As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never been impressed with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I first became aware of him due to his ludicrous overstatements about global warming and falsely claiming that George W. Bush didn’t win the 2004 presidential election. Indeed, he was previously lefty scumbag on many (perhaps most) issues, had more than a whiff of fringe lunacy about him, and (through no fault of his own) I find him hard to listen to, due to his spasmodic dysphonia. And I still think he’s more wrong than right on the vaccine-autism link.
But the Democrat Media Complex seems to have conspicuously hated RFK, Jr. since he suggested that link back in 2005. That hatred only kicked into higher gear when Kennedy had the unmitigated gall that his ancestral party might be willing to live up to its name and let him primary Slow Joe Biden. No such luck. The DNC opened their vast bag of dirty tricks to keep Kennedy from even competing in the 2024 Democratic Presidential primary, and thus making sure nothing would expose Slow Joe’s cognitive decline until it was too late for a real primary. Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump was a key factor in winning over a certain type of old school liberal who felt alienated from the modern Democratic Party’s increasing authoritarian, social justice-infected nature, but was still wary of Trump.
All that doesn’t necessarily make him a good Director of the Department of Health and Human Services. But damn, given how viciously Democrats have been attacking Kennedy on everything from CDC firings to vaccine policy makes me think that Kennedy may be over the target. It’s fascinating to see Democrats attack someone who literally grew up in the Democrat Party harder than they’ve attacked anyone else in Trump47’s cabinet.
The reasons for this are probably varied. One is the absolute refusal of the social justice left to admit that their full-bore 2020 Flu Manchu freakout, with its lockdowns, vaccine mandates (especially for children) and thunderous invocation of that most holy of deities, THE SCIENCE, were in any way mistakes or overreactions. The Democrat Party has come to represent the entirety of the ruling class, and Kennedy’s exposure of the lies and data manipulation carried out in the name of fighting Covid raises the specter of people actually being held to account for their self-dealing lies, and that Simply Will Not Do.
The second reason Democrats absolutely hate Kennedy is his documentation of how Big Pharma has bought control of the Democrats. Here’s a Rumble interview Jordan Peterson did with Kennedy on a variety of topics, including how Big Pharma (specifically Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKlein, and either Novartis or Novo Nordisk) were committing crimes, capturing regulatory agencies and how ObamaCare got the Democrats in bed with them.
(I had previously embedded that video (or an excerpt from it) here, but, what do you know, YouTube deleted that video.)
Kennedy may still be wrong about a great many things, but the more viciously he’s attacked, the more convinced I am that Big Pharma has fatally compromised both medical science and our unworthy political elites.
When you’re receiving this much flak, I have to assume that you’re over the target…
Happy Independence Day! It’s rained most of the last 24 hours here in central Texas, so the good news is no burn ban means we can set off fireworks, but the downside is significant flooding in the Hill Country (Kerville was particularly hard-hit).
The “Big Beautiful Bill” is now law, employment ticks up, more high profile leftist/media perverts busted, Democrats remain stuck on stupid, some Republicans retire, and proof, yet again, that the rules for the well-heeled are different than for other people.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Employers added 147,000 jobs in June as U.S. labor market continues to defy expectations.” For the MSM, it’s always “unexpectedly” all the way down.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist was arrested and charged after authorities allegedly discovered child porn on his work computer, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced Friday.
Thomas Pham LeGro, a 48-year-old video editor at the news outlet, was taken into custody on Thursday after FBI agents raided his Washington, DC, home and discovered a folder on his work laptop which contained 11 videos depicting child sexual abuse material, according to Pirro’s office.
FBI agents also discovered “fractured pieces of a hard drive in the hallway outside the room where LeGro’s work laptop was found,” during the execution of the search warrant.
The University of Pennsylvania has agreed to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports and correct records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. The university issued a statement on Tuesday vowing to comply with Title IX on the basis of biological sex and says it will apologize to “disadvantaged” female athletes.
“While Penn’s policies during the 2021-2022 swim season were in accordance with NCAA eligibility rules at the time, we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules,” Penn President J. Larry Jameson said in a statement. “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”
The U.S. Education Department and UPenn announced the voluntary agreement as part of a resolution of a federal civil rights case focused on Thomas, the biological male who won a Division I women’s title for the Ivy League university in 2022. The department’s Office for Civil Rights found that UPenn had violated Title IX by allowing a male to compete in women’s sports and occupy female-only facilities.
“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said. “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the University for future generations of female athletes.”
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened the Title IX investigation into UPenn on February 6, following President Donald Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” which interpreted Title IX law on the basis of biological sex rather than gender identity. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program or activity that receives federal financial assistance.
Trump’s diplomatic method, the exact opposite of what standard diplomats recommend, is a roaring success.
The least diplomatic president in U.S. history is scoring diplomatic victories.
Over the last couple of days, Donald Trump has gotten NATO to agree to a defense spending target of 5 percent and backed Canada off imposing a digital services tax on American tech firms.
He’s done this while being loathed by many of his foreign interlocutors. In fact, Trump has executed a near-complete inversion of the typical diplomatic formula. He’s not nice. He’s not conflict-averse. He’s not euphemistic. And yet he’s gotten results.
The NATO commitment, in particular, is potentially historic and could materially strengthen the position of the Western alliance for the long term.
Trump is violating the usual rules of persuasion. Abraham Lincoln famously said: “It is an old and true maxim that ‘a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’” Trump doesn’t hesitate to pour on the gall, often in ALL CAPS on Truth Social.
The leading 19th-century French diplomat Talleyrand said, “A diplomat who says ‘yes’ means ‘maybe,’ a diplomat who says ‘maybe’ means ‘no,’ and a diplomat who says ‘no’ is no diplomat.” Trump says “go to hell” as the start of the negotiation.
He persuades by pressuring.
He coaxes by threatening.
He de-escalates by escalating.
He wins friends and influences people by convincing them he thinks they’re freeloaders and losers.
A lot of this is a function of his personality and his experience as a Gotham real-estate developer with a nose for power dynamics, knack for showmanship, and willingness to court risk. It’s hard to see how his style of international politics will be replicable by a more traditional political figure. But undergirding his approach is a strategic insight into the gap between U.S. military and economic might and that of its allies, and how this meant there was a vast unexploited potential for the U.S. to throw its weight around.
When the U.S president is talking about pulling the plug on NATO, or cutting off trade talks with Canada — as Trump did in response to the proposed digital services tax — it’s going to get everyone’s attention.
The bull standing outside the door of the china shop is a powerful incentive to get along with the bull.
The rest of the conservative movement noticed this no later than, what, 2017? Nice of National Review to catch up…
In a post on social media platform X, FBI Director Kash Patel wrote that $14.6 billion in losses were incurred, while $245 million was seized, as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said in a separate post on X that hundreds of people were charged in the case.
“Public corruption will not be tolerated as the Director and I vigorously pursue bad actors who violated their oaths to all of us,” Bongino said, describing the case as the “largest healthcare fraud investigation” in the country’s history.
The investigation encompassed 50 federal districts and 12 state attorneys general, according to the DOJ. State and federal law enforcement agencies also took part, according to the FBI.
A statement issued by the DOJ said that criminal charges were filed against 324 defendants, including 96 doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and other health care workers across the United States. Officials said that 29 defendants were charged with partaking in transnational criminal groups who allegedly submitted around $12 billion in fraudulent health-related claims to U.S. health insurance companies.
Further, four defendants were apprehended in Estonia based on cooperation with law enforcement agencies in that country, while seven others were arrested at the U.S.–Mexico border or at American airports, the DOJ said.
That organization, federal prosecutors said, is accused of using individuals sent into the United States from other countries to purchase “dozens of medical supply companies located across the United States” before submitting $10.6 billion in fraudulent health care claims to Medicare for medical devices and equipment.
At the same time, that group allegedly exploited stolen identities from U.S. citizens across all 50 states, using their stolen medical information to submit the false claims, according to the DOJ.
In another action announced by the DOJ, federal officials said they filed charges in Illinois against five people, including the owners of two Pakistan-based marketing companies, in relation to a $703 million Medicare fraud scheme.
The defendants allegedly stole Medicare beneficiaries’ confidential information and sold it to laboratories and other medical companies, which then submitted false Medicare claims, according to the statement.
“The defendants allegedly used artificial intelligence to create fake recordings of Medicare beneficiaries purportedly consenting to receive certain products,” the DOJ’s statement said.
Here are some reasons why the Democratic drive to reinvent the party seems to have stalled out—and may have a hard time restarting despite their political opening.
The “’tis but a scratch” problem. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Knight insists, against all evidence, that his wounds are not that serious—“’tis but a scratch.” Democrats, in the aftermath of losing two of three elections to the widely-disliked Trump and seeing their coalition re-configured by massive losses among both white and nonwhite working-class voters, are still in denial about how serious their wounds are. They are not but a scratch and cannot be fixed by anything less than a full-scale overhaul of the party’s approach and image. Tinkering around the edges, while easier, will not work.
