Damon Young: To Stop White Supremacy, Eliminate Whites

Damon Young, a black writer for The Root, a black-oriented commentary site owned by the same people who own Jezebel, Gizmodo, and The Onion (their parent company is Univision), had this to say at The Root about the Atlanta massage parlor mass murders:

I don’t have much to add here today that hasn’t already been said.

Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people—white people and people who are not white, my mom included. There will be people who die, in 2050, because of white supremacy-induced decisions from 1850.

A line can and should be drawn from the actions of the white supremacist who walked into three Atlanta-area massage parlors yesterday, and allegedly killed eight people—six of whom were of Asian descent—to the relentless anti-Asian rhetoric pollinating national discourse over the past year. The former president, and the party of the former president, can and should be blamed for this and the sudden increase of racist violence against Asian Americans. The line doesn’t stop there, though. It extends back 400 years and has tentacles clawing everywhere white supremacy exists here, in America, which is everywhere.

There’s a line connecting this act of terror to the 11 people killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, and the nine people killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, of course. But also to gentrification, to red-lining, to racial profiling, to gerrymandering, to voter oppression, to mass incarceration, to the war on drugs, to the subprime mortgage crisis, to the vast disparities in both COVID deaths and who receives COVID vaccinations, to how the men and women who stormed the capitol just went home and had dinner with their families afterward. While we were still processing and recovering from what we witnessed, they were already back on their couches, watching Criminal Minds.

White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it. I guess a vaccine could work, too. But we’ve had 400 years to develop one, so I won’t hold my breath.

Is this calling for genocide? I find it hard to read it any other way. “It won’t stop until there are no more bodies left for it to infect.” So we have to kill “it”. That is, the bodies that it could infect. White bodies.

Jewishness is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it. I guess a vaccine could work, too. But we’ve had 400 years to develop one, so I won’t hold my breath.

Damon Young would be out of a job if he wrote that, and would deserve to be. It’s straight-up Nazism. You could read similar descriptions of black people in white supremacist literature. Stone-cold evil this is, wherever it emerges. But now, it is fashionable in the US progressive media to dehumanize white people.

A decade ago, the author David Livingstone Smith appeared on NPR to talk about his new book Less Than Human, which covered the process of dehumanization as a precursor to mass murder. From the book:

Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war against German forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German army, issued an order to inflict a “severe but just retribution upon the Jewish subhuman elements” (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as part of “international Jewry”, and were convinced that Jews controlled the national governments of Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, “soldiers and officers thought of the Russians and Jews as ‘animals’ … that had to perish. Dehumanizing the enemy allowed German soldiers and officers to agree with the Nazis’ new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any mercy or quarter.”

The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented example of the ravages of dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And yet, focusing on it can be strangely comforting. It’s all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.

When we think of dehumanization during World War II our minds turn to the Holocaust, but it wasn’t only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Final Solution were busy implementing their lethal program of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin’s Red Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of “the smell of Germany’s animal breath,” and described Germans as “two-legged animals who have mastered the technique of war” — “ersatz men” who ought to be annihilated. “The Germans are not human beings,” Ehrenburg wrote, “… If you kill one German, kill another — there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses.”

This wasn’t idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them civilians. When the tide of the war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder. “They were certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists…” writes journalist Giles McDonough:

East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army … In the course of a single night the red army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified … A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs.

Damon Young and The Root are preparing their readers to commit racist atrocities by dehumanizing those they will victimize. The Root is owned and published by Univision. Here is Univision’s executive leadership team. I bet not one of these people are aware that their company is underwriting what could easily be read as a casual exhortation to anti-white genocide. They ought to be.

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This article was published on March 18, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

Debts, Deficits, and the Entitlement Crisis

Michael Tanner’s book Going for Broke was published in 2015 and unfortunately, his message has become more urgent as time has passed. It should be no surprise to anyone that the United States government has reached new levels of debt after spending trillions of dollars to combat Covid-19. According to the US Government Accountability Office,

“As of Sept. 30, 2020, the federal debt was $26.9 trillion—up $4.2 trillion from last year, due largely to the government’s COVID-19 response.”

At the time of this writing the debt has now passed $28 trillion. Even more worryingly, the Wall Street Journal reported in September of 2020 that,

“The Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday that federal debt held by the public is projected to reach or exceed 100% of U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of U.S. economic output, in the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1. That would put the U.S. in the company of a handful of nations with debt loads that exceed their economies, including Japan, Italy and Greece.”

With the US economy slowly reopening and Covid-19 increasingly under control, now would be a good time to start to think about the elephant in the room, which is the ever-increasing national debt that has only accelerated in recent years.

US Debt 101

Tanner’s book starts off by explaining the basics of how the US federal budget operates and how it accumulates debt. Debt in and of itself is not a bad thing. Oftentimes going into debt may be necessary to make forward-looking investments or to navigate through tough times such as a war or a pandemic. The US government in particular accumulates debt when its expenses outweigh what it takes in from taxation. Rather than raising taxes, it fills that gap by accumulating debt to fund its programs by selling securities to private and public buyers. These buyers could be private citizens, corporations, foreign governments, and state or local governments. It would then fulfill those securities with interest.

The problem comes when fiscal discipline fails to return once the problem is solved, which is exactly how the government spends money. There’s always something new that politicians decide is worth going into debt over and spending more of the public’s money. There are few incentives to stop overspending and countless incentives to keep spending more and more. Tanner writes,

“Economists debate the exact relationship between the size of government and economic growth, but few would argue that government can consume an unlimited proportion of the national economy without it having a significant impact on the economy.

For example, Harvard’s Robert Barro found that “public consumption spending is systematically inversely related to economic growth.”

Accumulating large debts hurts the economy in a number of ways. Not only does it increase the need for taxation but oftentimes the government programs created by expanding debt are counterproductive. This idea is embodied in the economic term known as crowding out, which Investopedia explains

“One of the most common forms of crowding out takes place when a large government, such as that of the U.S., increases its borrowing and sets in motion a chain of events that results in the curtailing of private-sector spending. The sheer scale of this type of borrowing can lead to substantial rises in the real interest rate, which has the effect of absorbing the economy’s lending capacity and of discouraging businesses from making capital investments.”

Government spending and debt in effect displace productive private sector spending, which in turn slows progress and innovation. Tanner notes that,

“Liberian economist James Guseh found that every 10 percent increase in the size of government led to a 0.74 percent decline in economic growth in democratic mixed economies and a slightly larger 1.11 percent decline in democratic market based economies.”

This statistic has also been reproduced by a number of other economists. Large debts not only slow economic growth but could also cause acute harm such as increased interest rates along with higher inflation, higher taxes, increased likelihood of an international loss of confidence, and decreased political independence from countries that hold our debt, such as China. Oftentimes the reasons why the debt increases are not productive causes either. Tanner notes that,

“Government social welfare programs, for instance, encourage dependency, discourage work effort, and create disincentives for family formation. Government retirement programs crowd out private savings and can leave retirees with lower levels of retirement benefits than they might have received from investing that money privately.”

Tackling the growing debt problem means not only getting our financial house in order but cutting back on counterproductive social programs that are often poorly designed and insulated from competition. A failure to do so will not only set the country up for a slowly degrading economic future but also a potential debt crisis.

The Need to Cut Spending

The federal budget is divided into mandatory and discretionary spending. Discretionary spending is the most flexible and can be changed through the Congressional appropriations process during the drafting of a budget. It includes funding for most government functions we would think of such as the military, the police, regulatory agencies, transportation, infrastructure, research, and so on. Mandatory spending refers to entitlement programs that can only be amended by changing the law that mandated the spending, hence the name. Tanner writes that from the year 2000 to 2015,

“Nominal nondefense discretionary spending has increased by 80 percent, and defense spending has risen by 112 – even after the sequester-imposed reductions in 2013.”

Government programs continue to grow more and more expensive with little observable increase in quality or innovation. However, the elephant in the room is not discretionary spending but mandatory spending, which comprises over two-thirds of the federal budget. Spending on all ends continues to grow and grow with no end in sight. Tanner writes that

“Under the more realistic alternative fiscal scenario, by 2050 federal government spending will exceed 36 percent of GDP. Adding in state and local spending, government at all levels would be consuming around 51 percent of everything produced in this country. Beyond 2050, spending continues to rise to levels that would cripple the economy.”

Essentially, this is the slow death of the market economy, crushed not by lockdowns or the cunning of a deadly adversary, but by the gradual expansion of the state through otherwise benign democratic procedures.

Politicians often attempt to sell the public two flawed methods to solve the growing debt problem. The Left proposes that taxes should be raised to reduce the debt and fund programs. This is flawed because we do not have a taxation problem, but a spending problem. In order for tax hikes to actually address the debt, spending must be cut as well or else we are simply feeding the beast. The Right often talks about spending cuts, but only to discretionary spending which is a drop in the pond. Completely ending foreign aid for example would only eliminate 1 percent of the budget. Cutting funding to groups like Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would free up around .0002 percent of the budget. These discretionary budget trimmings are not only ineffective but deceptive political promises that seem to only leverage concerns about the debt to further partisan objectives.

Entitlement Reform

Entitlements are taking up over two-thirds of the budget while encountering little political will to confront them. These are all the sensitive and highly defended government programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Tanner writes that by 2050 it is possible that these three programs alone could consume up to 15.5 percent of annual GDP and possibly 90 percent of federal revenues.

Social Security is often considered the third rail of politics but just about everyone understands that the younger generation today will not have access to a solvent public retirement fund at the rate things are going. The book notes that the Social Security Administration stated,

“By 2033 the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 77 percent of scheduled benefits.”

The current system is not only financially unsustainable, it’s also a Ponzi scheme where those who pay into the system, working-age people, support those that collect the entitlement payments in a never-ending cycle. Although it may be advertised as a public retirement fund, those who pay into the system today will never actually get to use the money that they were required to pay in.

Tanner writes that one reform to answer this problem of solvency would be to switch to personal savings accounts where the money working people put in will actually be saved for them and not used in a general fund. Furthermore, such savings should be able to be invested in private equity markets which would further increase the funds available over the long term.

Medicare reform is another important entitlement issue that needs to be tackled. Tanner notes that some estimates have Medicare drowning in a sea of red ink with unfunded liabilities that could be worth more than $89 trillion today. Not only is it expensive and unaffordable, but the system itself is also counterproductive.

Tanner cites studies that show that higher Medicare spending does not result in better quality healthcare, Medicare does not provide better healthcare for the elderly than private insurance, and that 30 percent of current healthcare spending is wasted. Furthermore, people are living longer and longer, which raises the level of expenses per individual.

