The Chinese Nuclear Breakout and the Biden Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review

On August 12, 2021, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command Admiral Charles Richard stated, “We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China….The explosive growth in their nuclear and conventional forces can only be what I described as breathtaking.” He added that “…frankly, that word ‘breathtaking’ may not be enough.” Admiral Richard characterized China as a “peer” nuclear competitor and noted that we now face two nuclear “peer” competitors, Russia and China, compared to one during the Cold War.

Admiral Richard was talking about the massive Chinese silo construction program for the large, multiple warhead DF-41 ICBM, generally reported to be able to carry 10 nuclear warheads. He confirmed the earlier reports of two new ICBM fields and that each had about 120 silos for the large Chinese DF-41 ICBM. On August 12, 2021, Bill Gertz wrote in The Washington Times that a third ICBM field had been discovered and that, “Together, the three new missile bases will house 350 to 400 new long-range nuclear missiles, U.S. officials said. If 10 warheads are deployed on the DF-41s, China‘s warhead level will increase to more than 4,000 warheads on its DF-41s alone.”

The information we now have about the Chinese silo construction was not initially made public by the Biden administration. It was made public by analysts from NGOs (Jeffrey Lewis, Matt Korda and Hans Kristensen) and noted journalist Bill Gertz. Patty-Jane Geller of the Heritage Foundation noted that on the same day as Admiral Richard characterized China’s actions as a nuclear “breakout”:

…the Biden administration was reported to be considering delaying the Pentagon’s plan to modernize the United States’ Cold War-era nuclear forces. Worse, just a few days prior, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) sent a letter asking Biden to consider reducing U.S. nuclear forces. There’s a clear disconnect between the reality of the threat facing the United States and the Biden administration’s stated desire to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. strategy.

There is little indication that the Biden administration, as distinct from certain individuals in it, recognizes the significance of what is going on in China with respect to nuclear weapons modernization and expansion or that it will have any impact on its Nuclear Posture Review. Former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Dr. John Harvey, who had the nuclear weapons portfolio in the Obama administration, has indicated he believes that the Biden administration will “Carry forward the bulk—but possibly not every piece—of the Obama-Trump modernization program with some increased focus on NC2.”[1] The idea of cutting our nuclear forces and modernization plans in the face of such a great increase in the Chinese and Russian threat is almost mind-boggling. Furthermore, according to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, “I cannot say that under the current administration, we hear from Washington signals in favour of involving the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in our bilateral dialogue with the United States on strategic stability or some hypothetical negotiations in the future. This is not the case.”[2] There is no apparent motive for him to lie about this. Thus, the Biden administration appears to be largely ignoring the new China nuclear threat in its arms control diplomacy.

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Continue reading this article at Real Clear Defense.

He Said The Quiet Part Out Loud

During a July 21 town hall event on CNN, President Joe Biden was addressed by a member of the audience who posed a set-up question about guns. The questioner asked, “So, how will you address gun violence, from a federal point of view, to actually bring about change and make our local cities safer?” The front part of the president’s answer was nonsensical, but then he said the quiet part out loud: “Guns. I’m the only guy that ever got passed legislation, when I was a senator, that made sure we eliminated assault weapons. The idea you need a weapon that can have the ability to fire 20, 30, 40, 50, 120 shots from that weapon — whether it’s a — whether it’s a 9-millimeter pistol or whether it’s a rifle — is ridiculous. I’m continuing to push to eliminate the sale of those things, but I’m not likely to get that done in the near term.”

That language seems pretty clear to me — President “No One Is Coming to Take Your Guns” wants to take at least some guns, such as AR-15s, which can accept standard-capacity magazines of 30 rounds, for example. That plank of the Biden citizen-disarmament plan was made very clear in his “The Biden Plan To End Our Gun Violence Epidemic,” which I excerpted at length in the October 2020 Downrange column. But based on his remarks of July 21, he also broadened his wish list of firearms he’d like to ban/take/regulate to include 9mm pistols, based on their ability to accept higher-round count magazines. Do I think he actually wants to ban only 9mm pistols that accept 20 or more rounds in the magazine? No, of course not.

Hopefully, he’s right about the last thing he said: “… but I’m not likely to get that done in the near term.”

On September 1, 2021, about the date you’ll receive this issue, my home state of Texas will join 20 other states in allowing Constitutional Carry (CC), or permitless carry, for carrying a handgun. Sorry we’re so late. The following states allow permitless concealed carry and open carry: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

It could have been 22 states had Louisiana’s Democrat governor Gov. John Bel Edwards not vetoed a Constitutional Carry bill in that state. In a veto-override session that failed, GOP State Senators Patrick Connick, Louie Bernard, and Franklin Foil supported the legislation during the regular session, but voted against it when the chips were down and they had a chance to override Bel’s veto.

Hopefully, Louisiana voters will remember this when these legislators appear on a ballot in the future.

*****

This article was published in GunTests on August 23, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the author.

 

Who Will Pay the Price? Who Should Pay the Price?

As American citizens confront a foreign policy disaster of this magnitude, we must begin with an inventory of injured parties.

First, unquestionably, are the American men and women in our armed forces who have been killed and injured in this grievous failure. Very much like the Vietnam War, it is the grunts as we called them, who always pay the price for the Ivy League ‘best and the brightest’ who haunt the U.S. State Department and to an increasing degree, the U.S. Department of Defense.

There is nothing like a visit to a military cemetery, such as the one pictured above, to get a sense of the human cost.

It is difficult to feel sufficient empathy for the families who are dealing with the loss or long-term disability of their sons and daughters, when the effort for which such a dire price was paid now seems so meaningless. But we must try. What they must be going through is truly awful and painful without end. They deserve our profound respect and sympathy. It did not have to be this way.

Right behind them are the American civilians abandoned by the Commander-in-Chief.  U.S. civilians have been left behind before in conflicts such as  the Philippines in the early days of WWII after Japan’s rout of U.S. forces after Pearl Harbor. But that was because we did not have the means to save them. The Afghanistan debacle is so different. This is a self-inflicted defeat and humiliation of the United States, a country that had the means to get all of its American citizens out of country. Our leaders pulled out the means (its military assets) first and deliberately abandoned Americans. I cannot think of any act of cowardice and treachery in American history that compares with this.

The Afghanis will suffer greatly, women in particular but also many men who helped the U.S. cause. They are not just cruelly killing their opponents. They are doing so in a way to humiliate the United States. These are the people with whom the Biden Administration has entrusted the survival of our men and women left behind.

The network of alliances from NATO to SEATO will suffer because Biden and his advisors did not consult adequately with them, even though they had more troops in theatre than did the U.S..

The special relationship with Great Britain has been critically damaged as we have seen the unprecedented step of the British Parliament  condemning an American President.

The policy blunders coupled with clear and progressive signs of President Biden’s cognitive decline will embolden our enemies and give pause to all of our friends from Israel to Taiwan and around the globe. Perhaps worse than the senility of one man, is the utter stupidity of Biden’s coterie of advisors. What is their excuse? At least Biden might blame an aneurysm or senile dementia.

President Trump brought several Arab states, Israel and the U.S. closer together with the Abraham accords and other initiatives. This progress may well be reversed or lost if they believe the U.S. is a fickle and undependable partner.  Gee, I wonder where they might get that idea.

This is a terrible setback in the War on Terror.  We have demonstrated that we don’t understand radical Islam and how to deal with it longer term. Likely it will spread even more with training bases and support well beyond the geography of Afghanistan. With this disgusting failure of our President and his circle, militant Islam has shown it can defeat and humiliate the West. This will embolden them to attack us and our allies in the future. The Arab street respects power and Biden has shown the U.S. is currently run by incompetent weaklings and cowards.

There is a school of thought that says our reaction to radical Islam is what has made it metastasize. We have always found this school of thought wanting, as Mr. Qtub of Muslim Brotherhood founding fame was documenting and broadcasting his hate about the West based on his experience with American infidels during the innocent period of the late 1940s in rural Colorado. We can only imagine what he would think of modern day California and New York.

The American people will suffer for all of this. This will be unjust but the world will not care. A fair number of our countrymen would rather vote for a doddering old fool and a bunch of warmed over Marxist ideas than a strong-willed man who came from outside of the political club and sent far too many offensive tweets.

Say what you will about President Trump. At least he was in charge of his White House rather than the White House being in charge of him. He did not run from reporters but in fact engaged them, argued with them, belittled them, and yes, denigrated them. But he did not run and he faced his critics. For this combat, a sizable chunk of the public thought he was at fault for aggravating the press.

Well, now with the benefit of hindsight, we wonder how many voters would like to go back and change their ballots?

Who will suffer and who should suffer are, of course, two different groups.

Likely who will not suffer are the Democrat operatives who pull the strings behind Joe Biden, the puppet president. As one observer accurately put it, they put the man up to win, not to govern. The  machinery of the Democrat Party has a great deal to answer for. This includes this latest foreign policy disaster, the uncontrolled illegal alien invasion on the southern border, inflation, budget madness, declining race relations, soaring crime, turning the national security apparatus on political opponents, and the contradictory and idiotic policies related to Covid.

This is an unparalleled list of serious offenses for a President in the first seven months of his first year of governance.