The breaking point fallacy. Democrats have a hard time thinking outside their own views of Trump and the GOP. They are deeply convinced that Trump is perhaps the worst person to ever walk the earth and find it difficult to relate to voters whose views are more mixed. They are convinced that a breaking point from Trump’s actions will inevitably be reached where voters will wake up and realize Democrats were right all along, with happy political results to follow. This fallacy undergirded Democrats’ thinking in the 2024 campaign with rather unhappy results when that breaking point was not reached. Democrats’ reliably florid responses to Trump’s outrage-of-the-day in 2025 indicates that they are still hoping that breaking point can be reached and that they are puzzled, indeed outraged, that voters have not yet mounted the barricades. Conveniently, the expectation of a breaking point let’s Democrats off the hook from changing very much in their own party.
The “whatever it is, I’m against it” problem. In the classic Marx Brothers movie, Horsefeathers, Groucho uncompromisingly asserts: “whatever it is, I’m against it.” That pretty much sums up Democrats’ approach to Trump administration proposals and actions. With very minor exceptions, Democrats have refused to support any of it, even where these actions are popular and/or are targeted at clear areas of Democratic vulnerability that needed shoring up. Little to no effort has been made to stake out a middle ground that recognizes some of Trump’s actions address areas where Democrats have screwed up, while setting out a better (kinder, gentler?) approach that would more effective and less illiberal. Easier though to adopt Groucho’s approach and avoid the uncomfortable need to acknowledge mistakes and convince voters you won’t make them again.
The rising generations chimera. Many Democrats have seized upon the fact that leading Democratic politicians tend to be quite old, if not ancient (hello, Joe Biden!) and decided what is needed is younger Democrats. The changing of the guard—that’ll do the trick! On net, it seems like a no-brainer to move younger cohorts up in the party who can better communicate with young voters where Democrats have been losing ground. But what if these young communicators aren’t communicating anything to voters that would actually help Democrats dig out of the hole they’re in? Then the changing of the guard will only help at the margins.
Take Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic Millennial who pulled off an upset victory in the New York City Democratic primary and will likely be New York’s next mayor. His energy and media savvy are admirable but his radical cultural politics—only lightly sanded off recently—and his wildly impractical economic plans don’t seem likely to change the image of the Democratic Party in a good way. But he nevertheless will be a pole of attraction in the party, just as AOC and “the Squad” were in the aftermath of the 2018 election—and we saw how well that worked out. Democrats’ thirst for generational excitement, whatever its content, will make it even harder than it already was for Democrats to re-orient the party around an effective majoritarian politics.
Snip.
The “round up the usual suspects” problem. In the movie Casablanca, Captain Reynaud (Claude Rains) concludes the film by saying “round up the usual suspects.” The Democrats have an establishment and establishments don’t like change. Thus, there is a built-in tendency to blame messaging, narrative, lack of coalitional input, etc.—the “usual suspects”—rather than deeper problems of culture, economic policy, and class antagonism. Most recently this tendency was on display in the formation of a Project 2029 group drawn from various sectors of the Democratic establishment to craft a new, improved approach for the Democrats. As the Politico article on the group notes:
Some would-be allies are skeptical that such an ideologically diverse and divergent set of policy minds could craft anything close to a coherent agenda, let alone a politically winning one.
“Developing policies by checking every coalitional box is how we got in this mess in the first place,” said Adam Jentleson, who has spent recent months preparing to open a new think tank called Searchlight. “There is no way to propose the kind of policies the Democratic Party needs to adopt without pissing off some part of the interest-group Borg. And if you’re too afraid to do that, you don’t have what it takes to steer the party in the right direction.”
For Texas voters: “17 Proposed Amendments Head to Voters in November.” Expected a more detailed post on this sometime in October.
“Houston Parents Sue HISD Over Daughter’s Secret Social Gender Transition. A Houston family is taking the state’s largest school district to court, claiming their daughter was socially transitioned by school staff in direct defiance of their explicit instructions.”
Terry and Sarah Osborn, the parents of a Bellaire High School student, filed a federal lawsuit against the Houston Independent School District earlier this week, alleging the school socially transitioned their daughter against their explicit wishes. The lawsuit names several individuals, including Superintendent Mike Miles, Bellaire High School Principal Michael Niggli, school counselor Sarah Ray, and multiple teachers.
According to the suit, more than six Bellaire High School employees referred to the Osborns’ daughter—who is biologically female—using a masculine name and male pronouns for two years. The situation began in ninth grade, when the student’s theater teacher distributed a worksheet asking for students’ names and pronouns. Sarah Osborn specifically requested that the teacher use her daughter’s legal name and female pronouns. However, the student altered the worksheet, crossing out the original entry and writing in “he/him” pronouns.
The parents claim they did not learn about the consistent use of male pronouns by teachers until the student was well into her sophomore year. At that point, they formally requested that teachers revert to using their daughter’s biological pronouns. Despite these repeated requests, the lawsuit alleges that the teachers continued using male pronouns.
By the student’s junior year, the Osborns met with Principal Niggli to address the situation directly. They reiterated their concerns about the school’s handling of the matter. Principal Niggli attempted a compromise: teachers would refer to the student only by her last name to avoid using any pronouns at all. The Osborns, however, rejected this compromise and again instructed the school to use their daughter’s legal name and female pronouns.
The lawsuit also notes that the Osborns filed a request under the Texas Public Information Act, seeking employee communications regarding their daughter, HISD’s policies on the use of preferred names and pronouns, and documentation related to the student’s counseling sessions over the years. Elizabeth Rice, HISD’s attorney, responded that the request was too broad and asked for clarification. When the Osborns’ attorney insisted the request was sufficiently specific, Rice again claimed it was overly broad and said fulfilling it would require producing at least 77,344 pages of emails.
The lawsuit argues that HISD’s responses are evidence of “widespread past and ongoing treatment of their daughter as a boy by its employees,” carried out without parental consent and in direct opposition to explicit parental instructions.
The Osborns are asking the court to declare HISD’s policies in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, prohibit the district from using masculine pronouns or an alternate name for their daughter, and award attorney’s fees along with compensatory and punitive damages. The complaint states the district violated the parents’ “fundamental parental rights” under the Fourteenth Amendment and their “sincerely held religious beliefs” protected by the First Amendment.
Not only should the school district pay, but everyone involved in this should having their teaching certificate revoked and never be allowed to teach in the state again.
Yeah, Kerville has been hit hard by the flooding:
More good news: “Hamas leader and Oct. 7 mastermind Hakham Muhammad Issa Al-Issa killed in airstrike, IDF says.” Unlike Democrats, I think it’s a good thing when terrorist leaders get killed.
Diddy do it, but according to a jury, not all of it. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was convicted of a prostitution-related offense but acquitted Wednesday of sex trafficking and racketeering charges.”
A steady stream of reports is now developing that suggests Covid vaccinations may indeed hurt fertility and pregnancy outcomes.
I reported on a rat study that clearly showed fertility was impacted after the animals were injected with mRNA Covid vaccines. A recently published study (not peer reviewed yet) looking at data from Israeli women found a substantially higher-than-expected number of eventual fetal losses associated with Covid vaccination during gestational weeks 8-13.
A newly published peer-reviewed study analyzing nationwide data from the Czech Republic has reported a significant association between Covid vaccination and reduced fertility rates in women of childbearing age. The study, which examined approximately 1.3 million women aged 18–39 between January 2021 and December 2023, found that women who received the Covid vaccine before conception had a substantially lower rate of successful conceptions (“SC”, i.e., pregnancies that resulted in live births) compared to their unvaccinated counterparts.
Of course, vaccine mandate advocates swore up and down it was absolutely safe. Meanwhile, it seemsto be harming those with very low chances of dying from Flu Manchu…
“Florida Gov. DeSantis Announces Tax Holiday On Guns.” September 8 through December 21. Your move, Greg Abbott…
On July 1, District Judge Ann Donnelly of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled that there was sufficient evidence to proceed with a 16-count indictment against Huawei and its subsidiaries.
Huawei, which is closely tied to the Chinese communist regime, stands accused of racketeering, stealing trade secrets from six U.S. companies, and committing bank fraud.
With Donnelly’s ruling, the case will move forward toward trial. Currently, the proceedings are scheduled to begin on May 4, 2026.
Huawei stands charged with using a Hong Kong-based front company, Skycom, to conduct business in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions and with misleading banks in order to facilitate more than $100 million in illegal money transfers.
Additionally, the indictment alleges that Huawei engaged in racketeering to expand its global brand.
“Harris County Agencies Reportedly Spent Millions With No Paper Trail.” Even lefty County Judge Lina Hidalgo has been raising the alarm over it. Maybe she didn’t get her cut…
“Famed Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez Jr. was arrested for overstaying his visa and lying on a green card application and will be deported to Mexico, where he faces organized crime charges.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Spanish Operator of Proposed High-Speed Rail Liquidates American Subsidiary.” Yet another roadblock to the pie-in-the-sky Texas high speed rail project that will never be built.
So remember that story a while back in New York magazine’s The Cut, when the (I kid you not) Finance Reporter got scammed, withdrew $50,000 in cash from a bank, and handed it to a total stranger? To a lot of people, the details didn’t add up. Can you even withdraw $50,000 in cash without filling in a boatload for forms or triggering fraud warnings? One reporter went digging for the truth, and found out that, yeah, it looks like it’s true and you can just waltz out with that much cash…if you’re related to the Roosevelts.