Some of Tanner’s proposed reforms include raising the age of eligibility and implementing a voucher system that would give more choice to patients and encourage competition amongst providers to lower costs.

Medicaid reform is another important entitlement issue that must be addressed to confront our rising debt. Not only is its cost rising by the billions every year, but it fails to deliver quality healthcare to low-income individuals. Bureaucratic inefficiencies and low reimbursement rates contribute to patients being turned away at rates higher than if they were privately insured. Tanner notes that a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that mothers of children with serious medical conditions were denied an appointment 66 percent of the time when they mentioned their child was on Medicaid. This statistic is representative of Medicaid’s soaring cost that not only fails to deliver quality service but also turns out to be counterproductive.

Tanner notes a number of structural reforms to stop the ongoing strategy of only throwing more money at the problem. Some of those include a voucher system that would encourage more choice and competition and a switch to a block grant system which would encourage state-level experimentation that could increase efficiency while reducing costs.

Key Takeaways

Although the US debt has been rising for decades, the past few years, especially 2020, have seen the debt soar to new heights in a frightening time frame. Although proponents of Modern Monetary Theory may cheer on increased spending as proof that deficits do not matter, even they realize that this cannot go on forever unrestrained.

Tanner’s book provides sustainable and sensible solutions over the tired political talking points delivered by those who seem to only care about the debt as far as it benefits their agenda. The US government’s debt is soaring like never before and promises to only bring economic stagnation if not outright disaster. Looking past Covid-19, we should strive to implement bold reforms to our costly but important entitlement programs to truly deliver on fiscal stability. These reforms may not be popular or easy but there is no doubt that they will be necessary.

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This article was first published on March 17, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

How Arizona Can Leverage Antitrust Laws to Reel in Big Tech

How much longer will the government allow Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and Apple to run amok? Is their penchant to play speech police enough? Google-owned YouTube has a history of deplatforming and demonetizing conservative organizations. And by now, you probably know that Twitter didn’t hesitate to ban President Trump while he was still the President of the United States.

Or what about their influence on this past November’s election? Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg alone gave hundreds of millions of dollars to election offices to influence local elections. And as you can probably assume, it wasn’t to ensure the process remained fair and nonpartisan.

Or could it be Big Tech’s uncanny ability to collude with each other to serve their own interests? Just ask Parler how it went when Apple, Google, and Amazon conspired to remove the new social media company from the internet—an objective that Apple still appears to be committed to.

Big Tech companies are out of control, and it’s time for the government and our lawmakers to do something about it. Consumers rightfully expect a free marketplace where all individuals and companies can compete on a level playing field. But these Big Tech companies are becoming increasingly monopolistic. And while it was good to see 46 states, including Arizona, join the Federal Trade Commission to sue Facebook for such practices this past December, more work needs to be done.

Now, Arizona can play a key role in this effort.

Since 1974, our state law has prohibited actions that seek to restrict or monopolize trade. Arizona’s government and lawmakers should be leveraging such laws to reel in Big Tech before the problem gets even worse. Thankfully, the Arizona Senate is now looking to do just that by taking an important step forward with SB1155.

The purpose of this bill is to appropriate $1 million from the Antitrust Enforcement Fund to the Arizona Attorney General to “investigate and bring enforcement actions against technology companies engaging in anti-competitive, anti-consumer, or monopolistic behavior.” This would give the Attorney General the resources needed to litigate against Big Tech companies that violate Arizona’s antitrust laws.

And what better time than right now for such litigation to take place?

After all, Big Tech companies are gaining more and more power each day. And as they do, they will wield it on an even greater scale to stop emerging competition, stifle innovation, censor speech, and feed the fire of our current “cancel culture.”

That’s how we’ve gotten to where we are right now. And it’s going to get even worse if our government and lawmakers don’t do something about it. Just think about what that could mean for conservative voices and platforms—or even the next election.

It’s time for our state legislature to act. Arizona companies and consumers are being harmed by the Big Tech monopoly. But this can all be changed if lawmakers ensure everyone—including these tech companies—abides by the American principles of free speech, fair competition, and equal opportunity.

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This article was published on March 18, 2021 at the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and reproduced with permission.

Disaffecting Legal Voters Is Voter Suppression

The real problem with American election rules isn’t that people lack the opportunity to vote. The real problem is that people “don’t think their vote is going to make a difference.”

Efforts by liberals to allegedly increase voter access through schemes such as mail-in ballots, lax voter registration rules, and no voter integrity protections such as ID requirements are causing potential law-abiding voters to become disaffected by the process. This is the kind of voter suppression perpetrated by the left that conservative election reforms are designed to combat.

But progressive political activists, such as failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, are railing against Georgia proposals designed to regain public trust. Abrams claims that efforts to return absentee voting and early balloting to traditional timeframes, to reduce the number of ballot drop boxes, and to ask voters to prove their identity are “racist” and a “redux of Jim Crow.”

On the Fox News Channel program “Fox News @ Night,” Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper argued that voter integrity protections should not simply be dismissed with divisive rhetoric:

You have to separate two issues.

One is the fake claim that this is race-based. There is no evidence that having to use fewer boxes is going to affect more blacks than whites, or more browns than whites…. And there is no proof or evidence that having to demonstrate actual evidence that you’re a real citizen entitled to vote affects – again – one race over another.

The idea that we should address, the big problem that most Americans say for the reason that they don’t participate in the vote, is they don’t think that their vote is going to make a difference.

If you provide voter integrity measures, you ensure that people can be confident that if they participate it will matter.

The topic then turned to the federal legislation promoted by liberals that would do the opposite of many of the Georgia proposals. It would further allow for practices such as “ballot harvesting” and lower standards for ballot access as well as prohibit voter ID protections. Horace welcomed a more robust debate in the Senate that was not allowed in the House of Representatives (where there were no hearings before the massive bill was quickly put to a vote).

Horace noted that the focus needs to be on election integrity:

This isn’t about race. This is about political parties trying to advantage themselves.

The Constitution allows political parties to try to manipulate the process. The Constitution doesn’t allow the use of race as a means of accomplishing that.

The problem here is Stacey Abrams, and even Nancy Pelosi, tries to pretend that there is a race issue when there isn’t. Why not come right out and say, “we’re funding candidates that wouldn’t otherwise get support because we… want to see that we get an advantage.”

Let’s have a debate, and then that’s a real debate.

In its original “Blueprint for a Better Deal for Black America,” Project 21 recommended several election reform measures, including voter ID, proof of citizenship, cleaning up voter lists and not mailing ballots to those who do not request them. A new edition of the Blueprint is in production, and includes recommendations such as ending same-day and automatic voter registration allowances, stopping ballot harvesting and mandating that only citizens may vote.

Project 21 also recently participated in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee that could determine the constitutionality of ballot harvesting and out-of-precinct provisional voting. A decision, in that case, is expected in late June.

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This article was published on March 17, 2021, as part of Project 21 Black Leadership Network, and is reprinted with permission from the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Fauci and the Communists

This past week, Dr. Anthony Fauci shared a platform with a Chinese Communist Party “health expert,” and it went largely unreported by any Western media outlets. Chinese state media, on the other hand, could not get enough of it, because Fauci delivered a propaganda coup for the communist regime in Beijing. Countless state media outlets and CCP official praised the co-panelists for endorsing the endless amounts of anti-American propaganda shared during the event, which included demanding more devastating draconian restrictions in order to “combat” COVID-19.

Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a top “expert” in China’s National Health Commission who has been described as “China’s Fauci,” shared a panel with the NIAID chief over Zoom last week. The two discussed COVID-19 policy in a webinar organized by the University of Edinburgh, which also featured “experts” from the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization.

In his comments, Zhong hammered the Trump Administration and America in general, but praised the Biden Administration for rejoining the WHO. The Chinese official shared provably false information about China’s COVID-19 response and statistics, and claimed China’s brutal lockdown of Wuhan resulted in China winning its battle against COVID-19.

A loyal CCP member, Zhong spewed endless streams of false information, as lockdowns have not worked anywhere they have been tried, and they have been tried in almost every country in the world, with no demonstrable positive results.

Zhong continued, showing a slide presenting the U.S. as having the world’s worse COVID-19 response, with China demonstrating the world’s best response, which again, he attributes to the lockdown in Wuhan.

Zhong ended his presentation urging other countries not to open their economies just yet, and to perhaps wait until the entire world is vaccinated, which will take a few years. He also made the baseless claim that vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity, which he falsely described as “less-scientific.” Meanwhile, China’s economy and society, which includes a largely unvaccinated population, has been open since March of 2020.

Fauci endorsed Zhong’s comments, saying he “would underscore everything that Professor Zhong said.” The so-called public health expert added that he wants “a multi-year decades commitment, and that is to make and strive for essentially access to quality healthcare for everyone in the world so that health is really a human right in many respects.”

Fauci embraced the Chinese propaganda, emphasizing the importance of Wuhan-style lockdowns to “suppress” the virus.

“To emphasize something that both of us said; if we do not completely suppress this, we will continue to be challenged by variants which have a way of coming back to bite us,” Fauci said.

“We have been successful in the past by global cooperation with smallpox, with polio, with measles. There’s no reason in the world why we cannot do the same thing with COVID-19 by a combination of cooperative public health measures and the application of science,” he added.

You can watch the entire panel here:

Fauci’s appearance was praised endlessly by Chinese state run media outlets and Chinese Communist Party officials. Here’s a small sample size of the Chinese state apparatchik responses to the Fauci-Zhong panel.

The news comes following the revelation last week that Fauci and his deputies were directly coordinating with the Chinese government over COVID-19 messaging during the early outbreak in Wuhan, China. The transparency watchdog organization Judicial Watch has released new government emails acquired via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which show U.S. government health institutions signed off on COVID-19 related non disclosure agreements requested by Chinese Communist Party officials.

It’s important to recall that the United States and over 100 countries initiated lockdowns exclusively because of the “data” that was being transmitted out of Wuhan. It was faulty, unchallenged Chinese data, repeated by authoritative figures like Fauci and his colleagues, that convinced the world to undergo lockdowns and embrace early, aggressive ventilation of COVID-19 patients, among other botched, unscientific treatment and mitigation measures.

China instigated global panic through a deliberate disinformation campaign surrounding the novel coronavirus. Moreover, Beijing invented the concept of a healthy quarantine lockdown.

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This article first appeared on March 10, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research

Will FBI ‘Chats’ Send Conservatives To Prison?

With no requirements to record interviews, and the potential to prosecute based on false statements, the FBI has a terrifying amount of power over citizens.

