What has this desiccated, old weirdo achieved in his six weeks of semiconsciousness in the Oval Office? Well, there’s putting tens of thousands of Americans out of jobs, including union guys who voted for him. There’s telling the American people that their kids can’t go to school because public school teachers take priority over children because of science or something. There’s another war in the Middle East. Those are kind of accomplishments, but not really good ones.
His administration had someone named “Ducklo” who was mean to women. He had another who wants to be a woman and who wants to let your little boys be surgically turned into women. And Neera Tanden’s confirmation was blocked because she was a woman and totally not because she was an inept loudmouth.
If this is normalcy, what’s a freak show look like?
Are you * voters starting to feel a bit of buyer’s remorse? Let me ask it another way. Everybody enjoying your $2,000 check? Oh well. On the upside, they impeached Trump…and failed. Again, after sucking up two weeks of the Senate’s calendar. So, what do you have to show for yourself, * voters?
The massive coronavirus relief bill racing through Congress provides substantial new health-insurance subsidies to upper-income households. A 60-year-old couple with two kids making $200,000 would receive a subsidy of $12,000. In some parts of the country where premiums are high, families with incomes exceeding half a million dollars will qualify for thousands of dollars in subsidies to buy an ObamaCare plan. In contrast, a family of four making $40,000 receives an added benefit of just $1,600.
It also includes 25 weeks of paid leave for bureaucrats with children in closed schools. Meanwhile, parents with closed schools held hostage to teacher’s union who aren’t bureaucrats can drop dead.
Newly minted as a committeeman, Madigan was sent to the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention as a delegate representing Daley’s interests. He voted for the most constricting “pension protection” clause in the nation, which guaranteed government-employee unions benefits the government couldn’t afford in exchange for their backing of the Democratic machine, tying the state to an anchor of massive debt in perpetuity. He also voted for changes in the property-tax system that would later make him a millionaire through his law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, which specialized in appealing the tax assessments of the most valuable real estate in the Midwest and skimming off the reductions granted by political allies who heard the firm’s appeals.
Later that year, Madigan was elected state representative for the 22nd House District of Illinois. He would go on to be reelected 25 times, eventually being elevated to House speaker after he was made gerrymanderer-in-chief following the 1980 Census. The redistricting process had been expected to hurt Democrats badly, but Madigan’s cartographical cunning staved off a political bloodbath and earned him the title of “political wizard” from the Chicago Tribune. Many representatives now owed their seats to his pen, and they elected him speaker in 1983.
For all but two of the next 38 years, he would hold the speaker’s gavel, wielding parliamentary rules that gave him more power than any other legislative leader in the country. His one-man rule was finally merged with the party power structure in 1998, when he became chairman of the Democratic Party of Illinois. This made him a one-stop shop for special interests looking to pass or kill legislation. Commonwealth Edison, the state’s largest utility provider, last year was forced to pay a $200 million fine for attempting to bribe Madigan by providing no-work contracts and other perks to the speaker’s inner circle. Though he denied wrongdoing, the scandal ultimately hastened his downfall.
The wreckage of Madigan’s decades-long reign is obvious. When he became speaker in 1983, Illinois had a perfect credit rating. Since 2013, it’s had the worst credit rating in the nation, just one notch above junk. The reason is that while Daley built his political army with federal money, Madigan built his with state money, specifically state debt. Political foot soldiers owed generous pensions, early retirements, and other perks to the speaker’s protection. His fingerprints are on nearly every bill that enhanced state pension benefits, borrowed money to cover their costs, or shorted contributions to the systems to avoid difficult choices over the course of his 50 years in power.
The result of all those unsustainable promises is the most severe public-pension crisis in U.S. history, one with far-reaching implications for Illinois government. Since 2000, the state has cut spending on child welfare and other programs that help those in need by one-third after adjusting for inflation. Over the same time, spending on pensions and pension debt has increased 501 percent. The same story plays out at the local level, as Illinoisans are saddled with property-tax bills on par with their mortgages — bills that sap home equity out of once-prosperous Black communities, particularly — in exchange for sub-par services that get worse each year.
If you haven’t read New York magazine’s interview with David Schor, an Obama campaign veteran and liberal data analyst, it’s worth your time.
His post-mortem of the 2020 election shows how Democrats have increasingly become a party of college-educated whites, whose hard-left views aren’t fully shared by the black and Hispanic communities they claim to champion. His findings echo the concerns of older progressive analysts such as John Judis.
Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, Schor finds, Democrats gained 7 percent among white college grads, but lost 2 percent of African Americans and 8 to 9 percent of Latinos, as well as about 5 percent of Asian Americans.
Socialism and “defund the police” were the chief reasons, Schor says: “We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.”
Even on immigration, “If you look at, for example, decriminalizing border crossings, that’s not something that a majority of Hispanic voters support,” Schor says.
Speaking of Biden nominations in trouble, Xavier “I Hate Nuns” Becerra’s nomination is no slam dunk either.
When I saw a headline on a deadly crash involving an SUV carrying 25 people, I went “Obviously it must have been full of illegal aliens.” Well, guess what?
In a just world not plagued by a fake and corrupt media, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) would be on the edge of resigning his office today, not over a handful of times he allegedly got aggressive with women, but over his sociopathic executive order that required nursing homes to accept patients still infected with the coronavirus.
That, after all, is the real scandal here, the true scandal, an act so monstrous Cuomo knew he had to cover it up, which he did by falsely blaming the order on the Trump administration and then lying about just how many seniors died as a result.
But instead of being pressured to resign over that, he’s being hit with perfectly-timed allegations of sexual misconduct, two involving former staffers, one involving a complete stranger he met at a wedding.
As these things go, while his alleged behavior is inappropriate (especially in the workplace), it’s nothing compared to the credible allegations against His Fraudulency Joe Biden, which involve a full-blown sexual assault allegation. Biden got away with much, much worse, so…
So what’s going on? Why is America’s corrupt media not at all interested in some 15,000 dead senior citizens while they tar and feather Cuomo over the allegations he made three left-wing women uncomfortable?
The answer is obvious…
Four other Democrat governors issued the same sociopathic nursing home order as Cuomo. Four other Democrats ordered infected coronavirus patients be admitted into nursing home facilities where 1) the most vulnerable live, and 2) they’re not set up to handle an infectious virus.
What this means is that if the corrupt media were to do the right thing (like that will ever happen) and go after Cuomo over his deadly nursing home policy, it would open a Pandora’s Box against these four Democrat governors and the Democrat party as a whole, which is something our fake media will never do.
Democrats must be protected at all costs, even if the cost is thousands and thousands of lives.
So welcoming was the Kennedy clan that the exes of either sex stayed on as friends. Andrew put a stop to that. For Kerry, that meant no more former boyfriends, not even those whom the Kennedys regarded as family. That was the word, and Andrew was dead serious about it. The new rule reinforced the doubts the family had had about Andrew from the start: he wasn’t fun; he didn’t get fun. He was, to put it mildly, a spoilsport. Unlike the Kennedys, too, he didn’t mask his ambition with charm, and no one, not even his in-laws, would stand in his way. And, as Andrew’s star at HUD rose, he seemed increasingly to regard those in-laws with disdain.
He hated the gatherings in Hyannis; he always felt like the odd man out. The joshing around, the freewheeling talks—Andrew was just too tightly wound to join in. One night, as was typical, the family began singing songs, each member singing a favorite. “The Kennedys are terrible singers, but it’s one of the great joys,” explained Douglas Kennedy. “One time Joe [Jr.] is up there, and he sings ‘Danny Boy,’ and everyone is happy about it. Except Andrew. He’s on the couch with his arms folded, looking disgusted by the whole thing. Everyone is calling for someone else to sing a song. ‘Andrew, you sing,’ someone says. But he says, ‘No, I’m not Irish.’ So someone else says, ‘Sing something Italian.’ Andrew still won’t, so I sing ‘Volare.’”