So Diamond Distributors declared bankruptcy, and the new owners evidently decided, “Hey we can just sell all this consignment inventory we have, not pay the publishers for it, and use the money to pay back this Chase loan.” The publishers disagree…
Of the many self-inflicted dooms besetting the Democratic Party, the blue state exodus gets talked about far less than Trump Derangement Syndrome or the radical wokeness destroying the party (along with everything else it touches). But for a party that once crowed about “demographic destiny” making them the “permanent majority party,” the shifting demographics of people fleeing blue states due to lousy governance, and the resulting shift in electoral votes, is going make Democrats winning the presidency much more difficult in 2032.
“There is a year that should absolutely terrify Democrats. It’s not 2024 or 2026 or even 2028. It’s 2032.”
“The population movement right now is a flashing red warning sign for Democrats. The reason is the 2030 reapportionment. Every ten years, the US conducts the census. One big thing done with that data is the recalculation of how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives, and how many votes it gets in the Electoral College. And those numbers move in tandem. You gain two House seats. You gain two electoral votes. If you lose a House seat, you lose an electoral vote.”
“Democratic states are losing population and Republican states are gaining.”
“Here’s one way to think about it. In 2020, Joe Biden won* a 306 to 232 victory in the Electoral College. Then, after 2020, the census was finished and representation was reallocated for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election. Under the new map, winning those same states would have shrunk Biden’s victory margin by six electoral votes to 303 to 235.”
“The next census will happen in 2030, and the map will again change for the 2032 presidential election. And right now, the outlook for that map is a disaster for Democrats.”
“Blue states like California and New York shedding House seats and electoral votes, and red states like Texas and Florida gaining four new electoral votes and House seats each.”
“In 2024, Donald Trump won a 312 to 226 victory in the Electoral College. Under this projection, the exact same state and vote breakdown would swell that margin by 20 electoral votes to 322 to 216.”
“Right now the wind is absolutely blowing away from Democratic controlled states and towards Republican controlled ones. And it’s worth asking why.”
“The red areas of the country are becoming a bigger and bigger share of the pie, and it gets to a flashing red problem for Democrats, both for their political survival and brand identity.”
“For the most part, it is expensive as hell to live in a blue area governed by Democrats. The data is clear eight of the ten states with the highest rent prices are solid blue states, and eight of the ten states with the highest cost of living index are also solid blue states.”
“Having a high GDP or on-paper prosperity doesn’t mean much when most people can’t afford their lives.”
“So why are blue cities and states in such an affordability crisis right now? Well, to start, obviously we’re all thinking it 1, 2, 3: taxes. It’s just the fact that Democratic controlled states tend to impose higher tax rates. Sometimes that means taxes that some GOP states don’t even have, like the income tax.”
“Culture is another part. By now it’s clear that Covid in 2020 presented a particular challenge for blue states and cities. Many of which, took a much softer approach to urban disorder and unrest and are still trying to reverse the damage.”
“On a lot of stuff, Democrats also just tend to be more lax or more compassionate, depending on your point of view.”
“The upside might be that a homeless person is treated with more dignity, or you won’t get thrown in jail just for having a bag of marijuana. But the downside might be that now a public park is inaccessible to families wanting to use it, or people are doing hard drugs on the street without the law intervening, which isn’t actually compassionate to anyone.”
“But more than taxes or culture or anything else. The overwhelming majority of this issue stems from one big fact: housing. It has just become really expensive for people to buy or rent a place to live in many blue states. By any conceivable metric, the US overall is in an affordable housing crisis right now. The average renting American now spends over 30% of their income on rent. The ratio of income to housing prices is at a record high right now, and at its highest in blue states.”
“And we have clear data showing us that this has now become a direct drag on Democrats. An NBC analysis of the 2024 presidential race found that Trump made his biggest gains in the counties that have the worst housing markets. Remember those top ten most expensive states and how eight of them were blue states? Five of those eight were also in the ten states that swung the most towards Trump in 2024.”
“And even when people don’t move out of a blue city or state, the people that stay are increasingly reacting to the high cost of living. By losing faith in the Democratic Party. Again, especially middle and working class people. It’s not a coincidence that Trump’s biggest gains in 2024 were in diverse, working class congressional districts in California and the New York City area, places where the Democratic Party has full control and has failed to address the cost of living.”
“But we also know that there is a way to address this in cities, mainly because many blue cities in red states have done it. Take Austin, which is the seat of a county that voted for Kamala Harris by almost 40 points. It’s seen explosive growth over the past 15 years, partly because the city and state have been very successful in making housing more affordable. That’s not because every landlord there suddenly became a socialist or because they banned Blackrock, but because they fundamentally just built more housing, making more space and lowering the prices.” The City of Austin government proper had very little to do with that, though I’m sure it’s several orders of magnitude easier to build apartment buildings here than in San Francisco, and you see them going up all the time. But Austin is surrounding by bedroom communities in far more growth-friendly counties, and Texas beats the hell out of California for pro-growth policies.
“That’s the kind of thing that makes families move there, companies open there, students stay there. And remember, each one of those people is a tiny little piece of building another electoral vote every ten years. By contrast, cities like New York and LA and San Francisco and Boston are in an absolutely different spot. It is simply incredibly expensive to live there.”
“The Democratic Party sees its political power decrease when fewer people live in the states that it controls, but it is the policies of its own politicians which are preventing more people from living in them.”
The only “growth” that blue state politicians seem to embrace is that of their own bank accounts and the ranks of illegal aliens—the same illegal aliens that drive up the cost of housing for ordinary, non-subsidized citizens. The bluer the city or state, the more likely they are to pursue actively anti-growth policies on the assumption that more people equal more destruction of the environment. And how can Democrats create safe cities when the Soros-backed Democrats they elect are determined to keep violent felons on the street as long as they hail from designated victim groups?
How can Democrats pursue pro-growth policies when so many core ideological constituents are anti-growth?
If you pay attention, communist nations will always give you reminders of their essential cruelty. Word has leaked out that one of China’s brutal methods to fight the initial Wuhan coronavirus outbreaks was to stuff victims in body bags while they were still alive.
“Former resident Luo Xylene, now living in the United States, is sharing a harrowing account of state control human suffering and suppressed truth From his home in Wuhan Shiu district.”
“China enforced one of the most severe lockdowns in modern history. Entire neighborhoods and apartment buildings were sealed with steel bars welded across doors. Luo said some people were trapped inside with no food or medicine. ”
“Anyone who complained was labeled feverish and sent to isolation centers with infected patients.”
“Citizen journalists like Chill Shirang Jang and Fong Bin, who documented the lockdown’s harsh realities, were arrested in rapid succession.”
“Censorship was relentless. Videos showing COVID 19 deaths, often filmed by civilians, were intercepted and deleted. Luo said they erased every glimpse of the truth.”
“Inside the ambulance a body bag already had a person inside, but that person wasn’t dead. The zipper on the bag was still halfway open and their mouth was wide open.”
“No funerals were allowed and the person simply disappeared in silence. Families weren’t allowed to collect the ashes They were told they could only do so after the pandemic was declared over.”
“Luo’s own defiance posting online about the need for free speech came at a steep cost. Arrested and tortured, he recounted ‘they hung me from a stainless steel railing, my toes barely touching the floor. After hours, they beat my stomach with rubber batons until I lost control of my bladder.'”
“His ordeal shattered any faith in the CCP. He said with pain the CCP doesn’t treat the people as human beings. They’re nothing but bandits, and their crimes are too numerous to list.
“After years of fear and persecution, Luo escaped to the United States in May 2024.”
Honestly, dredging up all this horror again is just an excuse to embed to relevant Monty Python clip:
To hit or not to hit Iran, that is the question, illegal alien friendly judges land themselves in hot water, some party switch shenanigans in Florida, the Texas Senate passes some bills (good and bad), and updates on the proceedings against several disgraced politicos. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Also, Texas residents should remember that the Sales tax Holiday starts tomorrow.
Tenacity is the most important virtue of national leaders at war, which allows them to press on with no assurance of victory, fending off tremendous political pressures to fold. Winston Churchill displayed this quality in 1940. In June of that year, Germany appeared unstoppable. Paris and the entirety of Western Europe had fallen. The Luftwaffe was grinding down the grossly outnumbered British pilots, and German invasion barges were being assembled in Belgian ports. Even then, with Britain desperate for U.S. support, the American national debate on interventionism, prompted by the outbreak of war in September 1939, continued to break decisively in favor of the isolationists.
Exploring an accommodation with Germany appeared as the eminently reasonable and prudent course of action because of Herr Hitler’s generous offer to leave Britain and its vast empire intact. When British parliamentarians pressed Churchill to explain his plan, he confessed to his intimates that he had no plan at all. He was determined to just keep buggering on.
Then the situation became bleaker still for the British and for Churchill personally. In June 1941, the German army smashed its way into Russia, advancing rapidly toward what looked like an imminent victory. Although the Wehrmacht’s swift conquests promised to wholly remedy Germany’s only weakness—its lack of petroleum—the isolationists in the U.S. Congress remained dominant. Meanwhile, at home, London was abuzz with talk of Churchill’s heavy drinking, his personal dependence on gifts from his Jewish friends to pay for his extravagant tastes and, above all, his utter lack of strategy—he had failed to offer any path at all that could conceivably lead to victory.
Things looked grim all around. In North Africa, the brilliant German tactician Erwin Rommel was outmaneuvering British forces with ease. Much worse were the first reports of Germany’s astonishing technological progress: the world’s first jet fighter that could easily outfly every single British and American fighter; the world’s first air-to-surface missile (Fritz X) that, in September 1943, would sink the Italian battleship Roma (to prevent it from surrendering to the Allies); and the Tiger tank that could crush British armor.