Across the nation, FBI agents are swooping down upon conservative activists, Trump supporters, and anyone suspected of any tie to the January 6 clash at the Capitol. Conservative author Candace Owens tweeted on March 3: “About 10 of my friends who attended Trump’s speech but DID NOT go to Capitol building thereafter have had the FBI turn up at their door to ask them why they went to D.C. … Our FBI is trying to scare conservatives against ever gathering in the future.” 

Actually, the potential problem is far worse for people targeted by the feds. FBI chief Christopher Wray, who is scrambling to deliver the indictments that will please his congressional overlords, says the agency is conducting 2,000 domestic terrorism investigations. Few Americans recognize how badly the legal playing field is tilted against them.

When FBI agents knock on their doors, many Americans won’t hesitate to open up because they assume “those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.” But along with Bureau procedures that are a travesty of due process, the FBI is exploiting a sweeping law that criminalizes casual comments. Federal agents have the right to lie to you and to put you in prison if you lie to them. Any citizen who makes even a single-word (“no” or “yes”) false utterance to a federal agent faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. 

The federal false statements law conveys so much power that, according to Clinton administration Solicitor General Seth Waxman, federal agents can “escalate completely innocent conduct into a felony.” One federal judge condemned the law for encouraging “inquisition as a method of criminal investigation.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissenting in a 1998 Supreme Court case that upheld the law, warned that it can result in “government generation of a crime when the underlying suspected wrongdoing is or has become nonpunishable.” In other words, you can be not guilty of a crime but guilty of lying about the same noncrime. 

It gets worse. You don’t have to actually lie. Cardinal Richelieu is said to have declared 400 years ago, “If you give me six lineswritten by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” FBI agents have an easier task than the cardinal since they can fabricate the sentences they use to legally destroy their targets. The legal fate of individuals who talk to FBI agents does not depend on what they said. Instead, it hinges on what FBI agents claim they said. FBI agents don’t have to read a Miranda warning to people whose lives may be destroyed as a result of an interview.   

Unlike many other law enforcement agencies, the FBI rarely videotapes interviews, thereby permitting agents to create the narrative or “facts” which then can be used to charge individuals with false statements. A 2006 confidential FBI memo justified prohibiting recording because “perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques do not always come across in recorded fashion to laypersons as proper means of obtaining information from defendants. Initial resistance may be interpreted as involuntariness and misleading a defendant as to the quality of the evidence against him may appear to be unfair deceit.” Agents have been taught at the FBI Academy that targets of investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth,” but lying during interrogations could look bad to jurors who did not graduate from the FBI Academy.

Refusing to record interviews or make a transcript maximizes the FBI’s arbitrary power over private citizens. Instead, while one FBI agent asks questions, another FBI agent takes notes, which are later used to write a summary in a memo known as a 302.“An FBI agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations,” the New York Times noted in 2017. Boston defense attorney Harvey Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies a Day, notes that 302 forms are “notoriously unreliable.” He derided the FBI’s refusal to record interviews as foul play that allows “the FBI to manipulate witnesses, manufacture convictions, and destroy justice as we once knew it.” It is extremely difficult for individuals to dispute the ex post facto assertions in official FBI memos, thus explaining why some lawyers refer to 302s as “perjury trap forms.”

If the FBI shows up at your door, they are not there to commiserate with you about all those bastard liberals in Washington. How might the interrogation go if you attended Trump’s January 6 speech but not did march to the Capitol? You have nothing to worry about, right? They ask why you went to hear Trump: You tell them it was because you are a patriot. They ask a few more questions about your political beliefs. You reply proudly with the first thing that comes to your mind. And then they ask follow-ups that make you realize they have every message you ever sent via Parler. What about your raging post-election messages, the agents ask. You shrug and offer what sounds to you like a passable defense. And then the agents start quoting from all of your postings on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Uh-oh. “What I meant to say…” But the messages you sent to your hardline Facebook buddies were private, right? Nope—Facebook speedily turned over haystacks of private data to the feds after January 6. Perhaps the agents will ask exactly where else you went while in D.C. If you were one of the hundreds of people whose financial transaction records in the Washington area around January 6 were provided to the FBI by the Bank of America, your memory better be perfect. None of the questions from the preceding hypothetical interview indicate that you committed any crimes. But if the FBI 302 says that you contradicted yourself or misstated facts, you could become simply another bureaucratic scalp and a stepping stone for the agents’ promotions.   

As criminal defense attorney Ken “Popehat” White observed in 2017, “FBI agents are trained in two dozen ways to ratchet up the pressure on you without getting out of their chair—verbal, nonverbal, tone, expression, pacing, subject changing, every trick that any cop ever used in the box.” White scoffed at naive folks who bare their souls to G-men who flash a badge: “Do you know every federal criminal law? Have you applied every federal criminal law to every communication and meeting and enterprise you’ve engaged in for the last five years?”

Don’t believe the game is rigged? Go tell it to General Flynn. When anti-Trump FBI agents decided to get Flynn, the newly designated National Security Advisor for Trump, two of them showed up for a supposedly brief casual chat at the White House. After the interview concluded, the FBI agents did not believe that Flynn had lied. But Peter Strzok largely rewrote the other agent’s 302, along with helpful “edits” from his FBI mistress, Lisa Page, to make Flynn sound culpable. The FBI also put forward a new 302 written six months after the Flynn interview which relied on other agents asking Strzok what he remembered from the Flynn conversation. In May 2020, the FBI claimed that it had lost the original 302 from the Flynn interview. Flynn was dragged through the dirt for years in part because FBI protocol barred any transcript of his interview. But few criminal defendants have the resources to fight this type of FBI shenanigans. 

Anyone who still trusts the FBI system of interviewing and note-taking should recall what happened to Noor Salman, the widow of the guy who killed 49 people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando in 2016. She was charged with material support of a foreign terrorist organization and lying to the FBI about knowing about her husband’s pending attack on the nightclub. The FBI vigorously interrogated her for 18 hours without a lawyer and with no video recording, threatening her with the loss of custody of her infant son unless she signed a confession. Salman, who reportedly had an IQ of only 84, initially denied any knowledge but relented and signed a statement composed by an FBI agent. But the fabricated confession contained numerous brazen falsehoods that destroyed the federal case. FBI conduct in that case was suffused with deceit. Almost two years after the shooting, and eleven days after Noor Salman’s trial began, the feds belatedly admitted that the killer’s father, Seddique Mateen, had been a paid FBI informant for 11 years, starting in 2005.

Any conservative who has not been hibernating since last October recognizes that the Biden administration and congressional Democrats are pushing federal agencies to crack down far and wide on their political opposition. With Joe Biden denouncing the January 6 protestors as “domestic terrorists,” with Capitol Police acting chief Yogananda Pittman asserting that “tens of thousands” of terrorists or insurrectionists attacked on January 6, and with congressional Democrats howling about traitors who challenged or criticized the 2020 election, federal enemy lists are growing by leaps and bounds. The FBI is among the most opportunistic bureaucracies in D.C. and they will do what they have to do to secure budget increases.

The FBI’s “trust me—this is what I heard” 302 memo charade is a key source of FBI’s control over any American the feds choose to target. The current system tacitly assumes that FBI memos are the ultimate source of truth, far more trustworthy than the mere words spoken by American citizens. Attorney General Eric Holder in 2014 issued a guideline pushing the FBI and other federal agencies to use video recordings of interrogations of suspects. But the FBI has almost completely ignored Holder’s reform. More than 450 police departments in 50 states now routinely videotape interrogations. As the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported in 2011, a “scathing” Justice Department review slammed local police “for not videotaping all of its interviews and interrogations.” Unfortunately, federal judges and Congress permit the FBI to continue to brazenly stack the deck against American citizens.  

Will conservatives and Republicans be wise and tough enough to push for curbing the FBI’s vast arbitrary power? Justice Ginsburg aptly warned 23 years ago about “the extraordinary authority…to manufacture crimes.” Too many innocent lives have already been vexed by pretending that bureaucratic memos are infallible.

*****

This article first appeared March 13, 2021 in The American Conservative, and is reproduced with permission.

The Perils of One Party Leadership

Handing a government over to one political party does not always end with disastrous results.  There are times when single party leadership avoids massively bad policies and destruction.  But it is especially likely to occur when that one party leadership remains in control for long periods of time. The current pandemic has allowed for some of the worst examples of why not to hand over your government to one party — whether at the municipal, state or federal level.

Currently, the shining examples of this at the state level are the two bad boys of governorship – Andrew Cuomo in New York and Gavin Newsom in California.  There are other examples who somehow manage to get obscured.  Illinois is a perfect example with J.B. Pritzker, that man who inherited Hyatt millions, never had to work a day in his life, and bought himself a shiny new toy – Illinois Governorship.  He is aided and abetted by Chicago Mayor Laurie Lightfoot — that superstar of duplicity — and was until recently urged on by Michael Madigan, Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives for nearly 40 years.  These Illini have done a marvelous job of destroying a once great state, but we will focus on New York and California for they are truly special.

What can you say about Andrew Cuomo that has not already been said?  His unreserved arrogance is extraordinary.  His New York tough guy persona fits the scene.  Where was the state legislature when he co-opted dictatorial powers to supposedly save the residents of New York from the scourge of COVID?  Where were the courts? Nowhere to be found because of one-party rule that has been in place for years and years.  The court appointees are all left-wing agitators.  The only one who fought Cuomo is the worst mayor in American history, Bill de Blasio, who has a blood feud with him.

The result is mass murder of senior citizens and the state government in upheaval now because other elected leaders awoke.  What is their plan with a mass exodus of people from the state occurring because of Cuomo’s inane lockdown rules?  Raise taxes.  A perfect example of the perils of one-party rule.

Make no mistake, the current attack on him is a left-wing hit job.  They don’t need him anymore since Trump is out of the White House.  They want someone even more ideologically pure to further destroy the state.

On the Left Coast, we have Gavin “McCool” Newsom with his slicked-back hair and “First Partner” spouse.  He fits California like a glove.  He too runs a state that has been tie-dyed in one party rule for years.  Sure, California had “Arnold”, but he was counterproductive and got rolled by the entrenched powers.  Try appealing a ruling to a state court. Why?  They make the state legislature look downright moderate.  And some in the upper echelons of the Democrat party want to use California as a model for our federal government.  How perverse can they be?