Andrew stopped going to Hyannis at one point, a family member recalled. But he made sure to be with the clan at any gathering covered by the media. Early on, the family noticed that at every visit to Arlington Cemetery to honor their father or uncle, Andrew situated himself just so. “He would always find the exact perfect place to stand so he could be in the newspaper the next day,” recalled a relative. “So if that meant grabbing [Ethel’s] hand and walking to the grave, or standing next to John or Caroline, he would get himself in the frame. That was his whole thrust.”
[Kenneth Pollack’s Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness] identifies key aspects of Arab culture relevant to the book: conformity, centralization of authority, deference to authority and passivity, group loyalty, manipulation of information, atomization of knowledge, personal courage, and ambivalence toward manual labor and technical work. One can see how these values and behaviors will negatively affect military performance, especially the most glaring problem for Arab armed forces: poor tactical leadership from junior officers. Consistently, these officers fail to show any initiative or creativity—they rarely if ever adapt quickly to changing circumstances in battle. This makes perfect sense, though, if one considers these soldiers were trained to conform and defer to authority. This stands in stark contrast to the Israeli military, whose soldiers were raised in the “Start-up Nation,” which encourages innovation from all ranks.
The education system in Arab societies drilled in these values to the point that they became central to soldiers’ behavior. “Typical Arab educational practices relentlessly inculcated the values, preferences, and preferred behavior—the culture—of the wider society,” Pollack writes.
Pollack also explains that Arab military programs are modeled on the educational methods of the larger society, reinforcing certain patterns of behavior and conditioning soldiers to act and think in “ways that reflect the values and priorities of the dominant culture.”
I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race.
Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.
Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.
Sad news: Austin-based movie theater chain The Alamo Drafthouse has filed for Chapter 11. That’s reorganization, so most theaters will stay open. A good thing, too, since I’ll probably see Godzilla vs. Kong there…
Papa Johns founder John Schnatter vindicated. Laundry Service “the branding company hired which was hired by Papa John’s to improve its image, was caught on a ‘hot mic’ brainstorming ways in which it could use comments made by Schnatter to damage his image.”
It’s also possible every guy they showed this too to get feedback was terrified he’d get fired for sexual harassment if he mentioned it looked like a money shot in a porn video.
"I have always put my own money into #tailsofjoy. For years, every time a dog walked by, my husband would say, 'There goes our beach house'."-@ElayneBoosler
There’s nothing more tiresome than hackneyed references to The Matrix, except for the constant propaganda we’re hosed down with by the Establishment and its media lackeys about how everything is groovy in our totally free, free enterprise paradise of freedom and happiness and more freedom. Some of us have been woke for a while, having realized the undeniable truth that the system is rigged for the benefit of a garbage ruling class, whose sole accomplishment is to perpetuate a paradigm in which they maintain power and prestige by controlling institutions they didn’t create or build. Instead, they are cultural trust fund babies, the equivalent of third generation Kennedy brats with substance issues who got into power by getting into the right schools and modeling the right SJW attitudes. These oligarch overseers rely on us to toil in their figurative fields while they sit on their figurative porches, sipping locally-sourced figurative mint juleps.
I say burn it all down and rebuild America into what it is supposed to be, that is, what they tell us it is when they lie to us.
I’m not alone. We’re primed for some conservative anarchy. The normals’ resistance cannot be quelled; the revolution will be Telegrammed. Everyone’s gobbling up red pills, the one medication our incompetent Establishment is fully capable of distributing efficiently and effectively. You drop one and you see the Matrix. You see the lie. You see that it’s all rigged.
Snip.
I mentioned GameStop and these ladies not only knew what it was, but they cheered the armchair day trader anarchists. And they booed the hedge funders.
Rich Orange County Republicans booed the hedge funders.
And they booed Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, with one exception, Nikki! Haley too. The ones who had heard of the Bulwark booed it as well, so there were like three of those.
Populists in pearls, fully red pilled and woke as hell. They saw how the Establishment has been lying to them. They realized that they were never really members of the ruling caste despite their sweet rides and bank accounts. They were allowed its material trappings, but they were excluded from the real power, the power to govern themselves.
They have more in common with the Keystone pipeline worker John Kerry wants to go make solar panels – which seems unrealistic, since his Chi Com collaborators make them all – than with the rich and truly powerful elite.
People are getting woke – the red pill is socio-political anti-Ambien because it keeps you from falling back asleep and not seeing that everything is rigged.
They see how the ruling caste allows you this little band of autonomy, and how you are allowed some leeway to improve your material life, but the instant you try to assert power that threatens the status quo, the Matrix kicks in and its immune system reacts to snuff you out.
That was the revelation of the GameStop Revolution. You’re allowed to put your money into Wall Street and they might let you take some pennies out, but if you try to go big and play at the same level as the anointed, oh no. You don’t get to. The system shuts you down – literally. You can’t buy the hot stock. Does that apply to the hedge fund guys? You think they can’t play after you’ve been sidelined? Come on. It’s blatant market manipulation, but Wall Street owns the Asterisk Administration – Treasury Secretary & Lord High Protector of the Masters of the Universe Janet Yellin took nearly a million bucks to “speak” to the lever-pullers behind the RobinHood app – and the Administration owns the SEC, and do you think it will investigate the hedge funders who changed the rules? No, but look for FBI SWAT teams to be hitting the basements where the Reddit rebels live. That is, right after they bust more conservative meme guys for illegal memes.
Now, in perhaps the most chilling move yet from the new administration, the newly minted Defense Secretary [Lloyd Austin] plans to direct a military-wide stand down, reportedly to address “extremism” within the ranks.
Austin wants all military units to take an operational pause to discuss extremism as he works to grasp the full scope of the issue and better address the longstanding problem, John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, told reporters Wednesday. The pauses are expected to occur within the next 60 days, but Austin has yet to determine how the stand downs are to be completed, Kirby said.
“The intent is to reinforce the [Pentagon’s] policies and values with respect to this sort of behavior and to have a dialogue with the men and women of the force and to get their views on what they are seeing at their level,” Kirby said. “He wants commands to take the necessary time to … speak with troops about the scope of this problem. It’s a two-way conversation.”
Austin spoke frankly with the acting service secretaries and uniformed service chiefs about his concerns about extremism in the military, including white supremacism, said Kirby, who attended the meeting. The new defense secretary, who is the first Black leader of the Defense Department, wants the service leaders to better grasp how pervasive the issue is within their formations and work with leaders to stamp it out, Kirby said.
We have gone in a few short months from President Donald Trump preventing “critical race theory” dogma from being imposed on federal employees to the possibility that the armed services will have to apologize for their privilege.
it seems that Biden is intent on provoking just such a pushback by his record number of early and often radical executive orders — a tactic candidate Biden condemned.
On almost every issue — open borders, blanket amnesties, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the Green New Deal, and hard-left appointees — Biden is touting positions that likely do not earn 50 percent public support.
When Biden made a Faustian bargain with his party’s hard-left wing of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to win the election, he took on the commitment to absorb some of their agenda and to appoint their ideologues.
But he also soon became either unwilling or unable to stand up to them.
Now they — and the country — are in a revolutionary frenzy. The San Francisco Board of Education has voted to rename more than 40 schools honoring the nation’s best — Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln — largely on racist grounds that they are dead, mostly white males.
Statues continue to fall. Names change.
The iconic dates, origins and nature of America itself continue to be attacked to meet leftist demands. And still, it is not enough for the new McCarthyites.
Social media are banning tens of thousands. Silicon Valley and Wall Street monopolies go after smaller upstart opponents.
A wrong word destroys a lifelong career. Formerly sane pundits now call for curtailing the First Amendment. Thousands of federal troops blanket a now-militarized Washington, D.C.
