Welcome to a special Christmas day LinkSwarm! And by “special,” I mean “because Christmas falls on Friday.”
Explosion rocks downtown Nashville. “Around 6:30 a.m., police received a call for a suspicious RV with no tags parked across from the Davidson County courthouse. As officers arrived, the RV exploded, blowing out the windows of nearby buildings and leaving extensive damage.” They’re calling it an “intentional act.” Maybe, especially across the street from a courthouse. But it could still be a meth lab cooking off. As always, remember that much of the early reporting around such events are usually wrong.
Update: Assuming the message in this video is real, it does appear to be a premeditated act of which authorities were warned:
WATCH: “If you can hear this message, evacuate now.”
This is allegedly video of the explosion in Nashville this morning, with a woman’s voice recording over a PA beforehand…
The deal comes in just eight days short of the hard-Brexit deadline. Rather than erecting trade barriers to which some had resigned themselves, the two sides are looking toward a more cooperative than contentious relationship, reports the Wall Street Journal:
Under the terms of the accord, both sides will continue to trade free of tariffs but there will be significant new bureaucracy for importers and exporters. The free flow of workers between the two economies will end and trade in services will be much reduced. London’s vast financial center will no longer have guaranteed access to European markets.
The deal gives Britain significant freedom to depart from EU regulations and sign free-trade deals with countries like the U.S. But as the price for securing a deal without tariffs, the U.K. agreed that it wouldn’t seriously undercut EU standards on issues such as labor and the environment and would maintain similar constraints on the subsidizing of private industry.
The agreement must formally be ratified by the European and U.K. parliaments and signed off by EU leaders before the end of the year. Capitals have insisted they need proper time to comb through the text before approving it. Though their approval is likely, France has warned it could veto a deal if some of its key concerns, including access to British waters for its fishing fleet, aren’t met.
Here’s the short version: One main problem is that the 5,500-plus page legislative package was drafted behind closed doors by party leaders, then quickly unveiled hours before a vote.
As voices as disparate as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash have pointed out, this meant that most members of Congress had to vote for or against the package before actually getting to read the legislation.
Congress is expected to vote on the second largest bill in US history *today* – $2.5 trillion – and as of about 1pm, members don’t even have the legislative text of it yet.
That’s right: Trillions of taxpayer dollars were doled out, and the members of Congress who voted for it don’t even know where much of it is going.
This bill pours hundreds of billions of dollars into preexisting stimulus programs that were rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, without meaningfully addressing any of the problems. You can expect more stimulus checks sent to dead people and more runaway fraud to plague the expanded unemployment benefits.
“Tables Turned: Detroit Sues Black Lives Matter Group for ‘Civil Conspiracy’ to Riot and Attack Police.” The group in question is Black Lives Matter umbrella group Detroit Will Breathe. Discovery should be extremely interesting… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Andrew Yang is running for mayor of New York City. It would be very difficult indeed for Yang not to be a vast improvement over the burning Porta-Potty stuffed with dead clowns that is the De Blasio administration. As a moderate Democrat, I would expect Yang to be a better mayor than de Blasio or David Dinkins, but not as good as Rudy Giuliani or Ed Koch. I would expect a Yang mayoralty to be about on par with Bloomberg’s, with maybe more upside if he’s willing to shake up the corrupt status quo and not push his disasterous pet guaranteed income idea.
In an address to the UN Security Council on Monday during a monthly session on the Middle East, US Ambassador Kelly Craft asserted that President Donald Trump’s policies had “overturned” long-held views about diplomacy in the region.
“For decades, the prevailing assumption was that the world would only see normalized international relations with Israel following a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,” Craft told the virtual meeting. “But we have proven this assumption wrong.”
She touted the Trump administration’s pursuit of “economic and cultural ties” between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which has led to normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Similar deals with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Oman, among others, could also be in the offing.
“All of us here should think long and hard about what else we may have missed or misinterpreted over the years.”
“Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress ‘Hyper-Partisan Sites’ in Favor of ‘Mainstream News’ (The NYT) is a Fraud:
The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.
Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.
Snip.
The conceit that outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NPR are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is one you would be eager to believe, or at least want to induce others to believe, if you were a tech reporter at The New York Times, furious and hurt that millions upon millions of people would rather hear other voices than your own, and simply do not trust what you tell them. Inducing Facebook to manipulate the algorithmic underbelly of social media to artificially force your content down the throats of citizens who prefer to avoid it, while rendering your critics’ speech invisible — all in the name of reducing “hyper-partisanship,” “divisiveness,” and “misinformation” — is of course a highly desirable outcome for mainstream outlets like the NYT.
The problem with this claim is that it’s a complete and utter fraud, one that is easily demonstrated as such. There are few sites more “hyper-partisan” than the three outlets which the NYT applauded Facebook for promoting. In the 2020 election, over 70 million Americans — close to half of the voting population — voted for Donald Trump, yet not one of them is employed by the op-ed page of the “non-partisan” New York Times and are almost never heard on NPR or CNN. That’s because those news outlets, by design, are pro-Democratic-Party organs, who speak overwhelmingly to Democratic readers and viewers.
It is hard to get more partisan than the news outlets which the NYT tech reporters, and apparently Facebook, consider to be the alternatives to “hyper-partisan” discourse. In April, Pew Research asked Americans which outlet is their primary source of news, and the polling firm found that the audiences of NPR, CNN and especially The New York Times are overwhelmingly Democrats, in some cases almost entirely so.
As Pew put it: “about nine-in-ten of those who name The New York Times (91%) and NPR (87%) as their main political news source identify as Democrats, with CNN at about eight-in-ten (79%).” These outlets speak to Democrats, are built for Democrats, and produce news content designed to be pleasing and affirming to Democrats — so they keep watching and buying. One can say many things about these news outlets, but the idea that they are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is the exact opposite of the truth: it is difficult to find more hyper-partisan organs than these.
The Establishment decided that instead of having a vigorous debate and discussion over the safety and efficacy of these prophylactic potions, they would just short circuit the whole messy truth determination process that Western civilization has relied upon for a millennium – argument, debate, and eventually consensus after everything is fully and freely hashed-out – and move right to the Official Truth. All the smart set decided that the Official Truth would be that these vaccines were all perfect and necessary and that we needed to stamp out any hint of dissent lest people pause and think for themselves and thereby disrupt the plan by raising unapproved notions. And the tech overlords would do their part by ensuring that any info, ideas, or interplay that was not inline with the narrative would be suppressed.
It’s so much more efficient, you know, to tell people what they think than to take the time to convince them and refute counter-arguments.
Not everyone was foolish. It was very smart and good leadership for Mike Pence to take the shot in public in front of cameras. That a couple of tentacles didn’t sprout out of his clavicles was reassuring. That’s leadership, and that’s what our leaders should be doing. But most of our ruling class instead thinks that if they lie to us and suppress our debates and call us stupid enough, we’ll fall into line.
When has that worked for long?
A roundup of climate predictions for 2020 that were horribly wrong. Remember how snowfall would be a thing of the past?
Among Paul’s instances of waste were several health studies, including more than $36 million spent on studying why stress makes hair turn gray, more than $1 million spent studying whether people will eat ground-up bugs, and more than $3 million spent interviewing San Franciscans about their edible cannabis use.
As far as taxpayer dollars spent aiding other countries, $8.62 billion was spent in Afghanistan on counternarcotics efforts, more than $37 million was spent helping deal with truant Filipino youth, and more than $3 million was spent on sending Russians to American community colleges for a “gap year.”
Among funds spent on the environment, energy, and scientific research, more than $1 million was spent walking lizards on a treadmill, nearly $200,000 was spent studying how people cooperate while playing e-sport video games, and more than $2 million on developing a wearable headset to track eating behaviors.
The military had several particularly high expenditures this year that Paul listed as waste, including repurposing $1 billion in coronavirus response funds for unrelated acquisitions, more than $ 715 million in lost equipment designated for Syrians fighting ISIS, and $174 million on drones that were lost over Afghanistan.
Other eyebrow-raising expenses included more than $4 million spent on spraying alcoholic rats with bobcat urine, more than $10 million spent on would-be coronavirus test tubes that turned up as used soda bottles, and nearly $6 million spent building three bicycle storage facilities at Washington, D.C. Metro stations.
Man of the year: Jeffrey Toobin. “Toobin’s grip on the media was relentless. In 2002 he joined CNN and became the network’s chief legal analyst, a cocksure critic of Republicans…” (Hat tip: HashtagGriswold.)
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! On a personal note, I was just laid off from my Senior Technical Writer job, so if you have any leads in the department (for either Austin or remote work), drop me a line in the comments.
State-sponsored hackers believed to be from Russia have breached the city network of Austin, Texas, The Intercept has learned. The breach, which appears to date from at least mid-October, adds to the stunning array of intrusions attributed to Russia over the past few months.
The list of reported victims includes the departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, State, and the Treasury; the Pentagon; cybersecurity firm FireEye; IT software company SolarWinds; and assorted airports and local government networks across the United States, among others. The breach in Austin is another apparent victory for Russia’s hackers. By compromising the network of America’s 11th-most populous city, they could theoretically access sensitive information on policing, city governance, and elections, and, with additional effort, burrow inside water, energy, and airport networks. The hacking outfit believed to be behind the Austin breach, Berserk Bear, also appears to have used Austin’s network as infrastructure to stage additional attacks.
While the attacks on SolarWinds, FireEye, and U.S. government agencies have been linked to a second Russian group — APT29, also known as Cozy Bear — the Austin breach represents another battlefront in a high-stakes cyber standoff between the United States and Russia. Both Berserk Bear and Cozy Bear are known for quietly lurking in networks, often for months, while they spy on their targets. Berserk Bear — which is also known as Energetic Bear, Dragonfly, TEMP.Isotope, Crouching Yeti, and BROMINE, among other names — is believed to be responsible for a series of breaches of critical U.S. infrastructure over the past year.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) called for new leadership to replace House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), in an interview with The Intercept aired on Wednesday.
The remarks represent Ocasio-Cortez’s most direct challenge to current Democratic congressional leadership, and come a month after Michigan representative Elissa Slotkin vowed not to support Pelosi for another term as House Speaker. Pelosi is the only candidate for the position, but with Democrats projected to win at most 226 House seats, Pelosi can only lose eight Democratic votes to remain Speaker.