Gavin has lurched from failure to failure.  Shutdowns followed by more shutdowns.  Rules for openings that can allow you to operate your business one day and then have to close the next because of some calculations the “high priests of science” whisper in Mr. McCool’s ear.  Shut down outdoor dining when the science does not support that move.  And then botch the vaccination roll out and, just like Mr. Nasty on the other coast, blame Trump.  If Trump were to blame then how did that South Dakota hayseed, Gov. Noem, get 80% of her shots in peoples’ arms so quickly?  Likewise, how did that West Virginia hillbilly, Gov. Justice, get 85% in his peoples’ arms while Gov. McCool managed just 35%.  Newsom is now on the edge of being recalled.  Finally, a check and balance.

Fascinatingly, as the recall signatures pile up, Mr. McCool is handing out bribe money and loosening the rules.  The next thing you may see is Disneyland open before they move all their operations to Florida.  If the recall happens rest assured, he will open the five baseball stadiums for in-person attendance.  We may actually be allowed to eat indoors.  Radical moves to save his own position.

We are seeing the same one party arrogance radiating from our federal government.  Our Dear Speaker has submitted every left-wing dream bill she could whip up or rehash from prior Congresses.  She thinks with her buddy Chucky running the U.S. Senate they can push all their garbage dreams on the unwitting people of America.

Their biggest boondoggle is the ridiculously named Covid-19 Economic Relief Bill.  The three musketeers including our President keep pushing this monstrosity on us as if it is the salvation of the nation.  In fact, President Joe has challenged the press: “Tell me what would you cut from this bill?”  Here is your answer, Mr. President – EVERYTHING.  There is not a thing in this bill that makes sense unless you are a contributor to the Democrats and waiting for your payoff.  Even the $1,400 checks are misdirected to a large portion of the recipients.  We could save billions of dollars by using more current data. With one party rule, the magnificent Trio think they can stuff this down America’s throat and buy votes for the next four years.

Freshly empowered by what they see as one-party rule are two members of Congress, Anna Eshoo, and Jerry McNerney.  They sent letters to multiple corporations suggesting that they deplatform the political opposition.  They were cute about it.  They did not tell the corporations to cut off Republicans.  These two members of Congress knew that would infringe on the Frist Amendment.  The two just used their new powers of one-party rule to coerce them with veiled threats.  And we are less than two months into the life of this new administration.

People are leaving California and New York for more hospitable state governments.  Unless you want to move to Costa Rica, you cannot get away from Joe, Nancy and Chuck.  Americans can save themselves from this mess in 2022 — not too far away.  The question is: Will the residents of California, New York and other states like Illinois wake up and finally get rid of the mess they have allowed to happen?

*****

This article appeared March 14, 2021, in Flash Report, and is reprinted with permission from the author.

 

Learning From Failure – Get in the Fight Now!

It has often been said that you learn more from failure than from success.

We don’t doubt the wisdom in that observation. So, if it is true, we need to look at the state of American Conservatism today. This is the movement that supports the Constitution, the ideas of limited government, personal liberty, personal responsibility, free markets and the Judeo-Christian ethic.

Conservatives over the years have created an impressive array of think tanks, publications, and books. We have had some success at politics. But even as we have succeeded politically on occasion, the broader battle for the soul of the nation has gone against us.

We have failed. It is not a partial failure either. It has been a rout across a broad swath of institutions and public attitudes. Only in the recognition of that failure is it possible to move forward.

Part of the reason Trump could come out of nowhere to defeat multiple primary opponents and the Clinton machine was that people were frustrated with the current Conservative leadership. That leadership had failed us. It is a time for a realistic assessment of where we are in this ideological battle.

Conservatives have lost the universities and the secondary and primary schools. We have lost the metropolitan newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, sports, Hollywood, Broadway, popular music, museums, classical music, art, magazines ranging from men’s health to teenage girls, most of the network news organizations, book publishing, most of the mainline churches, comedy, large parts of the medical profession and healthcare and many large corporations. No doubt we left some things out but you get the point.

While small business still leans our way, we have even lost the Chamber of Commerce. Big business not only sides mostly with Democrats, they openly insult us with left-wing political and absurd “woke” messages in their advertising.

Increasingly, even the institutions of the military and our intelligence agencies are now largely under the sway of our opponent’s thinking. We have largely lost the courts and the permanent bureaucracy that controls our way of life. We have lost much on the county and city levels as well, with many major cities under Democratic dominance for a half-century.

The many local tyrants have been revealed even in more conservative jurisdictions by their response to the Covid crisis and their embrace of lockdown policies. A paradigm example of this is the governor of New Jersey, who when challenged by a reporter about his policies, admitted that it never occurred to him to consult the Bill of Rights.

Talk radio and independent publications such as The Prickly Pear remain the only areas where Conservatives hold sway.

We have been outsmarted by our opponents. While we sincerely disagree with them, one has to admire their ability to stay in the fight and persevere for the past century, their ability to organize, fundraise, and promote their own within our cultural institutions. They are serious about advancing their ideas, are willing to be ruthless and cunning while Conservatives tend to be passive because of their inherent desire to be left alone and to leave others alone.

We can learn much from our opponents from their success and our failure.

The success of the left is they realized early that they must capture the schools and the major organs of communication in society. They have been working on that for a century.  Conservatives backed the opposition to international communism, and many paid with their lives doing so. The irony is, we largely won the war abroad but lost the war at home.

Collectivists of all stripes are easier to organize because they are collectivists. Conservatives are like trying to herd cats. Our fierce independence is both our strength and weakness. You just don’t see Democrats cave on vital issues like you see Republicans. They understand that politics is a team sport.

It is said that politics is downstream from culture. What does it say then for America’s future when a former stripper has 70 million followers and is solicited by a political party to interview a Presidential candidate? We of course are referring to Cardi B, the rap “artist.” Maybe you are unfamiliar with her work. Click here to see the lyrics of her hit WAP (Wet Ass P..sy) of last summer.

Given this cultural effluent, if politics is indeed downstream from culture, we have a problem, don’t we?

The good news is despite the Left’s control of the schools and of culture, at least half the population remains on the Conservative side of the spectrum. We expect that quite a few old-fashioned Liberals will be coming our way as the Left accelerates its use of violence, intimidation, social canceling of any and all opponents of their declared socialist agenda.

Leftism is really a secular religion. If you are outside the canons of their racial guilt (the white man’s exclusive original sin), you are a heretic to be shamed and persecuted. Some on the left are now even talking about re-education camps for those that don’t follow. But Americans don’t like being pushed around and one of Trump’s most attractive characteristics was that he fought back. In doing so, he spoke for many Americans who could not find their own voice.

Perhaps progressive education is so inherently bad that the propaganda isn’t sticking or Conservatism tends to emerge spontaneously from those maturing, raising families, and engaging in commerce. This has been observed for years. Whatever the factors are at play, it is remarkable given the Progressive dominance on the idea conveyor belt, that we are still even in the fight.

There is an aphorism of some truth, that has been incorrectly attributed to Churchill, Clemenceau, and even John Adams that goes something like: “If you are not a Liberal when you are 20, you have no heart. If you are not a Conservative when you are 40, you have no brain.”

The disagreement is, after all, about the nature of man. It takes a while to see how people interact with each other over a period of years and circumstances to form an opinion. A more realistic view comes with experience and maturity.

If you believe man is basically good, then concentrating power in a few to rule over others is not a problem. If you think mankind must constantly struggle against a flawed nature, then you are skeptical about allowing power to concentrate anywhere (the Founders knew this so well). That includes multinational corporations that snuggle close to the government. And it is equally true of multinational corporations that snuggle close to the Chinese Communist dictatorship.

So, the good news is that there is still a substantial remnant of alienated, unappreciated and ignored people who do not like the direction our culture and politics are going.

They are silent for the most part and intimidated. Right now, they are a bit depressed as well.

We at The Prickly Pear hope to wake them up, inspire them, educate them, embolden them and get them in the fight.

Some question if there is still a “silent majority”, but evidence suggests it still exists. After all, with all the forces of media against President Trump, he received about 74 million (legitimate) votes. He may have even won the election, but it would appear the Left outsmarted us when it came to election integrity.

We are discouraged that so many individuals on the liberty side of the political spectrum don’t feel election integrity is more important. That issue needs immediate work. Why a Conservative venue like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal acquiesces is astonishing.

This is no time to be silent. It is time to rise up and let your voices be heard. Even though the Presidential election was “lost”, good progress was made in the House. The most enduring thing that might come out of this election mess is a stronger backbone among Republicans as it relates to election integrity.

Please pay attention to the TAKE ACTION section of The Prickly Pear. It will appear from time to time with concrete things you can do. It won’t take much of your time or resources. Click the SUBSCRIBE button and sign up so that we may grow.

Read our Mission Statement in ABOUT US. We are growing, adding excellent and truthful Conservative content every day and are committed to the mission of “informing, educating and advocating” America’s foundational principles to as many as possible. Exposing the Left’s goal of “fundamentally transforming America” into a socialist nation is critical to maintain our Republic and our liberty. Please consider a contribution to our efforts and platform. We are self-funded to date and ask that you now join us – we have learned from failure and implore you to sustain the fight against an endpoint of tyranny, the Left’s unstated goal for America.

If you are not willing to fight now, when will you?

In future articles, we will explore what we have done wrong as Conservatives and what we may be able to do better. But for now, we have to recognize what we have been doing is not working. The other side is winning.

We must overcome the natural aversion to action that plagues Conservatives. We don’t wish to rule others and we reject being ruled. For the most part, all we want is ordered liberty and to be left alone.

But we are past the time to ‘consider’ fighting back. It was Edmund Burke, considered by many to be the first modern Conservative who said, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Join us at The Prickly Pear and get in the fight.  We hope to have a dialogue with you and other liberty lovers so that we might improve and amplify the Conservative message. Click on the CONTRIBUTE button and help us grow. Be sure to bookmark (or favorite) us in your browser and tell your friends, family, neighbors and colleagues about our truthful, aggressive and fearless Conservative website.

Have courage. The election mess is a temporary event. It will only do lasting damage if you concede defeat in your own mind.

The Capitol Police Chief And Her Democratic Bosses Are Lying To You All To Hold Our Capitol Hostage

WASHINGTON — My city has been occupied for more than eight weeks. Major thoroughfares blocked, thousands of armed soldiers, armored vehicles, seven-foot fencing, concertina wire.

What’s it all for? An invading army across the Potomac? Rising far-right militias, ready to strike at any moment?

It’s because those idiot rioters had finally — after months and years of left-wing riots here and across the country — finally given Democratic lawmakers and the corporate media the right-wing riot they always claimed was around the corner.

It’s because panic porn and agitprop are useful tools when you’re working as hard as you can to spread fear and distrust against the half of the country that disagrees with your policies.