Nevertheless, the isolationists in Congress refused to fund even a prosaic piston-engine fighter project—the P-51 Mustang, the war’s best Allied fighter—which was developed with fast-dwindling British funds.
Churchill’s answer? Just keep buggering on.
Snip.
Whereas Churchill’s problem was an isolationist Congress that constrained a generally sympathetic president, Netanyahu enjoyed ample support on the Hill but faced an American administration determined to cut Israel down to size and to remove him from power.
As Israel fought a major, multifront war in October 2023, key U.S. officials encouraged domestic uproar against Netanyahu and worked to constrain him and even collapse his government.
That was not all the president’s doing, but Joe Biden’s administration was stacked with Barack Obama’s leftovers, who ran the gamut of pathological Israel haters, from Samantha Power to Robert Malley—the red-diaper baby of Stalinist Jewish parents in Paris whom I met in my youth when they were working for Algeria’s National Liberation Front, which was not merely fanatically anti-Israel but also declaredly anti-Jewish, much like Yemen’s Houthis today. With the CIA mostly very hostile (as it has been since it was established in 1947, as declassified documents fully reveal), only the Pentagon harbored some friends of Israel—although that hardly stopped the administration from using every trick in the book to delay mid-war weapons supplies to Israel.
Netanyahu faced a concerted campaign, directed from Washington, that brought together Israeli nonprofits and Netanyahu’s political opponents. Almost from the get-go, Netanyahu had to overcome calls and protests by well-educated—and some even well-meaning—Israelis and American Jews, as well as all the usual suspects in European capitals and almost every other world government incessantly demanding a cease-fire, not as a pause, but as an end to the war.
Worse still, several of Israel’s retired and barely retired generals threw their weight behind the cease-fire push. Some did so with the authority of true heroes, such as Yair Golan, the head of the unsubtly named The Democrats (a merger of the left-wing Labor and Meretz Parties) and former IDF deputy chief of staff no less. Golan jumped into his small car on Oct. 7 to successfully rescue people with his handgun, as did the former head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate Israel Ziv, now a very successful security contractor overseas after distinguished service, who became the guru of an entire cabal of retired generals, including some who served in Netanyahu’s government until they left it to oppose him. Then, inevitably, there were tawdry time-servers who somehow became generals without doing much other than talking, like Amos Gilead, who’s well known and much-favored in U.S. officialdom because of his hostility to Netanyahu.
All those former generals demanded the same thing, albeit at different times: to stop the war with no way of recovering the Israeli hostages and no way of forcing Hamas to accept supervised disarmament, therefore allowing it to use a cease-fire to reconstitute.
Furthermore, these generals offered no solution whatever to the Hezbollah dilemma in the north. The day after the Oct. 7 attack, Hezbollah started launching rockets against Israel. If Israel did not attack, Hezbollah forces, then assuredly the most powerful non-state army in the world, was certainly capable of burning every Jewish town and village north of Haifa with countless rockets (the number 110,000 that was widely circulated turned out to be simply invented) while targeting power stations, Ben Gurion Airport, port facilities, every chemical plant and refinery, and every air base with thousands of guided missiles. If Israel were to attack, those massive barrages would immediately begin.
As Netanyahu pondered this dilemma, he had to deal not only with his security establishment but also with unremitting pressure from Washington. A mere few days after Oct. 7, the Biden administration intervened and made clear its opposition to an Israeli preemptive strike against Hezbollah—a position it would maintain over the next year. In fact, when Israel finally eliminated Hassan Nasrallah in a strike on his bunker on Sept. 27, 2024, Biden’s reaction was an irate “Bibi, what the fuck?”
The Biden administration displayed a similar hands-off attitude toward Iran’s proxy in Yemen, allowing Tehran to pile more pressure on Israel. The Houthis joined the fight with their skirts, sandals, and Iranian supplied anti-ship missiles and drones that not only deprived Israel of its secondary Red Sea sea port access but also targeted commercial vessels, blocking navigation in the area and forcing shipping companies to find longer, more expensive routes, thereby augmenting U.S. and international pressure on Israel to end the war. Washington allowed Iran to stop maritime traffic in the Red Sea and Suez Canal without any retaliation against Tehran and its own maritime traffic, while Western disarray was compounded by the spectacle of very expensive European navies doing nothing much even as their Mediterranean ports lost all their Asian traffic.
This shameful passivity reinforced the Israeli conviction that France, Italy, and Spain, unable and unwilling to defend even their own direct material interests, would only yield to Muslim demographic and political pressure in other respects as well. Only the British joined the United States in eventually striking the Houthis, though mostly symbolically and nowhere near the sustained and targeted campaign required to destroy Houthi capabilities.
Between American permissiveness toward Iran’s multipronged campaign and Washington’s support for Netanyahu’s domestic opposition, calls for a Gaza cease-fire intensified and became the default position across the political landscape, from Israel’s left and even moderate center to most European governments, in addition to the Biden administration.
It is against this backdrop that Netanyahu’s pure resolve must be understood. With this remarkable array of forces, external and internal, bearing down on him, his tenacity was the only thing that mattered.
Read the whole thing.
The Houthis in Yemen are in the find out phase, as U.S. forces just blew up a vital oil port.
Fresh US airstrikes on Yemen Thursday marked the single-deadliest known attack under President Donald Trump’s new campaign targeting the Houthi rebels. The Pentagon has been intensely bombing Yemen since March 15, when the Gaza truce collapsed.
A Houthi spokesman announced Friday that the attacks killed 38 people and wounded 102 others. The death toll was hours later updated to at least 74 killed. The operation mainly targeted and destroyed the Ras Isa oil port, which sent massive fireballs shooting into the night sky.
The final pillar of the plan, calling to “confront long-term contributors to domestic terrorism,” is laden with potentially controversial social proposals.
This section identifies “ghost guns”—unregistered weapons without a serial number, often created via 3D printer—as one such contributor, and calls to “[r]ein in the proliferation” of such weapons, “encourage state adoption of extreme risk protection orders, and drive other executive and legislative action including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
It also called for “advancing inclusion” as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic to “mitigate xenophobia and bias.”
This would be in order to “address hate crime reporting barriers faced by disadvantaged communities by promoting law enforcement training and resources to prevent and address bias-motivated crimes,” according to the SIP.
Additionally, the plan encouraged “teaching and learning of civics education that provides students with the skill to fully participate in civic life,” and promoting “literacy education for both children and adult learners and existing proven interventions to foster resiliency to disinformation.”
The change at the border between President Biden and President Trump is nothing short of staggering, and two numbers best tell that story: 189,604 and 20.
The first is the number of illegal immigrants Border Patrol agents caught and immediately released into the U.S. in December 2023, at the depths of the Biden border chaos.
The second is the number of illegal immigrants agents caught and released into the U.S. in February — roughly one-hundredth of 1% of the total in Mr. Biden’s worst month.
For years, Border Patrol agents have been telling anyone who would listen that catch-and-release was the driver of illegal immigration.
Migrants who had a reasonable sense that they could live and work in the U.S. would pay $10,000 or more to smugglers to reach the border. If their chances of release were slim, they wouldn’t pay or make the trip.
Mr. Trump’s policies have drastically cut the chances of catch-and-release from 778 per 1,000 border crossers in December 2023 to just 2 per 1,000 in February.
“New Mexico Judge Resigns After Housing Alleged Tren De Aragua Member. The resignation occurred a few days after law enforcement arrested illegal alien Cristhian Ortega-Lopez…Democrat Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano resigned after police arrested an alleged Tren De Aragua (TdA) gang member.”
FBI Director Kash Patel announced Friday that the bureau has arrested Judge Hannah Dugan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin on charges of obstruction, accusing the Dugan of obstructing an arrest of illegal immigrants last week.
“We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject — an illegal alien — to evade arrest,” Patel said in a brief statement shared on X – which was subsequently deleted and re-posted. “Thankfully our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public.”
The days when Democrats can blithely ignore immigration laws are coming to a close.
Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), the second most powerful Senate Democrat, announced Wednesday his decision not to run for another term after nearly three decades in the world’s greatest deliberative body.
Durbin, 80, is ending his Senate career after five terms, the longest tenure of any Senator in Illinois history. His retirement opens up a deep blue seat in 2026 and will create a leadership competition for Senate Democrats amid frustration with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and generational turnover within the party.
Remember, in Minnesota, crimes aginst designed hate objects are perfectly legal. “Progressive Minnesota Prosecutor Lets State Employee Off with No Charges for Alleged Tesla Vandalism.”
The Hennepin County Attorney’s office is seeking diversion for Minnesota Department of Human Service employee Dylan Adams after he allegedly vandalized at least six Teslas in Minneapolis while walking his dog….
Progressive County Attorney Mary Moriarty took office in 2023 and has faced strong criticism for her soft-on-crime approach. On several occasions, Moriarty has shown leniency to violent criminals, including suspects charged with murder and sexual assault, leading to disputes with prosecutors and outrage among victims’s families.
Is she Soros-backed? You better believe it. I hope Elon Musk sues all of them for everything they own…
Well, this is disturbing. “Stunned cops allegedly find 180K rounds of ammo packed in minivan driven by two Mexican nationals.”