If Trump’s pushback tried to return to traditions ignored during the Obama years, Biden’s reset promises to become far more radical than Obama’s entire eight years.
Biden has not been above water a single time in the Approval Index rating. This index is the difference between how many likely voters strongly approve and how many strongly disapprove. Total approval has hit 50% once so far…
This result is astonishing when you think about it. President Biden has the full weight of nearly every corporate media outlet, tech company, and cultural institution behind him. They have been drooling all over themselves to convince us this is a return to unifying normalcy. After all, his favorite ice cream is chocolate chip, and his two German Shepherds just love their new digs. So normal. So unifying.
While other Republican legislators complain and pontificate about Twitter, Facebook and Google’s interference in our elections and censoring of conservative voices, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared war on the tech giants.
DeSantis is proposing legislation that asks the Florida state legislature to impose stiff fines – up to $100,000 per day – on tech companies that “deplatform” political candidates running for office in his state. Candidates like, for instance, Donald Trump.
Calling the tech giants “enforcers of preferred narratives” whose interests are “not in the public interest,” DeSantis, a Republican, wants to “ensure the protection of the people and their rights.” His proposed bill would allow individuals and the Florida attorney general to sue firms that violate newly established safeguards against privacy violations and censorship.
DeSantis also suggested that other activities, such as colluding to ban people or companies from payment platforms or from cloud services, could also be outlawed.
Presuming that the popular governor can get his measure passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature, it could become a template for the other 23 GOP-led states. It could, in effect, be the beginning of a revolt against the unacceptable dominance and manipulation of our nation’s discourse by Big Tech.
Here’s my game plan for how Trump can make Trump and America great again.
First, Trump must become the kingmaker of the GOP. The Trump Army is 74 million strong. The Republican Party belongs to Trump. He should remake the party in his image.
In some ways, his defeat was empowering. As president, Trump couldn’t get rid of RINOS and never-Trumpers, because he needed their votes. But from the outside, he can remake the party, elect allies and end the careers of the GOP traitors who stabbed him in the back. Are you listening, Rep. Liz Cheney?
Trump should recruit, endorse and campaign for Trump Republicans in each GOP primary where they’re running against RINOS, never-Trumpers and backstabbers. Seventy-four million Trump voters will vote for his chosen candidates in GOP primaries. By 2022, the GOP will be 100% remade in Trump’s image.
Secondly, Trump should spend the next four years fixing voter fraud at the state level. Trump should recruit his billionaire buddies to put up hundreds of millions to attack this problem. Trump’s goal should be to reform election law in just the handful of states that cost him the election: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona.
If Trump spends his time, money and focus on reforming election laws in those six states, the GOP will be back in business in 2022 and 2024.
Thirdly, Trump needs to raise billions from his billionaire backers to build TMN: Trump Media Network. That should include a national cable TV network; a national talk radio network; a new version of Drudge Report (called Trump Report); and conservative versions of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Conservatives will never again have to depend on the mainstream media or Silicon Valley to broadcast their news and opinions.
Only Trump has the money, brand and fundraising ability to change the media and social media landscape like this. And think of the amazing bonus: Not only will 74 million Trump voters have permanent places to communicate but if we all move away from mainstream media and social media, they will collapse. Trump will cripple his enemies and put many of them out of business.
However, I’m not a fan of Root and others idea of Trump running for the House.
Bryan Proffitt, “the Vice President of North Carolina’s largest teachers’ association is a self-avowed Marxist activist linked to Liberation Road – a ‘revolutionary socialist‘ group that follows the teachings of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong.” Sounds like a good reason to put your children in a private school. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Biden Administration hates private space ventures and pulled permission from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to fly. Punishment for Musk supporting the GameStop squeeze? Either way, it’s blow to American space capabilities and a boon for Chinese domination of space. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“Joe Biden put me out of business by suspending new oil and gas leases and drilling permits. I am a petroleum geologist and generate drilling prospects in the Rocky Mountains on federal lands. I worked six years to get a prospect ready to drill and Biden just illegally broke the terms of the lease, killing the deal.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
International law enforcement agencies said on Wednesday they had dismantled a criminal hacking scheme used to steal billions of dollars from businesses and private citizens worldwide.
Police in six European countries, as well as Canada and the United States, completed a joint operation to take control of Internet servers used to run and control a malware network known as “Emotet,” authorities said in a statement.
“Emotet is currently seen as the most dangerous malware globally,” Germany’s BKA federal police agency said in a statement. “The smashing of the Emotet infrastructure is a significant blow against international organised Internet crime.”
In the “stop panicking” category: “Statehouse wins position GOP to dominate redistricting“:
An abysmal showing by Democrats in state legislative races on Tuesday not only denied them victories in Sun Belt and Rust Belt states that would have positioned them to advance their policy agenda — it also put the party at a disadvantage ahead of the redistricting that will determine the balance of power for the next decade.
The results could domino through politics in America, helping the GOP draw favorable congressional and state legislative maps by ensuring Democrats remain the minority party in key state legislatures. Ultimately, it could mean more Republicans in Washington — and in state capitals.
By Wednesday night, Democrats had not flipped a single statehouse chamber in its favor. And it remained completely blocked from the map-making process in several key states — including Texas, North Carolina and Florida, which could have a combined 82 congressional seats by 2022 — where the GOP retained control of the state legislatures.
After months of record-breaking fundraising by their candidates and a constellation of outside groups, Democrats fell far short of their goals and failed to build upon their 2018 successes to capture state chambers they had been targeting for years. And they may have President Donald Trump to blame.
“It’s clear that Trump isn’t an anchor for the Republican legislative candidates. He’s a buoy,” said Christina Polizzi, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, on Wednesday. “He overperformed media expectations, Democratic and Republican expectations, and lifted legislative candidates with him.”
Snip.
The biggest disappointment came in the seat-rich state of Texas, Democrats needed nine seats to reclaim the majority after flipping a dozen in the midterms. Though some races remain uncalled, so far Democrats were able to unseat one incumbent and Republicans offset that with another pickup.
Now Texas Republicans, retaining control of the Senate and the governor’s mansion, will have total authority over the drawing of as many as 39 congressional districts in the state. Democrats fear Republicans will pack and crack the rapidly diversifying suburbs to dilute unfriendly voters. Despite targeting 10 districts, Democrats failed to flip a single targeted seat in 2020 on the current map, which was drawn by the GOP roughly a decade ago.
There are plenty of things to worry about with Democrats control (by the skin of their teeth) the White House, the Senate and the House, but federalism provides strong state power as a counterbalance to the federal government.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and researcher who has received almost $20 million from the Department of Energy was arrested Thursday after he allegedly failed to disclose ties to the People’s Republic of China.
Mechanical engineering professor Gang Chen faces charges of wire fraud, failing to file a foreign bank account report, and making a false statement in a tax return, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston revealed Thursday.
Prosecutors allege the 56-year-old professor, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, has held a number of positions on behalf of the PRC with the goal of promoting China’s technological and scientific capabilities.
They claim he shared his expertise directly with Chinese government officials “often in exchange for financial compensation,” including serving as an “overseas expert” at the request of the Chinese consulate in New York and a member of at least two PRC Talent Programs.
The Department of Energy has given Chen $19 million for research since 2013.
The president didn’t mention violence on Wednesday, much less provoke or incite it. He said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
District law defines a riot as “a public disturbance . . . which by tumultuous and violent conduct or the threat thereof creates grave danger of damage or injury to property or persons.” When Mr. Trump spoke, there was no “public disturbance,” only a rally. The “disturbance” came later at the Capitol by a small minority who entered the perimeter and broke the law. They should be prosecuted.
Actually, I think it’s been firmly established that the entry into the capitol occurred even before Trump stopped speaking.
Also not so much in the news: Israel launched its biggest airstrike in years against Iranian positions in Syria.