And it’s because acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman is perfectly content to use her own men and women as political pawns and scapegoats to please her new Democratic bosses.

Just as with “two weeks to slow the spread,” on Capitol Hill we were told one month to stop the “insurrection.” Then three weeks in, the acting Capitol Police chief requested that fencing remain permanently, a sort of replacement for providing the training and enforcing the standards that are expected of police departments across America.

In the following weeks, reporters at outlets like Politico thirstily spread rumors from unnamed “Guard members” that March 4 was the day the militias would finally come back. Except this time, instead of tens of thousands of people flying and driving to the capital for a widely advertised protest with nearly zero preparation for crowd control, there was internet “chatter” about something may be happening to a building people can’t walk within 100 yards of because it’s surrounded with razor wire and thousands of National Guardsmen.

 

While headlines like “Capitol Police Say Intelligence Shows Militia Group May Be Plotting To Breach The Capitol” ran in The Washington Post, readers who got seven paragraphs down learn the FBI actually didn’t “have any indication of violence or a specific, credible plot at this time” — the kind of fact that might cause more intelligent or honest journalists to wonder what “intelligence sources” the Capitol Police were citing. None of that got in the way, of course.

And none of it got in the way of acting Chief Pittman, who requested Thursday that the occupation be extended a further two months after the men and women of the National Guard are slated to finally return to their homes, families, and lives.

None of it is enough. While the men and women of the Armed Forces — men and women who could be helping at the border, distributing vaccines, home with their children, or literally anywhere but Washington — lined the halls and stood guard outside against an imaginary army that couldn’t get within 100 yards in any direction, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi warned lawmakers to scurry among the tunnels beneath the Capitol instead of walking the halls like adults.

Because “chatter.” If terror attack “chatter” sounds familiar, it’s because you remember 9/11. Same thing, right?

“I plan on going in,” one senior Republican staffer told The Federalist Thursday morning. “Given the Army trucks, soldiers with guns, and barbed wire fences I can’t bring myself to take the left seriously when they tell me that a guy from Indiana is going to show up and be real mad about something he read on Reddit.”

But it doesn’t matter to the leadership in Congress or Pittman. What matters is the narrative. It’s all a great big theater, and all of us here in D.C. — the Capitol Police officers, the Guardsmen, the staff, the neighbors — are living in it.

*****

This article first appeared in The Federalist on March 5, 2021 and is reproduced with permission.

What Inapt Pandemic Response Is Doing to Our Societies

Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”

The pandemic, or rather how we and our governments chose to act in 2020, turned that enemy into a blessed savior and projected as the external threat an invisible and ever-lurking disease. Suddenly, old rules no longer applied, and governments rushed in to fill the void showering us with shiny gifts (“More money, more power!”).

What we had were livelihoods wrecked, dreams shattered, and despair spreading faster than the disease these measures attempted to counteract. Against that, indiscriminately delivered government checks are small comfort.

What we’ve had in the last year are mostly stupid government regulations (are there any clever ones…?) and people sheepishly internalizing them as if they were handed down by a prophet on stone tablets. Yes, the Covid mania is a religious cult. What worries me more than a misplaced resurgence in idolatry is the social attitudes that come with this. Now any threat can again be dealt with by imposing rules like we just did – my life becomes yours to govern. (You don’t think the climate crowd is eager for their turn to call the shots?)

While the U.S. was busy dishing out dough in a not-so-covert attempt at introducing Universal Basic Income (UBI) schemes, European rulers went with the more zombifying version: freeze labor markets in place, by paying employers and workers not to work. “Hands up, nobody moves,” said European governments and regulators.

In the spring, this temporary measure – like all long-lasting“temporary” government measures – seemed reasonable, as this invisible threat would blow over in a few weeks (right?). Why upset productive labor relations when we’ll be back to normal before long?

Weeks turned into months and months into a year. It’s unthinkable that after a year on the government payroll, living a remarkably chill life with no noticeably financial consequences for the individual, that this hasn’t shifted the mentality and ideological makeup of large segments of society. I wonder deeply what it does to a population: while workers in industries affected were compensated by governments borrowing and printing money, those whose incomes were not directly affected were left to fight for themselves – without any of the pleasures and routines, their lives usually involved.

For a year or so, plenty of Europeans got a paid vacation (without the pleasure of traveling, however), at the expense of everyone else. Americans sidelined the employers to instead shower their populace with cash and rent moratoriums. The same unforgettable lesson was imbued into the civic psyche on both sides of the pond: government can afford anything; that, to cite the MMT adage, we can have nice things.

It’s not hard to put this in terms that remind us of harrowing political discourses: a divide between creators and leechers, between value producers and welfare queens, between those who make and those who mooch. We accept that the young and the old live off the sweat of those working, understanding very well that we all pass through those phases. It’s a very different thing that governments now are surreptitiously enacting: some people get to live well at the expense of everyone else, while your passions, dreams, and friendships deteriorate and decay.

Yet, this fairytale must one day end, either in disappointment and reconciliation if we still want to continue as a free society, or in resentment and (hopefully nonviolent) civil war if we’d rather move away, separate, and segregate. The divide between those whose livelihoods were ruthlessly taken from them – tourism companies, restaurants, and pubs, the small-business owners forever closing shop – and my friends enjoying the bulk of their pre-pandemic salaries at no or part-time (low-intensity) work, is too vast to bridge.

In that sense, the small comfort of government checks even to those whose livelihoods have not been destroyed is at least something: they get some compensation for the freedoms and experiences that the government took away. Europeans in similar positions have not; they have forcibly lost a year of their lives, with very little to show for it, and now loom tax hikes, as Britain’s Chancellor Rishi Sunak recently announced.

Thanks, government, for your splendid service.

And I’m not the only one worrying about these subtle changes. The Wall Street Journal editorial board commented on the contents of the $1.9 trillion package:

“Only a small part of what Democrats passed is for pandemic or economic relief. It’s mainly a way station on their high-speed train to a cradle-to-grave welfare-entitlement state. Most of the $1.9 trillion will flow to government unions or supposedly temporary income transfers that Democrats intend to make permanent later this year.”

The rationale? “Most Democrats want to detach welfare from work as a matter of principle.”

The Illusion that Everyone can Live at the Expense of Everyone Else

Plenty of things were tearing American societies apart well before the pandemic: the culture wars, intellectual intolerance, the generational divide, insiders against outsiders in labor markets and housing markets. Europe shared in on some of America’s troubles and added fault lines of their own: immigration, the euro, and the bureaucracy of the EU superstate.

It’s fair to wonder what extensive UBIs, government welfare, and zombification of labor markets do to the fabric of an already torn-apart society: don’t worry about making your way, the government’s endless purse of gold is here to save you from all and any hardship you may or may not experience. Don’t look after yourself or those close to you; don’t save for a rainy day, don’t be responsible, don’t learn valuable skills that make you more employable; in fact, don’t work hard – or at all. Just, you know, flip Reagan’s terrifying words, embrace those nice-looking chaps from the government, and blame someone else for your troubles (anyone, really: the Republicans, the elites, the covidiots, the patriarchy, white privilege, the arbitrary social values that don’t take you seriously after you dyed your hair neon green).

The pandemic and the government overreach that followed it are just another ill added on top of the previous ones. To rulers, always on the flourishing side of any divide, this is a dream come true: no (financial) cost, no public outcry or political obstacles. A fantasyland for those who want governments to be saviors not of last resort but of first resort. And if everyone shares in the ostensibly free handouts, we’re all guilty when proponents of ever-larger governments next say, “But Uncle Sam saved us during Covid! You all benefited from his generous financial support!”

Ethan Yang writes persuasively that

“Although many people support lockdowns because they believe they will help control the virus, others genuinely see them as a means to fundamentally change American society out of spite for our individualistic values.”

The rifts between those who make their way fair and square and those who leech off the government pandemic support are probably unmendable.

That Wall Street Journal editorial doesn’t muck about with qualifications: “The goal of this Democratic program isn’t Covid relief. The point is to expand and solidify the role of government as the guarantor of every American’s income unlinked to any obligation to work.”

Salute your new Washington savior; (s)he’s probably here to stay.

*****

This article first appeared on March 12, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from AIER, The American Institute for Economic Research.

PolitiFact: 90% of Biden Stimulus Spending Not Directly Related to COVID-19

Details of Biden’s bloated spending package are so damning that even liberal-leaning fact-checkers have no choice but to agree with conservative criticisms.

President Biden’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” could soon become law.

The budget-busting legislation, sold as emergency COVID response and “stimulus,” passed the Senate over the weekend. But even the liberal-leaning fact-checking website PolitiFact is pointing out that almost all of the bill’s spending is unrelated to the health effects of COVID-19.

“Total spending directly on COVID-19’s health impacts ranges from $100 billion to $160 billion,” fact-checker Jon Greenberg writes. “At the high end, direct COVID-19 spending represents about 8.5% of the bill’s $1.9 trillion cost.”

Of the bill’s nearly $2 trillion in spending, PolitiFact reports that just $14 to $20 billion goes to vaccine distribution and vaccine-related efforts. This is a tiny fraction, a mere 1-2 percent. Overall, the spending that actually goes to health-related matters pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions doled out for partisan priorities.

For example, at least $350 billion goes to bailing out state and local governments—despite most not actually experiencing predicted COVID-19 tax revenue shortfalls. That means Biden’s bill spends more than twice as much lining the pockets of bankrupt blue states than it does actually addressing public health.

Legislators also included a completely unrelated $86 billion bailout for union pension plans. And the bill pours $128 billion into public education. Despite what advocates claim, it’s not actually money to “reopen schools.” A whopping 95 percent of the money will be spent after 2021.

These are just a few of the big-ticket spending items that are unrelated to COVID-19. But slipped into the bill’s 600+ pages are literally countless smaller allocations of millions in taxpayer money. Many of these carve-outs are for waste like billions for racial justice programs for farmers or politician’s pet projects like $1.5 million for a bridge in New York that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wants built.

It’s not surprising that Republican elected officials are blasting the package as wasteful and bloated.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the inclusion of “All kinds of liberal wish list items that would do nothing to help American families put COVID behind them” in Biden’s bill.

“This isn’t about COVID relief,” Republican Senator Pat Toomey, a long-time fiscal conservative, said. “It’s about using a health crisis as an excuse to ram through a left-wing wishlist.”

Indeed, the details of Biden’s bloated spending package are so damning that even liberal-leaning fact-checkers have no choice but to agree with conservative criticisms.

*****
This article first appeared on March 13, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the Foundation for Economic Education.