Our fervent hope is that voters will see these offenses for what they are and give them such an electoral thrashing in 2022 that today’s radical Marxist Democrats become a footnote in history.

Then there is the main stream media who hid the incompetence of this man from the American public and viciously and intentionally distorted the views and record of his opponent. They deserve professional and economic destruction.

Where do these poorly informed and prepared advisers to this demented President come from? Where do the sycophants in the media come from?

This is a dangerous failure of America’s ruling class and its foot soldiers that largely comes out of our colleges and universities and then burrows into our increasingly ineffective institutions.

We now have a working list of who has been hurt by this botched job. Now we need to complete a list of who should be held responsible for this tragedy. We need to start with the Democrat Party and not stop until they are swept from the White House to the mayors’ mansions in every blue city. Then, we need to get to work and reform our universities and the many institutions that have been so damaged by the graduates of the failed public school system and higher education system in America.

Absolute Power Is No Covid Safety Net

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown champions have perennially invoked “science and data” to sanctify any mandate politicians impose. Hard facts have recently shown that neither vaccines nor face masks provide surefire protection against the virus. But no amount of evidence has yet shaken faith in the magic of absolute power.

Covid policies are increasingly degenerating to the equivalent of sacrificing virgins to appease angry viral gods. New Zealand on Tuesday imposed a nationwide lockdown in response to a single Covid case in the capital city. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered her captive citizenry: “Do not congregate, don’t talk to your neighbors. Please keep to your bubble.” Arden asserted that “complying with these rules, making sure we do all we can to stamp it out, still remains the best strategy in the world right now.” Ardern did not deign to explain why almost no place else in the world, including places with vastly more Covid cases, sought to outlaw everyday conversations.

In Australia, the military is patrolling city streets to enforce the latest lockdown. Daniel Andrews, the Premier of the state of Victoria, recently decreed: “There will be no removal of masks to consume alcohol outdoors.” One Aussie lamented, “My business has been forcibly closed. Everyone has been sent home without pay. We are banned from leaving our homes except for the 5 reasons given by the Government.”

There is no “science” to justify prohibiting Australians from going more than 2 miles from their home. But New Zealand and Australia presume that no one will be safe unless government officials have jurisdiction over every breath that citizens take.

In the United States, many of the same pundits and activists who howled about the evils of “microaggressions” are now cheering for the government to forcibly inject everyone with a Covid vaccine. Biden publicly declared that he is checking to see if he has the power to force everyone to get injected.

Biden endorsed the vaccination passports that some cities have already imposed. Radio host Grant Stinchfield commented, in Los Angeles “you can [defecate] on the street, shoot drugs in crack tent on the sidewalk and even steal anything less then (sic) 900 bucks but now you have to show papers to get in a restaurant or gym!?!?” New York City’s passport regime effectively bans the majority of blacks from many activities of daily life, since they have a much lower vaccination rate than other groups.

Far greater restrictions may be on the horizon. The Associated Press reported that the Biden administration is considering “mandating vaccines for interstate travel” but is delaying any such decree until “Americans were ready for thestrong-arming from the federal government.” A top former Homeland Security official has called for placing anyone who is not fully vaccinated on the No Fly list, thereby expanding the list to scores of millions of people and creating new havoc for air travel. Biden administration officials have offered no evidence that such restrictions would end the pandemic but it would permit the president to demonstrate the same machismo that President Nixon showed with his illegal invasion of Cambodia in 1970.

Politicians’ anti-Covid recommendations increasingly resemble frightened soldiers shooting at any noise they hear in the dark. NIH Director Francis Collins recently condemned the “epidemic of misinformation, disinformation, distrust that is tearing us apart.” But much of the misinformation has stemmed directly from the Biden administration’s flip-flops and fearmongering. On August 3, Collins announced during a CNN interview that “parents of unvaccinated kids should… wear masks” in their own homes. He conceded: “I know that’s uncomfortable, I know it seems weird, but it is the best way to protect your kids.” A few hours later, Collins recanted on Twitter, perhaps after other political appointees persuaded him to stop sounding like a blithering idiot.

Covid misinformation started at the top. In a CNN Town Hall last month, Biden declared, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Biden administration officials kept reciting the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” refrain long after it became clear that vaccines were rapidly failing to prevent the spread of Covid. On August 8, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky finally admitted: “What [COVID vaccines] can’t do any more is prevent transmission.” Helluva asterisk. Prior to that, the Biden administration even refused to disclose the number of “breakthrough” infections that had occurred among White House staff. Prof. Eric Topol complained that the CDC’s false statements on Covid risks was a “blatant failure putting millions of vaccinated Americans at unnecessary risk for breakthrough infections.”

On Thursday, a front page Washington Post article castigated the CDC for withholding Covid information from the public, noting that its “overly rosy assessments of the vaccines’ effectiveness against delta may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security.” Tom Frieden, former CDC director under Obama, suggested that the long delays in disclosure led some people to “wonder if the CDC is hiding results.” CDC Director Walensky responded to the debacle by promising “to develop a new forecasting and outbreak analytics center to analyze data in real time,” the Post reported. The CDC apparently did not previously consider it worthwhile to spend any of its $8 billion annual budget on such a project.

The Biden administration has sought to blame the resurgence of Covid on scofflaws who did not submit to every revised command. The Official Enemies List has expanded from those not wearing a mask to those resisting getting vaccinated, and it will soon include those who balk at getting a third (and fourth? fifth?) injection.

The biggest expansion of the Enemies List occurred on August 13, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorist alert, warning law enforcement agencies that “anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists could exploit… potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.” Anyone who loudly objects to being locked back under house arrest will be the moral equivalent of the Taliban, or maybe Hezbollah. Previous federal driftnets for potential troublemakers expanded far beyond individuals who threatened violence. The feds may already be compiling vast lists of Covid critics that could come in handy at some future point.

But at least government officials now recognize the real enemy. Covid Czar Tony Fauci recently declared, “I know people must like to have their individual freedom… but I think that we’re in such a serious situation now, that… mandates should be done.” Fauci predicts that once the FDA rushes its formal approval of the Covid vaccines, there will be far more mandates imposed on Americans.  The fact that the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine has fallen to 42% is irrelevant. A vaccine isn’t a failure as long as the government can force everyone to get additional injections.

The primary “evidence” for most Covid policies is the job title of the government official issuing the decree. As University of California San Francisco professor of medicine Vinay Prasad wrote last month, “When it comes to non-pharmacologic interventions such as mandatory business closures, mask mandates, and countless other interventions, the shocking conclusion of the last 18 months is this: We have learned next to nothing.” Prasad slammed his colleagues for failing to do reliable research on key issues of the pandemic: “Anyone who considers themselves a scientist should be embarrassed by our collective failure to generate knowledge, and this failure is once again looming large.”

For bureaucrats and politicians, gaining power and compelling submission are victory enough, even when their policies fail to vanquish a virus. Citizens are obliged to assume “government knows best, even when it knows little or nothing.” People won’t get infected as long as they are groveling to federal commands, right? Unfortunately, the government has no liability for the injections it approves or the freedoms it destroys.

Faith in absolute power is not “science” – regardless of how many scientists pledge allegiance to Washington in return for federal funding. As historian John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, observed, “When you mix politics and science, you get politics.” There is no safety in submission to damn fools, regardless of their pompous titles.

*****

This article was published on August 26, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research. 

Report: Wisconsin Lost Track of 82,000 Ballots in State Biden Won by 20,000

Wisconsin lost track of more than 82,000 mail-in ballots cast in the state in the November 2020 elections—more than four times the margin of difference separating the two presidential candidates in the state, according to a report by the nonprofit Public Interest Legal Foundation.

The legal foundation, an election integrity watchdog group, released a research brief Friday looking at one of the most closely contested states in the 2020 presidential election.

However, the Wisconsin Elections Commission disputes those findings, as the commission spokesman said the report “mischaracterizes election systems and cherry-picks data,” adding, it is “unreliable and frankly, it’s sloppy work.”

Joe Biden defeated then-President Donald Trump by 20,682 votes in Wisconsin in the November presidential election. However, according to the legal foundation’s report, 82,766 mail-in ballots in the state were either undeliverable or suffered an unknown fate.

A further breakdown by the legal group shows that 1.4 million ballots were sent by mail. Of those, 6,458 were undeliverable. An additional 2,981 mail-in ballots were rejected. The vast majority, 76,308, met an “unknown” fate.

“The federal data show the 2020 election had more mail ballots that were never counted than the margin of victory in the presidential election in Wisconsin,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said in a statement.

“This isn’t the way to run an election,” said Adams, a former Justice Department lawyer in the Voting Section. “Mail ballots invite error, disenfranchisement of voters, and puts the inept U.S. post office determining the outcome of elections.”

Wisconsin was among the three most closely contested states in the country, along with Georgia and Arizona, each of which Biden won by 0.6% or less. A Washington Post analysis in February found that flipping about 43,000 votes across those three states could have changed the Electoral College outcome.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation previously determined 14.7 million mail-in ballots were unaccounted for nationally. The group bases the numbers on data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. In the nationwide popular vote, Biden received 81,268,924 votes to Trump’s 74,216,154—a victory margin of 7,052,770.