Two Mexican nationals pulled over in a routine traffic stop in Colorado were found with 180,000 illegal rounds of ammunition in the back of their van, according to federal prosecutors.
Caesar Ramon Martinez Solis, 41, and Humberto Ivan Amador Gavira, 24, were pulled over late last month for failing to dim their headlights and using a turn signal in Canon City, 35 miles southwest of Colorado Springs, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado.
Officers then found 180 boxes stacked in the back of the van — each labeled as having 1,000 rounds of ammo, mostly .308 but also 30 boxes of 7.62, the feds said.
Ammunition in back of minivan.
The federal government’s main website on COVID-19 information has been taken down and replaced with a new version discarding the natural-origin theory of the coronavirus that was pushed by the Biden administration.
Where the previous website pushed vaccine and testing information, the White House is now displaying scientific proof that the virus was man-made and leaked from a Chinese virus lab while calling out U.S. officials and agencies that it says “obstructed” the truth from the American people.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is named along with Dr. Peter Daszak, Dr. David Morens and other public officials who are accused of engaging in “a multi-year campaign of delay, confusion, and non-responsiveness in an attempt to obstruct the Select Subcommittee’s investigation” and to hide incriminating evidence.”
Now will Democrats finally accept the truth, or continue clinging to the “wet market” origins like they cling to all their other lockdown lies?
“Hegseth Denounces Journalists Who ‘Won’t Give Back Their Pulitzers for Discredited Stories as Pulitzer Board Facing String of Setbacks in Trump’s Lawsuit. He insists he is the subject of ‘hit pieces that ‘come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax.'” Soon the legacy media can be financially, as well as factually and morally, bankrupt.
So the Russians captured a Bradley in Ukraine. After analyzing how it compares to their own BMPs, they want one.
The Russians have gotten a closeup look at an M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle and seem to like it better than their own armored vehicles.
The Bradley offers more protection and can fire more accurately than its Russian equivalent, the BMP-3, according to a Russian report that was leaked onto a Telegram channel earlier this month.
Experts told Task & Purpose that the report appears to be legitimate.
Priority legislation that would raise the homestead exemption for elderly and disabled homeowners by $50,000 passed the Texas Senate on Wednesday. With other planned exemption increases, elderly homeowners would receive a total of $200,000 in homestead exemptions.
Senate Bill (SB) 23 and Senate Joint Resolution (SJR) 85 raise the school tax homestead exemption — a reduction in the taxable value of a home — for age 65 and over homeowners from $10,000 to $60,000. The proposal is estimated to cost the state $1.2 billion through the next biennium.
Both passed by a 30 to 1 vote with the lone “no” coming from state Sen. Nathan Johnson (D-Dallas), which is the first “no” vote against a homestead exemption increase in the Senate in multiple sessions.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick prefaced this proposal in an early-April press conference, during which he said he and Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) were working together on the item.
This is on top of the planned standard homestead exemption increase from $100,000 to $140,000.
Just in case you hadn’t heard: Pope Francis dead at 88. “The pope, who led the Catholic Church for twelve years, passed away just one day after Easter Sunday when the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Despite his ongoing health problems, he made several appearances during Holy Week, including a trip to St. Peter’s Basilica and a visit with Vice President JD Vance on Sunday.” Sic transit gloria mundi.
Hijacking thwarted. “A U.S. man hijacked a small plane in Belize on Thursday, stabbing two passengers and a pilot, before one of the stabbed passengers fatally shot him, officials in Belize and the United States said. The plane then landed safely.”
Pizzo, considered a possible candidate for governor in 2026, said unaffiliated voters helped elect him to office. He added that the state party needed new leadership, but Democratic leaders didn’t want him to be it. The party that his late father volunteered for in the 1960s, he said, “is not the party today.”
“Here’s the issue: The Democratic Party in Florida is dead. But there are good people that can resuscitate it. But they don’t want it to be me,” he said.
Pizzo’s stunning announcement — which caught Democrats completely by surprise — of a switch to no party affiliation is just the latest blow for Florida’s beleaguered Democratic Party. The state currently has 1.2 million more registered Republicans than Democrats, and no Democrat holds statewide elected office — a far cry from Florida’s former status as the ultimate swing state.
It’s got to hurt to have the Minority leader of the third largest state in the union leave your party because it’s too radical. Especially since a quarter century ago Florida was still The Land of the Hanging Chad…
Florida party switch shenanigans the second: “David Jolly, a former Republican U.S. Congressman in Florida’s 13th Congressional District who left the GOP amid his distaste for President Donald Trump, has now registered as a Democrat. He’s also launched a political committee, Florida 2026, ahead of what many expect to be a gubernatorial bid.” I doubt someone who left office in 2017 is going to be at the top of anyone’s list, and Charlie Crist’s post-Republican career hardly offers a blueprint for success in Florida politics…
“Disgraced former Representative George Santos (R., N.Y.) was sentenced Friday to 87 months in federal prison for wire fraud and identity theft, completing his remarkable rise and fall from a newly elected swing-seat congressman to widely ridiculed conman whose colleagues expelled him from the House..”
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has opened an investigation into Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) over donations made to her 2024 campaign by the Democratic fundraising organization Act Blue.
The FEC began its probe after receiving a complaint from the conservative Coolidge-Reagan Foundation in late March.
The complaint alleges that Crockett received 53 separate donations of $595 from a 73 year old supporter named Randy Best through the Act Blue portal.
However, when one of Crockett’s opponents for 2026 spoke to Best’s wife, she denied that the couple knew anything about donations, raising concerns that the Act Blue donations may have been made by others with donations being given under false names.
Crockett’s campaign received more than $870,000 in donations through Act Blue.
At this point, I think we have to assume that ActBlue was consciously constructed to enable fraud.
In the latest scandal to rock the state’s largest public school district, on Friday, a federal jury found Houston Independent School District’s (HISD) former chief operating officer, Brian Busby, and vendor Anthony Hutchison, guilty on 33 charges related to a long-running bribery scheme.
The scheme, which prosecutors say began as early as 2011, included kickbacks to Busby as well as cash payments to former HISD board president Rhonda Skillern-Jones and multiple other officials in exchange for lucrative contracts for construction, landscaping, mowing, and maintenance at district schools.
In some instances, Hutchison overbilled the district by $6 million through his exclusive contract to provide mowing and landscaping for the entire district. He also obtained contracts through Skillern-Jones to complete projects at several schools using funds derived from a 2012 voter-approved bond referendum.
After a trial that lasted nearly four weeks, both Busby and Hutchison were convicted on charges of conspiracy, bribery, filing false tax returns, and witness tampering. Hutchison was also convicted of wire fraud.
Skillern-Jones, who also later served as a Houston Community College trustee and worked for Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis (D-Pct. 1), entered a plea deal in 2021 and admitted that she had received $12,000 in cash from Busby in a Walmart parking lot.
Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld says that the people at the top of Marvel comics, Dan Buckley, David Bogart and David Gabriel, have done a horrible job, especially with X-Men, and have to be fired.
And speaking of people getting fired for being bad at their job, Alyssa Mercante fired from Kotaku. Asmongold: “Put the fries in the bag.”
As mentioned in yesterday’s LinkSwarm, Trump has offered temporary tariff relief for everyone…except China. China got hit with even higher tariffs. Evidently the only “trade war” that is happening right now is with China…and China is losing.
Behind the global economic chaos provoked by president Trump’s tariff tsunami, there are growing indications of a strategic purpose. It is now conceivable that plunging into, and then retreating from, a generalised trade war was actually a deliberate means to a truly geostrategic end: to thwart China’s ambition to replace the US as the dominant world superpower.
While Trump’s public statements still chiefly concern the need to impose economic measures to correct decades of unfair foreign trade, senior US officials, including Pete Hegseth, defence secretary, and Scott Bessent, treasury secretary, are increasingly taking a more strategic geopolitical line.
In late January, Hegseth told the US armed forces that America would “work with allies and partners to deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific by communist China”. In Panama, he said that Beijing was investing in the region for military and economic advantages. “War with China is certainly not inevitable … But together we must [deter] China’s threats in this hemisphere.”
Bessent has linked recent US tariff tactics with a shared geostrategic pushback against China, stating that “we can probably reach a deal with our allies, and then we can approach China as a group”.
In this light, the suspension of tariff combat for 90 days with most countries, while doubling down on the levies imposed on China, leaves Beijing isolated and in the firing line.
So far, after reciprocal gestures and vowing to “fight to the end”, Beijing has focused mainly on rallying anti-US sentiment across the globe. But India and Australia declined to join forces with China. ASEAN remains caught between opposing powers. The EU, in a quandary over Russia and Ukraine, likewise continues to hedge.
China has long sought to frame the West as a feeble, fragmented anachronism. Is it conceivable that, by unleashing economic fire and fury on friends and then provisionally reining it in, Trump might succeed, where Western multilateral diplomacy failed, in forcibly forging a credible consensus of opposition to the threat of global Chinese hegemony?
One assumes that Washington understands that it cannot prevail over China alone and a substantive US pivot to the Asia Pacific to press home a contest with China is starting to emerge. Trump has already reached out to Japan and South Korea, and US officials have tackled Vietnam. The Philippines, in striking distance of any hostilities over Taiwan, support the US and talk about preparing for war.