I wonder: If enough of the hard left defects to keep Pelosi from one more term as speaker, might there be enough Democrats to vote for a moderate Republican as Speaker rather than being ruled by The Squad?
Another Obama-era crony green energy boondoggle goes bust:
Move over, Solyndra. Another green boondoggle from the Obama era has failed, and taxpayers are out as much as $510 million. Late last week Judge Karen Owens approved a Chapter 11 plan of reorganization by Tonopah Solar Energy. Tonopah operated the Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada that received $737 million in guaranteed loans from the Obama Administration.
The plan includes a settlement with the Department of Energy that leaves taxpayers liable for as much as $234.68 million in outstanding debt, but the total public cost is even higher. Crescent Dunes also received an investment-tax credit, and the 2009 stimulus legislation allowed it to receive a cash payment in lieu of credit. In 2017 the plant received more than $275.6 million from Treasury under the Section 1603 program, which it used to service its outstanding liabilities. So taxpayers already gave Crescent Dunes cash to pay off its taxpayer-backed loans.
Snip.
DOE expected Crescent Dunes to produce up to 482,000 megawatt hours every year, but the plant hasn’t produced that much energy in its lifetime. In 2019 Crescent Dunes’s hot salt tanks suffered what partial owner SolarReserve described as “a catastrophic failure” that has left the plant inoperable.
Since molten salt is one of the key elements in many next generation nuclear plant designs, I searched online for pictures of what a catastrophic hot salt tank failure looks like, but I couldn’t find any.
Last week, Portland law enforcers raided a house that had for months been illegally occupied by trespassers affiliated with Black Lives Matter and Antifa. At the barricaded property, officers made arrests and found a stockpile of firearms.
Under normal circumstances, the armed trespassers would be prosecuted, and that would be the end of the story. But in riot-plagued Portland, Oregon, things are very far from normal.
The city’s “progressive” district attorney immediately dropped the charges against the occupiers, and their comrades soon sent in reinforcements to build a sprawling autonomous zone in the middle of a densely populated residential area.
The militants called the place the Red House Autonomous Zone — named after the red-painted house occupied at the heart of the zone. In doing so, they took inspiration from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, Washington. During the summer, leftist extremists chased police out of a six-block area of the Emerald City and drew their own “borders,” complete with checkpoints manned by armed “security.” The three-week experiment in lawlessness ended in mass vandalism, attempted rape, multiple shootings and two homicides.
Portland’s RHAZ is following in the same footsteps.
The house at the center of the autonomous zone was occupied by members of the Kinney family and their allies. The Kinneys, who haven’t paid their mortgage since 2017, were evicted after a tortuous legal process. The fact that they own a second house nearby didn’t prevent the mixed-race Kinneys and their allies from claiming victimization by — you guessed it — “racism.”
Soon after last week’s raid on the occupied house, some 100 Antifa comrades mobilized through social media to retake the space. “There is an active call for numbers, defensive gear and supplies and change of clothes,” tweeted Antifa group Youth Liberation Front.
Within a few hours, the entire street was blocked off with stolen fencing, wood and junk taken from nearby homes. Some brought in power tools to reinforce the barriers. The militants laid out piles of rocks, metal spikes and glass bottles at strategic points to act as supply points for projectile weapons. They lined the road with impromptu “booby traps” — upward-facing nail strips, caltrops and more.
Portland police officers tried to shut down the RHAZ early on, but they were attacked and chased away. Their police cruisers were smashed up; they didn’t return.
“Those present at the barricades should leave it behind, put down your weapons and allow the neighborhood to return to peace and order,” Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell asked the militants, who ignored his polite request.
Portland residents should file federal civil rights lawsuits against Portland officials for equal protection violations. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A serial sex offender and Black Lives Matter activist recently released from prison served a titular leadership role at the Antifa autonomous zone in north Portland.
Micah Isaiah Rhodes, 27, was convicted of three counts of second-degree sexual abuse of minors in 2018. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after violating probation by being near children during an Antifa occupation of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
“Former [Andrew] Cuomo Aide Lindsey Boylan Alleges Governor Sexually Harassed Her For Years.” Hey, what do you want to bet that #BelieveAllWomen magically doesn’t apply to powerful Democrat yet again? For Reasons.
Rhode Island’s Democratic governor Gina Raimondo: “Don’t go out and wear a mask.” Four days later: Goes to a wine bar, doesn’t wear a mask. Laws are for the peasants, not the Democratic Party ruling class. (Hat tip: Andrew Malcolm.)
Realize I’m becoming a Paglia stan acct, but in a minute and a half she nails exactly what’s gone wrong w leftism, academia, and the frauds who’ve usurped both. Worth a watch. pic.twitter.com/PkYtNrqkvu
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! First up: The rest of the nation gets to see what an incompetent hypocrite Austin’s current mayor is:
Austin Mayor Steve Adler is the latest powerful democrat to prove they’re a complete hypocrite:
In a November 9 Facebook video, Austin mayor Steve Adler advised the public to “stay at home” but failed to disclose he was broadcasting from a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. But wait! It gets better (worse?)!
Adler and 8 family members took a private jet to his Mexican getaway. All of this was the day after Adler reportedly hosted a small wedding for his daughter at a hotel in Austin.
The Mexico trip with family came the day after Adler hosted a small wedding for his daughter at a trendy South Congress Hotel with 20 attendees. Adler says he consulted with health authorities prior and that guests had to undergo COVID-19 testing and practice social distancing.
Is there a “consult with health authorities prior and undergo COVID-19 testing” exception to the lockdown rules? Of course not! Laws are for the little people…
The complete absence of Joe Biden’s coattails is forcing the usually delusional Democrats to get perilously close to the truth during this self-examination. Whether the activists speaking the truth will be listened to by the Elders of the Village in the Democratic Party remains to be seen. It should also be noted that those elders are very elderly and may not be amenable to alterations in a narrative they’ve been crafting regarding themselves for decades.
Some more hard truth:
Some worry that the party, once rooted in the working class but now run and funded largely by college-educated liberals, may be losing its touch with blue-collar voters of all races outside major metro areas.
“We’re such a Beltway party that we can’t even fathom that there are a lot of Mexicans in the [Rio Grande] Valley who love Donald Trump,” said Chuck Rocha, a Texas-raised Democratic strategist who runs Nuestro PAC, a super PAC focused on Latino outreach. “Biden won, and that’s great, but everything underneath Biden was a huge catastrophe.”
The Democratic Party has been gleefully refashioning itself as a coastal elite party for quite a while now. They traded blue-collar workers in the heartland for celebrities. Who needs to worry about jobs in Ohio when you’re partying with Beyoncé, right?
They didn’t get anything about why Donald Trump won in 2016, then they spent four years making up lies about why it happened because those lies allowed them to remain in their coastal bubbles and not get any hard glimpses at reality.
Their sense of entitlement from 2016 never went away, and they think that they’ve been somewhat vindicated by the apparent Biden victory. That victory is illusory, however. It took four years of the mainstream media being more corrupt than ever before combined with an election year global pandemic and a healthy dose of voter…irregularities to bring about this result. It really didn’t have anything to do with the Democrats and their ideas being wildly popular.
Because they aren’t.
Democrats are so blinded by their hatred for President Trump that they are unlikely to learn anything from this election.
Liberal idiots in Minneapolis keep making the same mistakes over and over again. “In case you didn’t do the math, that’s a 63% increase in the number of homicides, compared to 2019, and the year is not over yet. Just a few more holistic victims of community-based murders”
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, France’s president from 1974 to 1981, dead at age 94. He was a French conservative, which meant he was significantly to the left of Walter Mondale. He wasn’t the worst leader in France’s history, but was a big fan of a centralized EU, having helped craft a (rejected) constitution for it in 2004.
Spanish bank Banco Sabadell’s acquisition of UK’s TSB goes horribly wrong thanks to amazing IT stupidity:
Experts at the time warned that Sabadell was significantly overpaying for TSB while underestimating the potential costs of integrating the new business into its existing IT platform. But Sabadell ignored the warnings and went ahead with the operation, believing that it would serve as a catapult onto the international scene as well as cement its place as a pioneer in Internet banking. In both cases, the exact opposite happened.
Branded the “biggest IT disaster in British banking history,” the botched IT upgrade led to hundreds of thousands of customers being unable to access their online accounts for weeks on end. Standing orders, payrolls, mortgage instalments and other payments and transfers failed. Thousands of customers fell victim to fraud attacks. Even when the bank tried to apologize, it sent apologies out to the wrong people, in the process breaking the EU’s new data protection laws.
At the root of all this chaos was Sabadell’s stubborn determination to get the new IT system up and running as swiftly as possible, in order to save millions of euros in monthly fees it was having to pay to TSB’s former parent company, Lloyds Bank plc, to use its old legacy IT system. Sabadell’s Proteo4UK system was not even close to being ready to roll out at TSB, as IBM consultants brought in to try to remedy the problems have since attested. But senior management went ahead anyway, adopting, as one insider put it, a hope-and-pray attitude.
That “move fast and break things” paradigm might work fine if you’re a free social media startup, but not if you’re a bank and your buggy, incomplete code handles people’s money.
Thomas Sowell remembers Walter E. Williams. “He was my best friend for half a century. There was no one I trusted more or whose integrity I respected more.”
Williams is probably most famous for being a regular guest of Rush Limbaugh, but I probably first became aware of him from his work in Reason magazine, which published excerpts from his book The State Against Blacks. (No Amazon link, because the book is out of print and hideously expensive on the user market; a canny publisher should get it back into print.) Like Thomas Sowell (to whom he was often compared), Williams used his inside understanding of the American black experience to argue persuasively that free markets were the best mechanism to lift black people out of poverty, and that government intervention (be it a minimum wage, Affirmative Action, heavy business regulation, the welfare state, or closed shop labor rules) constantly undermined black economic progress.
As you might expect, Williams was not a fan of #BlackLivesMatter or ascribing the lack of black economic progress to “systemic racism”:
While it might not be popular to say in the wake of the recent social disorder, the true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called “systemic racism.” Instead, we need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities.
Some of the most dangerous big cities are: St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Newark, Buffalo and Philadelphia. The most common characteristic of these cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by liberal Democrats. Some cities — such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark and Philadelphia — haven’t elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. On top of this, in many of these cities, blacks are mayors, often they dominate city councils, and they are chiefs of police and superintendents of schools.