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission asks local election officials to provide numbers on how many mail ballots were not returned as voted, were undeliverable, or were otherwise “unable to be tracked.”

The U.S. Postal Service inspector general found 13% of mail ballots in the 2018 election used the official tracking system.

The inspector general says ballots in the “unknown” column could have been put in the wrong mailbox or thrown out with unpaid bills.

Reid Magney, spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, objected to the findings, in a detailed email statement.

The statement asserted the legal foundation report does not use data from the Election Administration and Voting Survey report. Instead, Magney said, the information appears to be from raw data from the Election Assistance Commission.

“Their figures for ballots sent, undeliverable ballots, and rejected ballots count are all incorrect—in some cases by a wide margin,” Magney told The Daily Signal in the email statement.

He referenced Wisconsin’s own reporting that shows about 85,000 absentee ballots were not returned, “but there is no indication they ‘went missing’ or were undeliverable.” He said the number used for “unknown” ballots “doesn’t add up to any combination of ballot status classifications used in the State of Wisconsin.”

“The PILF report makes a big deal of how many more ‘unknown’ ballots there were in Wisconsin in 2020 compared to 2016,” Magney continued. “But as a percentage of all absentee ballots, “unknown” ballots plummeted from 7% in 2016 to 3.8% in 2020.”

Trump has alleged his election loss was fraudulent. However, he has come up short in all of his legal challenges.

Unaccounted-for votes do not prove the outcome would have turned out differently, as it’s not knowable how many of the uncounted votes were for Biden and how many were for Trump. But according to the legal group, this marks the first time, going back to at least 2012, that the number of unaccounted-for ballots was larger than the margin of victory.

For example, when Trump won the state of Wisconsin in 2016, defeating Hillary Clinton by 27,257 votes, there were only 12,984 unknown or undeliverable mail-in ballots, according to the report. In the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama carried the state by 205,204 votes, and there were only 54,077 unknown or undeliverable mail-in ballots.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation report doesn’t allege an incorrect election outcome, but focuses on the perils of mass mail-in voting, which occurred in 2020 primarily as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Expanded vote-by-mail efforts create stress tests on a state’s voter-registration list maintenance system and reveal if investments in ballot chains-of-custody were effective,” the report says. “When Wisconsin loses track of more ballots than the difference between winning and losing its Electoral College votes, that is a core system failure.”

*****

This article was published on August 27, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

For Brits, Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle Is a Betrayal

When President Joe Biden addressed the American people on the Afghanistan withdrawal last Friday, we were witnessing the death spiral of one of the most calamitous U.S. administrations of modern times.

This presidency is sinking faster than the Titanic, increasingly friendless on the world stage, and looking like easy prey to America’s enemies, from Beijing to Moscow.

Biden appeared confused, angry, incoherent, and clueless as he spoke from the White House. He is no John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, or Franklin D. Roosevelt. His presidency is a disaster of epic proportions.

Not only was Biden defiant as he took questions from the media, he was also spreading the kind of disinformation that is unworthy of an American president. For example, he declared that America’s allies were not questioning the credibility of the U.S. over the Afghanistan debacle, and fully supported the decision to withdraw.

This is a flat-out lie. Indeed, deep-seated criticism of the Biden strategy has spread across Europe.

Some of the harshest words for the Biden administration have come from Berlin, where Armin Laschet, who has replaced Angela Merkel as the leader of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union, referred to the American withdrawal as “the biggest debacle that NATO has suffered since its founding.”

Biden is clearly living in the Twilight Zone if he thinks that U.S. allies, from London to Warsaw, are not openly questioning the Biden administration’s credibility on the international stage.

This is a bitter, defiant, and delusional president who will not accept reality.

America’s allies are deeply concerned over the chaos in Kabul and many have sent in their own forces to extract their citizens before the Talban take full control of the city, including the main airport. In reality, Biden has dramatically undermined U.S. allies and America’s standing in the world.

>>> An Afghan Veteran Talks About the Situation in Afghanistan:

Further, by failing to consult the British government and other NATO allies on the timing of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden is damaging the U.S.-U.K. special relationship, America’s most important bilateral partnership.

The British have fought shoulder to shoulder with the United States on the battlefields of Afghanistan, and more than 400 British military personnel have laid down their lives in combat.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the U.S., the British were the first to stand with the U.S., and take part in military strikes against the Taliban.

The British see Biden’s actions as a betrayal. They have been stunned and shocked by the amateurish and disorganized approach taken by the Biden administration, which has put the lives of several thousand British citizens at risk. Staggeringly, it took Biden 36 hours to return a call from Prime Minister Boris Johnson last week, as the Taliban strengthened its iron grip over the Afghan capital.

The British parliamentary response has been fast and furious. The House of Commons was recalled from summer recess last Wednesday, with dozens of members of Parliament and government ministers condemning the “catastrophic” and “shameful” approach of the Biden presidency.

One member of Parliament spoke of Biden “throwing us and everybody else to the fire.” Others referred to the U.S. president as “dishonorable” for blaming the Afghans for their own demise, and accusing them of refusing to fight.

The criticism from members of Parliament was widely echoed in the British press. In the words of the London Daily Telegraph: “The US’s tawdry, hopelessly mishandled withdrawal matters to the entire Western community because it has grim humanitarian consequences, Islamists have gained a base of operations, and our global competitors are emboldened.”

No U.S. president in modern times has been more loudly and unanimously rebuked by Great Britain’s political leaders than Biden.

On a visit to London last week, I was struck by the damning comments reserved for the U.S. president not only from backbench MPs but also from government ministers as well.

British lawmakers are utterly horrified with Biden’s reckless and dangerous approach. They are also appalled by his hostile stance toward Brexit, his unwillingness to move forward with a U.S.-U.K. trade deal, and his administration’s “woke” far-left ideology.

Biden is greatly undermining America’s position as the leader of the free world. His disastrous foreign policy and weak leadership is hugely damaging to the image of the United States across the Atlantic and throughout the free world.

The U.S. needs a grown-up in charge.

Biden is rapidly becoming an embarrassment, and his non-leadership is a gift to the enemies of the West, from the Taliban to the Chinese Communist Party.

America has never been weaker at the helm in the modern era, and many of our allies are now looking to America post-2024 for the restoration of U.S. leadership.

*****

This article was published on August 25, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Biden’s New Eviction Moratorium

The Supreme Court ordered the Biden administration on Thursday to stop enforcing the federal eviction moratorium recently extended to October.

In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the high court ruled that the moratorium, which has prohibited landlords from evicting low-income tenants since its implementation in March 2020, would need congressional authorization to be continued. The decision potentially exposes about 12 million Americans, who reported having little to no confidence in being able to make their next rental payment, to imminent eviction.

“It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has taken,” the Supreme Court ruling said. “But that has not happened. Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination.”

“It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts,” it continued.

Nearly 7.5 million U.S. households are behind on rent, and approximately 3.6 million say they will likely be evicted in the next two months, according to a Census Bureau survey released earlier this month.

On Aug. 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended the moratorium until early October. The new directive was tailored to apply to regions with “substantial and high levels” of coronavirus transmission, or roughly 95% of all U.S. counties.

The White House initially signaled it wouldn’t extend the moratorium beyond its previous expiration date, but the administration changed course after pressure from Democratic members of Congress. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the previous moratorium may stay in place, but could only be extended with congressional approval in a June order.

“The Biden administration is disappointed that the Supreme Court has blocked the most recent CDC eviction moratorium while confirmed cases of the Delta variant are significant across the country,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement. “As a result of this ruling, families will face the painful impact of evictions, and communities across the country will face greater risk of exposure to COVID-19.”

The Georgia and Alabama chapters of the National Association of Realtors filed an emergency motion after the CDC extended the moratorium, citing Kavanaugh’s concurrence. The plaintiffs, representing landlords and property owners, also cited remarks by President Joe Biden indicating that the moratorium was extended in order to tie up the court system.

“I can’t guarantee you the Court won’t rule that we don’t have that authority, but at least we’ll have the ability to — if we have to appeal — to keep this going for a month, at least,” Biden told reporters. “I hope longer.”

A federal court in Washington upheld the new moratorium, ruling that while its legality is dubious, Kavanaugh’s opinion “tied” its hands. A panel of judges from the Court of Appeals for D.C. affirmed the lower court’s ruling last week, opening the door to Supreme Court review.

The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to uphold the new moratorium in court documents filed Monday.

“This decision is the correct one, from both a legal standpoint and a matter of fairness,” National Association of Realtors spokesperson Patrick Newton told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday. “It brings to an end an unlawful policy that places financial hardship solely on the shoulders of mom-and-pop housing providers, who provide nearly half of all rental housing in America, and it restores property rights in America.”

“No housing provider wants to evict a tenant—it is always a last resort and reserved for the rarest cases,” he continued. “The best solution for all parties is rental assistance, and all energy should go toward its swift distribution.”

Earlier in the day, the Treasury Department acknowledged that 89% of the $46.6 billion allocated by Congress to assist low-income renters during the pandemic hasn’t been distributed by the states. Most states have distributed less than 14% of the Emergency Rental Assistance program funds that the federal government awarded them.