Visa Overstays Don’t Negate the Benefits of Border Barriers

Editors’ note: This article appeared in 2019 in Just Facts Daily. With the current illegal alien invasion at the border created by the new administration in less than two months, James D. Agresti’s piece from two years ago is more timely now than then.

*****

Other than their mode of entry to the United States, is there a material difference between illegal immigrants who cross the border illegally and those who legally enter the U.S. and then illegally overstay their visas?

Correct Answer:
Yes

Numerous activists and media outlets have claimed that robust border security is pointless because many illegal immigrants legally enter the U.S. by using visas and then don’t leave when their visas expire. Such claims are misleading because all visa entrants are screened by the U.S. government to keep out foreigners who pose risks to the health and safety of Americans, while illegal border crossers are not. This lack of screening allows criminals to enter the U.S., and hundreds of thousands of them have committed violent crimes in the United States. “Removable criminal aliens” are non-citizens who have been convicted of crimes in the U.S. that warrant immediate deportation hearings. Based on data from 2007 to 2009, the Obama administration Department of Homeland Security estimated in 2010 that about “1.94 million removable criminal aliens are in the United States today.”

Documentation:

Opponents of President Trump’s plan to build a wall along much of the Southwest border often argue that it won’t be effective because many illegal immigrants enter the U.S. by using visas. Visas allow people to temporarily visit or live in the U.S., but every year, hundreds of thousands of people don’t leave when their visas expire. No matter how strong or tall a wall may be, it cannot stop this activity.

Those who make that claim—including many media outlets and “fact checkers”—are misleading the public by omitting a key fact: Visa entrants are screened by the U.S. government to keep out foreigners who pose risks to the health, safety, or finances of Americans—while illegal border crossers are not.

This lack of screening allows known criminals and others who are likely to harm people to enter the United States, such as the hundreds of thousands of non-citizens who have committed violent crimes in the U.S. and been deported.

Federal Law

Under Title 8, Section 1182 of federal law, “aliens” who pose risks to the wellbeing of others are generally “ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States.” This includes, for example, foreigners who:

  • have been convicted of or admit to committing certain crimes “that involve moral turpitude, whether under U.S. law or foreign law…”
  • have “a communicable disease of public health significance.”
  • are drug abusers or addicts.
  • have physical or mental disorders that “may” endanger “the property, safety, or welfare” of themselves or others.
  • are “likely … at any time after admission, to become primarily dependent on the U.S. Government (federal, state, or local) for subsistence.”
  • do not “make a credible showing” that “all” of the activities they will engage in “while in the United States are consistent” with their visa applications.
  • have “inadequate documentation” to prove that they meet the criteria above or other requirements of federal law.

Purveyors of Half-Truths

In comments and articles about border barriers, many individuals have raised the issue of visa overstays as a foil to Trump’s plan without mentioning that visa entrants are screened for dangers while illegal border crossers are not. Some notable examples include:

Furthermore, an examination of the first 20 results in Google News for border wall visa overstay did not produce any results that revealed the key difference between visa overstays and illegal border crossers. This systematic omission of a vital fact can lead to widespread public ignorance, something that has become common with many issues.

Likewise, when reporting on illegal immigration and crime, journalists, politicians, and scholars have distorted the truth by:

Echoing the comments of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, media outlets have also claimed that border walls are ineffective because some people find ways to get around, under, or over them. However, the purpose of such barriers is not to completely stop illegal border crossings but to stem the tide of them, and this has occurred in a variety of nations and locations where such barriers were erected.

In summary, prominent organizations and individuals have repeatedly misled the public about the life-threatening consequences of illegal immigration and the role that a comprehensive border barrier would play in reducing them.

*****

This article first appeared on January 9, 2019 at Just Facts and is reproduced with permission.

 

The Rights of the Naturally Immune

There is an important issue that, in the midst of all the talk of vaccines, has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves: the civil rights of those who have already developed natural immunity to the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is said to cause Covid. 

Yesterday, I got the results of the test I took to detect whether I had developed a T-Cell response to the virus.

Like the antibody test I took almost 2 months ago, it was positive.

These two things would appear to demonstrate that for all intents and purposes my body knew exactly what to do with this virus and that it probably has the equipment to dispose of it again were it, or one of its cousins, to revisit me in the near-to-medium term.

And even if one or another related strain were to visit me in that future, studies suggest strongly that the attack would be considerably less virulent than the one I overcame without excessive trouble in December.

In a halfway rational world, what to do going forward in regard to getting a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be something I’d discuss with my doctor in the discreet quarters of the examination room. Were it to be offered, I would politely refuse it. And he, seeing the test evidence in my file, would raise no objection.

And since the danger to me in the future from the virus is minuscule, and the science has clearly borne out what Fauci and Maria Van Kerkhove of the WHO flatly said was true before someone upstairs got to them—that asymptomatic transmission of respiratory diseases of this type is virtually nonexistent—I’d be free to live my life as I pleased without a mask, and with complete freedom of movement. 

But instead of this, I am facing enormous pressure to get a vaccine in order to recover my basic rights as a citizen. And even then, those in charge are saying, I will still have to run around with a completely useless, breath-robbing and personality-canceling mask on my face. 

And all this for a disease that, even before the introduction of vaccines, gave those infected by it a roughly 997.5 out of 1,000 chance of survival.

The civil authorities have decided, in effect, that fully indemnified pharmaceutical companies, whose pasts are obscenely littered with fraud, and the calculated creation of crises in order to up revenues on their products (OxyContin anyone?), have the de facto “right” to force me to take an experimental vaccine that, in the very, very best of circumstances, will only match what my apparently well-functioning body has already given me without any side effects.

And this, while straight out telling me that even if I submit to their government-coerced medical experiment I will probably still not get my full constitutional rights back.

This is an important issue that needs to be addressed much more vigorously than has been the case up until now.

*****

This article first appeared on March 9, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

Rep. Andy Biggs Says Follow the Science, Open Schools

It’s past time to open schools, Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., says.

“The percentages for teachers or students is really, really low,” Biggs, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, says of the risk of contracting COVID-19. “In Florida, they’re playing sports.”

“The flip side of it, of course, is this isolation, this online learning, this basic lockdown for these kids is producing greater suicide rates, higher depression rates,” Biggs says. “And something like half of all the adolescents and young adults have experienced some suicidal ideation that they had never had before. That’s a result of these school lockdowns, which don’t follow the science and they don’t make sense.”

The third-term congressman from Arizona joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss reopening during the pandemic, as well as to weigh in on the crisis at the southern border.

Rachel del Guidice: I’m joined today on “The Daily Signal Podcast” by Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona. Congressman Biggs, always great to have you with us on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”

Rep. Andy Biggs: Great to be with you, Rachel. Thanks for having me.

Del Guidice: You just wrote an op-ed for the Washington Examiner about kids going back to school and why that’s important. And the op-ed [is] called “Let parents, not teachers, decide when children go back to school.” Can you tell us about the op-ed and why this is important?

Biggs: I wrote the op-ed in immediate response to the Chicago school union stuff. But it isn’t just that, we’ve been actually talking about schools reopening for many, many months. The data’s clear. It was clear from Europe. It’s clear.

We’re in Florida today and Florida has successfully been reopening schools. They’re playing sports. But a lot of people say, “Oh, we’re worried about the teachers.”

But the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] director, who’s now the CDC director, before she was the CDC director, said, “You can actually open up schools. They’re not petri dishes. They’re not these superspreader events. You’re not going to create a cataclysmic problem.”

And then when she became the CDC director, she said, “Well, now maybe we’ve got to have vaccines or something and all this.”

The reality is we haven’t seen anything like that at all. There’s no vector. The percentages for teachers or students is really, really low. In Florida, they’re playing sports.

The flip side of it, of course, is this isolation, this online learning, this basic lockdown for these kids is producing greater suicide rates, higher depression rates.

And something like half of all the adolescents and young adults have experienced some suicidal ideation that they had never had that before. That’s a result of these school lockdowns, which don’t follow the science and they don’t make sense.

Del Guidice: In the op-ed you make the point that President [Joe] Biden, in his best imitation of truth minister from “1984,” has deemed the in-person school for one day a week, even if it is not a full day, it means schools are “opened up.” Why is this not the case?

Biggs: You can’t say that meeting a half a day in person means that you have an open school. That’s just a lie.

And that was my point there, is that President Biden campaigned, “We’re going to open up schools.” And then when he found out that teachers unions didn’t really want to open schools and go back to work, he said, “Well, we’ve opened them up. … We’re going to call it good because some places have half day open.”

That’s ridiculous. And it doesn’t change the other negative factors that we talked about.

We’ve got students that have been out almost a year, and that may mean that they fall behind two, three, four years because they’ve lost the foundation. And especially, I look at two groups, [one being] the young kids because their ability to read needs to be cemented in by the time you’re in third grade.

That’s what they tells us, it becomes very difficult to learn to read after that. And then we’re basically pulling those kids out and really going to cause the massive problems, maybe lose a generation.

The other one is the adolescent-age kids who rely on socialization and peers to help them adjust as they’re getting ready to leave high school, move to college or trades, or whatever. They’re being harmed tremendously.

Del Guidice: Democrats have their $1.9 trillion COVID-19 bill. And I believe about 9% of it goes actually to COVID relief. … This is just an honest question that I have, is there money in this bill for schools to reopen?

Biggs: Well, there actually is. There’s about $6 billion for the schools to reopen. All the rest of the money that’s in for schools is out beginning of 2023 and forward. It’s not in this fiscal year.

Believe me, we didn’t need to do the bill that we did in the middle of the night last night because the previous five bills had a trillion dollars left over, including about $60 billion for public schools.

And I guess the third point to make it as if schools aren’t going to open up, why in the heck are we giving them more federal dollars?

Del Guidice: What else is in this bill that has nothing to do with COVID-19 since only 9% of it does go to COVID?

Biggs: Well, you have a huge amount of money going to bail out blue states and blue cities and towns who’ve mismanaged their pension funds or anything else.

And by the way, every state is going to get $500 million. That’s like the blank check portion of this thing. It’s insane. So, that’s where they’re starting out. Then you get bonuses and stuff on that based on having a high unemployment.

So think about it. If you’ve mismanaged your state, you’re going to get more money because you’re going to have more people that are unemployed. That’s in there. So there’s that.

You’ve got money for [National Endowment for the Arts], [National Endowment for the Humanities], for libraries and museums. That’s probably half a billion dollars just with that.

We’re sending $750 million overseas. You got $50 million for family planning, including abortions. You’ve got $400 million because we’re concerned, I say that facetiously, that some pets might be more susceptible to COVID. They’re going to go [to] an experiment on COVID.