In 1965, there were no blacks in the U.S. Senate, nor were there any black governors. And only six members of the House of Representatives were black. As of 2019, there is far greater representation in some areas — 52 House members are black. Nine black Americans have served in the Senate, including Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, Carol Moseley Braun and Barack Obama of Illinois, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kamala Harris of California. In recent times, there have been three black state governors. The bottom line is that today’s black Americans have significant political power at all levels of government. Yet, what has that meant for a large segment of the black population?
Democratic-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets. Consider Baltimore. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state’s math exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state’s English test. That same year in Philadelphia only 19% of eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 16% were proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 4% of its eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 7% were proficient in reading. It’s the same story of academic disaster in other cities run by Democrats.
Violent crime and poor education is not the only problem for Democratic-controlled cities. Because of high crime, poor schools and a less pleasant environment, cities are losing their economic base and their most productive people in droves. When World War II ended, the population of Washington, D.C., was about 800,000; today, it’s about 700,000. In 1950, Baltimore’s population was almost 950,000; today, it’s around 590,000. Detroit’s 1950 population was close to 1.85 million; today, it’s down to 673,000. The population of Camden, N.J., in 1950 was nearly 125,000; today it has fallen to 74,000. St. Louis’ 1950 population was more than 856,000; today, it’s less than 294,000. A similar story of population decline can be found in most of our formerly large and prosperous cities. In some cities, the population decline since 1950 is well over 50%, and that includes Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Academic liberals, civil rights advocates and others blamed the exodus on racism — “white flight” to the suburbs to avoid blacks. But blacks have been fleeing some cities at higher rates than whites. The five cities whose suburbs have the fastest-growing black populations are Miami, Dallas, Washington, Houston and Atlanta. It turns out that blacks, like whites, want better and safer schools for their kids and don’t like to be mugged or have their property vandalized. And like white people, if they have the means, black people cannot wait to leave troubled cities.
A preference cascade occurs when a group of people who have long felt strongly about something they felt they couldn’t express suddenly find out that there are a lot of people who feel the same way. It happened in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, when the rise of Solidarity started a series of shocks to the decaying edifice of communist control that made people realize that just about all their fellow citizens hated living under communism just as much as they did.
Now a similar preference cascade may be taking place among black Americans willing to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party.
For years, Black America’s absolute fidelity to the Democratic Party has been one of the bedrock assumptions of political calculations in the United States, with Democratic Presidential candidates regularly receiving some 90% of the black vote every four years. The pattern was so pronounced that neither Republicans nor Democrats felt the need to aim campaign pitches at black Americans, Republicans because they felt it was useless and Democrats because they felt it was unnecessary.
During the same period, cities across American enjoyed uninterrupted Democratic Party control and uninterrupted decay. Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia: None has had a Republican mayor in the last half century. Black Americans voted for Democrats in near-monolithic numbers since 1964 only to see the cities they lived in continue to get worse.
The black community is not owned. They’re free Americans with free minds, talents, and ideas and deserve to practice and perfect that level of autonomy just like everyone else does.
However, the Democrats have more or less forbidden anyone from the black community from reaching across the aisle or considering any ideas that break from their approved ideological boundaries. Being a black person and a Republican will cause the Democrats to suddenly turn on you in vicious ways. They’ll lob racist names at you like “Uncle Tom” or worse.
They’ll even arbitrarily decide that you’re not really black.
It’s a brave thing to step out of line and disagree with a large group at the best of times but this is a time when political tensions are at their height. Any political or ideological disagreement could result in your entire life being destroyed by the mob.
For a black person in America, I can only imagine how difficult it is to stand up and say that you’re not going to go along with the approved behavioral codes set for you by the mainstream social guidelines. It will result in a backlash, but the black community knows how to endure, and little by little, they’re enduring the hate and anger thrown at them for reaching across the aisle and shaking hands with the man you’re not supposed to ever even look at without scorn.
It started with Kanye West hugging President Donald Trump and talking about how much he likes him. Maybe they thought that was the end of it. West is a massive talent but they could write him off as loony.
But then recently, Ice Cube thanked Trump for all the things he’s doing for the black community. Cube is a legend, and calling him crazy wasn’t going to fly in this case.
Lil Pump also came out with his own profanity ridden endorsement of Trump.
Now, as my colleague Alex Parker recently wrote, Lil Wayne did the exact same. He sent out a tweet containing a picture of him smiling with Trump and thanking him for the work he’s doing on criminal justice reform.
Democrats are incredibly upset and it’s not hard to understand why. These endorsements will have an effect. If they don’t outright turn people to vote for Trump, then they’ll do something even more horrifying. They’ll make reaching across the aisle a normal thing to do, and the distrust and prejudice against Republicans that the Democrats have built and fostered for so long will begin to dissipate.
Unapproved ideas may begin to creep in and delusions will begin to melt. The Democrat party will lose its hold on the black community and the vote they took for granted for so long will begin to lessen.
Perhaps the Democrats didn’t see this coming, but perhaps the world should have.
The black community isn’t a community known for being friendly with the establishment. They have a lot of reasons to be distrustful or resentful of it as you can imagine. Trump is anything but the establishment. He came in as an outsider whose political experience was a few failed campaigns and some meetings with politicians in the past.
When Trump hit the scene it was clear he wasn’t a part of the Washington machine. He wasn’t a politician and he didn’t care much for their rules. It was clear they hated him for it from the word “go.”
Trump began getting to work for the black community, bringing their unemployment levels to all-time lows. He lowered their taxes and opened up opportunity zones. He began channeling money to black colleges. He’s also been doing a lot for criminal justice reform, which was overdue for change.
The black community began to wake up and see what was happening. The Democrat party hadn’t been on their side for a long time. It was using them. Little by little that became apparent, and soon you had black people switching parties.
Maybe the Democrats thought they had the black community on lock, but the black community proved that they’re not owned by anyone.
The rapper endorsements were significant in a way that all those “Actors reunions for Biden” were not. Does anyone think the Seinfeld cast would endorse anyone but liberals?
Rap stars endorsing Republicans, especially a Republican President so hated by white political elites as Donald Trump, is just about unprecedented. Many black people may be low information voters, but they know their cities are broken, they know that Democrats run their cities, and most don’t think that rioting, looting and defunding the police are answers.
Seeing not just black celebrities endorsing Trump, but black celebrities whose entire images revolve around being “ghetto” endorsing Trump does carry novelty value. That’s the sort of thing that gets attention and breaks through to voters that never watch CNN or pick up The New York Times. That’s the way preference cascades start.
In the meantime, what #BlackLivesMatter seems to be accomplishing is getting black-owned businesses looted and burned and getting more black people shot.
New York City’s homicide rate is at a five-year high; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century, according to The New York Times. At 4 a.m. last Sunday, a 30-year-old woman was shot in the head in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a house party. On Saturday afternoon, a man and a woman were shot to death outside a Brooklyn home. Early Friday morning, a 19-year-old girl was shot to death in the heart of Manhattan, near Madison Square Park, on East 26th Street.
Milwaukee’s homicides have increased 132 percent. “In 25 years, I’ve never seen it like this,” a Milwaukee police inspector told the Police Executive Research Forum, referring to the violence and the low officer morale. Shootings are spiking in Indianapolis. Other cities will show similar increases once their crime data are published.
Snip.
So far this year, more people have been killed in Baltimore than at this point in 2019, which ended with the highest homicide rate on record for that city. June’s killings, which eclipse those of June 2019, include a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant and her three-year-old daughter. They were gunned down in their car by the father of the woman’s unborn child, according to the police.
The victims in these shootings are overwhelmingly black. So far this year, 78 percent of all homicide victims in Chicago are black, though blacks are less than a third of the population. But the defund-the-police advocates and the Democratic establishment have said nothing about the growing loss of black lives.
Their stated goal—to achieve equality for blacks—masks a different agenda. In the “What We Believe” section of the BLM site, they highlight the work they do to “dismantle cisgender privilege” and their desire to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—a structure that many, including myself and Kanye West, believe is key to rebuilding black communities. The mission statement mires a message that should be about black lives in a slew of buzzwords and Marxist psychobabble. Not all the sentiments are bad, but none will create positive change in the black community.
That’s one reason why rapper Lord Jamer says that #BlackLivesMatter is “a movement that was given to us by, you know, George Soros and his f***ing boys. Because they saw how things were going and they didn’t want to go back to the 60s to where we started having our own organic movements. That was a big f***ing problem for them.” (The Black Panthers had many problems with radical Marxism of their own, but at least were not funded and controlled by Democratic Party billionaires.)
Democratic Party affiliation among young black people is at an all-time low. “Only 47% of [under-30 black voters] say that the [Democratic] party is welcoming to Black Americans, and only 43% say they trust Democrats in Congress to do what’s best for the Black community.”
A lot of black people seem to understand that the biggest problem facing black America isn’t “systemic racism,” but Democratic indifference to their suffering and the breakdown of the black family.
The American economy was doing gangbusters before the overreaction to the Wuhan coronavirus hit, with black unemployment hitting historic lows. Some of that was due to the Trump Administration actually enforcing border controls against illegal aliens. Probably no demographic has suffered from wages suppressed by illegal alien labor than working class black Americans. But the Democratic Party, seeing “demographic transformation” as a key to permanent majority status, has not just turned a blind eye the illegal alien problem but has actually encouraged it, constantly pushing for more welfare for illegal aliens and blanket amnesties for illegals.
Now that we’re on the other side of the V-shaped recovery, the economy grew at a record pace in the third quarter. Biden tax increases would kill that recovery dead.
Here’s a very short video which points out why transactional politics should trump the personal for black voters:
I think this video sums up what Ice Cube did and the thought process that has to change amongst black people. pic.twitter.com/12aBjyLdI6
This Trump billboard offers a succinct summary of the choice facing all Americans:
George Soros and the radical left have offered up #BlackLivesMatters as an AstroTurf movement providing sham leadership of black Americans to empower the hard left by cowing white liberals and to keeping black Americans voting for Democrats. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is offering real reform, a booming economy, and a very strong slate of black Republican candidates like Kimberly Klacik, John James and Wesley Hunt. And in Donald Trump, Republicans have a leader capable of closing deals others thought impossible. Is getting hosts of Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel any less impossible than getting black Americans to vote Republican?
President Trump seems within striking distance of closing that impossible seeming deal. All that has to happen is for black Americans to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party that’s ignored them for the last half century.