*****

This article was published on August 27, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

 

Fawning Over Fauci

We know that for the past year and a half, Fauci has played the role of public-health papa before a fawning media. We also know that despite his guidance flip-flops and questionable support for the government’s pandemic policy lapses, Fauci continues to hold forth on the latest measures such as mask and vaccine mandates.

Most importantly, though, we know that Fauci is the man at the top of the bureaucratic food chain regarding certain kinds of research funding. In other words, Fauci is responsible for doling out billions to supplicant scientists all over the world. When it comes to federal grants to research on deadly pathogens, including zoonotic viruses that resemble SARS-CoV-2, there is no higher authority in the United States than Fauci. He is a research monopsony.

So, we need to know more. Much more. Yet journalists are failing us.

Serious Questions Remain

Someone has to break through the institutional narrative. Someone has to cut through the cult of personality. And someone is going to have to stick out his-or-her neck to ask more questions of the world’s most powerful people. Note that none of these questions will gain much traction if they come from a right-wing politician in a Congressional hearing. We need journalists.

The media must consider the disturbing possibility that the very organization whose mission is “to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability” might be responsible, if indirectly, for the deaths of about 4.5 million people as of this writing.

Therefore, what we urgently need to know, are clear answers to the following questions:

  • Was Fauci and his agency responsible for funding research that could have led (or did lead) to a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? It doesn’t matter whether or not you like Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) or his politics. What matters is getting a more definitive answer to the above question. Technicalities around definitions of “gain of function” by NIH functionaries are irrelevant. We need the complete picture.
  • If we know gain-of-function or similar research carries a threat of this magnitude, why does the U.S. government fund such research at all? Indeed, why does the NIH/NIAID carry out this sort of research in collaboration with the Chinese, whose leaders have a sorry human rights record and probably have their own bioweapons program, according to various “intelligence” sources? We need to know the full story.
  • Was Fauci involved in any sort of cover-up about the potential origins of the virus? Such includes possible collusion with players such as Jeremy Farrar, Peter Daszak, Francis Collins, or Kristian Andersen. Remember that the latter warned Fauci initially that SARS-CoV-2 looked to have been engineered in a lab. Indeed, on January 31, 2020, Andersen wrote this to Fauci:“The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”Note this is the same Kristian Andersen who, just four days later, concluded that the very idea of a lab-made virus was a set of “crackpot theories.” We also know that, in the interim, Andersen met with Fauci, among other persons of interest. If one goes from warnings to gaslighting others making such warnings in just four days, we must ask why.

Questions around Fauci’s involvement (or negligence) ought to be at the top of every outlet’s list when it comes to a pandemic that has killed more Americans than the U.S. Civil War and millions more worldwide. What would the people in that fateful meeting stand to lose if the public knew they were at all responsible for this pandemic?

It has taken intrepid opinion writers such as Matt Ridley. Add in a network of investigatorsthat includes trollish provocateur Yuri Deigin to do the journalists’ job on the lab-leak hypothesis. Reporter Alison Young gets an honorable mention, I admit. And Katherine Eban deserves credit for going against the grain but was already firmly attached to the spigots that pumped out the same lab-leak theory when her piece in Vanity Fair hit newsstands. WaPo’s Josh Rogin tells of a GOP congressional report but why is the GOP doing the WaPo’s job?

What Journalism Has Become

We ought to have more answers to these questions, but journalists are no longer doing their jobs. Or perhaps more accurately, most journalists no longer think their job is to get to the bottom of anything. Some write for clicks. Others write for party. Too few seek the truth.

Imagine having a press credential and saying the following to yourself:

  1. Anthony Fauci is just one bureaucrat among many at the NIH/NIAID; he couldn’t possibly keep track of whether taxpayer funds were going to research into deadly viruses, much less whether research funds in Wuhan were for “gain of function.”
  2. If experts like Kristian Andersen are at the highest echelons of scientific expertise, then who is anyone to question that expertise–especially when it comes to viral pandemics? If I question Andersen’s claims, my colleagues might call me a crackpot.
  3. Anthony Fauci has done such a good job of guiding the country during this terrible public health crisis that his agency’s potential involvement in the deaths of millions is no reason to question his continued leadership.

And yet, with rare exception, the above are just the kinds of things a journalist would have to tell herself to stick her fingers in her ears and say lalalalala, nothing to see here.

Instead of starting with skepticism of official narratives, journalists now see themselves as the sentinels positioned around those narratives. This troubling abandonment of journalism’s primary purpose threatens our ability to make sense of the world.

Sadly, for many journos, that’s the idea.

Instead of digging for the facts, the media have become bullhorns for state actors and political proxies. Instead of ‘speaking truth to power,’ most now think their job is to serve power. Their favored experts, whose expertise is unassailable, are just agents masquerading as sources of truth. The very idea of science as an ongoing process has been corrupted. And the media now view their favorite politicians as would-be angels ready to bring about Heaven on Earth (well, if they didn’t have to contend with the opposition’s monsters.) As they see it, a journalist’s job is to propagate and amplify narratives that keep the public compliant and otherwise lost in a Hall of Mirrors. Let our vaunted leaders do their jobs, which is apparently to shore up architectures of behavioral control. Sometimes that means repeating talking points ad nauseum or telling noble lies.

American Pravda

If you could travel back in time and tell a Soviet, high in the Politburo, that there was no need to threaten reporters with the Gulag, they would not believe you. Yet here we are.

J-schools around the country have provided the political elite with willing pawns. Those who might once have probed authorities now serve as their mouthpieces. In America today, those closest to the seat of power squint at Jen Psaki and see C.J. Cregg.

But why?

Some play to internet incentives and social media dynamics. Others fear being canceled by their peers. A few fear their editors. But most of them are just lazy ideologues pumped out of Columbia or UNC-Chapel Hill. They’re trained to repeat variations on the party line. If a reporter’s duty was ever to improve public sensemaking, they have abandoned that duty. Between treating experts as near-omniscient or seeing career bureaucrats as paladins of the public trust, journalists have become credulous, willing instruments of the U.S. Ministry of Information.

The Gated Institutional Narrative

Twitter personality Eric Weinstein thinks the media have abandoned their mandate and have become guardians of what he terms the “gated institutional narrative.” I can’t help but agree. Yet when it came down to Paul vs. Fauci, Weinstein decided not to take sides. Instead, he surmises that Fauci’s involvement at the highest levels could be a form of “12-D chess” beyond the kin of Fauci’s populist interrogators. At least that’s how Fauci sees himself, suggests Weinstein.

When the stakes are high, Weinstein is wont to take detached, even esoteric positions. Maybe he doesn’t want to turn out to be wrong. Or maybe this is his poetic way of saying I don’t know. He certainly doesn’t want to be confused for the troglodytic contrarians who follow him. Whatever his motivations, Eric Weinstein is not a journalist. But it’s reasonable to assume he agrees with the proposition that journalists ought to be doing their jobs on this and other issues that would require breaking through the “gated institutional narrative,” 12-D chess notwithstanding.

So how do you fix journalism?

Objectivity in journalism is dead. It’s not only dead because journalists no longer value it, but also because most people have come to terms with the fact that no one is in a unique position to serve up Truth with a capital T as if it were a cheeseburger. Everyone is locked in their perspectives and we are all mediated by screens. But what’s left of journalism in the post-truth era is an army of lost souls pumping volleys in a meme war with no apparent end. That has to change if we are ever going to make any sense of things.

There is no single way to restore journalism’s integrity. It’s going to take a lot of different approaches. My favorite approach, though it’s probably the hardest, is to change the incentives that drive journalists. But that’s going to take innovation. Specifically, geeks will have to create sensemaking systems that put more people’s skin in the game — especially the journalists. Whether through reputation or remuneration, there needs to be a higher cost to being wrong.

In the next couple of years, we’ll see the advent of censorship-resistant sensemaking technologies. Such technologies will offer incentives for anyone to bring validating or falsifying evidence to journalists’ claims, including all the dubious “fact-checkers” out there. I imagine a kind of perceptions market designed to filter out bullshit or bravado and encourage the crowdsourcing of higher-quality evidence. (Better Skeptics is one such early effort though it lacks a market mechanism.)

Until such technology exists, we have to appeal to the time-honored tradition of being the one to get the scoop. We must awaken whatever journalistic ethics lies buried in the hearts of those few remaining journalists who have a heart.

Simply said, we need our journalists to:

  1. Start by questioning authority and office;
  2. Forget about who the facts might help or hurt;
  3. Track the truth to the extent possible, minimizing ego, bias, or baggage;
  4. Be a catalyst for copycats who might scoop you;
  5. Look for the story instead of the spectacle;
  6. Ask Who chooses? Who benefits? What are the facts?
  7. Follow answers to 6 wherever they might lead;
  8. Never bury inconvenient truths;
  9. Treat your sources with respect;
  10. Fight your editors to keep your integrity.

We may never know what happened in Fauci’s meeting in early February 2020. But we know that every single person in that meeting would have had strong incentives to call the notion of an engineered virus a crackpot theory (which they did), propagate the natural-origins theory (which they did), and obscure their potential involvement in the creation of a virus that has done so much damage around the world.

Though it might mean sacrificing short-term gains, journalists who do their jobs will be rewarded in the long run.