So we get sending vaccines overseas, and we’re going to test animals to see if they might get COVID. This is the kind of garbage that is in this bill.

You got, [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s getting a subway system out there, up in the Bay Area. And [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer’s getting another bridge in New York.

Rachel, they changed the name of it from the COVID-19 relief package to the America recovery plan, or something like that. It’s like, they went from global warming to climate change because it wasn’t accurate.

So you can’t say it’s COVID relief because it’s not. What it really is is this massive boondoggle of pork and buying our votes around the country. That’s what that’s about.

Del Guidice: Honestly, it came to mind when you were talking about that, when it comes to what Nancy Pelosi’s wish list says, as well as Senator Schumer said, it almost seems like earmarks. I feel like a case could be made, like, these are basically earmarks.

Biggs: Yeah. They’re they really are basically earmarks. Except for with earmarks, you could identify who the earmarks were going for, not always. But yeah, these were earmarks for sure. And they’re going to go straight into earmarks. You better believe it.

Del Guidice: Well, you voted “no” on Democrats’ Equality Act, and I want to talk a little bit about this piece of legislation.

There’s a lot to it, but one of the components of it is it will allow biological men who identify as women into women’s restrooms. It will allow boys who are biologically boys into girls’ locker rooms to disrobe. It will allow biological men or boys on women’s soccer teams or sports teams.

Can you tell us more about this piece of legislation and your perspective of it and how it’s going to impact women and just society in general?

Biggs: This may be the worst piece of legislation in the history of the United States of America. Quite frankly, what it does in the guise of equality, we actually heard people saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t vote. No, we just want to be able to love each other.” That isn’t what this is. This is control. This is actually attacking religious freedom. It’s attacking women.

So domestic violence shelters, if you have a woman who’s been abused by a man and they go to the domestic violence shelter, but some guy who is identifying as a woman that day, they get to come into their domestic violence shelter—any public accommodation, any public entity cannot basically control for biological men and women.

So a safe space for women might be that domestic violence shelter. It might be the women’s locker room. It might be the girls’ locker room at school. It might be the girls’ bathroom at an elementary school. If a 6-year-old kid says, “I’m really identifying as a girl today,” you cannot prevent them from going in there. That’s how ludicrous this bill is.

So you have all of that going on, at the same time you tell parents and physicians, doctors, and counselors, if a child—and a minor—says, “I really want to change my sex,” the parents might say, “We don’t think you’re ready to make that decision.” The counselor agrees. And then the physician says, “I agree that this should not happen.”

If you don’t allow the puberty blockers and hormone therapies that go with this, they can take your kid away from you. That’s what’s in the equality bill. And that’s just a small component of the equality bill.

When I said they’re attacking religion—we debated this last night. And the Democrats were saying, “We’re not attacking religion at all.”

There’s a provision right in there that says that RFRA, which is the Religious Freedom [Restoration] Act of 1993, that says, “You can have defense to some of these social issues if you have a sincerely held religious view.”

They specifically say, “It’s no defense,” because they’re criminalizing all these things. So if you don’t do these things, it becomes a criminal conduct and RFRA would have allowed protection for religious people of consciousness faith. They specifically said, “Nope, you can’t have those exemptions anymore. You can’t have those protections.”

They are attacking religious freedom, associational freedom, freedom of speech. And they’re interjecting the government between the parent and the child. That makes it the worst bill in the history of this country—in my opinion, unconstitutional.

Del Guidice: Given the attacks on religious freedom and now that these safety guards for people who have deeply held religious beliefs, that really those are not going to be available anymore, do you foresee people of faith or people with deeply held religious beliefs going to prison over this?

Biggs: They might. They’re trying to put all people of faith into a box.

Don’t forget, this week, while the equality bill was going on, in two different hearings in the House of Representatives, they were holding hearings basically declaring that if you voted for Donald Trump or if you’re Republican, you’re a racist xenophobe, white nationalist, domestic terrorist.

So at the same time, they’re trying to put people of faith in this box. They’re basically also saying, “And if you wander outside that box and express yourself, you’re a domestic terrorist.”

That’s where we’ve come. And so, I’ve been saying now for about a month and a half, two months now that we’ve moved into fascism.

We’re no longer just a soft socialist nation. We’re into fascism because you add the censorship that we’re all experiencing and that’s being done, not by the government per se, but with this federal government’s encouragement to go ahead and censor any kind of dissenting or opposing viewpoint.

The heterodox conservative viewpoint is being stifled while you are allowing the orthodox leftist view of collectivism and corporatism. That’s what’s happening in the United States today.

Del Guidice: Well, we do have a Democrat House, Senate, and White House. The Republicans aren’t the majority. But are there any ways that the Equality Act can be countered? Do you see any opportunity to address any of these issues?

Biggs: Whether it’s the Equality Act or even HR 1 or the COVID bill, we have to rely on the Senate because the Senate still has the 60-vote filibuster rule. So that’s their first line of defense.

And if the Senate can’t keep enough Republicans off these bills, or if the Democrats say, “We’re going to change the rules so we can ram it down your throat,” then we have to rely on two other places—the courts, and they’re notoriously unreliable, but there are some good places that we can rely on, and then the states. In particular, I think of the states’ attorneys general.

So, if HR 1, which is the election bill, gets through, we need the states’ attorneys general to immediately file the lawsuits to enjoin that so we can attack that. Same with Equality Act, they’re going to need to bring cases on that. Same with the immigration abuse, they’re going to need to bring the lawsuit.

Thus, the states’ attorneys general, they may need the state legislatures to—I’m trying to remember which state this week … passed legislation saying, “We don’t have to comply with President Biden’s executive orders.”

So, the state legislatures have a role to play in this. And I’ll just tell you, the governors, … they could step up and become the most important political force in this country today, if governors were courageous and would do this.

Del Guidice: Another item on Nancy Pelosi’s agenda is a $15 minimum wage. What is that going to do to jobs?

Biggs: The [Congressional Budget Office] has said that that’s going to eliminate 1.5 million jobs. I think they’re overly conservative. We have a lot of hidden jobs as well.

Restaurants are going to be decimated. Unskilled, low-wage people, which are mostly kids coming out and getting their first job, they’re not going to be able to get a job because there’s going to be fewer jobs available to them. So, not only will you have jobs lost, nobody’s going to be hired for these jobs.

You’re going to see a move to automation. We’ve already seen that at the fast-food places where you go in and there’s automated menus, etc. You’ll see more automation to replace folks like this.

But what exacerbates the loss of jobs is, at the same time that’s going on, this poorest border, these promises of amnesty, where you’re bringing in low-wage, low-skilled workers to compete with our low-wage, low-skilled workers, our American kids. That’s the problem.

Del Guidice: Actually, [that’s] one of my next questions. The Biden administration has said that they plan to give amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants. Why is this a problem? What will this look like? What are the implications of the bill?

Biggs: First of all, that 11 million number has been used for 13 years. Now it’s really closer to 20 million, maybe even north of 20 million. So we have to be honest with that number. The number’s probably, I believe, twice as much as they’re saying. So that’s No. 1.

But the other thing is it provides a massive draw factor incentive. So you’re going to have lots of folks coming over. They’re already massing on the other side of the border.

Biden has told them specifically, “Don’t come yet. Don’t come yet. We’re not ready for you.” He’s telling them just to wait there, just on the other side of the border in Mexico, because when he gets his amnesty through, if he does get it through, then it’ll be time to come through. And that’s what he wants.

But what that will do is, we know that there’s already unaccompanied minors, not 6-year[-olds], we’re talking 15- to 17-year-olds. Oddly enough, MS-13 gangs fit that profile. I’m not saying all of them are, but we do know that there are gangs coming in.

We’ve got cities along the borders. A liberal Texas mayor said, “Mr. Biden, please, please don’t release these people into our community.” They’re starting to release them into the communities. Again, that’s going to bring crime, stress on the social safety nets of those communities.

All of these things that are going on, that’s what you’re seeing happening right now along the border because of Joe Biden.

Del Guidice: Well, lastly, I wanted to ask you about cancel culture. It’s something that’s really come up a lot recently when it comes to social media, different organizations, even nonpartisan organizations—like the Job Creators Network. Their Twitter has been taken down because of some alleged broken rule that they violated of Twitter’s.

First of all, I wanted to hear your perspective of cancel culture. And then secondly, I think the House Freedom Caucus had its own cancel culture moment, to a degree. So if you’re able to address that at all, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Biggs: Cancel culture is the move to tyranny and fascism that I was talking about earlier. My wife will tell you I’ve harped on this for decades.

The left is inherently tyrannical. You can’t do socialism without coercing people. You can’t do fascism without coercing people. And America isn’t going to let you nationalize soda pops and stuff like that, or basically anything.

So, it becomes a fascism where you’re controlling through regulation. You’re controlling it through taxation and they start doing a bidding. That’s what canceled cultures become.

So all the social media outlets are basically doing the left’s, the hard left’s bidding at preventing the opposition from speaking. And they’ll cancel you. They’ll prevent you from doing stuff. I’ve had my social media taken down. All of this stuff, they want to erase you.

I just have to get this off my chest before I go to the HFC moment that you’re talking about. They want to have a unitary party. That’s what they want. Who has unitary parties? Authoritarian governments. We have, basically, an oligarchical fascism in the United States today.

I know I’m going to get hassled for saying that, but that’s really what you got. And you got to face the facts because they’re trying to constrain your freedom and who you are.

So, our moment, we were invited to come to an event called Conservative Members Conference in Florida. One of the big hotel chains in the country, the biggest hotel chain in the country had contracted with the host of that event, which wasn’t us. We were just invited to come. Freedom Caucus was invited to come.

When this hotel chain found out who was coming, they said, “We can’t host you guys. You’re a bunch of conservatives coming into this event.” And so they canceled a half-a-million-dollar contract, to my understanding of what that was, because they didn’t want a bunch of conservative staying at their hotel.

And what that means is the host of this event had to scramble to find another place. And by golly, they did find it. [It] was a great place and I’m leery to even say what the name of that place was because they might get canceled. Because that’s how obscene this is.

We’re seeing conservative actors fired. We’re seeing conservative athletes ostracized or cut. [We saw a conservative coach], for wearing a [One America News Network] T-shirt while he’s fishing with his boys, they forced him to apologize to keep his million-dollar-plus-a-year job. That’s the whole thing that we’re talking about. It’s not enough that Joe Biden was sworn in as the president of the United States.

I’ve seen this in Congress, where a chairman has said to a member of the House Freedom Caucus, “I want you to admit that Joe Biden is the legitimate president of the United States.”

“What do you mean?”