A senior U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the attack told The Associated Press that the airstrikes were carried out with intelligence provided by the United States and targeted a series of warehouses in Syria that were being used as a part of the pipeline to store and stage Iranian weapons.
The official said the warehouses also served as a pipeline for components that supports Iran’s nuclear program.
Maybe the Islamic Republic of Iran expects that they can just ask the Biden Administration for highly enriched uranium directly…
Total crude oil imported from Saudi Arabia last week: Zero.
Two companies, Google and Apple, each control about half of the smartphone market. So when the two companies made a move against Parler, the conservative social media alternative, it effectively erased its app from existence. Joining the party was a third member of the FAANG Big Tech consortium, Amazon, which deplatformed Parler from Amazon Web Services.
AWS controls a third of the cloud marketplace. Microsoft and Google are in 2nd and 3rd place.
Blocking an app doesn’t permanently kill a social networking service, though it places it at a structural disadvantage, but Apple and Google can flag sites as unsafe through their browsers.
Originally, the social media giant and former favorite platform of President Trump claimed that it was simply a matter of accounts not verifying their information. Twitter claimed that until those accounts did so, they would simply not show upon follower accounts.
Well, the tune has been changed. As most suspected from the beginning, there is actually a widespread deletion of conservative accounts goings on under the guise of them being QAnon related. This has supposedly hit over 70,000 accounts so far.
Let me explain how this works. Basically any small amount that propagated the idea that the election was stolen is going to be lumped in as QAnon and targeted.
I don’t believe in QAnon conspiracies. I do believe the election was stolen.
“The world’s biggest gun forum was booted off the Internet because they can be.” In other news, Go-Daddy sucks. I hope AR15.com files a very expensive lawsuit against them.
Looks like Twitter didn’t quite erase Trump’s tweet history:
Gab CEO Pulls Off The Impossible For Trump… INCREDIBLE!
“Gab CEO completely backed up Pres. Trump’s Twitter account before it was deleted & recreated him on Gab! What’s even more impressive is he did this while traffic was up 700% & under attack..https://t.co/F3olVzPpYy
— Liberty Times & Politics #FreeSpeech (@dmills3710) January 13, 2021
There is a large segment of American society, maybe 15-20%, that has not had a president who represents their basic worldview for decades. These folks tend to be white, exurban or rural, believe in religious tradition and cultural conservatism without being regular church-goers, very patriotic, very pro-military, hostile to immigration and free trade, skeptical of big business, big government, and establishment experts, and in favor of entitlement programs and the safety net…
Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan appealed to this demographic to a large extent. Beyond that, the only major national figure I can think of in my lifetime who more or less represented them was George Wallace.
So along comes Trump who appeals to this constituency almost perfectly. Sure, he’s a rich New Yorker, but his outer-borough accent and mentality, scorned by the elite, reminds people that their own regional accents are also scorned by the elite.
This constituency used to be divided between Republicans and Democrats, which is one reason they lacked influence on presidential nominees, but they have shifted to be heavily Republican, which gave them a lot of influence on the nominating process in 2020 [I think he means 2016 here. -LP], and they chose Trump.
Trump, to almost everyone’s surprise, wins. So how do big government, big business, elite experts and so on, i.e., the establishment, react, from his fans’ perspective? Without even giving Trump a chance, they decree that he is illegitimate, that he needs to be resisted, and that his voters are beyond redemption; “this is 1932 in Germany” was not a rare reaction.
So, from these voters’ perspective, the one time in their lifetimes and much longer a president comes around who really speaks to their worldview, the establishment tries to destroy him. Rather than the anti-Trump sentiment persuading them, it makes them stronger supporters, people who see Trump as their weapon against an establishment that disparages them.
Intel ousts CEO Bob Swan and replaces him with Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger. Intel has stumbled so badly over the last few years that replacing Swan (who has a finance background) is probably overdue. Gelsinger spent 30 years at Intel, some as CTO, so maybe he has a good chance of ironing out their process problems.
Speaking of semiconductors, there’s a global chip shortage going on, with auto makers among the hardest hit. And it’s not from TSMC’s cutting-edge fabs, it’s from older, larger geometry fabs. And dependence on Chinese chips plays a role as well.
Democrats ❤ Communism:
Someone must have pinged @HaroldFordJr during his appearance on @SpecialReport just now and told him that his Mao was showing.
Portland police are taking longer than ever to respond to 911 calls? Just because the ruling democrats hate them and won’t back them up, refuse to charge habitual lawbreakings, and engendered a wave of retirements? Imagine that. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
Burning in Hell watch: Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a pregnant mom to death and cut out her unborn baby to parade around as her own, was executed.
A short video about how Social Justice Warriors manipulate language to box in political opponents:
The people who claim that everything is sexist, that everything is racist. The people who claim that we all need to check our privilege. Those people are using a side of academic jargon. They’re using linguistics sleights of hand and emotional tricks and verbal misdirection to stack the deck and to tilt the argumentative playing field in their favor.
They’ll show up and they’ll say, we need to talk about social justice. We just want to have a conversation. We just want to talk. There’s nothing going on here. It’s just a conversation. That’s all we want. We just want to talk and have a conversation. And then they’ll proceed to say that they have good hearts and they’re going to use their voice to take up space in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, that the personal is the political, and that we have to do the work if we want to be on the right side of history.
And when you give your reply, they’re going to say, well, we need to call a spade a spade. You need to check your privilege and stay in your lane. You need to shut up and listen until you can educate yourself about your problematic ideas because you’re on the wrong side of history.
If they get angry during this conversation, they’ll claim the anger is the language of the unheard, and that their anger is fueled by love. If you get angry during this conversation, they will claim that you have white fragility and that you are crying male tears. And if you ask them to explain themselves, they will say, oh, don’t demand my emotional labor. But if you offer to explain yourself, they will say, quit mansplaining.
They rig the conversation by redefining the terms. And then they use sleight of hand to deal unfair attacks from the bottom of the deck. And all of this is done in the service of controlling the conversation
Election Day definitively confirmed the existence of hidden Trump voters. Undetected by polls and long denied by the establishment media, Trump’s surprising surge had to come from somewhere. Either these supporters were hiding from pollsters or pollsters were hiding them. Regardless, their existence raises disturbing questions about the role played by the establishment media and pollsters in influencing this election.
Election Day provided the startling revelation that a contest that supposedly had been over for months, actually would not be decided for days, and perhaps longer. In reality, the “blowout” proved a nail-biter. More unsettling is the fact that the race probably had been this close all along and that the false impression likely influenced the outcome.
As recently as October 12 the RealClearPolitics average of national polling had Biden at 52.3 percent and Trump at 41.7 percent. The average on Election Day was 51.2 percent to 44 percent. As of November 18, the actual popular vote figures are Biden at 51 percent and Trump at 47.2 percent.
From his October 12 level, Trump’s support increased over 13 percent. How could an error of such magnitude occur? Clearly a lot of hidden Trump voters came from somewhere. The question is whether they were hiding or were hidden.
Whether this was a sin of omission or one of commission has enormous implications for America’s elections. After years’ worth of concern about whether there had been Russian interference in our elections, it bears considering whether America has just fallen victim to internal tampering to a far greater degree.
The establishment media’s preferred answer to how the polls failed to detect millions of Trump voters is that the error was stupid, not sinister. “Whoops, we just missed them” — despite this being pollsters’ business, their assurance that they had “fixed” their polls’ problems from 2016, and the mistake being of incredible size. As results show, 2020’s error is greater than 2016’s.
The establishment media has readily blamed the pollsters, essentially exonerating itself by saying that it was just reporting what it was told. Yet neglected is the fact that the polls’ results were confirming the establishment media’s own bias. This bias has been repeatedly cited for decades and has never been clearer than over the last four years. As testament to the miraculous coincidence of pro-Biden polls and establishment media’s pro-Biden bias, consider the reverse: Would the establishment media have so readily regurgitated polling data showing the race as close as it turned out to be?