Taiwan, South Korea, India, Japan, Vietnam, Philippines: It’s like a greatest hits of nations that have bad blood with China. It’s no wonder they’ve chosen to trade with the world’s biggest economy rather than a historical enemy with designs of territorial expansion.
The developing world now faces a binary choice, and ruthlessly exploited debt and resource dependencies are not a firm basis for loyalty. This remains the case despite decades of nugatory US investment and engagement.
Under Trump’s tariffs, it is too soon to know how far China will be able to maintain the global supply lines on which its aspirations to become the world leader of innovative consumer production depend. Nor will it be easy to develop export markets big enough to compensate for declining sales to the West and its allies. Beijing’s military influence has begun to expand, but remains localised.
Most importantly, the question of Taiwan is now implicit in US language about deterring Chinese aggression. How does Trump’s assault on China’s geostrategic ambitions affect the threat of an imminent blockade, or even a full-scale invasion? The widespread view that an invasion isn’t inevitable now gives little real assurance.
Indeed, with the US taking an active stance, the status quo based on “ambiguity” is gone. Preparations to besiege Taiwan, let alone to invade, would be spotted in time for pre-emptive action.
104% tariffs on China are not enough, I’m advocating 400%. I do business in China, they don’t play by the rules. They’ve been in the WTO for decades. They have never abided by any of the rules they agreed to when they came in for decades. They cheat, they steal, they steal IP, I can’t litigate in their courts. They take product, technology, they steal it, they manufacture it and sell it back here …
I want Xi on an airplane to Washington to level the playing field. This is not about tariffs anymore. Nobody has taken on China yet … As someone who actually does business there, I’ve had enough. I speak for millions of Americans who have IP that have been stolen by the Chinese … the government cheats and steals and FINALLY an administration … that puts up and says “enough!” …
Xi can only stay the supreme leader if people are employed … It’s time to squeeze Chinese heads into the wall NOW!
Or check out this video from Chris Chappell of China Uncensored.
“The CCP wants to defend global trade. But they’re the ones who destroyed it in the first place.”
“The Chinese Communist Party is freaking out about US tariffs. They’ve launched a full-on propaganda blitz, calling the tariffs abuse. And blackmail. And if anyone is an expert on abuse and blackmail, it’s the CCP. The CCP is also claiming to be the defender of global trade. Yes, China is going to safeguard multilateralism and the multilateral trading system. And they totally are! I’m not being sarcastic here. They really are.”
“The CCP is going to fight for the current global trading system. It’s not because they love international cooperation, which is just propaganda BS. It’s because the CCP has spent decades manipulating global trade to their advantage. So there’s no way they’re going to let all that lying and cheating go to waste. Plus, global trade is basically the only thing keeping China’s economy afloat.”
“China is an export economy. That means their economy relies on manufacturing stuff for the rest of the world to buy. Chinese manufacturing exploded after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Because China was able to make stuff more cheaply than other countries, consumers around the world benefited from lower prices on Chinese imports. But countries also lost tons of manufacturing jobs to China. The US alone lost more than two million jobs between 1999 and 2011 as a result of Chinese imports.”
“Besides manufacturing, the other big driver of China’s recent economic growth was real estate investment. Which became a problem after China’s real estate market started to collapse in 2020. So, the CCP decided to double down on manufacturing. They pumped billions of dollars into building more factories and exporting more goods to keep China’s economy from crashing. Which did work, but now China is making way more stuff than the rest of the world can buy. That’s called overcapacity.”
“China is making way more batteries, solar panels, and electric vehicles than the rest of the world wants. And because China has so much overcapacity, it also doesn’t import much from other countries. Which means China now has a trade surplus of almost a trillion dollars. That’s more than any country’s trade surplus in the past century, even adjusted for inflation. And China doesn’t show signs of stopping. Its export volume is growing three times as fast as global trade. That’s insane.”
“So what happens when China exports more and more stuff? They have to cut prices to be able to sell it all. Which means other countries lose even more jobs to China. Entire industries shut down. There are now certain products you can only buy from China. And when those are critical things like medical supplies, that gives China massive political and economic leverage on other countries. Remember when China stopped exporting medical goods during the early days of Covid? Yeah, that, but on an even bigger scale.”
“So that’s why the Chinese Communist Party is fighting to maintain the global trading system. They dominate it. And without it, China’s economy would fail. And their political control would crumble.”
“But how did China get here? It’s not just about cheap labor. The CCP has built an entire economic system to dominate global trade. Back when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, they promised to follow rules to ensure fair trade practices. To be fair to the CCP, something I never thought I’d say, they did make a bunch of economic reforms in order to get into the WTO. But after they joined, they violated the WTO rules repeatedly. They’ve been cheating the system for decades. And largely getting away with it. You see, the WTO rules are set up to prevent government intervention that would artificially distort global trade. But in a communist system, it’s government intervention all the way down.”
He brings up the example of honey producers getting subsidies at every step of production.
“This industrial policy is incredibly effective for the CCP. It’s how the CCP jump-started its entire electric vehicle industry. And they’re now flooding the rest of the world with cheap EVs.”
“Yes, these are all things that other countries do, too. But no one does them on the same scale as the CCP. In 2019, the CCP spent almost $250 billion dollars on its industrial policy. That’s massive.”
“But it’s not just industrial policy. There are also ways China’s entire financial system distorts global trade. Like everything in China, the financial system is political. All banks in China are either state-owned or state-linked, so the CCP controls how they give out loans. Which means state-owned banks give lots of loans to state-owned enterprises, and to other companies the CCP wants to support. And if those companies can’t pay them back? The banks just keep extending the loans. Because it’s better to take the financial risk than to risk getting on the CCP’s bad side.”
“The CCP’s industrial policy and financial system is destroying the global trading system. More countries have stopped relying on the World Trade Organization to stop the CCP’s unfair trade practices. Instead, they’re putting their own tariffs on Chinese goods. Like Europe’s tariffs on China’s EVs. Or President Trump’s tariffs on China’s…everything.”
Then there’s China’s use of transshipping to other countries to get around tariffs and sanctions. “The US has had anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese honey since 2001. So Chinese exporters have tried to get around it with what’s called ‘honey laundering.'”
“So that’s how the CCP’s industrial policy, their financial system, and their export system are all designed to manipulate global trade. They’ve kept China’s economy going, while hurting other countries. Both advanced economies and developing economies are dealing with the fallout. But it’s gotten so bad, that the rest of the world has no choice but to fight back. Not just the US, but also Europe. And as a result, we may be watching the collapse of global free trade. And it’s the CCP’s fault.”
Also, Trump has the upper hand in the fight because China’s factories had already been closing left and right before he took office, due to rising labor costs and dwindling foreign customers. Here’s a China Observer video from 11 months ago speculating that 90% of Chinese factories might have to close.
And that was before Trump’s tariffs.
Trump is going to win his trade showdown with Xi because American has a much stronger economy than China, one that supports vastly higher domestic consumption, and because he holds all the cards.
For some reason, the egos of disgraced New York Democratic politicians are so large that they never seem to think they’re too disgraced to run for office again. Just like Anthony Weiner before him, disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo thinks he can run for New York City mayor and people will forget the sex scandal that drove him out of office.
I don’t know who he’s running against, but this commercial ought to knock him out of the race in short order:
FADE IN: Picture of Andrew Cuomo.
NARRATOR (V.O.): Andrew Cuomo resigned the Governor’s office in disgrace. Now he wants to be mayor. Does he think we forgot what he did?
CUT TO: INT. POLITICIANS OFFICE
Cuomo standing next two men in suits with a legend under them reading MEDICAL SPECIAL INTERESTS. Legend at bottom reads 2020.
MEDICAL SPECIAL INTEREST GUY 1: We don’t want old people dying of Covid in our hospitals. It’s bad for business.
MEDICAL SPECIAL INTEREST GUY 2: Here’s a giant bag of money. (HANDS CUOMO A GIANT BAG OF MONEY) Can you shove them into nursing homes so they die there instead?
CUOMO: Boy, can I!
CUT TO: INT NURSING HOME NIGHT.
Several elderly women sitting peacefully watching TV.
CUT TO: (Andrew Cuomo violently slams open the door, then pulls two knives out of his suit pockets)
CUOMO: Wake up, grandma! Time to die!
CUT TO: (Cuomo violently plunges the knives into the first elderly woman. She screams as geysers of blood shoot out of the wound.)
CUT TO: (Montage of Cuomo stabbing the remaining woman in the nursing home, slitting their throats, decapitating, etc., while the voice over narration plays)
NARRATOR (V.O.): Andrew Cuomo received more than $1 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association, then directed nursing homes to take in Covid patients rather than sending them to hospitals. Over 15,000 of them died. Does he think we forgot?
CUT TO: (Closeup of a blood-drenched Andrew Cuomo.)
CUOMO: Hi, I’m Andrew Cuomo, and I’m running for mayor of New York City!
CROSE-FADE TO CLOSING TAG
TAG, RED LETTERS ON GRADUATED GRAY AND BLACK BACKGROUND: Who will he kill next?
THE END
That should shove Cuomo’s campaign right off the platform and onto the third rail in short order…
As when Elon Musk dismantled the censorship apparatus at Twitter, leftists are bemoaning Meta/Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg ending “fact checking” at Facebook as though it was the end of some sort of golden age. What they are actually bemoaning is that they will no longer be able to suppress political opinions they disagree with.
Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan to spell out just how the Biden Administration’s censorship regime worked.
I don’t necessarily trust Zuckerberg’s assertions that Facebook’s original intentions were pure as the driven snow when he started putting fact checkers in place (and that’s one reason I’m not editing out things like “um,” “like,” and “you knows,” as these may be verbal tells when he’s glossing over or eliding information rather than just verbal throat clearing), but I think his depiction of how government pressure for censorship came down is probably accurate.
Mark Zuckerberg: “We’re just going to have the system where these these third party fact checkers and they can check the worst of the worst stuff right, so, um, things that are very clear hoaxes…so so that was sort of the original intent we put in place the system, and it just sort of veered from
there.”
MZ: “I think to some degree it’s because some of the people whose job is to do factchecking, a lot of their industry is focused on political factchecking so they’re just kind of veered in that direction.” Left unsaid is that everywhere in the MSM, that “fact checking” is slanted to the left and has been for a long time.
MZ: “I think people just felt like the fact checkers were too biased. Not necessarily even so much in what they ruled, although sometimes I think people would disagree with that a lot of the time, it was just what types of things they chose to even go in fact check in the first time, in the first place.”
MZ: “After having gone through that whole exercise, it, um, I don’t know, it’s something out of, like, you know, Nineteen Eighty-Four. One of these books where it’s just, like, it really is a slippery slope, and it just got to a point where it’s just ‘OK, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program.” Maybe it’s just me, but I kind of feel that when the guy forced to institute the censorship regime compares the censorship regime instituted under his watch to Nineteen Eighty-Four, maybe we ought to consider taking him at his word and not automatically write it off as hyperbole.
MZ: “Covid was the other big one, where that was, that was also very tricky, because you know at the beginning it was, you know, it’s like a legitimate public health crisis.”
MZ: “We didn’t know at the time how dangerous it was going to be, so at the beginning it kind of seemed like, OK, we should give a little bit of deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this.”
MZ: “But when it went from, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve to, um, you know, in…like in the beginning, it was, like, OK, there aren’t enough masks, masks aren’t that important to then it’s like oh no you have to wear a mask and, you know, all, the like, everything was shifting around.”
MZ: “It just become very difficult to kind of follow, and this really hit the most extreme, I’d say, during the Biden Administration, when they were trying to roll out um the vaccine program.”
MZ: “I’m generally pretty pro rolling out vaccines. I think, on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative. But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who was basically arguing against it, and they pushed us super hard, um, to take down things that were honestly were true.”
MZ: “They basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects you basically need to take down.”
Joe Rogan: “Who’s ‘they?’ Who’s telling you to take down things that talk about vaccine side effects?”
MZ: “It was people in the in the Biden Administration.”
Rogan talks about the difficulty of moderating at scale. Zuckerberg says one-third to one-half of the planet use one of Meta’s services on a daily basis.
MZ: “They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV, talking about how 10 years from now or something, um, you know, you’re going to see an ad that says OK, if you took a Covid vaccine, you’re eligible [for] this kind of payment, like this sort of like class
action lawsuit type meme. And they’re like ‘No you have to take that down.’ We just said no, we’re not we’re not going to take down humor and satire. We’re not going to take down things that are that are true.”
MZ: “It flipped a bit. Biden, when he was, he gave some statement at some point, I don’t know if it was a press conference or to some journalist, where he basically was like these guys are killing people and, and um, and I don’t know. Then, like, all these different agencies and branches of government basically just like started investigating and coming after our company it was it was brutal it was brutal.”
Rogan slamming government supressing basic disease recovery mechanisms to boost the vaccine snipped. That “red-pilled a lot of people.”
MZ: “Trust in media has fallen off a cliff.”
Should we trust Zuckerberg? To quote Omar Little from The Wire, “I trust his fear.” As I noted in Friday’s LinkSwarm, the MAGA winds must be blowing very strong indeed for Zuckerberg to flip so quickly and completely. Zuckerberg probably had misgivings while these things were going on, but unlike Musk, would never have voiced them so openly had Trump not won.
Also, as Tim Pool noted, “Facebook built a portal for Feds to log into their system to flag ‘misinformation.’ For more than a decade, the federal government, the FBI, the CIA, I think the NSA, had backdoor access to Facebook as well as other companies.”
Time for an update to this old classic
The Jim Jordan report Zuckerberg references is the final committee report on the weaponization of the American government to censor opposing political viewpoints. The report is not only hard to find online (it’s not in the first page of Google results), it is so large (17,014 pages) that it seems to be literally unreadabe in Firefox, as whatever Acrobat window thing they have wants to jump back when you scroll to the second page. As a partial remedy, I have (with a bit of difficulty) captured the introduction and posted it here, though the paragraph breaks may not be exact.
The founding documents of the United States articulate the ideals of the American republic and guarantee to all American citizens fundamental rights and liberties. For too long, however, the American people have faced a two-tiered system of government—one of favorable treatment for the politically-favored class, and one of intimidation and unfairness for the rest of American citizens. Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the contrast between these two tiers has become even more stark.
To stand up for the American people, the House of Representatives authorized the creation of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government within the Committee on the Judiciary. During the 118th Congress, the Select Subcommittee worked to “bring abuses by the Federal Government into the light for the American people and ensure that Congress, as their elected representatives, can take appropriate action to remedy them.”2 The mission of the Select Subcommittee has been to protect and strengthen the fundamental rights of the American people.
By investigating, uncovering, and documenting executive branch misconduct, the Select Subcommittee has taken important steps to ensure that the federal government no longer works against the American people. This work is not complete, but it is a necessary first step to stop the weaponization of the federal government. From its inception, the Select Subcommittee sought to protect free speech and expand upon the constitutional protections of the First Amendment. Throughout the Biden-Harris Administration, multiple federal agencies, including the White House, have engaged in a vast censorship campaign against so-called mis-, dis-, or malinformation.
The Select Subcommittee revealed the extent of the “censorship-industrial complex,” detailing how the federal government and law enforcement coordinated with academics, nonprofits, and other private entities to censor speech online. The Select Subcommittee also revealed how the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership—created “at the request of” the Department of Homeland Security3—urged Big Tech to censor Americans online.
The Select Subcommittee’s oversight has had a real effect in expanding the First Amendment. In a Supreme Court dissent, three justices noted how the Select Subcommittee’s investigation revealed “that valuable speech was . . . suppressed.”4 In a letter to the Committee and Select Subcommittee, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden-Harris Administration “pressured” Facebook to censor Americans.5 Facebook gave in to this pressure, demoting posts and content that was highly relevant to political discourse in the United States. In response to the Select Subcommittee’s oversight, universities and other groups shut down their “disinformation” research and federal agencies slowed their communications with Big Tech.
Pursuant to its mission, the Select Subcommittee also examined the weaponization of federal law-enforcement resources. Many FBI whistleblowers have disclosed to the Select Subcommittee examples of waste, fraud, and abuse at the FBI. When these whistleblowers came forward, the Bureau brutally retaliated against many of them for breaking ranks—suspending them without pay, preventing them for seeking outside employment, and even purging suspected disloyal employees. Through its oversight, the Select Subcommittee revealed how the FBI abused its security clearance adjudication process to target whistleblowers, with the FBI even admitting its error and reinstating the security clearance of one decorated FBI employee.
The Select Subcommittee also investigated the executive branch’s actions in intruding on and interfering with Americans’ constitutionally protected activity. The Select Subcommittee revealed and stopped the FBI’s effort to target Catholic Americans because of their religious views, detailed the Justice Department’s directives to target parents at school board meetings, stopped the Internal Revenue Service from making unannounced visits to American taxpayers’ homes, caused the Justice Department to change its internal policies to respect the separation of powers and limit subpoenas for Legislative Branch employees, and highlighted the vast warrantless financial surveillance of Americans by federal law enforcement.
The Select Subcommittee has examined the federal government’s efforts to interfere in our elections, highlighting the FBI’s fervent efforts to “prebunk” a story about the Biden family’s influence peddling scheme in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The Select Subcommittee’s work also demonstrated how the Biden campaign colluded with the intelligence community to falsely discredit this story as “Russian disinformation.”
This report accumulates and presents the findings of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government during the 118th Congress. The federal government must work for all Americans, not just the favored few. As the country moves forward from the disastrous policies of the Biden-Harris Administration, it is important that policymakers ensure that the federal government can no longer be weaponized against American citizens. “Freedom is fragile thing,” Ronald Reagan warned in 1967, “it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”6 The Select Subcommittee’s work in the 118th Congress has been a start to a long and difficult process to better protect Americans’ fundamental freedoms. But our work is not the end. More must be done to ensure that our fundamental liberties and cherished rights continue for Americans to come.
1 THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE para.
2 (U.S. 1776). 2169 CONG. REC. H130 (daily ed. Jan. 10, 2023) (statement of Rep. Tom Cole).
3 STAFF OF SELECT SUBCOMM. ON THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FED. GOV’T OF THE H. COMM. ON THE JUDICIARY, 118TH CONG., THE WEAPONIZATION OF ‘DISINFORMATION’ PSEUDO-EXPERTS AND BUREAUCRATS: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PARTNERED WITH UNIVERSITIES TO CENSOR AMERICANS’ POLITICAL SPEECH (Comm. Print Nov. 6, 2023) [hereinafter “NOV. 6 REPORT”].