*****

This article was published on August 24,2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

Report: Gov. Lujan Grisham’s Car Gets Less Than 13 mpg, Well Below 52 mpg She Seeks For All State Vehicles

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham drives a car with an average fuel economy of less than 13 mpg, according to records obtained by Power the Future and first reported by The Federalist.

At the same time, Lujan Grisham committed the state in 2019 to new energy efficiency standards that included requiring new cars sold in the state beginning this year to emit an average 52 mpg, a goal that hasn’t been achieved.

“While not as bad as John Kerry’s private jet, Gov. Lujan Grisham’s actions surely deserve an honorable mention for the most green hypocrisy in the country,” Power the Future Communications Director Larry Behrens told The Center Square.

Power the Future is a nonprofit organization that advocates for energy workers in the U.S. The group filed an Inspection of Public Records Act request with the governor’s office to obtain the information on the fuel economy of the vehicle Lujan Grisham uses. The state data revealed her vehicle averaged 12.65 miles per gallon between July 2020 and June 2021.

“This Governor has overseen nation-leading unemployment, long breadlines, and adoption of the radical green agenda that is hurting New Mexico’s working families,” Behrens said. “At the same time, she’s getting less than 14 mpg to drive around and lecture the rest of us on the climate. Make no mistake, her eco-left allies will stay quiet about her gas-guzzling ways because they care more about political power than being honest.”

Lujan Grisham’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

Fox News and The New York Post reported earlier this month that John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s climate czar, has traveled in his private jet at least 20 times this year, emitting 30 times the amount of carbon of an average car.

*****

This article was published on August 26, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

Media Are Only Tough on Biden When He’s Not in the Room

President Joe Biden is still in the midst of the worst stretch of news coverage of his administration—and it’s one of his own creation.

Facts that have emerged about Biden’s calamitous withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan show that he was unwilling to listen to his own military leaders, changed his story about his faith in the Afghan fighting force, and told other easily disprovable falsehoods about conditions on the ground.

To their credit, the news media have been extremely tough on Biden, calling him out on his inaccurate or inconsistent statements and holding him accountable when his rhetoric doesn’t match reality in Kabul. But that’s only when he’s not in the room.

At last Friday’s press conference, presumably arranged to help him gain better communications footing on Afghanistan, Biden actually took questions, albeit from a small, preselected group of reporters. It’s easy to see why the White House keeps Biden under wraps much of the time, because he got himself into trouble on several fronts.

The commander in chief made several dubious claims that were either immediately refuted by others in his administration or by media located at the scene of the chaos.

He claimed that al-Qaeda was “gone” from Afghanistan when it has a presence in at least 15 provinces.

He disputed that there have been criticisms from our NATO allies, when in fact complaints have been public and plentiful.

And he assured us that Americans were having no trouble reaching the airport in Kabul to catch a flight home, when in truth some have been harassed and beaten.

Indeed, one day after Biden’s remarks, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul advised Americans to avoid going to the airport altogether until they were directly instructed to do so by someone from the government.

Following Biden’s appearance, the media dissected all of these statements and laid out in great detail how wrong the president was on each count. For a media that has been extremely forgiving of Biden’s many flaws, it was an impressive display of “speaking truth to power.”

The Sunday morning shows piled on, with hosts and guests pointing out Biden’s fallacies.

And so, when Biden announced another press conference on Sunday afternoon, the stage was set for White House reporters to ask Biden “what he didn’t know and why he didn’t know it.”

Only that didn’t happen.

Incredibly, none of the reporters present, many of whom represented outlets that had blasted Biden for his falsehoods of 48 hours earlier, could summon the courage to confront him with the most obvious questions about his previous statements.

The most adversarial question came from CBS reporter Ed O’Keefe, who asked Biden about a new poll showing Americans “no longer consider you to be competent, focused, or effective at the job.”

But even then, O’Keefe felt the need to go light on Biden, including in his question an apology, saying, “Forgive me, I’m just the messenger.”

So, how to explain this bifurcation of media attitude toward Biden? On one hand, they are willing to castigate him from afar when he tells blatant untruths, but on the other, they will not do so when given the opportunity to question him directly.

One theory on the tough media commentary is that they feel Biden has betrayed them: his embarrassing performance makes them look like fools for cheerleading for his candidacy and early presidency.

It’s my opinion that during the Democratic presidential primaries, many reporters favored other contestants, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. But when Biden became the Democratic nominee, he became their de facto candidate of choice.

The reporters who were with Biden during the campaign were well aware of his drawbacks, just as they knew of President Donald Trump’s campaign arguments that Biden was ill-prepared to lead the country.

Now that Biden is flailing, commentators who previously glossed over his flaws are more willing to lash out and be critical.

But what of reporters who demur when face-to-face with Biden—something they never did when Trump was at the podium?

The simplest explanation is that access is powerful leverage for the White House. Biden has been far less available than his predecessors to this point, and has not yet agreed to sit down for interviews with major outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal.

It is also readily apparent that Biden has a pre-scripted list of reporters he intends to call on during press events, sometimes even fumbling for a card to make sure he gets the names right. What’s unknown is whether these screened reporters are required to tell the White House communications staff the gist of their questions in advance.

Given this landscape, it seems obvious that making Biden look bad in a press conference is not a smart approach for reporters who want to continue to have access, hear their names called to ask questions, or be granted an audience in the Oval Office.

Further proof of this dynamic can be seen by comparing Biden’s Sunday press event with Monday’s appearance by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.

On Sunday, Biden rattled off a series of numbers, indicating that the United States already has airlifted thousands of people out of harm’s way in Afghanistan. He did not say, nor was he asked, how many of them were Americans.

But by Monday, the press was ready for Kirby, and grilled him on the number of Americans who are still inside the collapsed nation.

By now, it ought to be dawning on the Biden White House that this is not like a campaign, and it can’t just protect the boss as much as possible and hope to ride out the bad news. But as long as reporters in the room are hesitant to vigorously question the leader of the free world, they will be tempted to continue the strategy.

*****

This article was published on August 23, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Afghanistan’s Former President and the Kleptocracy of “Liberal Democracy”

The predictable collapse of the American-imposed Afghan government has served as a powerful illustration of the hubris of the West’s Very Serious policy elites. Within the chaos of the past week emerged a figure that perhaps best personifies the sheer inadequacy of the modern ruling class: former president Ashraf Ghani.

Looking at Ghani’s resume, it is easy to see why he was a perfect figure for Western governments. Born in Afghanistan but educated abroad, he holds a PhD from Columbia and supplemental education from the business schools at Harvard and Stanford. His resume included teaching stints at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins before holding positions at the World Bank and the UN prior to the war in Afghanistan. Ghani served as the chief advisor to President Hamid Karzai and as the state’s finance minister prior to assuming the presidency. (Both of his elections sparked allegations of election irregularities.)

He is also the author of the book Fixing Failed States, published by Oxford.

Ghani is perhaps best known now as a man who fled his presidential palace with $169 million. Even before an official denial from the former president, questions around the logistics of transporting that amount of cash cast doubt on the claims. Still, regardless of what actually happened when Ghani fled Kabul, there is a truthfulness to the image of the failed leader stealing from the Afghan people.

Ashraf Ghani embodies the degree to which modern neoliberal democracy is a façade for the ruling kleptocracy.

After all, no matter what happened in his final moments as president, Ghani was a failure at putting into practice what he had spent his entire life talking about: making Afghanistan a prosperous nation. While he was a darling of Western politicians and prestigious NGOs, he was a leader completely inept and out of touch with the realities of a country he spent most of his adult life avoiding.

As Bloomberg’s Eltaf Najafizada and Archana Chaudhary noted:

In many ways, Ghani’s swift downfall reflects the broader failures of the U.S. to impose a government on Afghanistan that had buy-in from a range of competing power brokers with a long history of fighting on the battlefield rather than at the ballot box. Although he was a Pashtun, the country’s dominant ethnic group, Ghani was seen as an outsider who lacked the political touch to unite disparate factions, and he became more isolated over time. 

“Ghani was not accommodating of the realities of how Afghanistan works,” said Kabir Taneja, author of [the book] “The ISIS Peril: The World’s Most Feared Terror Group and its Shadow on South Asia” and a fellow at Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. “He either didn’t understand or couldn’t understand the warlords, who are essentially people representing ethnic fault lines.”

Ghani’s main utility was his comfort with the American politicians his regime depended on for financial and military support. For the Afghan state, the support of Washington was always more important than the support of the nation. The collapse of such a political order is predictable, as was the rampant corruption. A generation of military contractors became very rich, thanks to Beltway investments in boondoggles such as an $88 billion army that vanished without US support—even as the people of Afghanistan suffered rising poverty.

The victims of the past two decades are the tens of thousands of lives lost, and the taxpayers plundered for this boondoggle. The benefactors are the war profiteers in all their forms and individuals like Ghani, who will be able to spin failure into a comfortable life of speaking gigs. 

This sort of underserved enrichment is, of course, not as obscene as the image of a runaway president moving pallets of American dollars. But the real scandal is just how normal this sort of outcome is.