We say goodbye, then, to journalists elevating as worthy of public notice obvious liars and lunatics, including convicted felon Michael Avenatti, gossip columnist Michael Wolff, mental health quack Bandy Lee, and conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch — all because they oppose the administration.
Goodbye to weekly “bombshells” that land with a “splat!” instead of a “boom!”
Goodbye to near-daily input from presidential historians turned political assassins.
Goodbye to members of the press acting as if the cover artwork of the latest edition of a prestige news magazine is in some way provocative, stunning, or even particularly interesting.
Goodbye to White House correspondents pretending as if they are reporting from an active war zone or claiming they feel safer covering authoritarian regimes.
Goodbye to the Holocaust being invoked against the administration on a near-daily basis.
Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the Texas Rangers and other officials to help the City of Dallas respond to a spike in murders and other violent crimes that has gripped the city.
Abbott directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to send help to the Dallas Police Department (DPD) which will include special agents, state troopers, two helicopters, and two patrol planes.
“The rise in violent crime in the City of Dallas is unacceptable, and the Texas Department of Public Safety will assist the Dallas Police Department in their efforts to protect the community and reduce this surge in crime.”
Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell fined $1,000 for violating his own stay at home order to visit his grandson’s birthday party. Not quite a lobbyist-funded trip to The French Laundry, but still not a good look…
Austin leftwing journalists go after (checks notes) moms and sex trafficking victims for daring to oppose police budget cuts. Next up: The cishetronormative oppression of apple pie.
What real hope and change looks like in the Middle East:
This amazing map shows the transformation @realDonaldTrump fomented in the Mideast with his reality-based foreign policy. If the swamp creatures really return it will be a tragedy. But reality is stronger than their fantasies, which is why their ME policies have always failed. https://t.co/vxJDZlP9NG
The third and final presidential debate is in the books, Trump breaks 50% approval, and the hard left plans another riot and arson spree if they lose. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
That appeared to be one lesson from a Zoom focus group conducted after the debate by messaging expert Frank Luntz. Speaking to 15 undecided voters — and yes, they appeared to be really undecided — Luntz asked for a one- or two-word description of the candidates’ debate demeanor. For Biden, the words were mostly bad: among them were “vague,” “very vague,” “non-specific,” “cognitively impaired,” “old,” “uncomfortable,” “elusive,” “grandfatherly,” and “defensive.”
For Trump, they were mostly much better: among them were “controlled,” “composed,” “constrained,” “reserved,” “poised,” “con artist,” “surprisingly presidential,” “calmer,” and “restrained.”
There will be more coverage of the debate, of Biden’s promise to end the oil industry and, indeed, more about Mr. Luntz, in Monday’s BidenWatch.
President Trump just hit the “Holy Grail” of breaking the 50% approval rating, hitting 52% approval in Rasmussen polling. All the usual poll caveats apply.
The left is currently planning on how to peacefully protest if President Donald Trump wins. Ha, just kidding! They’re going to burn everything down:
An activist group is planning large-scale and widespread ‘disruptive activity’ starting on the night of the election, in an attempt to stop what it predicts will be an “attempted coup” by President Trump in the form of a refusal to accept the election results.
“Shut Down D.C.” is setting the stage for mass gatherings in D.C., noting that the “resistance” must begin during the “muddied” legal and political debate over the election outcome.
“We need to show that we’re ungovernable under a continued Trump administration…That can mean blocking traffic at major intersections and bridges, shutting down government office buildings (why should ICE or the FBI be able to keep doing Trump’s bidding when he’s leading with a coup?!?), or blockading the White House.”
The document bases its action plan upon the scenarios projected by the establishment leftist “Transition Integrity Project” for election night and sketches these activists’ response to each, explicitly rejecting the possibility that Trump could legitimately win. It continues:
We’ll keep it going until Trump concedes. We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winter– maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable.
As it becomes clear that Trump’s coup is failing, institutions and the elites will start to abandon him – or we will approach them as part of the problem. Either Amazon will shut down AWS for the Trump loyalists in the government or we’ll shut down their fulfillment centers. Either governors will tell their national guards to stand down or we’ll shut down their state capitals as well. Over time, Trump will grow increasingly isolated and his empire will crumble down around him.
The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power.
Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.
The Left seeks to transform America into something never envisioned by the founders, a huge all-encompassing, panopticon state, one run by anointed Platonic guardians. Our elite watchmen will use their unlimited power to force upon us an equality of result society—with themselves properly exempted.
The hard Left’s defense is that its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.
Large swaths of the downtowns of America’s large cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland—are becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable. Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless. Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism. The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse.
Back in 2018, I wrote about the phenomenon of Great Southern Democratic Hopes — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-learning state who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.
Prime past specimens of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes include Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Michelle Nunn and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But 2018 brought the modern king of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes, Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.
You notice none of those candidates actually won, although O’Rourke deserves some credit for performing better than any other Democrat in decades. Still, next spring, Ted Cruz will be in the third year of his second term, and O’Rourke, having completed a presidential bid that also didn’t live up to the initial hype, will be teaching at Texas State University.
This cycle: Amy McGrath.
after McGrath won the primary, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin declared, “Democrats serious about winning chose Amy McGrath.” The Frankfort State Journal concluded, “McGrath has the name recognition and financial backing to give McConnell, well, a run for his money.” Fueled by Democrats across the country who are itching to see McConnell defeated, McGrath’s fundraising has been off the charts — $37 million in the last quarter, more than $82 million overall.
And yet it is mid October, and McConnell does not appear to be running for his money. The newest Mason-Dixon poll puts the Republican ahead, 51 percent to 42 percent. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives McConnell a 96 percent chance of winning. In a year when Democrats are finding themselves in surprisingly strong shape from Maine to Colorado and from Montana to Arizona, McGrath is an afterthought and on pace to turn out like the last Democrat who took on McConnell. In 2013, Politico wrote of Grimes, “The fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.” Mitch McConnell won reelection in 2014, 56 percent to 40 percent, in what was not the fight of his political life.
China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?
There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’”
The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.
When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”
Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.
To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”
Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”
It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”
In a joint press release issued early this morning, SK Hynix and Intel have announced that Intel will be selling the entirety of its NAND memory business to SK Hynix. The deal, which values Intel’s NAND holdings at $9 billion, will see the company transfer over the NAND business in two parts, with SK Hynix eventually acquiring all IP, facilities, and personnel related to Intel’s NAND efforts. Notably, however, Intel is not selling their overarching Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group; instead the company will be holding on to their Optane memory technology as they continue to develop and sell that technology.
Per the terms of the unusual agreement, SK Hynix will be acquiring Intel’s NAND memory business in two parts, with the deal not expected to completely close until March of 2025. Under the first phase, which will take place in 2021 once all relevant regulatory bodies have approved the seal, SK Hynix will pay Intel the first $7 billion for their SSD business and Intel’s sole NAND fab in Dalian, China. This will see Intel’s consumer and enterprise SSD businesses transferred to SK Hynix, along with the relevant IP and employees for the SSD business, but not any NAND IP or employees. Similarly, while SK Hynix will get the Dalian fab, the first phase does not come with the employees that operate it.
Following the first phase, Intel will continue to develop and manufacture NAND out of the Dalian fab for roughly the next four years. This period is set to last until the rest of the deal fully closes in March of 2025. At that point, SK Hynix will pay Intel $2 billion for the rest of their NAND business. This will finally transfer all of Intel’s NAND IP and related employees over to SK Hynix, along with the Dalian fab employees.