Welcome to the last LinkSwarm before the election! Halloween is tomorrow, and I will actually be handing out candy in the time-honored traditional manner.
The economy grew at a white hot 33.1% rate during the third quarter, which is what happens when you lift the counterproductive economic lockdowns Democrats want to keep in place. We’ve still got recovering to do (something that’s not going to happen under a Harris-Biden Administration’s huge tax hikes), but it looks like we’re enjoying the V-shaped recovery that so many economists assured us was impossible.
The next few days will be a Cat 5 hurricane of mainstream media spin and Democrat bullSchiff designed to make you think that you’ve already lost this election. They want your morale shattered, your spirit broken, and you to put a lid on your participation in saving your country from leftist tyranny.
It’s all a lie.
It’s a psychological operation designed to keep you on the sidelines.
We got this.
All you need to do is vote.
People reach out to me all the time looking for hope, and I’ve got plenty, because things are breaking our way. You have structural factors like the fact that incumbents tend to win, particularly when the economy is improving and we’re not in some idiotic new war. You have factors like how the Democrat candidate is a desiccated old weirdo who pretty much called a lid on his campaign back in July and whose corruption is being shown to be more corrupting every single day. You have manifest enthusiasm for our guy and tumbleweeds for theirs. You have people moving from Hillary to Trump, but nobody moving from Trump to Grandpa Badfinger. Trump dominated the debate where Oldfinger doubled down on his deeply unpopular program of destroying millions of oil industry jobs, single payer, and Matlock for All. On the inside, the insiders almost unanimously think Trump will win – that’s the real talk behind the scenes among people whose names you know. Early voting numbers are GOP-friendly, and many polls now show Trump moving up or taking the lead.
We have the heat, we have the momentum, we have this to lose.
Speaking of rappers endorsing Trump, Lil Wayne (who I have actually heard of) all but did that as well:
Just had a great meeting with @realdonaldtrump@potus besides what he’s done so far with criminal reform, the platinum plan is going to give the community real ownership. He listened to what we had to say today and assured he will and can get it done. 🤙🏾 pic.twitter.com/Q9c5k1yMWf
AMD buys Xilinx for $35 billion in an all-stock transaction. Xilinx dominates Field Programable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and has fingers into a lot of weird verticals I don’t have any visibility into. Like AMD they’re fabless, and like AMD they use TSMC as their foundry. Assuming all the usual merger hurdles (both regulatory and cultural) can be overcome, this is probably a good move for both sides.
The owners of a bunch of famous Austin businesses come out against the tax-hiking rail bond. “‘We are not open, we are not going to be open for a long time so no money coming in paying an extra $3000,’ said Shannon Sedwick with Esther’s Follies.” Also opposing the huge tax hike for the bond: Former Democratic State Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, who will never be mistaken for a fire-breathing conservative.
What GOP insiders hoped would be a quiet race for Speaker of the Texas House got suddenly heated on Thursday, with four establishment Republicans officially in the hunt – and at least one other poised to jump in. Most Texans have never heard of none of them.
Officially filing declaring their candidacy today are Republican State Reps. Chris Paddie of Marshall, Trent Ashby of Lufkin, John Cyrier of Bastrop, and Geanie Morrison of Victoria joining Democrats Senfronia Thompson of Houston and Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio
Republican Dade Phelan of Beaumont was also reportedly considering jumping into the race as the “Team Bonnen” candidate.
Remember how the New York Times hyped an op-ed by “Anonymous” slamming Trump? Honestly, I barely do, because all the fake “anonymous” #JustTrustMeBro “sources” “familiar with” Trump just blur together in my mind. Well, turns out the “Senior Trump Official” was a minor official turned CNN staffer, so they, and most of the liberal media complex that trusted them, just straight lied to us to smear Trump. You know, just like all their other anti-Trump “bombshells.”
It’s bad enough that Gov. Cuomo presided over the needless COVID-19 deaths of thousands of vulnerable people in New York nursing homes.
It’s bad enough that he wrote a shameful book praising himself for his pandemic response and now is doing a victory lap of self-congratulation in the worst-hit state in the nation.
It’s bad enough that he is mounting a pre-election scare campaign on COVID vaccines to stir up anti-vax sentiment for political purposes.
But now we discover that Cuomo got campaign funds from the hospital organizations that lobbied for his lethal policy for the elderly and which then bought TV ads whitewashing his culpability.
An exclusive audit of campaign donations to Cuomo by OpenTheBooks.com shows disturbing links with industry bodies which demanded the disastrous order forcing nursing homes to admit COVID-infected patients hospitals didn’t want.
“Jeremy Corbyn suspended from Labour Party over response to antisemitism report.” Wow, that’s not closing the barn door after the cows have escaped, that’s closing the barn door after the cows have escaped, run off to a different region, been captured, fattened, slaughtered, made into hamburgers, and consumed at a St. Swithun’s Day feast in Wessex.
Broadcast this video in reply to every single BLM claim that Police across the country target Blacks. Walk away! pic.twitter.com/BSA1HOsqFo
— 👠IStandWithTrump ⭐️⭐️⭐️WhoDoesFBIserve? (@superyayadize) October 24, 2020
“$150 MILLION worth of illegal cannabis, weapons, and 3 kangaroos seized by York Police.” That’s York, Ontario, a locale for which I’m reliably informed kangaroos do not constitute native fauna.
Borepatch thinks the election is over. “The only thing that the Democrats had going for them was the lockdown. The breathless hyping of the ‘rona was intended to fan the flames of fear which would justify further lockdown and economic devastation. They then blamed Trump for all this, while the media shamelessly covered for them. That’s all gone now.”
A keening wail of lamentation rings out across the land at Mr. Trump’s possible, dastardly recovery. How dare he! — to paraphrase Saint Greta Thunberg. 209,000 other Americans died, and not him! What vile and unholy devices got him out of a sure death sentence? No doubt Democratic Party astrologasters and consulting augurers will be searching for clues among the orbiting planets and the spilled organs of sacrificed chickens in the days to come. Perhaps Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) can snare a few of the president’s attending physicians into his House Intel Committee and rev up another impeachment for going against doctors’ orders. Wouldn’t that be a delectable counter to the looming confirmation process for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement next door in the Senate this month?
“Media Criticizes Trump For Downplaying Virus Threat By Not Dying.” “Every hour that he lives is another hour that the severity of this virus is undermined!”
Some of the worst things about it is the element of transformation of the formerly mild-mannered and kindly into founts of seething malevolence.
It’s deeply unsettling to see the rage come over a person, as I recently did when looking into the eyes of a previously genial acquaintance who was shrieking with rage at me, her eyes narrowed with what looked like hatred.
People don’t like what threatens them, especially if they have no immediate factual answer to some of the evidence presented to them. What’s left to them is to explode—which this person did, ultimately getting into her car and peeling off with tires screeching. I would guess, although I don’t know, and I’m certainly not about to ask, that she and plenty of other people I know might be rejoicing, openly or secretly, in Trump’s diagnosis.
Are they “possessed?” Is this “demonic?” I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I tend to think in psychological terms because these people are, for the most part, not inherently evil. They are filled with self-righteousness, and they have been whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons. This is no accident.
Wishing that your opponent dies of a disease is pretty bad, but some go beyond the passive voice when hoping for our deaths. They seek to do it. Exhibit A is tech overlord Dick Costolo, a former Twitter CEO apparently, who tweeted on September 30th, “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.” So Dick, which by coincidence also happens to also be your name, you want to play horsey, huh?
I guess casually cheering the murder of political opponents gets you some guffaws from your pals in Palo Alto cafes. But those of us who have ventured outside of the carefully constructed (and costly, in terms of sweat and blood) safe space that is the United States, and who get that the natural state of man is not driving Teslas and sipping bespoke Napa Chardonnay in prosperous, secure enclaves with one’s liberal cronies, know better. People who cheerlead political murder tend to be people who will support political murder given the chance to make it happen.
One challenge for the dilettantes of death is to find the people who would actually commit political murder for them, but money and institutional inertia make that possible. As we have seen, woke zillionaires can fund their own lil’ revolutionaries. They are the ones behind Antifa, and if Donald Trump is reelected, we will likely see the DoJ (once Trump rids himself of the worse than useless FBI Director Christopher Wray, who never met self-serving establishment narrative he didn’t eagerly hump like a horny dog rubbing on the nearest leg) forced by Bill Barr to concede that this is an Astroturfed RICO conspiracy paid for by rich leftists. Yet, Antifa is not a combat organization (unless you are one person surrounded by a dozen of these brownshirts) but an information operation asset.
But the Dicks of the elite are spoiled and soft and while this all seems like fun and games to them, with somebody else doing the murdering, they don’t realize that history holds that the status quo doesn’t remain in effect for everyone else when one group decides to alter it to its advantage. That is the plan – the establishment, outraged at the people who held them accountable for their legacy of failure, incompetence, and corruption by electing Donald Trump and a Republican Senate, intend to alter the status quo to ensure that this outrage never happens again. They intend to add states to increase their leverage. They intend to change voting laws to allow cheating and impose “campaign finance laws” that will be enforced against your candidates but not against establishment candidates to ensure there are no more troublesome populist alternatives. They intend, using tech companies and big corporations, to impose thought control and punish dissenters by cutting them off from access to the routine modes of living in this society – social media, banking, transportation, education. They intend to pass laws to disarm you so the ultimate failsafe of freedom is negated. And they intend to pack the Supreme Court to ensure they can’t be stopped by that pesky Constitution.
But they will expect you to remain static and to respect and obey as if nothing has changed. You must be loyal to the institutions that betrayed you because…well, that’s unclear. Perhaps they hope you’ll just keep going along as if nothing is different out of habit, or from fear of losing what little they have left to you.
Yet, the notion that Americans will wake up one morning, see that they are no longer free, shrug, obediently line up to turn in their Remingtons and Mossbergs and reconcile themselves to serfdom is not in the cards.
More studies find face masks ineffective against the Wuhan coronavirus than found them effective. I suspect that N95 masks might well be effective, but not this ‘wear any damn thing” Virus Theater we’re stuck in.
Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey puts the kibosh on last-minute Democratic attempts to force through online voting.
Authorities arrested a North Texas candidate on dozens of felony voter fraud charges after catching him red-handed with a box of mail-in ballots belonging to local voters.