For generations now, the governing institutions of the West have been a means for highly credentialed academics to get rich off taxpayers, regardless of merit and performance. Leading academic institutions use their credentials as a way to empower a technocratic class with grandiose aims and dangerous ideologies. With the assistance of organizations like Ghani’s World Bank, these same institutions are able to infect other nations—as illustrated by how many central banks, including Afghanistan’s, are staffed with Ivy League alums.

Along the way, these same public officials continue to push a political agenda to further consolidate power in globalist institutions far removed and isolated—culturally, economically, and physically—from the public, all the while proclaiming themselves defenders of “liberal democracy.”

Regardless of whether or not Ashraf Ghani actually escaped his nation with bags full of cash, it is proper to see him as a thief who robbed the people of Afghanistan and the US. And his example is the norm, not the exception. 

​As Murray Rothbard famously noted, “[T]he State is a gang of thieves writ large.” The same label applies to the technocratic class that it empowers.

*****

The article was published on August 20, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

NEA Head Demands More Lockdowns and Masks, Defends Anti-Vaccine Teachers

When Becky Pringle, the president of America’s largest teachers union, sat down for an interview with The Atlantic, a left-progressive magazine owned by liberal mega-donor she surely expected softball cover from her fellow arch-liberals. However, as the president of the United States discovered when he sat down with a Clinton administration flack-turned-ostensible-journalist this week, even the most committed partisan outlets cannot defend a leftist defending a completely indefensible position. For Pringle and the National Education Association, that position is simple: no vaccine mandates for us, but mask mandates and school lockdowns for your children.

For Your Children, Lockdowns and Masks

The Atlantic’s Emma Green asked Pringle a simple question: “Do you believe that every school in the United States should be open for full-time, in-person instruction in the fall of 2021?” Pringle’s response was not “Yes,” but the same hostage taking that teachers unionists have employed since the first identification of COVID-19:

We have been working the whole year to try to ensure that every single school has the big R: resources. . . . For that to be true, the community has to work with schools to ensure that they follow the science, listen to the infectious-disease experts, and then make decisions that will keep their students safe.

On masks, Pringle demands more mandates on your kids. For all Pringle’s citation of “the science” in defending these unprecedented measures, note well that European countries, which have often employed much harsher general lockdowns, have typically not forced elementary school children to wear masks for eight hours per day because European health officials have seen no scientific evidence that any benefits of such mandates exceed their costs.

For Us, Not Even the Fee for the Gaming License

But Pringle and the NEA think one intervention goes too far: vaccination mandates for school staff, who are often NEA members. While children cannot see each other’s smiles at NEA demand, Pringle cautions about “complexities of vaccinations” and asks that her members receive “accommodations that need to be made.” She did deign to acknowledge that unvaccinated teachers should regularly be tested for COVID.

Put simply, the ruling class of which Pringle is a member is to suffer no imposition comparable to that imposed on children and parents. In The Godfather Part II, Michael Corleone told the senator, “My offer is this: Nothing; not even the fee for the gaming license.” In exchange for demanding a previously unthinkable imposition on children, Pringle offers next to nothing.

Strictly Business

Green also pressed Pringle on a “perception” we have noted is well founded but liberals often prefer to ignore: Teachers unions appear responsible for most of the school lockdowns. And Pringle, following her AFT counterpart Randi Weingarten, responded like the politician she is, denying that she put her members ahead of children in an act of supreme gaslighting.

The COVID-19 response has made clear that teachers unions’ principal loyalty is to their political agendas and the interest of their most radical activist members. One cannot blame Pringle or Weingarten for putting the people who pay their salaries ($285,365 and $417,968, respectively) first. As Corleone would say, “It’s not personal . . . it’s strictly business.”

*****

This article was published on August 20, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from Capital Research.

Texas Parents Seeking To Home School Increases Five-Fold From 2020 Record

The number of Texas families pulling their children out of public schools and pursuing home-schooling in one week this month is five times greater than the same time period last year, the Texas Homeschool Coalition reports.

“We are literally inundated with calls and emails from thousands upon thousands of families asking how they can begin homeschooling this fall,” Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition, said in a statement.

“In the fall of 2020, the number of homeschooling families in Texas had nearly tripled from 4.5 percent in the spring to 12.3 percent by October, according to the U.S. Census Bureau,” the coalition reports. A conservative estimate put the number of students being home-schooled in Texas in 2020 at roughly 750,000, a state record.

Last year, the coalition saw a 400% increase in requests from parents to help them process withdrawal requests from public schools. Prior to the state shutdown, between 22,000 and 25,000 Texas students had already been withdrawn from the public school system.

But then as children returned to school through virtual learning and parents observed what they were being taught or not being taught and increased failing grades were being reported, more parents withdrew their children from public schools. The coalition then published an online map reporting data related to the withdrawal of children from public schools in grades 7 through 12 based on Texas Education Agency data, which includes only those grade levels.

But 2021 numbers are “now crushing” the 2020 records, Lambert says.

The weekly call and email volume the coalition received last week set a new record, with more than five times more parents contacting them then during the same week last year, Lambert says. The call volume exploded after school districts imposed mask mandates and other restrictions, defying Gov. Greg Abbott’s order preventing them from doing so.

“Our call volume and contact volume doubled last week. We went from 300 to 500 calls to 1,000,” Lambert said.

Many parents hoping to have their children return to school in person with fewer restrictions than last year said they don’t want to have anything to do with school districts’ retaliatory policies for noncompliance or ongoing school district mandates.

Lambert told ABC affiliate KTRK TV, “We are hearing parents who are saying, ‘You know, I am real uncomfortable with the situation in the schools’, ‘I do not want my kids to wear a mask’, ‘I do want my kids to wear a mask.'”

Of the parents the coalition has spoken with, 72% said they were going to continue home-schooling as they did last year; 19% said they were going to try to return to in-person instruction and 9% said they were undecided.”

According to a survey last year by RealClear Opinion Research, 40% of registered voters polled said they were more likely to home-school after their state’s respective lockdowns ended, meaning in the Fall 2021 term.

John Schilling, president of the American Federation of Children, said at the time, “Every single family with kids in school has been incredibly disrupted by the lockdowns. With 55 million students no longer in their normal educational setting, families are clearly considering new options and many are seeing the benefits of homeschooling and virtual schooling.

“Policymakers owe it to the taxpayers who are footing the $800 billion K-12 education bill to maximize their investment by ensuring every child has access to a quality education and outcomes are improved across the board.”

Texas lawmakers took note, and passed two home-school-related bills during the regular legislative session. Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bills into law, The University Interscholastic League Equal Access Bill, House Bill 547, and the Learning Pod Protection Act, Senate Bill 1955, which become effective Sept. 1.

HB 547 will allow public school district students whose parents pay taxes to school districts to participate in University Interscholastic League sponsored activities. SB 1955 exempts learning pods from local government regulatory burdens.

*****

This article was published on August 21, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

The Socialist Robot from Scranton

Certainly this early in the first term, it might be premature to issue judgements on Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., but we confess he has turned out to be even worse than our most disturbing nightmare.

He has divided the country further, by pitting the masked against the unmasked, the vaccinated against the unvaccinated. He has attempted to divide blacks against whites, completely buying into notions of white supremacy and Critical Race Theory. You would think he was actually the President of Black Lives Matter.

He has even taken to symbolic kneeling. The gesture, besides proving he is still pretty lithe, is that he is one them. One of those who feels America was founded in racism and still suffers from systemic racism. 

He continues his class warfare rhetoric and is even dividing the country between those who work and those who wait for a government check.  He thinks landlords should continue to pay their mortgages and pay their taxes, but collect no rent, thus dividing landlord and tenant.

He seems to believe that those who disagree with him are domestic terrorists while he is silent about his supporters conducting more than 175 major riots and killing and wounding innumerable police officers last summer leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

Even as the riots continue in places like Portland, can you recall any remarks he has made condemning such violence?

His domestic agenda is aggressively partisan. With an historically narrow margin in  the House and a 50/50 split in the Senate, he is cramming legislation through that is larger and more intrusive than the New Deal and Great Society.  

It used to be an axiom in Washington, that major social legislation required bipartisan support, or it would not stand and would not be accepted.

He has already failed at the border, failed with the economy, failed with inflation and disastrously failed in Afghanistan. To all those failures he either seems unaware or not concerned. It is as if he is above all the mess he is making.

Biden and the Democrat Party have junked that bipartisan rule and Republicans must return the favor. If Republicans can come to power, despite the plans the Democrats have to change the population of the country and all reasonable voting procedures, we must vow to repeal every law and every executive order passed during the Biden term. We must not accept this socialist assault on the nation and abuse of power.

Beside the policy disagreements we have with the man, his demeanor is strange. Scott Johnson of POWERLINK fame perhaps has the best description…animatronic.

There is something eerily mechanical about his performance. He comes out and squints into the teleprompter and reads in a stilted way, often slurring words that garble even the most carefully worded speech. He often chops the lectern with hands held identical on left and right sides, all with the grace of a puppet slightly off in timing.

He calls on reporters from a prepared list, and on August 26, actually said he had been “instructed” to call on a reporter from NBC.  Instructed by whom?  Is he that carefully programed?  Why does he have to be coached?