NAND = Flash memory, and it’s a very profitable business to be in most times, but not part of Intel’s core microprocessor business. In Intel’s case, NAND is what you run once your fab is too old to crank out Microprocessors, and Fab 68 in Dalian was built in 2010 as a 65 nanometer fab. With Intel’s cutting edge currently at 7nm, you can see how it would be easy for them to part with, especially since the flash division was losing money despite record revenue in 2019. What Hynix gets out of the deal is harder to fathom. They’re buying a revenue stream in a sector that should be profitable, add another fab to their stable, and maintain parity with DRAM rivals Samsung and Micron. But that’s an awful lot to pay for a small revenue stream bump, a ten year old fab and no NAND IP until 2024.
“U.S. Sanctions Have Caused ‘Serious’ Damage to Iran, Tehran Says.” Good. Maybe they could stop being jihadist scumbags who oppress your people with a brutal theocracy? Just a thought…
Armenia-Azerbaijan truce breaks down within hours.
Chairman of the Georgetown County (South Carolina) Board of Voter Registration and Elections resignes after stealing Trump signs. Note: Repeatedly stealing the signs of political opponents isn’t a “lapse of judgement.”
The Nate Paul scandal has, at its heart, allegations that federal and state law enforcement officials abused the rights of an American citizen. The facts from all sides seem to indicate an unwillingness by the OAG staff to investigate Paul’s complaint; their unwillingness to do so must be explored.
If the 2019 raid was properly conducted, why has that not been confirmed? Why delay an investigation into the raid? If the raids were legitimate, why, after more than 13 months, has Nate Paul not been charged with a crime?
On the other hand, Nate Paul might—indeed—be a notorious villain. But in the current environment, shouldn’t state investigators be willing to double-check that the actions of law enforcement officials are conducted properly? Even accused criminals have constitutional rights.
Just as important, what if Mr. Paul is not a villain and merely a businessman targeted for less than honorable reasons? Is it merely a coincidence that U.S. Attorney Bash resigned from office three days after Mateer tendered his own resignation?
Likewise, it is possible—as the seven OAG employees allege—that Paxton was acting “under duress” in pushing for this investigation into the complaint made by his friend Mr. Paul. Whether or not Nate Paul’s allegations have merit, Texans need to be certain their elected officials are not acting improperly or unethically in the course of their jobs. Was Mr. Paxton simply pursuing justice for a Texan, or was he acting under undue influence?
Bret Weinstein kicked off Facebook, presumably for daring to voice anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts.
I have been evicted from Facebook. No explanation. No appeal. I have downloaded "my information" and see nothing that explains it.
We are governed now in private, by entities that make their own rules and are answerable to no process. Disaster is inevitable. We are living it. pic.twitter.com/JBTFH2devl
I don't care who you are, but seeing your dog dressed as Chuckie, running towards you with his wig and little knife arm, is just funny….. pic.twitter.com/vwaX0as0qW
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.”
Search for “American Inventor” on Google Image Search.
Spoiler: On the first page teaser strip, you get Thomas Edison, eight black people, and a picture of Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell with coloration that makes him look black:
Clicking on the “Images” search tab likewise seems to bring up 90% black inventors.
Missing from the first image results:
Orville and Wilbur Wright
Benjamin Franklin
Nikola Tesla
Eli Whitney
Willis Carrier
William Shockley
George Westinghouse
Thomas Jefferson
Ernest Lawrence
Of the black inventors shown, probably only George Washington Carver ranks among the top ten American inventors.
Someone has obviously gone to a great deal of time and effort to falsify history for political reason. Particularly suspicious is the elevation of Lewis Howard Latimer, an Edison underling who helped develop a better light bulb filament, to the second position on the list, shortly after Democratic president nominee Joe Biden announced that it was Latimer rather than Edison who invented the light bulb.
I can think of three possible explanations for the multiple racist results to be shown across all image search services:
Someone at Google has made the conscious decision to feature black inventors at the expense of all other races and the other search service are somehow using Google image search as their own image search engine.
Coordinated efforts across image search companies to distort the search results.
Someone is employing a web spider to automatically game image results to favor black Americans (this could explain how the dark-skinned image of Alexander Graham Bell makes the cut).
All of these are causes for concern.
We’re getting to watch the Ministry of Truth falsify history in real-time for political reasons.
Biden’s back, Bernie’s coronation is postponed, Buttigieg and Steyer are Out, Bloomberg sucks up to China, Super Tuesday looms, and Biden seeks help from the Holy Roman Empire. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
East Carolina University (North Carolina): Biden 29, Sanders 25, Bloomberg 14, Warren 11, Klobuchar 5, Buttigieg 4, Gabbard 1. Evidently both the Carolinas love them some Biden…
But from a broader perspective, the emergence of Sanders as the Democratic frontrunner mirrors the rise of Trump and the crackup of the Republican Party in 2016, and for many of the same reasons. In both cases, a significant swath of each party’s voter base rejected the party establishment after years of being pandered to or ignored altogether.
Populism cuts both ways, right and left, and the impending takeover of the Democratic Party by a left-wing populist should have been anticipated by party leaders four years ago—and maybe it would have been, if they hadn’t been busy gloating over the GOP’s apparent misfortune of being taken over by Trump.
But Trump’s triumph was a necessary corrective to a party that had lost its way. When Trump cinched the nomination in 2016, it was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it. Gone was the mild-mannered GOP of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and John Boehner. Gone were the empty platitudes, repeated ad nauseum for decades, about comprehensive immigration reform and defunding Planned Parenthood. Gone was the slavish devotion to global free trade deals regardless of the toll it took on American workers. Gone, too, was the subtle deference toward the liberal media that belied the Republican establishment’s ambivalence about the issues rank-and-file Republicans really cared about.
Trump swept all of that away. Before he went to war with Democrats and the media, his candidacy was an all-out assault on the Republican establishment, which had drifted so far from its base that GOP leaders didn’t take him seriously until it was too late. They couldn’t see what he saw: Republican voters—and not a few independents and moderate Democrats—were tired of being ignored by their leaders, whom they had grown to despise. Trump was able to topple the edifice of the GOP because he saw it was rotten underneath.
Now, Sanders is poised to do the same to the Democratic Party. The media is aware of this, but only vaguely, tending to frame Sanders’s rise as a contest between a radically leftist base and a more moderate Democratic electorate at large. That’s one reason the press has so quickly glommed on to the candidacy of Bloomberg, treating him as a viable contender for the nomination and a real rival to Sanders.
“If [Sanders] is the nominee, we lose,” said one Democrat.
That lawmaker indicated that a Sanders primary win would cost Democrats their state in the fall. The lawmaker suggested that many voters could leave the top of the ticket blank. Two other vulnerable Democrats indicated that a Sanders nomination would almost certainly cede their states to President Trump, to say nothing of the impact on races down the ballot for Democratic House and Senate candidates. One Democrat said they would try to hyper-focus on local issues to serve as a counterbalance. But the lawmaker conceded it’s hard to compete with the Sanders narrative and the reverberations of impeachment.
Here’s what’s dangerous about enjoying Bernie’s early success and Dems’ early troubles: Most people say he can’t win and he’ll hand four more years to the other party. Many of those people include the alleged elites of his own party.
Sanders has a cadre of hardcore nobodies who feel alienated from both parties, especially the establishment types who inhabit the once uninhabitable swamp that Maryland so generously donated to the new nation back in 1790.
Those cadres, many of them young, ignorant and inspired, get excited at the mere mention of the name of the man who’s lived off taxpayers virtually his entire career and still managed to acquire three homes.
He’s grumpy, often angry but he is what he is, an authentic, angry grump. His disciples pack the rallies to the rafters or the farthest street corner, cheer everything he says, especially the angry stuff.
The candidate talks about implementing a most ambitious program of reforms that no one thinks can get through Congress. Many fellow party officeholders are already running for fear he’ll drag them down to defeat.
Any of this sound familiar? It’s a parallel phenomenon to the Trump Train of 2015-16. A rich guy from Queens (Bernie is a Brooklyn native) who instinctively tapped into the anger and frustrations of millions of overlooked Americans he has nothing in common with and harnessed that power to a surprise upset ticket into the White House.