Carrollton mayoral candidate Zul Mirza Mohamed was charged Wednesday with 109 felonies for fraudulently requesting and obtaining mail-in ballots he alleged were for nursing home residents.
According to a press release from Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree, his office was tipped off to the possible mail-ballot harvesting scheme on September 23 by the Denton County Elections Office.
Multiple mail ballots had been requested on behalf of Carrollton residents to be sent to a post office box in Lewisville, which purportedly belonged to a nursing home facility. Investigators contacted the voters and found they had not made the ballot requests.
Investigators also learned the post office box was obtained using a fake Texas driver’s license and fake student ID from the University of North Texas, and they began surveilling the post office.
On October 7, investigators saw the suspect pick up a box of requested mail-in ballots and take them back to his residence in Carrollton. Officers obtained a search warrant for Mohamed’s home and inside found the fake driver’s license and box of ballots—several of which had been opened.
I’m a police officer in a major American city. Many of you reading this have seen a movie or TV show set in this city. Some of you have vacationed here. We have a big problem with poverty, unemployment, people scamming the welfare system, drugs, and violent crime.
Honestly, though, who I am and where I work isn’t important—what I stand for is. I show up every day I’m scheduled to work, on time, and I work. I don’t hang out at the station, I handle calls for service and I constantly back up other officers. I quickly progressed to different specialized units and, over time, even began to help out at the academy and became a Field Training Officer.
But after a couple of high-profile incidents where suspects wound up dead, we were essentially told to stop pursuing the bad guys: Too much liability for the city. So, if a violent felon who shot someone last week is spotted and you know it’s him? Depending on the ranking officer working, you’re most likely not going to be allowed to go get him.
Snip.
Call someone out on being a worthless lazy officer? Is that worthless lazy officer a lieutenant’s mistress?! You just earned yourself a transfer to night watch in some outpost no one wants to work.
In every major city there’s a punishment assignment. Everyone who’s ever been a city cop knows this to be true.
After a while, that same lazy officer who’s been sitting in that same lieutenant’s lap, or who’s never really done anything noteworthy, except maybe they went to the right school or are in the right clique, they now have time on the job and they take the sergeants test. They pass and, if your department doesn’t go straight down the list, they’re now a supervisor! Newer officers have no idea they’re working for someone who’s telling them someone else’s war stories or making themselves seem more important than they really were in the situation.
Roll call training is all about administrative work and checking boxes off for monthly audits. We barely talk about that stolen silver SUV that is absolutely raping us nightly with auto burglaries. Oh, and since our policies are out there for anyone to read (including the bad guys) in the “interest of transparency,” they know we can’t pursue them for a property crime once they blow the red light at the intersection after we light them up and they flee. Never mind the fact that that stolen SUV is occupied by a wanted felon for armed robber in possession of a stolen AK-47. It’s just a property crime, right? No big deal. If they t-bone a family of four and kill someone, the fleeing felon isn’t at fault. I am.
Snip.
You have mayors bowing to the political pressure from a small, very vocal, minority that wants to defund (read: abolish, in many cases) the police.
Some mayors have made it known to their department brass they’d rather endure the optics of Revolutionary Communists (read: ANTIFA/BLM) rioting, looting, and burning their cities down, than have their police officers be seen wading into the fray with riot batons in hand.
You realize that if cities abolish police departments, gated communities are going to hire private police forces, made up of nearly all ex-police from the agency that just disbanded (see Minneapolis when that happens) and ex-military guys. The city won’t have oversight and their rules and regulations are going to be way more relaxed. Less area to patrol and a large pay raise? Less crime? Sign me up!
Major media outlets constantly fan the flames of civil unrest nationwide. In a race to be first with many stories, they finish last in credibility. The initial tragedy de jour is front-page news, leading all newscasts in prime time. Meanwhile, the retraction or exoneration of the officer is buried. No apologies from the likes of Shaun King, MSNBC, CNN, or Al Sharpton. They’ve all already moved on to the next rage-bait.
Who gives a f— if some honest hard-working cop had his or her life ruined and is in financial shambles because they got a no-win call dropped in their lap, right? All cops are bastards, anyway. Black Lives only seem to matter when cops are involved in the death, justified or not, of a black person.
Every single week, in many major cities all across this country, murders within the black community occur — oftentimes with stolen firearms. I’ve lost count of the bodies (mostly black, never in my case shot by police) I’ve stood over. Sometimes at night when I’m trying to fall asleep I hear the blood-curdling screams of family members (mostly mothers) who rush to the scene and are held back at the police tape.
So, in a knee-jerk reaction to a high-profile incident, in an effort to placate a mob, there is talk of not only defunding the police but abolishing them. Do you know what that leads to nationwide? Cops like me are not being proactive. At all. Because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Seven of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s own aides have accused him of “improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses” in relation to Austin investor Nate Paul.
Former Paxton assistant and current United State congressman Chip Roy called on Paxton to resign, which is not a good sign.
Speaking of Democratic governance, Baltimore’s next mayor is complaining about Donald Trump when he should be complaining about his fellow Democrats:
Baltimore is no more “unjust” now than it was before its murder rate soared half a decade ago. What has changed is that Baltimore is less policed than it was back then. And that’s thanks to the policies and pronouncement of its pathetic Democrat mayors and other leading pols.
It seems clear that Brandon Scott will continue in their tradition. Thus, it seems equally clear that Baltimore will remain exhibit A when informed people talk about the breakdown in law and order under the watch (if you can call it that) of Democratic mayors.
Today’s Democratic politician receiving a felony indictment comes to you from Rochester, New York, where Democratic Mayor Lovey Warren was indicted on felony campaign finance fraud charges. “At issue are transfers made from Ms. Warren’s political action committee to her campaign committee that far exceeded the $8,557 limit that a campaign could receive from an individual donor.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Democrat Party official arrested for allegedly pulling knife on ‘Women for Trump.'” “The communications director for the Democrat Party of Washington County, Oregon [Clayton John Callahan], was arrested after allegedly pulling a knife on female Trump supporters at an outdoor event hosted by the Oregon Women for Trump.”
Some quality trolling in the footnotes. In response to Google being obnoxiously evasive about market share questions, the subcommittee noted 'interesting how Microsoft was obnoxiously evasive about market share.'
The Red Headed Libertarian notes that the MSM seems to intentionally conflate anarchists with legal militias, and offers a brief history lesson:
DJT was asked to denounce “militias & white supremacists” at the debate.
Conflated Political language is never by accident.
Dems failed to repeal 2A based on the prefatory clause so now they take on operative clause-
In Heller, Scalia said militias are made up of individuals.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian ™ (@TRHLofficial) October 8, 2020
Their response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian ™ (@TRHLofficial) October 8, 2020
Democrats are behaving badly (as usual), peace is breaking out in the Middle East (not as usual), how Soros and company are funding violent unrest, some Wuhan coronavirus shenanigans, and some unexpected stealth fighter news. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
The Elite has stiffed Bernie (twice), alienating his supporters.
The Elite has sent their (white) radical street muscle into Black neighborhoods, burning and looting black businesses.
The Elite hasn’t really done anything at all for the hispanic community. Their support for communists has hurt them in Florida where Donald Trump is outpolling Joe Biden among hispanics (!).
The Elite has pushed outsourcing (most recently the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty which Trump killed). Private sector unions have noticed.
The Elite has pushed the virus lockdown which has thrown millions of restaurant employees out of work. Many of these folks belong to SEIU. Now that emergency unemployment benefits have run out – and restaurants are going out of business because of the continuing lockdown – you have to wonder if these people will start to wonder why they support the Democrats.
Public Sector employees have done well, but the areas that locked down hardest are the areas where the government budgets are most in trouble. New York City is going to lay off 40,000 employees. The Elite has hoped that Biden will win and bail out the states and cities. Good luck with that.
Lastly, suburban women are hit with a Democratic Party double whammy: schools remain closed in many (especially Blue) areas. Women see their family lifestyles massively disrupted, and potentially are forced to consider giving up their own job to home school their kids. At the same time they see radical rioters entering suburban towns. Rioters are filmed telling people to get out of their homes which will be taken as “reparations”.
From The Department of Duh: “Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter.” Further: “The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The point person for the Fight Back Table, a coalition of liberal organizations planning for a “post-Election Day political apocalypse scenario,” leads a progressive coalition that is part of a massive liberal dark money network.
Deirdre Schifeling, who leads the Fight Back Table’s efforts to prepare for “mass public unrest” following the Nov. 3 election, founded and is campaign director for Democracy for All 2021 Action, a project of Arabella Advisors’ Sixteen Thirty Fund. The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a dark money network that provides wealthy donors anonymity as they push large sums into the left’s organizational efforts.
The connections suggest that post-election mobilization isn’t just the project of a liberal fringe, but that powerful Democratic Party interest groups are also involved.
Created in 2019, Democracy for All 2021 Action includes more than 20 labor union, think tank, racial justice, and environmental groups that push for automatic and same-day voter registration, prohibiting voter ID laws, and removing “barriers” to naturalization, among other initiatives. While the Sixteen Thirty Fund does not report Democracy for All 2021 Action in its D.C. business records, the group acknowledges that it is a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund at the bottom of its website. The Sixteen Thirty Fund has been used as an avenue for donors to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to state-based and national groups in recent years. In 2018 alone, $141 million was passed through the fund to liberal endeavors.
A complete list of groups that make up the Fight Back Table is not publicly available, but Schifeling’s group appears to be an integral part of its efforts. Beyond being the point person for the Fight Back Table’s election war games, Schifeling has ties to two of the Fight Back Table’s founding groups, Demos and Color of Change, which are part of Democracy for All 2021 Action. Schifeling’s group is also a part of Protect the Results, a separate coalition that is collaborating with the Fight Back Table on mass mobilization to “protect the results of the 2020 elections” in more than 1,000 locations across the United States.
The post-Election Day prep follows other doomsday planning scenarios by liberal activists. The Transition Integrity Project released a 22-page document that mentioned “violence” 15 times, “chaos” 9 times, “unrest” 3 times, and “crisis” 12 times. The Fight Back Table, likewise, is preparing for extreme outcomes, including violence and mass mobilization efforts following the elections.
Snip.
Schifeling’s group is just one of dozens that fall under funds affiliated with Arabella Advisors. The funds have facilitated more than $1 billion in anonymous funding since President Donald Trump took office.