Someone has seen that he is very well dressed. Looking presidential is different from being presidential. An impeccable suit with matching tie is not a substitute for leadership and real intellectual substance. He puts on a show of being Presidential but there is something hollow about the whole display. It is sort of like a false front western town on the back lot of a Hollywood studio.

The skin on this face is stretched from plastic surgery and his smile is reliably crooked, as if rehearsed to perfection. His eyes are often empty, as if devoid of feeling. He can look into the camera and lie without any compunction. He can abandon tens of thousands of Americans behind enemy lines without feeling or a sense of duty. He just feels annoyance if the subject of their plight is brought up.

What did seem to arouse his emotion is when he was questioned about desperate people falling thousands of feet from departing C-17s. “That was five days ago” he snapped incorrectly. Apparently the horror of the thing and his culpability in it diminished with the passage of a few days.

He has shown a strange lack of emotion on just about everything except attacking his predecessor. 

Unlike those in the English Parliament, Biden shows no anguish, no sense of shame for what he has done in Afghanistan. It  seems all so mechanical and cold.

If questions are asked to challenge the script, he turns and walks away as if he can’t be bothered with any explanation for his disastrous policies. We are not owed any kind of discussion as he acts as if he were a king. He walks away slowly, with diffidence. It is either that he that needs to flee or his instructions are to escape to a safe space as soon as he is confronted.

It is almost as if he was created for Disneyland’s audio animatronic show  although we suspect Abe Lincoln would run from the stage if Biden were included.  And he is far too flat for the Country Bear Jamboree. 

Biden’s mouth is moving but you get the feeling that the words are not his and that what remains of this brain has become a recording device, and a bad one at that. He is the White House animatronic show with a Marxian dialogue.

Say what you will about Trump, but he was spontaneous, rushed to the microphone and took the questions, answering off the cuff, sometimes to his detriment. He was so much in charge, he had trouble keeping some key people in cabinet positions. But at least he was genuine. He may have had views with which you disagree, but you never questioned those were his heartfelt opinions. Biden acts like a robot whose batteries are fading.

There is a calculated coldness about the man. It reminds one of dictators such as Joseph Stalin who once noted that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of millions is a statistic. He seems unmoved by the Americans he has put in harm’s way, the certain death of many of our Afghan allies and the crisis he has foisted on NATO.  We have a deadline to meet and that is that. If Americans can’t get out, they are on their own. They are now just a statistic.

An orderly withdrawal could have been engineered with due consideration to Americans and those that supported us. And, it could have been done without arming the Taliban to the teeth.

History will judge his actions harshly and so should we as voters.

Educrats Are Panicking As Their Extremism Alienates More Families

These events at the beginning of a new school year indicate one thing: the educational establishment in this country is losing its grip on power and running scared.

The optics on unconditional surrender are terrible, which is why Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon avoided fanfare when she signed Senate Bill 744, a law that suspends high school graduation requirements for reading, writing, and math. Her reasons: to combat systemic racism and boost graduation numbers for minorities.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS), already feeling the heat for advancing critical race theory, has doubled down by greenlighting Policy 8040, which provides exceptions for transgendered students at the expense of the rest of the student body and the faculty. The approval came a few days after LCPS showed its contempt for parents and community members by restricting their ability to attend board meetings and voice their concerns there.

Up in Rhode Island, the state branch of the National Education Association (NEA) is suing to block the public records request of a kindergartener’s mother who has dared to question the wisdom of teaching critical race theory to five-year-olds.

On the national scene, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, has threatened another year of school closures if students (vaccinated or not) don’t wear masks, a demand that is utterly unsupported by the science she claims to be following. This shakedown comes after emails revealed in May that the AFT had been instrumental in convincing the Biden administration’s Centers for Disease Control to delay reopening schools in early 2021.

Taken together, these events at the beginning of a new school year indicate one thing: the educational establishment in this country is losing its grip on power and running scared.

A Regime in Crisis

When in peril, authoritarian regimes react in predictable ways. They try to deflect attention from the glaring problems they created and often flat-out lie about how things are going. If need be, they will crack down on those who oppose them. Most important of all, they try to increase their subjects’ reliance on them.

All of these actions are signs that those who run these regimes are facing a serious threat in the form of a burgeoning revolution. The American education establishment is confronting just such a revolution.

Discontent with American schooling has been growing for decades, but the ruling junta has been able to contain the damage in large part through a massive disinformation campaign demonizing the various forces arrayed against them. Until recently, the power of the teachers’ unions and their political allies seemed all but invincible.

Then COVID-19 hit, and the game changed. Suddenly, parents saw just what their children were being taught, and they were not pleased. What’s more, they saw the ineffectiveness of remote learning and the hubris of those who foisted it upon their children. Now the smoldering embers have become a fire and the regime is scrambling to reassert control.

Assaulted on Several Fronts

Homeschooling is the most direct beneficiary of parents’ new revolutionary fervor. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) reports a major surge in homeschooling using U.S. Census Data.

Even when compensating for remote learning by “[labeling] students as homeschoolers only if they were not simultaneously enrolled in public or private schools,” the data shows that three times as many homeschooled students in the spring of 2021 than there were a year before. While the HSDLA cites fears of COVID as one reason to expect the homeschooling boom to continue, it also notes that safety issues unrelated to COVID, such as bullying, and curriculum concerns are other major factors.

Recent information for the other two education options, charter schools and private schools, is more sparse. However, charter school creation and enrollment have been steadily increasing over the past decade and the movement will most likely benefit from the anti-teachers’ union sentiment engendered by lockdowns and curriculum shifts.

As for private schools, a report from the Cato Institute notes the economic turmoil of the last year and a half has forced some to shut their doors and reduced overall enrollment. However, because of their independence from school districts, private schools were far more likely to resume full-time in-person learning by the end of 2020, an important point to consider should public schools initiate lockdowns and remote learning in the future. Also, private school parents “reported fewer negative effects—academic, emotional, physical—on their children from the pandemic than traditional public school parents,” which testifies to the superior COVID responsiveness of the private sector.

The true measure of the cultural shift taking place, however, is in the increase in support for school choice. A RealClear Opinion poll conducted this past June indicated an increase in this support across the board, including for parents being able to direct how to spend some or all of COVID money set aside for K-12 education. Most surprising is the fact that in just over a year, support for school choice from registered Democrats increased from 59 percent to 70 percent, which bodes ill for the decades-old alliance between the party and the teachers’ unions.

The educational establishment’s spate of saber-rattling reveals the weakness of its commitment to the families it supposedly serves. Although it still possesses incredible resources, it fears real competition like never before. It is high time that American parents treat the educrats like the paper tigers they are and declare their independence by embracing the other educational options available in a free society.

*****

This article was published on August 23, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

Only 5 Percent Of People Evacuated From Afghanistan By The US Are Americans

About only 5 percent of the people the United States has evacuated from Afghanistan are Americans seeking safe passage home.

More than 82,300 have been airlifted from Kabul since the government’s collapse nearly two weeks ago, but the Pentagon says that, as of Wednesday [August 25], only 4,400 Americans were rescued in those evacuation operations.

President Joe Biden previously promised to get out the Americans who are left in Afghanistan and subject to the Taliban’s rule, but so far, our own citizens do not appear to be the priority.

The State Department also confirmed that a majority of the people whisked away on flights from Kabul are not U.S. citizens. On Tuesday, Politico national security reporter Alex Ward reported leaked numbers indicating that in just 15 hours on Aug. 23, the United States evacuated approximately 6,916 people from Afghanistan. Only 483 of those were American citizens while the rest were Aghan nationals.

While estimates suggest that thousands are still stranded in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s swift takeover of the capital city, the Biden administration still refuses to disclose just how many Americans were left behind. The administration’s process for thoroughly vetting individuals coming into the United States from Afghanistan is also unclear.

Polls indicate that Biden’s approval ratings are nosediving following his administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan, but Politico reports that the White House and “administration allies have begun aggressively touting the success of their evacuation efforts in the war-torn country, offering frequent updates on the number of evacuees.”

“They’ve framed the operation as historic — in line with the Berlin airlift — declared that they’re ‘over performing’ their own metrics, and trumpeted the president as ‘defying expectations,’” the article stated.

*****

This article was published on August 25, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich Tells ‘Lawless’ Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to Provide Subpoenaed Material to Auditors or Lose Millions in State Revenues

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich laid down the law today with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced that his office (AGO) determined the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (MCBOS) is in violation of state law for failing to comply with the Arizona Senate’s legislative subpoena related to the 2020 election audit. If MCBOS does not change course, the AGO will notify the Arizona Treasurer to withhold Maricopa County’s state-shared funds as required under the law.

“We are notifying the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors that it must fully comply with the Senate’s subpoena as required by the law,” said Attorney General Mark Brnovich. “Our courts have spoken. The rule of law must be followed.”

Today’s decision stems from a “SB 1487” complaint filed by Senator Sonny Borrelli under A.R.S. § 41-194.01, which authorizes any legislator to request the Attorney General investigate a county or city alleged to be in violation of state law. On July 26, 2021, Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and Senator Warren Petersen (Senators) issued a subpoena to MCBOS related to the Senate’s audit of the 2020 election. The Senators requested six categories of items for production by August 2, 2021, including routers and network logs.

*****

Continue reading this article published August 26, 2021 at Gateway Pundit.