The parallel is, of course, imperfect. Sanders is older, Jewish, no friend of Israel. He doesn’t know from tax cuts. There’s hardly anyone safe from the many trillions in new taxes the lifelong politician promises.
There’s a very long way to go in this process. But winning has a way of adorning anyone with campaign credibility and more admirers. You can smell it already.
“Russians Declare Election Too Chaotic For Them To Successfully Interfere.” “‘In our wildest ambitions, we never would have tried to get a straight out Communist to win the nomination in a major U.S. party,’ Putin said. ‘I don’t know how we’re supposed to interfere and add to that.’ Putin hung his head sadly. ‘It’s like people don’t even need a Russia anymore.'”
Joe Biden thumped all the competition in South Carolina. The scale of his victory there scrambles the Democratic race. And Biden’s victory takes more steam out of the candidacies of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. But it is not easy to imagine Biden having the stamina to take on Sanders in a long race.
The result should worry Democrats who wanted unity. There had been some evidence in the polls that black voters were warming up to Sanders. They did not do so in sufficient numbers in South Carolina to begin making Sanders into a consensus candidate.
Can Biden sustain the momentum? It’s hard to imagine that he can. This is a Saturday-night victory just days before Super Tuesday. Biden cannot mount much new campaign organization in the upcoming states or process any surge of donations into a surge of advertising. If Sanders wins the preponderance of delegates available next Tuesday, then Biden will just be another non-Sanders candidate, like Pete Buttigieg, who was given a strong look by a particular subset of voters within the Democratic Party. Meanwhile Sanders continues to put points on the board.
Biden’s biggest difficulty is the media. Biden is now depending on an avalanche of earned media gushing about his “comeback” in the race in South Carolina. But, unlike John McCain in 2008, Biden is a candidate uniquely disliked and distrusted by the liberal media apparatus that would provide him such a narrative. They are very likely not to give it to him.
Although much has been made about the continuing importance of black voters and black turnout to Democratic general-election victories, I expect to see stories in the next 48 hours about the unique nature of South Carolina’s Democratic electorate. There may be an undercurrent of internal Democratic class warfare in these accounts, emphasizing that South Carolina’s Democrats are much less educated, less Latino, and less progressive than the party as a whole. Sandersistas will emphasize that Sanders polls better with blacks in the North.
Biden’s victory raises serious questions about the role that liberal-leaning media play in the Democratic process. Black voters overwhelmingly rejected the liberal-media-approved alternatives to Bernie — Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. That media class has been whispering about Biden’s unfitness for office.
Hey, give some credit to those of us in the Vast right Wing Conspiracy: We’ve been shouting about Biden’s unfitness for office! He works with dead people. Hey, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, they’re both Chinese leaders with Xs in their name. More worrying is the fact that there were two different Chinese leaders between the two that Biden’s mind skipped right over. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) What?
“My name’s Joe Biden, I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States senate—if you like what you see, help out, if not, vote for the other Biden”
What words ordinary people associate with Hunter Biden: corruption, Ukraine, sleaze, cocaine, strippers. What word New York Times associates with Hunter Biden: “art”:
Jobless man at center of huge political controversy rents $12k/month house, keeps Porsche in driveway, converts pool house to art studio. NYT publishes feature on art. https://t.co/4cmLtAkNFV
“Biden Wishes Some Country, Any Country, Would Try To Influence Election For Him.” “Seriously, anyone! Prussia! Czechoslovakia! The Holy Roman Empire! They’re still around, right?”
“Anytime we’ve had this before, society blows up and they do set up the guillotines and the guillotines don’t have to be chop your head off. They could be confiscatory taxes, they could be seizing the endowments of uh, educational institutions and um, philanthropic organizations, all of which those proposals are out there. You know, you’re going to have to do something about this income inequality and a lot of it comes from zero interest rates.”
The business of the New York City billionaire (yes, another one) gets significant revenue from its financial and data services in China. He is deeply enmeshed with that country’s business and government networks, and it shows.
Snip.
If Bloomberg wins, he would arguably be the most pro-China president since an avalanche of such presidents following Richard Nixon, who fatefully opened the American economy to the country in 1972….loomberg generally ignores China’s growing military and diplomatic power, instead focusing his claims on how benefit can be derived from China’s growing economy. In a 2008 Newsweek article, he wrote that a “growing Chinese economy is good for America”. He continued, “we have a stake in working together to solve common problems, rather than trying to browbeat or intimidate the other into action.”
Here he broadcasts China’s “win-win” rhetoric against “zero-sum” thinking. But in his many comments on China, Bloomberg does not adequately address the zero-sum thinking of China’s own leaders who argue that the Chinese autocratic system is superior to liberal democracy. Neither does he adequately address how China’s growing economy fuels its global military power projection, or the ongoing praxis of Maoist ideology that lauds the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as growing from the barrel of a gun.
(Caveat: Really not wild about how this website’s bandwidth-and-gimmick heavy idea of webdesign.) (Hat tip: Instapundit.) “Bloomberg’s $400 million bet looks increasingly likely to flop as he lags in Super Tuesday states.” But he’s not out of it yet:
The sub-tweeters and thumb-twitchers are writing Michael Bloomberg’s political obituary after his admittedly less than thrilling turn in Las Vegas, but the pundits were always coming not to praise him, but to bury him. Who does this rich amateur think he is? What year does this out-of-touch oligarch think we’re in, 2016?
The elites of the Democratic party and their baggage train in the media have, like an earlier elite in search of a restoration, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They remember only the humiliation of Trump’s victory in 2016. They refuse to consider the reasons for their repudiation by the voters, or the arrogance that led Hillary Clinton and her team to assume that the Blue Wall was theirs by hereditary right. And they refuse to accept another lesson of 2016: it’s still possible to fix a party conference, but the party no longer controls the primaries and the debates.
Remember how Democrats and Republicans alike mocked Donald Trump for even entering the Republican nomination race? Remember how the pontificators decreed that Trump’s lack of political experience disbarred him from the high office of crashing the biggest economy in the world, as the professional politicians managed to do in 2007 and 2008?
Snip.
The truth is, Bloomberg is in the Democratic nomination race for as long as he wants to be. The longer he stays in the race, the greater the amount of money he’ll spread around. The more he spends, the more the party managers and the senators and the governors and, though they’re far too high-minded to admit it, the media will come to see his candidacy as a fact that’s going to go the distance, and a reality to which the smart money should accommodate itself in case Bloomberg’s candidacy becomes a payday.
Bloomberg understands the lessons of 2016 because, like Donald Trump, he understood them long before and was prepared to act accordingly. Trump and Bloomberg know what the rest of the Democratic field know but, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, lack the integrity to say. The politicians of America are for sale to their highest donor.
Bloomberg also shares with Trump a businessman’s awareness of the price of morals and the cost of moralizing. Elizabeth Warren affected outrage about Bloomberg’s alleged jokes about ‘horse-faced lesbians’ and transvestites, but Trump has already proven that these attitudes, fatal though they may be in the politically correct kingdom of the campus, are an inverse form of recommendation: the kind of candidate who refuses to bow to the puritans might also be the kind of president who could refuse the bribes of the donors.
At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. How does a candidate dropping out increase the likelihood of no majority? Shouldn’t it clear the field up and make it easier to achieve a majority?
The key is in how the Democrats’ delegate math works. The rules require candidates to receive at least 15 percent of the vote, typically, to win delegates statewide or at the district-level.
Buttigieg was projected to get under 15 percent in the vast majority of states and districts on Super Tuesday. Thus, his votes were essentially wasted. Redistributing his votes to other candidates will help them to meet the 15 percent threshold, however. In particular, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were both close to the 15 percent line in many states or districts. So even an extra percentage point or two would help them get over that line in more places. For instance, both Bloomberg and Warren were projected to finish with an average of 14 percent of the vote in California before Buttigieg’s dropout. Now, they’re forecasted for 16 percent instead.
