’t under institutional control is Donald Trump because he would never say those things. So now we’ve got a new paradigm where the only trustworthy person is the least trustworthy person.”
“You can’t wake people up because they’re dying to get back to the process of making money by betraying their fellow countrymen. The globalization thing came to an end. There’s no new idea about how to make money, right. And the pyramid schemes are collapsing.”
Ellis talks about how freedom of speech has become so constrained by leftists shibboleths. “I can’t say this, I can’t express myself…this is maddening. I can’t live!” And how many people confided to him secretly that they were going to vote for Trump, even though they could never say it in public.
“So Trump is going to hit this thing over and over again, the left is programmed to say certain things, to defend certain things. If you have to make the point that there is absolutely zero connection whatsoever between Islam and terror, there is no connection whatsoever, zero, it’s an illusion, somebody can hit that all day long, every day.”
“There is, there was once upon a time, a heuristic that said the best way to have a multicultural society is that you have to have some load bearing fictions. Like all religions are equally problematic in all ways. There’s no way that’s true…As a result, those heuristics hardened into dogmas.”
“‘Why are those everybody complaining about the trade deals we inked since they helped people in Mexico?’ As if American voters are gonna vote to help Mexican peasants. I mean, it’s great if Mexican peasants are helped, but I just don’t see the lowest echelons of American society having as their top priority, helping Mexicans with their vote. I mean, none of this makes any sense.”
Ellis: “Trump presented something extremely new into the conversation and the left couldn’t deal with it. The media couldn’t deal with it. I always felt that they had kind of dealt with them in a neutral way and just reported what he did without all his hyperbole. I don’t know if he would have won necessarily.”
Weinstein (in response): “All just, smart, honest people had to be rejected from the institutional layer. Universal expulsion of people who will not go along with the gated institution. My theory about this [is] that we grew very quickly in a very stable way. That was totally anomalous post world war II to about 1972, and every single institution that you see has an expectation of that kind of growth continuing. And so what happened is, is that all of those institutions, when they went pathological, they became Ponzi schemes and you needed to have a group of people in that institution who would not reveal the Ponzi scheme. And so effectively our expert class has been selected for as the people who will not blow the whistle on the fact that they’re lying.”
“It’s easy to be Trump. It is. But the only problem is is that if you beat Trump in the way that’s easy to beat Trump, you will not service the people with second and third homes in the Hamptons. And so those people are saying, well, I wasn’t thinking of spending that much to beat Trump.”
“Do you, do you really want nine conservative Supreme court justices? If you do, if that’s what excites you, I highly recommend talking about reparations for slavery.”
I have significant ideological disagreements with Weinstein on various issues, but his analysis of how Democratic dogma, institutional hypocrisy and Trump Derangement Syndrome have driven the left insane is insightful.