Funds affiliated with Arabella Advisors act as a “fiscal sponsor” to liberal nonprofits by providing tax and legal status to the groups. This setup means that the nonprofits do not have to file individual tax forms to the IRS, which include information such as board members and overall financials.
Some of the most prominent groups on the left fall under these funds, including Demand Justice, which fights Trump’s judicial nominations, and numerous prominent state-based groups. Funds at Arabella are also used to push grants to outside groups not contained within their network, including David Brock’s American Bridge, John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, the Center for Popular Democracy, and America Votes.
Three new George Soros campaigns to further advance the left’s radical agenda have been uncovered in separate news reports published this week. Keep in mind that the U.S. government subsidizes the Hungarian billionaire’s deeply politicized Open Society Foundations (OSF) that work to destabilize legitimate governments, erase national borders, target conservative politicians, finance civil unrest, subvert institutions of higher education and orchestrate refugee crises for political gain. Details of the financial and staffing nexus between OSF and the U.S. government are available in a Judicial Watch investigative report.
With the help of American taxpayer dollars, Soros bolsters a radical leftwing agenda that in the United States has included: promoting an open border with Mexico and fighting immigration enforcement efforts; fomenting racial disharmony by funding anti-capitalist racialist organizations; financing the Black Lives Matter movement and other organizations involved in the riots in Ferguson, Missouri; weakening the integrity of our electoral systems; promoting taxpayer funded abortion-on-demand; advocating a government-run health care system; opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts; promoting dubious transnational climate change agreements that threaten American sovereignty and working to advance gun control and erode Second Amendment protections.
The list extends even further, with Soros tentacles—money—reaching previously unknown domestic and foreign causes that promote a broad leftwing agenda at various levels. It turns out Soros donated $408,000 to a Political Action Committee (PAC) that supported Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, whose office just dropped felony charges against the actor who fabricated a hate crime earlier this year. The actor, Jussie Smollett, claimed he was attacked in Chicago on his way home from a sandwich shop at 2 a.m. He said two masked men shouted racial and homophobic slurs, beat him, poured bleach on him and tied a rope around his neck. Smollett blamed the crime on white Trump supporters. When the hoax was uncovered, prosecutors charged him with 16 felonies but Foxx dropped all the charges this week. Illinois campaign records provided in the news report show that Soros personally contributed $333,000 to Foxx’s super PAC before the March 15, 2016 primary was over and an additional $75,000 after she became Cook County’s top prosecutor. “Soros has been intervening in local races for prosecutor, state’s attorney, and district attorney — often backing left-wing Democrats against other Democrats in doing so,” according to the article.
Another report published this week reveals that a Soros foundation gave $1 million to a nonprofit that favors choosing the president by popular vote. The group, National Popular Vote Inc., gets millions from leftist groups to push its purported agenda of ensuring that “every vote in every state” matters. Another group, Tides Foundation, that raises money for leftwing causes, also contributed to the popular vote nonprofit. Soros’ OSF’s have given millions of dollars to the Tides Foundation, according to records provided in the story. Based in San Francisco, the group envisions a world of shared prosperity and social justice founded on equality, human rights, healthy communities and a sustainable environment. The nonprofit strives to accelerate the pace of social change by, among other things, working with “marginalized communities.”
The last article documents what Judicial Watch has reported for years—Soros’ huge influence in the U.S. government, specifically the State Department. The agency pressured Ukraine officials to drop an investigation of a Soros group during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Barack Obama’s U.S. ambassador actually gave Ukraine’s prosecutor general a list of people who should not be prosecuted. “The U.S.-Soros collaboration was visible in Kiev,” the article states. “Several senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials and FBI agents appeared in pictures as participants or attendees at Soros-sponsored events and conferences.” The piece further reveals that internal memos from Soros’ foundations describe a concerted strategy of creating friendships inside key U.S. government agencies such as the departments of Justice and State.
Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber: “Woe is to us! We’re a racist institution! We repent of our white privilege!” Department of Education: “Well, if you’re a racist institution, I guess we’re going to have to investigate you for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and possibly pull your federal funding.”
If you want to know why the vast majority of initially Trump-skeptical conservatives have embraced the president, one reason is that he’s actually willing to name the enemy and take the fight to them:
The president is denouncing critical race theory on national television—and elevating this intellectual fight into a major campaign theme.
The battle-lines are drawn: we can embrace the principles of 1776 or the principles of 1619.https://t.co/rAfKQXX9ma
You may not have noticed, since the media tried desperately to bury the story, but the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, formally recognizing Israel. If Obama had done this, it would be the leading MSM story for weeks, with our ruling class insisting he deserved another Nobel Prize.
Speaking of the Obama Administration’s incompetence:
So many Obama-era "heard realities" turned out to be so much wishcasting, or else covering up for the multitudinous failures engendered by their own manifest incompetence. https://t.co/Fyzo1YZfHW
Other Arab nations are in talks to follow suit. “Those in advanced talks with the US over Israeli relations are though to include Oman, Sudan and Morocco.” And possibly Saudi Arabia.
A recent sermon from one of Saudi Arabia’s leading clerics called for Muslims to avoid, quote “passionate emotions and fiery enthusiasm” towards Jews.
It’s a marked change in tone from Imam Abdulrahman al-Sudais, compared to previous emotional statements he’s made about the plight of the Palestinian people.
In the past the cleric had prayed for Palestinians to have victory over what he called “invader and aggressor” Jews — a nod to Israel.
However, Sudais’ new remarks referenced a relationship between them and the Prophet Mohammad.
“He treated the Jews of Khaybar equally and treated his Jewish neighbor well.”
All by itself, the softening of the hard-line stance against Israel among leading Wahhbist clerics in “The Land of the Two Holy Cities” is huge, arguably a bigger shift in Muslim thought than all the Arab-Israeli peace treaties combined.
The late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir summed up the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East decades ago when she said: “Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us. We can forgive them for killing our children. We cannot forgive them from forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with them when they love their children more than they hate us.”
Prime Minister Meir’s sentiments 50 years ago were the result of numerous occasions where Arab leaders rejected very favorable territorial agreements and other peace settlements and opted for war instead. The very clear message was, and has always been, that the Arabs would rather die fighting the Jews than thrive while living alongside them. Just think about the seething hatred an entire group needs to have to sustain such a disastrous outlook. It truly boggles the mind.
Are today’s Democrats much different? Their single-minded hatred of President Trump and his supporters knows no bounds. They oppose every policy he puts forth, contradict his every statement, and try to undermine his very humanity just like Islamic radicals regularly attempt to dehumanize Jews in Israel and all over the world,
They don’t even like to refer to him as “President Trump,” as they immaturely prance around on TV and social media calling him “45” as if referring to him solely as the 45th president is some kind of serious insult. Palestinians and other Israel-haters pull a similar move when they refuse to call the land “Israel.” They instead opt for nasty Orwellian terms like “Zionist entity.”
And now they are running a presidential campaign with the sole message of “get Trump.” There’s not one person really planning to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden; they’re all just Trump-haters. None of those voters can truly articulate the slightest argument for Biden without talking mostly or all about Trump. It’s the most hateful campaign against an incumbent since the pro-slavery Democrats tried to unseat Abe Lincoln in 1864, and that’s saying something.
All of this hate has been in place of what could have been four years of deal making with Trump, who came into office with no real orthodoxies to maintain and without a long political career filled with masters to oblige.
Like the wasted 72 years of Palestinian stubbornness in the face of so much Israeli success since 1948, Democrats have chosen a scorched earth policy rather than acknowledge their defeat in the last election or take advantage of any policies they could have pursued with this president on infrastructure, health coverage, and ending U.S. involvement in unending wars.
It has been called to our attention that this article is not satire. We regret the error. Those responsible have been sent to our state-of-the-art re-education camp. pic.twitter.com/02RtE6tO1f
Rosie and Ellen shows featured toxic work environments where staffers were required to work 80-90 weeks.
Alan Dershowitz sues CNN For $300,000,000 in defamation lawsuit. “The Harvard Law professor emeritus is demanding $300,000,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from CNN for misrepresenting his legal arguments in the Trump impeachment trial.”
“New Netflix Movie Actually Murders Puppies To Teach That Murdering Puppies Is Bad.”
“Following California’s Plagues Of Darkness And Fire, Pacific Ocean Turns To Blood.” “I figured it was just a murdered hobo, but there was way too much blood. You’d have to have killed at least a thousand hobos, and that hasn’t happened out here since the ’90s.”
The CPA was founded in San Francisco in 1972 during the heady days of the Marxist-oriented Asian American Movement, and today it also has a very active chapter in Boston. From its start, it has been a promoter of the People’s Republic of China.
According to an authoritative 2009 Stanford University paper tracing its early days to the present, and which can be found on Marxist.org, “The CPA began as a Leftist, pro-People’s Republic of China organization, promoting awareness of mainland China’s revolutionary thought and workers’ rights, and dedicated to self-determination, community control, and ‘serving the people.’”
The CPA, continued the paper, “worked with other pro-PRC groups within the U.S. and San Francisco Bay Area … Support for the PRC was based on the inspiration the members drew from what they saw as a successful grassroots model that presented a viable alternative to Western capitalism.”
One of the ways it did this was by holding “film screenings that were open to the public, sometimes showing Chinese films as well to facilitate understanding of the country’s revolutionary ideas. … CPA also took the lead with groups such as the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Organization to celebrate China’s National Day on Oct. 1”.
To this day, the CPA continues to be a partner of the PRC in the United States. Three years ago, the Boston chapter teamed up with China’s Consulate General in New York to offer Chinese nationals the opportunity to renew their passports, getting praise from China’s official mouthpiece, China Daily.
Last year, the CPA sponsored the raising of the PRC’s flag for the first time ever over Boston’s City Hall to honor the takeover of China by the Chinese Communist Party, just as the Stanford paper says has been its practice from the beginning, but this time drawing protesters. The event was organized, again, with the Chinese Consulate. Consul General Sun Guoxiang was on hand to say that, “The common interests are far more important than differences between U.S. and China.”
CPA co-founder Lydia Lowe also spoke at the event, reminding her audience that “McCarthyism is behind us. The Cold War is behind us.” In an essay she authored with other people on the Marxist revolutionary site LeftRoots last year, Lowe sounded as though she wanted to start another Cold War, writing that she wanted Asians to play a role in creating a “revolutionary strategy” that would achieve a “fundamentally different society.”