Biden was also projected to finish under 15 percent in some states and districts — so Buttigieg’s dropout helps him out also in a few places. Biden went from a projected 14 percent of the vote to 16 percent in Minnesota, for example.
Conversely, Sanders was already projected to get 15 percent almost everywhere. So although he will pick up a few Buttigieg voters, they don’t necessarily translate to more delegates.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Everybody who wanted a Hillary Clinton podcast, raise your hand. (pause) OK, that’s Ben Rhodes, Huma Abedin, and Bill Clinton (gets her out of the house). Also: “We Need to Talk About Hillary Clinton’s Disturbing Harvey Weinstein Ties.”
Sanders gained steady employment for the first time when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., by ten votes in 1981, at the head of a coalition of leftist civic-action groups against a five-term Democrat who was tacitly endorsed by the Republicans as well. Sanders accused him of being a patronage-tainted stooge of local developers. As mayor, Sanders balanced the municipal budget, attracted a minor-league baseball team (it was called the Vermont Reds not because of Sanders, but because it was a farm team of the Cincinnati Reds). He was a pioneer in community-trust housing, sued to reduce local cable-television rates, and championed an imaginative multi-use redevelopment plan for the city’s Lake Champlain waterfront; his slogan was “Burlington is not for sale.” He worked well with all groups (except some developers) and showed no signs of the authoritarianism of the doctrinaire Left, though he admired some of their most odious exemplars, such as Fidel Castro, whom he unsuccessfully tried to visit. He was reelected three times as a declared socialist, with his vote inching up above 55 percent in 1987, and he had another try at the governor’s chair in 1986, but got only 14 percent of the vote. By this time Sanders was already focused on national government and had invited leftist professor and eminent linguist Noam Chomsky to give a speech in 1985 denouncing American foreign policy. He retired as mayor in 1989 and became a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1989 and at Hamilton College in 1991.
In 1988, Sanders ran again as an independent for statewide office, as congressman at large for Vermont, and gained 38 percent of the vote, double the vote for the Democratic candidate, and within three points of the winner, Republican Peter Smith. Two years later, he ran again as an independent, but without a Democrat in the race, and this time he entered Congress, aged 50, as a Democratic-left independent fusion candidate. He served eight consecutive terms as a congressman and then in 2006 won the first of three terms (so far) as U.S. senator. It was unjust for Michael Bloomberg to suggest that Sanders was a Communist, as he does believe in free elections. He has stuck to his platform and doggedly fought out his career at the polls through 20 elections between 1972 and 2018, 16 of them statewide, albeit in a small state. It is correct, but unsurprising given that he sat as a socialist in the Senate, to say that he has introduced 364 bills as a senator, of which only three have passed, and two of them were to name post offices.
Bernie Sanders believes in mobilizing the less advantaged 50.1 percent of the voters in America, as in Vermont and in Burlington, by promising them a sufficient share of the wealth and status of the upper 49.9 percent of society, while assuaging any reservations about confiscating the wealth and income of others by denouncing the system and representing such redistribution as fairness. He wants an environmental revolution, no doubt to reduce pollution as a side benefit, but more importantly as a planet-saving cover for his assault on capitalism and his acquisition of the votes of the relatively disadvantaged. He is making a direct appeal to a majority of Americans by promising them economic benefits wrenched from the hands of the greedy 49.9 percent, or benignly showered upon them by a kindly state, as if the state got its money from anyone but its constituents.
Sanders keeps saying he’ll attract new voters. New York Times: Yeah, not so much. Here are 55 facts about Bernie Sanders. Nothing says “reasonable centrist” like hanging a Soviet flag in your office. Also: “Throughout his adult life he has denigrated Democrats, calling the party ‘ideologically bankrupt.'” Even Sweden’s Democratic Socialists find Bernie Sanders too far left. More media double standards:
Help me out here. Who decides which old comments "resurface" and which stay "long-buried"? pic.twitter.com/ADNKZjEjB5
It’s a 2 hr drive from Charleston to Myrtle Beach & locals do it all the time – Not @BernieSanders– He & his entourage flew from Charleston to Myrtle Beach in not 1, not 2, but 3 Gulfstream Jets today. It took them 10 minutes to fly. Who is the elitist?? #BernieIsACommunistpic.twitter.com/2CWMXVn4eE
WaPo: “Wow, Bernie sure loves him some communist dictators. Who knew?” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) “Hey there, Mr. SuperDelegate! How do you feel about Bernie as the nominee?” “Aw, HELLS NO!” Bernie bros show up in the middle of the night with bullhorns outside the homes of DNC members Wow, that’s sure to bring them over to your side! There’s at least one outlet that’s all the way in the tank for Bernie: The Onion. Thou Shalt Not Make Funny Of Thy Holy Socialist.
Update: Billionaire Tom Steyer: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 29, 2020. The shade of John Connally can rest a little easier tonight: No longer is his spending $11 million to garner one delegate the most embarrassing waste of money in presidential campaign history. Through January 1, Steyer spent $253,718,074 to get zero delegates. Steyer’s campaign never made any sense:
Even relative to the other longshots, Tom Steyer, who dropped out of the race on Saturday night after a disappointing finish in the South Carolina primary, was a longshot. Nor was it entirely clear why he was running.
Steyer, a billionaire from his previous career as a hedge fund manager, spent the years before his presidential run pushing two causes in particular: efforts to mitigate climate change and the impeachment of President Trump. But Steyer’s presidential campaign wasn’t particularly focused on either issue — or anything else. He embraced some more liberal ideas (a wealth tax) and opposed others (Medicare for All). He cast himself as a populist while also emphasizing his business experience. He touted his electability and his commitment to fighting climate change, but not in ways that were particularly unique compared to the other candidates.
Steyer’s broader electoral strategy, skipping Iowa and New Hampshire while using his fortune to pump ads into states later in the calendar that the other candidates were not focused on yet, was fairly novel at first. And it halfway worked. According to our polling averages, Steyer eked just into the double digits in Nevada and South Carolina. He finished with 5 percent of county convention delegates in Nevada and 11 percent of the vote in South Carolina. That’s more than a lot of candidates managed.
But it’s not good. And in national polls, Steyer’s support never escaped the low single digits.
That’s why I always cheered on Steyer’s campaign: The money he spent on it was money he couldn’t spend against Republicans in races where it might have helped viable Democratic candidates win.
Warren was clearly the favorite candidate of academics and journalists — the intelligentsia. Why? Because she was the quintessential “front row” candidate, to borrow a term from author and photographer Chris Arnade. The image of her campaign will be her on a debate stage, hand raised, ready with an answer — but losing support roughly every minute she speaks.
After her dismal showing in South Carolina, there is no chance of Warren becoming the electoral alternative to Bernie Sanders. The first three states tried Pete Buttigieg in that role. South Carolina resoundingly chose Joe Biden. Her campaign fell between two stools: the young, somewhat nervous Left, and an older, aspirational center.
Her campaign persona had a funny way of playing to each. To the Left, she offered her ambition: her plans to end private health insurance, institute a wealth tax, make day care universal and free. Her promise was to give them security. To the center, she gave her ability to do homework. Every issue had an elaborate plan. Every plan was drawn up in dollars and cents. Sometimes the figures weren’t quite right. To them, she offered her competence and attention to detail.
Well, sort of. Her Medicare for All plan would send the federal budget into a new stratosphere, and she didn’t even include the cost of her plan to cover illegal aliens as well. Not to mention that her proposal includes tax increases that are unconstitutional and politically infeasible.
Both she and Gabbard are evidently flying to Michigan before either knows how badly they lost on Super Tuesday.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