4 Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43, 78 (2024) (Alito, J., dissenting).
5 Letter from Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Exec. Officer, Meta, to Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman, H. Comm. on the Judiciary (Aug. 26, 2024).
6 Governor Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address (Jan. 5, 1967).
And remember this was all part of a coordinated international censorship regime. The recently shut down Center for Global Engagement, started under Obama, was a a key proponent of this censorship regime.
When lefties bemoan the change in Facebook, this is what they’re lamenting: The ability to censor the free speech of fellow Americans under the direct mandate of federal government agencies working on behalf of the Democrat Party to suppress the speech of their ideological opponents.
Happy New Year! The Biden Administration is made of lies (which you already knew), a few links about guns, mysterious deaths in Tarrant County jails, Russian finds new, embarrassing ways to lose equipment, Hasbro destroys D&D’s legacy, and a look at biblical werewolves. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
One of Biden’s main legacies: Corrupting official government economic statistics:
Another 653,000 fake jobs revised away by govt statisticians. They were faking the data during 2023 and 2024 to try to boost Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
In the revisions, they have also admitted to 818,000 fake jobs being removed from the 2023 data.
A brand new investigation from the Wall Street Journal has revealed that scientists knew early on that the COVID-19 virus was an engineered virus that escaped a lab, but the information was suppressed by intelligence agencies and removed from all presidential briefings on the matter.
Three scientists from the National Center for Medical Intelligence, John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien, had reported their findings that the virus was manipulated in a lab. They shared their findings with the FBI, but were soon told to stop.
In August of 2021, Biden was briefed on the origins of COVID-19 after a 90-day investigation from intelligence agencies. National Intelligence Director Avril Haines briefed the President and left out all research pointing to a lab leak from her briefing.
Sarah Hoyt has a pretty good plan moving forward: We win, they lose.
It’s going to take a long time for us to stop flinching and deciding we’re going to be betrayed. 2020 left scars in the collective psyche, and scars take a long time to fade if they ever do.
The last four years we were hunching our shoulders and just enduring the blows, and that will take a long long time to fade.
And sure, there are things that won’t go our way. But you shouldn’t worry too much about that.
Look, the edifice that supports the boot on our necks is not only rickety. It always was rickety.
Keeping the big lie of the all powerful centralized government in place was a full scale production, and it required a fully coordinated media, fully coordinated panels of “experts”, and a trusting public that believed all of it. Or at least a majority of the public that believed all of it.
It has been eroding for a while, since social media and blogs got really big in the wake of 9/11. Despite their best efforts at censorship, a massed multitude of — what did they call us? — hobbits is harder to control than a few journalists who want to be invited to the right parties.
Trump’s election in 2016 was the first time the media lost to the hobbits. Really lost, publicly. They didn’t like it. The hell the establishment has put us through since is their payback.
It came with unexpected consequences though. The main ones being: their masks were yanked off; and we don’t believe them anymore.
This is the sort of thing that not all the king’s horses and not all the king’s men can put together ever again.
Sure, we’ll “lose” some. Sure, they’re making cunning plans to thwart the will of the people.
But be not afraid. If we win even a few places, it’s enough for the whole edifice of oppression and lies to come tumbling down.
It has been tumbling down, already, even while they were nominally in power, which is why we won 2024.
Be not afraid. This is very important. The rest will fall into place, provided you keep your heads and remember you’re Americans.
Until a few years ago I was working as a mid-career research scientist, no I won’t tell you what field. Within my collaboration I was known for being extremely productive. I’ve seen jaws drop when I show colleagues my publication list.
Then it came time to start applying for junior professor positions.
Got a few interviews, but doors kept getting slammed in my face. It’s a very opaque process ofc, they never tell you why. In one case however I had the dean – a portly Hispanic woman – tell me two minutes into the interview that “women in STEM are very important to me”, and ultimately heard informally from one of the profs at that dept that I hadn’t been hired because of interference from the dean, despite all of the profs on the committee wanting me, and that instead they’d hired … no one.
One of the many controversial chunks of the short-term spending bill that sparked debate recently included funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
But what’s the problem? After all, who doesn’t like “Global Engagement”?!
Well, this agency — formed by Barack Obama — has been moonlighting as a censorship czar, handing out taxpayer dollars like candy to groups that spend their time suppressing conservative voices online.
(In other words, your average Obama administration government office.)
But after widespread backlash, the new version has no room for the Global Engagement Center.
Snip.
Reports from the Washington Examiner indicated that the GEC bankrolled groups like the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, organizations that basically police speech with the finesse of a drunk mall cop. The Federalist and the Daily Wire even sued the GEC over its role in suppressing right-leaning voices.
Thanks to the new continuing resolution, the GEC finally met its own doom, with yet another scrap of Barack Obama’s legacy shuffling off into the sunset like Joe Biden’s last remaining marble.
Sounds like some companies are asking for a lawsuit:
Just got a dm from someone who works in recruiting at one of big tech companies. He said it's internal policy within the team he works for to reserve roles for what they call “outside talent”.
They are not allowed to recruit Americans for these roles but must go through the…
Suspicious. “North Texas Activist Is Latest to Die in Tarrant County Jail. Mason Yancy was the ninth person to die in Tarrant County Jail custody this year….Yancy was well known to grassroots activists in North Texas and across the state as an advocate for limited government and First and Second Amendment rights. He co-founded Open Carry Texas with activist-turned-attorney CJ Grisham.”
Anti-Chinese riots in Africa, following a disputed election in which Daniel Chapo of the ruling FRELIMO (socialist, formerly communist) party was declared the winner. Seems like the citizens of Mozambique aren’t big fans of Belt and Road…
Waterloo records in Austin is relocating under new ownership. “Caren Kelleher, founder and president of Gold Rush Vinyl, confirmed Thursday she and business partner Trey Watson (CEO of Armadillo Records) will be taking over Waterloo Records. The vinyl shop has operated in Austin for more than 40 years, including 35 years at its current location along West Sixth Street and North Lamar Boulevard.” I used to spend a fair amount of time searching their used CD bins, but I all but stopped going downtown during the “homeless camping” fiasco. (Hat tip: .)
We’ve previously covered that China’s demographics are in severe decline and that China’s GDP may be overstated by 60%. Now a researcher says that China’s population could be overstated by 37-50%.
(Before we dig in, two caveats: First, the channel is Lei’s Real Talk, from someone who came over from communist China and was a student in the U.S. during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, but she doesn’t use her full name, which she says is to protect her family back in China. Second, she’s using AI to answer some of her questions. Still, the math-based questions don’t seem conducive to the “AI hallucinations” we see elsewhere, but some caveat lictor seems in order.)
“We know China is facing a series of economic challenges. Weak consumer, confidence falling real estate prices, high debt, industrial overcapacity, sluggish exports, and so on and so forth. But the underlying issue of the faltering economy, in my opinion, is a severe population crisis.”
“China’s actual population is far below than the official figure of 1.4 billion.”
“I want to compare China and India’s population between the 30-year period from 1990 to 2020. Let’s also compare their average fertility rate between the two countries and their medium age.” If you run those very basic numbers, things don’t add up.
“In 1990, China’s population is over India is by about 270 million [1.14 billion vs. 870 million], and 30 years later China’s population is still over India by 30 million [1.41 billion vs. 1.38 billion].”
“However, if you look at the fertility rate, India’s average fertility rate [2.97%] during the 30 years years is so much higher than China’s [1.70].” All these are the official published rates.
“With that kind of fertility rate in India consistently over 30 years, India’s population should be larger than China’s. Mathematically it’s impossible that China’s population is still greater than India’s.”
I’m skipping over a detailed breakdown of the two country’s respective fertility rates by decades.
“I asked GPT to apply the fertility rates for each country and give me the total population in 2020 for India and China respectively, and this is the results it generate. In 2020 population, India’s population was 1.38 billion, China’s was only 890 million.” India’s number is off the official figure by 4%. China’s number is off by 37%, or 520 million people. And this is at a time when life expectancy for China has been increasing.
Analysis of various other population factor considerations snipped.
“I asked AI to recalculate everything by replacing the official fertility of 1.7 and 1.5 from the year to 2000 to 2010 replaced them with Dr. Yi Fuxian [University of Wisconsin Madison demographic researcher whose work we previously mentioned here] fertility assessment of 1.1. It came up with a shocking total population of 695 million, and that’s less than half of the announced population of 1.4 billion.”
We didn’t see a huge drop in economic output because China’s economy is investment driven.
“Population loss took place over 30 years, and particularly started since 2000, and this reduction in population didn’t show up as reduction in consumer spending until this generation reached the age of 18, or even older, when they started to spend money. So now we start to see the impact on consumer spending because there’s a time lag.”
Plus Flu Manchu deaths.
“China suddenly saw a wave of kindergarten closures, so in some cases private kindergartens have been shrunk by 20% in some regions.”
“So for all these factors combined, I think China’s real population may be between 600 million and to 800 million.”
Given the GDP overstatement estimates, this enormous overstatement of China’s population seems plausible. It also makes all those wild claims of “China will soon overtake the US economically” look even more ridiculous.
China’s “one child per couple” policy will be seen by future generations as one of the greatest self-inflicted catastrophes in history.