Almost 15 Million 2020 Mail-In Ballots Unaccounted For

Almost 15 million mail-in votes have “gone unaccounted for,” according to a new report by the Indiana-based election integrity group ”Public Interest Legal Foundation” (PILF).

“In the face of a pandemic, states from across the nation hastily pushed traditionally in person voters to mail ballots while, at the same time, trying to learn how to even administer such a scenario” the report stated.

PILF describes itself as “the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity,” existing “to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity and fight against lawlessness in American elections.”

Former Justice Department civil rights attorney and current PJ Media contributor J. Christian Adams, the president of PILF, said the results don’t bode well for mail-in voting.

“These figures detail how the 2020 push to mail voting needs to be a one-year experiment,” Adams said in a statement.

Bills in Congress, including H.R. 1, the supposed For The People Act, “risk inflating these numbers even further, pushing our election system toward error, disenfranchisement, and ultimately widespread doubt about election outcomes,” Adams continued. “Some of the counties with the least experience in administering mail voting rejected the most ballots nationwide. If continued, 2020-style chaos will become the norm.”

Federal data compilations show that the status of 14.7 million ballots was deemed “unknown” by election officials during the 2020 election, and almost 43.1 million ballots combined from elections in 2012 and onward.

*****

Continue reading this article at PJ Media.

Our $28 Trillion National Debt Is Coming Due

If we don’t stop our runaway national debt, it will require much higher taxes and dramatic cuts in spending.

Last September, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the federal debt wouldn’t hit $29 trillion until 2028. Just short of a year later, the national debt stands at $28.6 trillion and is set to surpass $29 trillion within weeks.

Since Congress hasn’t yet enacted all its new spending proposals, the CBO debt estimates don’t yet include them. The $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill still has to pass the House, and a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill will add to the current budget. The proposed 2022 budget will likely be more than $6 trillion (up from $4.8 trillion in 2020).

Adding all this up, a $40 trillion federal debt is likely within a couple of years. Estimates that the debt will reach $50 trillion by 2030 are not particularly remarkable given the current pace.

The CBO assumes that interest rates on the national debt won’t reach 2 percent until 2027, but this is a big assumption. If the interest rate rises by just 1 percent, that would create an additional $400 billion in annual payments on the national debt.

Interest Rates and Inflation Worsen the Outlook

To finance the debt, the U.S. Treasury has to sell bonds. Currently, the interest rate on ten-year U.S. Treasury bonds is just 1.29 percent. From 1990 to 2020, the rate averaged 4.4 percent. Over the 60 years from 1960 to 2020, it averaged 6.0 percent.

Even if we return to only the 4.4 percent rate, that would cause a massive increase in interest payments. A 3 percentage point increase would add $1.2 trillion to the annual deficit. Soon, we will find ourselves borrowing more just to pay the interest on the debt that we already owe.

Inflation has been on the rise, and interest rates have to at least be high enough to compensate bondholders for the dollar’s diminishing purchasing power. In June and July, consumer inflation averaged an annual rate of 8.4 percent. Over that same two months, the producer inflation rate, the cost to businesses, soared at an annual rate of 12.6 percent.

In fact, interest rates on bonds have to outpace expected inflation for anyone to want to buy them. I will not lend you money if I expect the total you pay me back is worth less than what I originally gave you. The return has to be even more than inflation because bondholders also have to pay taxes on their interest income.

Increased Tax Rates Will Drive Up Debt

President Biden’s proposed increases in individual and corporate income tax rates would create even greater increases in interest rates, thus adding even further to the dramatic debt increases that Biden and Democrats have planned.

Our entire national income (GDP) is now $22.72 trillion. Few European countries have higher debt burdens relative to GDP. Greece’s debt is 107 percent greater than its national income, and Italy’s is 55 percent greater. Few would disagree that both of those countries have debt crises, and our debt already exceeds annual income by 26 percent.

Imagine if you had to borrow each month to pay the interest on your mortgage payment, and that you did so for many years. Lending money to someone like that would be very risky, and any loan would come with high-interest rates to compensate for that risk.

Countries can and do default on their debt. Argentina defaulted, but was cut off from international trade and foreign capital markets, plus faced seizure of its assets in other countries.

High Government Debt Causes Inflation

Many heavily indebted countries try to solve the problem with increased inflation. In theory, 50 percent inflation would reduce the value of the debt by 50 percent. But lenders are unlikely to simply be caught off guard, and new buyers won’t buy bonds unless they have a high enough interest to protect them against hints of such rampant inflation. And, of course, high inflation comes with its own dire economic consequences.

The unique status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency would make such an inflationary escape particularly costly for the United States. In the face of high inflation rates, foreigners will sell their dollars and the dollar’s value will fall. That will make it more costly for us to buy goods from other countries. Foreign-held dollars will also come back to the United States, increasing the domestic money supply and causing further inflation.

All this means a lot of pain. Given how quickly our debt is increasing, that pain isn’t just in store for distant future generations. If we can’t stop the runaway national debt, it will require much higher taxes and dramatic cuts in spending. For older people looking out for threats to Social Security and Medicare, this is it.

*****

This article was published on August 19, 2021 and is reprinted with permission from The Federalist.

Joe Biden “Leading the World” Off a Cliff

President Biden just delivered a speech on Afghanistan so rife with misdirection and mendacity that it’s hard to know where to start. But from the welter of Orwellian Newspeak, let’s pluck a line in which we find Biden praising himself for his handling of Afghanistan. Biden told us: “This is about America leading the world, and all our allies have agreed with that.”

If so, this is about America, under his stewardship, leading the world off a cliff.

Whatever the arguments for leaving Afghanistan or maintaining a minimal force, Biden and his advisors and planners (assuming there were any?) have delivered the worst of all worlds. Whatever the difficulties inherent in any retreat, this is a rout. The great American superpower has been chased out of its embassy, out of Kabul, out of Afghanistan, by the Taliban—who now surround the airport where Americans are fleeing for their lives, and Afghans who worked with them are begging for passage—if they can get to the airport at all.

This is a humiliating defeat, echoing way beyond Afghanistan. It is guaranteed to embolden America’s enemies and signal our allies that it is folly to trust America. China is gloating online, with propaganda organs putting out headlines such as this, from the Global Times: “U.S. will abandon Taiwan in a crisis.” Nor should we write that off as mere propaganda; there is a deeply alarming likelihood that this is exactly what Beijing, with its ringside seat (including an open embassy flying the Chinese flag in Kabul) is now calculating. Russia’s Vladimir Putin must be relishing the moment, fresh from telling Biden at a June summit that neither Russia nor China was interested in a U.S. military presence in Central Asia, once Biden completed his plans to pull out of Afghanistan. These predatory powers want America gone from their neighborhoods, and for their purposes, the more ignominious the departure, the better.

Nor is it going to reassure America’s friends and allies that Biden and his handlers are so busy trying to spin the story that they seem to have fetched up in some alternate universe. Biden began his remarks by stressing that the U.S. evacuation effort in Kabul is “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.” He underscored that of all the countries in the world, only America is “capable of projecting this much power on the far side of the world with this degree of precision….” Yes indeed, America is a mighty nation, and we can be proud of the astounding abilities and courage of our armed forces.

But as Biden, or his speechwriters, formulated this praise of the military, it serves chiefly to deflect attention from the atrocious planning and strategic idiocy emanating from the office of the Commander-in-Chief (including the decision to pull out weeks ago from Afghanistan’s commodious Bagram military base, near Kabul; leaving the commercial airport as the only escape route). This is not the Berlin airlift—in which America led a defiant support of freedom. In Kabul, the American troops ordered back in by Biden to carry out the evacuation have been handed a mission that boils down to America’s self-demeaning rush for the exit. If Biden is going to tout U.S. military power, he owes us all an honest explanation of why, under his command, this nightmare scene—with its iconic image of Afghans falling to their deaths from an American Air Force jet on takeoff—turned out to be the best America could manage.

There’s plenty more, including Biden’s bizarre claim that al Qaeda is gone from Afghanistan: “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al Qaeda gone?” Though according to a report just this June by a United Nations panel of experts on these matters: “Large numbers of Al-Qaida fighters and other foreign extremist elements aligned with the Taliban are located in various parts of Afghanistan.” (These are topics on which even the UN tends to produce more reliable information than the Biden White House, which is doubly intriguing because, though we can’t tell for sure, it is quite likely U.S. intelligence that has helped inform the UN report.)

Then there’s Biden’s astounding assertion that “I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.” Perhaps someone should brief him on the fury in Britain’s parliament, summed up in a Reuters headline: “UK lawmakers condemn PM Johnson and U.S. President Biden over Afghanistan.” Or the anger of NATO members that Biden did not consult them about his plans for withdrawing from Afghanistan. For that matter, Biden and his crew would be wise to take a moment to stop the gaslighting and actually listen to the American public. For all the federally-backed crusades for American self-flagellation, there is an enormous number of Americans who prefer being proud of their country, and proud of its role as leader of the Free World. They really don’t like the Biden version of withdrawal from Afghanistan—neither the oily fictions from the White House, nor the grotesque defeat now playing out in Kabul.

*****

This article was published on August 23, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the Independent Women’s Forum.

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