And CPA drew praise from China’s mouthpiece China Daily just a few weeks ago, for taking part again in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in San Francisco.
It is clear, then, that CPA works with China’s communist government, pushes its agenda here in the United States, and is regularly praised by China’s state-owned mouthpieces. It is clear, too, from, this perspective, why the CPA would sponsor a new enterprise by BLM founder Alicia Garza: they espouse the same desire for world communism.
Garza sits atop a worldwide revolutionary empire, starting with the Black Lives Matter Global Network she founded, which now has 15 chapters in the U.S. and several more all over Canada, Australia, and Europe. As Foreign Affairs wrote in its September/October issue, “Today, BLM has a global network of dozens of chapters. This number will likely grow exponentially in the coming years.”
Garza is also behind the Movement for Black Lives, with its 50 domestic organizations. In July she said, “We helped to also pull together an ecosystem that was much broader than the organization that we founded, and that ecosystem is called the Movement for Black Lives and it is taking the world by storm.”
Movement for Black Lives is unabashedly anti-capitalist, saying on its website, “we are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.”
Since protests erupted after George Floyd, an African American, died in police custody on May 25 in the U.S. state of Minnesota, the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn international headlines for its push to address systemic racism in America.
Chinese officials have also championed the movement, seeing it as a way to criticize the United States for its track record on human rights issues after months of scrutiny over Beijing’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
“Racial discrimination is a long-lasting problem in the United States,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian in June. “Black lives matter and their human rights should be guaranteed.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted “I can’t breathe,” a reference to George Floyd’s last words, as her response to U.S. State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus’ criticism of Beijing’s Hong Kong policy.
Xinhua, the state-backed media outlet, claimed in a report that “the United States is in pain, anger and the widest unrest for decades over racial injustice,” adding African Americans have suffered disproportionately high death rates from the COVID-19 outbreak.
Chinese media have heavily covered the protests and unrest in American cities, painting them as a failure of the country’s democratic system.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Chinese media paid more attention to the riots in Portland and Seattle than America’s own “mainstream” media.
According to Asia analyst Gordon Chang, the Chinese consulate in Houston, recently ordered closed by the state department, may have been clandestinely supporting various protest groups in the United States with the goal of stoking racial violence.
Chinese consulates across the country have come under renewed scrutiny in recent months as several high-profile hacking jobs targeting Americans were exposed. Just recently, two college-age hackers were arrested by the FBI and charged with several cybercrimes.
The Chinese consulates in America have become nests of spies and saboteurs, so it shouldn’t surprise us that they are carrying out directives of the Chinese Communist government to weaken and divide America by stirring the pot of racial division.
zthe goal of the Cultural Revolution was to eliminate what Mao called the “Four Olds.” The four olds were Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas—everything that pre-dated communism in China. Mao saw them as a threat to his communist rule, so he unleashed the Red Guards to eliminate them. The Four Olds had to be replaced with new customs, new culture, new habits and new ideas—communist customs, communist culture, communist habits and communist ideas.
The Red Guards didn’t start out by killing people and destroying property. They started out with intimidation to back up Mao’s cultural revolution to change place names, especially street names. People even changed their own names so as to break with any association with the Four Olds.
The movement escalated from there. Anyone who seemed to cling to any of the Four Olds was harassed and intimidated. Property damage was next. Examples of old Chinese architecture began to be targeted for destruction by Red Guard mobs. Chinese literature books were seized by the Red Guard and burned. Artwork was destroyed by gangs of thugs who would go into homes to search for anything considered Old. The Red Guards ransacked homes of those who were not considered reliable supporters of the communist party. Ancient, sacred Chinese temples were destroyed. Cemeteries were desecrated and corpses were even dug up and torn apart. Monuments were taken down.
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
I’m sure it does. And that’s not surprising.
Former FBI assistant director of intelligence Kevin R. Brock thinks antifa and #BlackLivesMatter are tools for both China and Russia to undermine the superpower status of the United States:
Here’s what years of intelligence collection by the FBI and other parts of the intelligence community have long determined: China and Russia know they cannot defeat the United States militarily or economically. Yet, the elimination of the U.S. as a superpower that impedes their communist vision remains their goal.
Both China, which has thieved its way to faux prosperity, and Russia, with its perpetual inferiority complex fueling its tiresome resentments, have pinned their hopes on dividing Americans, on pitting us against each other as a means of breaking a unified national will and rendering us dispirited, unable or unwilling to respond to their future hegemonies. And disinformation campaigns accentuating America’s faults historically have been a favored strategy, particularly by Russia.
Both of those countries are well aware that the most convenient way to divide Americans is along racial lines, since the United States is orders of magnitude more racially diverse than any nation on earth. Americans are hyper-sensitized to charges of racism because ours has been a long struggle to create a country where an unprecedented collision of races, creeds and cultures could coexist under an ideal of individual liberty. Given mankind’s history, it’s a miracle we’ve had any success at all.
And so, accusations of racism in our country are a damning cudgel, an effective wedge to both arouse suspicions and chill dissent. There is no greater shame today than to stand accused of committing the mortal sin of racism.
That is why we are seeing an expansion of the definition of racism and “hate speech” by a class of accusers who really don’t have racial justice as their primary goal. Charges of racism have become the most effective way to eliminate resistance and to censor or cancel voices opposed to a totalitarian worldview.
Accordingly, racism now ostensibly exists in the packaging of products, in tweets about the national anthem, and in how images of Jesus are depicted. The Smithsonian Institution recently asserted that evidence of racism is found in traditional values, such as delayed gratification and the nuclear family. If that’s true, then, yes, racism is surely systemic — it’s in the very air we breathe. But it is not true. It is a lie told by those who want us to believe that America is broken and needs to be replaced.
Who are these people who have wrested away legitimate racial justice narratives in order to advance their own agenda? They are the discredited remnants of failed economic Marxism who have pivoted to a vision of cultural Marxism that no less subjugates the rights and freedoms of individuals to control by the state. They have scurried from the wreckage of pure communist ideology into academia and various media, powerful platforms to indoctrinate minds and control narratives.
Their young proxies are the radical or anarchist interlopers such as antifa, surfing on the backs of actual racial justice protesters. These black-clad, masked marauders of the far left showed up to suck media attention from legitimate protesters by starting fires, destroying businesses and attacking police. Their demographics are readily noticeable: young, mostly white, many from privileged suburban families and fresh from college campuses that filled their minds with false tales of totalitarian nirvana. After exercising their destruction, they Uber back to their own safe neighborhoods, far from the ones they just helped destroy.
None of this is conclusive proof that China created antifa/#BlackLivesMatter, or that China is the only backer of it (George Soros’ financial backing is well-documented), or even the only foreign backer, but the fact that a hostile foreign Communist government is backing a hostile, violent Communist movement in America would seem to be important news.
Trump spoke to the family’s minister to see if he should meet with the family of Jacob Blake. His father, Jacob Blake Sr. insisted on having a lawyer present if Trump were to visit with the family. The President wasn’t interested in playing any of those games. Instead, he met with the people in Kenosha that were devastated by the rioting and damage, and law enforcement who calmed down the riot. His trip was not focused on politics but on getting the community what it needed.
Two days later, Biden visited Kenosha as well. But his was a trip to please his radical handlers. It was made only because the President’s trip was successful.
Unlike Trump, he met with Jacob’s anti-Semitic father. But that makes sense for Joe, after all, the Democratic Party’s far-left base is filled with anti-Semites. The media made a big deal about Jacob’s father speaking to Biden, but not talking to Trump. They ignored the fact that Blake Sr. is a Jew-hating Bigot.
Jacob’s father is a Farrakhan-supporting, raging bigot. And he’s Joe Biden’s new BFF. If he was a Trump supporter, his hate-mongering would be fodder for the news. But he’s part of the Democrats and their BLM offensive so there’s silence.
Nate Silver, the popular statistician and data geek who publishes his predictions for political outcomes throughout the country has released some new findings for the November Presidential Election and the news for Team Biden isn’t great. In fact, they are downright bad.
You'll sometimes see people say stuff like "Biden MUST with the popular vote by 3 points or he's toast". Not true; at 2-3 points, the Electoral College is a tossup, not necessarily a Trump win.
OTOH, the Electoral College is not really *safe* for Biden unless he wins by 5+.
In 2016, Clinton won the national popular vote by just over 2.8 million votes or 2.1%. Her enthusiasm rating was just 12 points behind Trump at this same time in the election (early September) in 2016. Polls found that of Trump’s base, 58% were enthusiastic about voting for the now-current-President versus just 46% of the same voters for the now-defeated Clinton. In other words, despite the majority of her voters being less-than-enthusiastic about showing up to vote for her, she still won the national popular vote by 2.1%.
This is where the bad news for Biden comes in. Currently, Biden’s enthusiasm score trails that of the President by 17 points. Of the President’s supporters, 65% are enthusiastic about voting for him, a seven-point increase from his 58% at the same time in the race in 2016. Biden, on the other hand, enjoys a 48% enthusiasm rate, up just 2% from his 2016 predecessor.
This simply means that Trump enjoys a much stronger support from his base than does Biden his. If history is any indicator, Trump will likely do better against Biden in 2020 than Clinton did in 2016, at a 2.1% margin of national vote victory. If we apply that to Nate Silver’s data, Biden would only have about a 22% chance of victory against Trump come election day.
Interviews with more than two dozen Democratic Party officials and strategists in the suburbs reflect confidence in Biden’s ability to compete with Trump on issues surrounding this summer’s civil unrest, but also widespread concerns about the political volatility — and potential allure — of the president’s law-and-order message.
In Pinal County, Ariz., where “Thin Blue Line” flags have proliferated outside Phoenix and Tucson, Holly Lyon, chair of the local Democratic Party, said, “There is that little sort of unsettled feeling in people because we can tell that [Trump’s messaging] is grabbing hold, and it’s working.”
Snip.
Two Democratic strategists who recently viewed focus groups of suburban voters described high-propensity voters increasingly concerned about unrest in urban centers, though both strategists said it was unclear whether that concern would push them to Biden or to Trump.
One of the strategists described a focus group in which white, college-educated women reacted to the protests by discussing their own property values and, in one woman’s case, her family’s mortgage.
“White women who have college degrees are starting to really get sick of this,” the strategist said.
Some state polls are showing signs of it. In Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, a Monmouth University poll released last week found that Biden’s lead over Trump had narrowed statewide, and that Trump was leading Biden by 2 percentage points in 10 swing counties, including some Philadelphia suburbs, erasing a large advantage Biden had built there earlier this year.
If civil unrest persists, said Robert Tatterson, secretary of the Democratic Party in Ozaukee County, outside Milwaukee, Trump “will be able to be the strong man, only-I-can-save-you leader, and that’s playing out just like I had feared.”
Note that the word “antifa” is completely missing from the article. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who notes “People always say Trump is ‘talking the wrong way.’ He was talking the wrong way in 2016, and then he won. Talking the wrong way is Trump’s super power.”)
President Trump’s approval hits 52%…and 45% among black Americans.
Why did Joe Biden leave his Delaware basement and fly all the way to Pittsburgh to give a speech Monday with no crowd — no supporters in attendance — and not even answer press questions? He could have given the same speech from Delaware, but he flew to Pittsburgh. Why? Paul Kengor’s article today in The American Spectator explains that support for Trump has surged in Pennsylvania over the last month, in large part because of Biden’s “highly ill-advised pick of Kamala Harris, who folk in this area see as a West Coast leftist whose ‘progressive’ bona fides include an unwavering opposition to fracking.”
Kengor explains that, in Pennsylvania, fracking means jobs — lots of good-paying blue-collar jobs — and by choosing Harris as his running mate, Biden is effectively threatening to kill those jobs.
The Real Clear Politics average in top battleground states confirms the momentum shift. During July, Biden’s lead was about 6 points, but since the conventions, Trump has cut that lead in half — and that’s just the public polls. Everybody knows there is a “shy Trump voter” factor, where people are afraid tell pollsters who they support, but are likely to choose Trump on Election Day. That factor may be as large as 5% and Biden’s slippage in Pennsylvania, where the latest Monmouth poll shows him with just a 3-point lead, obviously set the alarm bells ringing at Biden campaign HQ.
“Biden-Harris ClusterFrack – First They Were For Fracking Ban, Then Polls Shifted, Now They Are Against Ban.”
Memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now.
First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten. Biden has enjoyed a comfortable lead throughout both the primary polling against Trump, and post nomination. But there are concerning trends for Biden that mirror those of Hillary Clinton’s position in August 2016. In fact, Biden is doing worse in the polls than Hillary was at this time — but you wouldn’t know this based on media coverage of course.
Pollster Frank Luntz breaks it down. On August 25, 2016, Hillary held a +9.2 advantage over Trump in the RealClearPolitics average for Pennsylvania, a state she lost. Currently Joe Biden holds a +5.7 average lead. In Michigan, Hillary held a +9 advantage in polling, a state she also lost. Biden is at +6.7. In Wisconsin, the state Hillary lost and infamously did not visit once for the duration of the general election, Hillary held a lead of +11.5. Biden sits at +6.5. The only state of the crucial swing stats where Biden’s polling outperforms Hillary’s is Florida, where Biden holds a +4.8 average lead. Hillary’s lead was +2.9. She of course lost Florida as well, all but sealing the presidency for Trump and the unthinkable for the media. Biden still holds about an +8.5 lead nationally, but for a candidate who is perceived to have less professional baggage and considered more likable than Hillary, these numbers should be putting the Biden campaign on alert.
Biden also received no post-convention bump, as most candidates do when more voters start paying attention to the election. Biden was of course at a historical disadvantage with COVID-19 canceling out the possibility of a large-scale convention, but the trappings were all there: video presentations, major endorsements, candidate speeches. Yet still nothing.
Then consider the fact that Trump’s base support has not eroded. Trump’s popularity with voters, as measured by FiveThirtyEight, shows his support has more or less remained between 40-44 percent throughout his presidency. While he currently trails Biden in the crucial swing states, Trump enjoys a rock of support, even after three years of Russiagate, Robert Mueller, sustained negative media and entertainment coverage, sports team boycotts, impeachment and of course the pandemic. Roughly 40 percent of the country, we can assume, has simply tuned out the media.
Plus Biden’s wimpy response to the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting,
The weirdness of Slow Joe’s Speech. “The speech itself was a mind-numbing collection of platitudes, cliches, and lies. To that extent it was a conventional political speech. Listening to it, however, is painful. Biden has become a deeply contrived figure. Thus the artificiality of the staging.”
More on that subject:
From all appearances, Biden can't go off script or disobey aides or staff to keep talking or even respond to people going off the script. I've never seen anything like this.
A text from a friend watching the press conference: “Who are asking Biden these questions?? It's like watching someone make sure a 3 year old wins CandyLand.”
Ann Althouse watches a Biden-Harris chat so you don’t have to. Actually, that’s not true: she only makes it 20 seconds in, then switches to reading the transcript. Also dings Harris for lying about her imaginary hard-scrabble background. “Her mother was a medical researcher at prestigious institutions, and her father was an economics professor at Stanford. They didn’t have any financial struggles, did they?”
That always-fake Biden lead in Texas blows away like the fog it always was. “Trump is now leading Biden among likely voters, 48 to 46 percent, according to the poll from The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Poll has Trump up by ten points in Missouri. If so, Trump should be worried, since he clobbered Hillary by about 18 points in 2016.
See if you can count how many ways this New York Times piece on competing Biden and Trump ads talking about the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots tries to spin the issue for Biden.
“Secret Service Inadvertently Confirms Gateway Pundit Story About Biden Sexually Assaulting Agent’s Girlfriend.” The 2009 file on the incident was destroyed due to “retention standards.” More: “We had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.”
Slow Joe gonna Slow Joe:
The fact that this sad man is even considered a candidate for leader of the free world embarrasses me as an American. pic.twitter.com/2qqEYznEYM
[T]he Democrats have no intention of accepting defeat at the ballot box. If you think that they were sore losers in 2016, you ain’t seen anything yet.
And what they’re doing is effectively threatening violence if Biden does not win, and it’s just a variation on the theme that Biden talked to [in] Pittsburgh, during the week, when he said if you don’t vote for him, ‘ya ain’t safe.’
ox 9 News in Minneapolis did the research for us. Here are a few of the criminals they found Harris did a solid for.
Among those bailed out by the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) is a suspect who shot at police, a woman accused of killing a friend, and a twice convicted sex offender, according to court records reviewed by the FOX 9 Investigators.
According to attempted murder charges, Jaleel Stallings shot at members of a SWAT Team during the riots in May. Police recovered a modified pistol that looks like an AK-47. MFF paid $75,000 in cash to get Stallings out of jail.
Darnika Floyd is charged with second degree murder, for stabbing a friend to death. MFF paid $100,000 cash for her release.
Christopher Boswell, a twice convicted rapist, is currently charged with kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault in two separate cases. MFF paid $350,00 [sic] in cash for his release.
Kamala Harris and her friends in the corporate media, otherwise known as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, will pretend this never happened and they are counting on voters to be too ignorant to know that it did. Harris was so eager to be on the rioters’ team that she literally raised money for them in the hopes that they could be released and foster further mayhem.
You might have forgotten the first time you heard the name Kamala Harris. It was probably 16 years ago, when Harris found Democrats, along with decent people of all political persuasions, united against her.
At the time, the story of a murdered California policeman had become national news amid widespread indignation over Harris’s role in the case. Her actions revealed her true nature as a ruthless partisan committed über alles to the causes embraced by far-left ideologues — even when that commitment meant denying justice to a fallen officer and inflicting injustice on his family and law-enforcement colleagues.
On the night of April 10, 2004, San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza and his partner, Barry Parker, were patrolling the city’s Bayview District. Despite Bayview’s being a notoriously high-crime neighborhood filled with danger, a selfless sense of duty had led Officer Espinoza to request it as his assignment “because he felt he made the most impact as a cop there.”
As the officers drove the streets, they noticed a man in a long, dark coat who appeared to be acting in a suspicious manner, walking with only one of his arms swinging naturally, as if he were trying to conceal something. They decided they should pull over to stop and talk to him. Officer Espinoza exited the patrol car and followed the man on foot, calling out an order to halt and identifying himself as law enforcement. The man — later identified as David Hill — first sped up before eventually slowing and stopping. He turned around, lifted the AK-47 rifle he had been hiding, and opened fire, murdering Officer Espinoza, who had never even unholstered his service weapon.
Hill was a member of the West Mob, a criminal street gang that terrorized those who lived and worked within its geographic “territory” by committing rapes, homicides, assaults with firearms, narcotic sales, car thefts, burglaries, and robberies. As an expert testified at trial, “Retaliation against a [rival] gang member sends a message to other gang members, but the murder of a police officer sends a message to the community: ‘Hey, even your protectors can be touched.’”
That was Officer Espinoza: a protector of the community, a devoted husband to his wife, and a doting father to his three-year-old daughter, cut down in cold blood.
Just three days after Espinoza’s murder, before he had been laid to rest and without caring to call his widow, Harris, who was then the San Francisco district attorney, invited reporters and camera crews to a news conference to announce that she would not seek a death sentence in the case. Per the New York Times, she argued that doing so would “send the wrong message” and be “a poor use of money.” But California assemblyman Joseph Canciamilla, a fellow Democrat, explained it better: “This is clearly a case where local politics took precedence over the facts of the case and a deliberative review of the circumstances.”
“The United States welcomes the emergence of a prosperous, integrated China on the global stage, because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Jiang, recalled Frank Jannuzi, the Senate aide who organized the trip and took notes at Mr. Biden’s side.
Snip.
Two decades later, China has emerged as a great power — and, in the eyes of many Americans, a dangerous rival. Republicans and Democrats say it has exploited the global integration that Mr. Biden and many other officials supported.
The 2020 election has been partly defined by what much of Washington sees as a kind of new Cold War. And as Mr. Biden faces fierce campaign attacks from President Trump, his language on China points to a drastic shift in thinking.
Mr. Biden calls Xi Jinping, the authoritarian Chinese leader, a “thug.” He has threatened, if elected, to impose “swift economic sanctions” if China tries to silence American citizens and companies. “The United States does need to get tough on China,” he wrote this winter in an essay in Foreign Affairs. Mr. Biden now sees the country as a top strategic challenge, according to interviews with more than a dozen of his advisers and foreign policy associates, and his own words.
Completely missing from this article: any mention of Hunter Biden.