“No, he’s the legitimate president of the United States, I want you to admit that.

“He got sworn in. He’s sitting in the Oval Office.”

“I want you to admit [that.]”

That is how insane these people are. And that’s a committee chairman for the Democrats. We’re not talking some yum-yum who’s in the squad, we’re talking about the chairman of one of the most powerful committees in Washington, D.C. “You must admit that he’s the legitimate president.” To what end?

And my response to that is, I will admit he’s a legitimate president when you admit that you tried to delegitimize Donald J. Trump’s presidency for the last four years.

The point is they want obeisance. They want compliance. This isn’t about freedom anymore. This is about control and power and hatred. And that’s where the left is today, Rachel.

Del Guidice: Well, Congressman, thanks. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for running through all these issues. We appreciate having you with us all the time. Thanks for being here.

Biggs: You bet. It’s good to be with you.

*****

The interview first appeared on March 11, 2021  at the Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission. 

Google, Ad Tech, and the Gutting of the News Publishers

So now we have another gutting, this time at the HuffPost, and omertà reigns.

This kind of thing – news publications with lots of traffic gutting their staff because they’ve been losing tons of money – has been happening for years, and these publishers and the media outlets that report on it are under some kind of omertà and aren’t talking about what is actually causing the losses that trigger the gutting. So now we have another gutting, this time at the HuffPost, and omertà reigns.

BuzzFeed – which acquired the HuffPost last November from Verizon, which had acquired it as part of its 2015 acquisition of AOL, which had acquired the Huffington Post, as it was called then, in 2011 – announced on Tuesday that it has laid off 45 HuffPost reporters, editors, and producers, and that HuffPost Canada will be shut down entirely. In addition, two executive editors resigned over the deal. So 47 people gone.

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, one of the cofounders of the Huffington Post in 2005, told employees at the virtual meeting where the gutting was announced that HuffPost’s “losses last year exceeded $20 million, and would be similar this year without intervention. Though BuzzFeed is a profitable company, we don’t have the resources to support another two years of losses.”

So some hypothetical math: Let’s assume that these 47 HuffPost employees cost the company on average, benefits and taxes included, $150,000 each a year. This is probably way high since publishers are not known to pay rich salaries and offer huge benefits but stay with me for a minute. Shedding these 47 employees would then save the company $7 million a year. That leaves another $13 million to cut to reach break-even.

But wait… these people produced news content that generated pageviews that produced revenues from ads, and if you cut these people out, content is going to drop, page views are going to drop, revenues are going to drop, and you’re chasing a moving target.

BuzzFeed knew about these losses last year when it did its due diligence before it acquired HuffPost. BuzzFeed itself has undergone waves of layoffs in order to shrink itself to profitability.

Not once did BuzzFeed mention the reasons why HuffPost lost money last year, and the reasons why BuzzFeed itself had engaged in waves of layoffs of its own people. Omertà.

Other news publications have filed for bankruptcy without ever specifying the real reason for the losses. Big publishers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have gutted their staff without specifying the real reason – the company that is the real reason.

But separately, the bad boy of news publishing, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal among many other publications, officially broke the omertà about the existential issue for publishers: Google’s total dominance in multiple layers at the core and all over internet advertising. And its abuse of power in that arena.

Last year, it was reported that News Corp complained to antitrust authorities in the US and other countries that Google was abusing its power and sucking revenues out of the stream that should be going to publishers. And I see what Google is doing to publishers every day on my own site.

*****

To read the rest of this article, click here, and go to Wolf Street.

HR 1 Means the End of Free Elections

Editors’ note: This bill passed in the U.S.House of Representatives on March 3, 2021 on a strictly partisan vote. It goes to the U.S. Senate and must be defeated there.

The Democrats discovered electoral gold in 2020. They featured a historically weak, senile presidential candidate backed by a radically left-wing U.S. Senator. Yet they were able to win a record 85 million votes cast for their unattractive candidates.

How did they do it? They ignored traditional methods of garnering voter support—rallies, platforms, showcasing the candidates and their vision for governing.  Instead, they focused on manipulating the election system itself, creating and exploiting ballot uncertainty and potential fraud.

It worked so well that Nancy Pelosi is attempting to permanently institutionalize the stratagems that brought victory with the obvious goal of tilting elections permanently to Democrats. It’s called HR1, the (humor alert) For the People Act.

HR1 would federalize all significant election law, incorporating the most fraud-friendly aspects that made the 2020 election suspect to so many Americans.  For example, the bill would greatly expand mail-in voting. Bulk mail voting, by demolishing the chain of custody for ballots, is inherently susceptible to non-detectable fraud.

The New York Times recognized that mail-in balloting makes it “much easier“ to buy and sell votes and renders elderly voters especially vulnerable to coercion and exploitation. The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project deemed the “significant cost to the integrity of the voting process“ sufficient to justify ending the process. Yes, ending.

Instead, HR1 blocks attempted reforms at mail-in voting. The bill prohibits states from “requiring any form of identification as a condition of receiving an absentee ballot“ or requiring a witness, notarization or any other form of signature authentication.

Moreover, the voter rolls used for mailing would still be protected from “purging“, i.e., updating. This means hundreds of thousands of ballots addressed to dead, moved or ineligible voters can easily be cast by anyone who found them.

Ballot harvesting ratchets up even more opportunities for fraud. For example, party workers walk door-to-door in selected neighborhoods, helpfully offering to assist residents in filling out and delivering ballots and then submitting piles of completed ballots. No safeguards are present to prevent throwing out unwanted ballots. Naturally, ballot harvesting is legalized without limit in HR1.

Bulk mail voting available to anonymous recipients with ballot harvesting serving as the delivery system turns elections into contests to see which party can more successfully scale up legalized fraud. Any party hoping to win an election would be forced to participate. Possessing scruples against organized vote manipulation would be a recipe for failure.

But wait, there’s more. States would also be mandated to accept same-day registration. They would be forced to count late arriving ballots for 10 days after the election. Virtually any effort by poll workers to check ID or verify that a vote is legally cast is prohibited.

Let’s connect the dots here. An illegal immigrant, using his “papers”, could register the day of the election and then demand a ballot. By law, poll workers must comply so long as he simply attests to citizenship. (If found out later, he would face no penalties). Thus he could cast a “legal” ballot that is virtually untraceable.

HR 1 would also require political causes and candidates to disclose their donors. Ideally, transparency would be desirable. In the world we live in, the Left has become very aggressive at harassing and canceling supporters of conservative causes.

Countless workers, including CEOs, have lost their jobs and their voice for donating to conservative causes or speaking out. Since sanctions for advocacy work in only one direction, the effect of forced disclosure would be to further hamstring the Right.

The given justification for all this is voter suppression.  Yet voter suppression is virtually nonexistent, a relic of our past. It is difficult to find an interested, eligible voter who is thwarted from voting by the system or anyone who thinks they should be. Registration is convenient and broadly available, while transportation is provided free for potential voters.

In the end, HR 1 may come down to a test of whether our Constitution still protects us from tyranny. The premise is that purposeful voter suppression requires that we legalize fraud potential.

If Democrats can get Americans to believe that, they’re in. Free and fair elections are out.

*****

Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.

Electric Vehicle Subsidies and other Fantasies

Electric vehicles (EVs) are the future. Everyone will want one because they’re emission-free, ecologically responsible, and more affordable every year. That’s why GM, Volvo, and other manufacturers will soon be making only EVs.

Or so we’re told.

Some people have high disposable incomes and do most of their driving locally. For them buying an EV may be a viable choice.

Why do the rest of us need mandates and subsidies to “persuade” us to buy EVs, instead of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles? Who’s actually getting the subsidies – and who’s paying for them? What other costs and unintended consequences are hidden from view?

President Biden wants to require all new light/medium-duty vehicles sold by 2035 (or sooner) be EVs. Vice President Harris wants only ZEVs (zero-emission vehicles) on America’s roads by 2045. Various states have already passed or are considering similar laws. Some would ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2030.

A 2021 Tesla Model S Long-Range can go 412 miles on a multi-hour charge; its MSRP is $80,000. A Model 3 costs around $42,000; the Model Y all-wheel-drive $58,000. Similar sticker-shock prices apply to other EV makes and models, putting them out of reach for most families.  “Long-range” models achieve that status by loading them down with expensive, heavy batteries and long charging times.  Most electric vehicle ranges are far shorter.

To soften the blows to budgets and liberties, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wants to spend $454 billion to build 500,000 new EV charging stations, replace U.S. government vehicles with EVs, and finance “cash for clunkers” rebates to help at least some families navigate this transportation transformation.

Politicians are being pressured to retain the $7,500 per car federal tax credit (and hefty state tax rebates) now scheduled to lapse once a manufacturer’s cumulative vehicle sales since 2009 reach 200,000. EV drivers also want other incentives perpetuated: free charging stations, access to HOV lanes for plug-ins with only the driver, and not having to pay gasoline taxes that finance the construction, maintenance, and repair of highways they drive on.

Not surprisingly, a 2015 study found the richest 20 percent of Americans received 90 percent of these generous EV subsidies. Lobbyists are clearly more valuable than engineers for EV manufacturers and drivers.

Under this Robin-Hood-in-reverse system, the subsidies are financed by taxpayers and generations of their descendants – including millions of working-class and minority families, most of which will never be able to afford an EV.

Any cash for clunkers program will exacerbate the problem. By enabling sufficiently wealthy families to trade fossil-fuel cars for EVs, it will result in millions of perfectly drivable cars and trucks that would have ended up in used car lots being crushed and melted instead.

The average cost of previously-owned ICE vehicles will increase by thousands of dollars, pricing even them out of reach for millions of lower-income families, which will be forced to buy pieces of junk or ride buses and subways jammed with people they hope won’t be carrying next-generation COVID.

The United States will begin to look like Cuba, which still boasts legions of classic 1960s and ‘70s cars that are lovingly cared for and kept on the road with engines, brakes, and other parts scavenged from wrecks and even Soviet cars. But once the states and feds ban gasoline sales, even that will end.

Perhaps even more ironic and perverse, the “zero-emissions vehicle” moniker refers only to emissions in the USA – and only if the electricity required to charge and operate ZEVs comes from non-fossil-fuel power plants. Texans now know how well wind turbines and solar panels work when “runaway global warming” turns to record cold and snow.

With many politicians and environmentalists equally repulsed by nuclear and hydroelectric power, having any electricity source could soon become a recurrent challenge.

Zero-emission fantasies also ignore the essential role of fossil fuels in manufacturing ZEVs. From mining and processing the myriad metals and minerals for battery modules, wiring, drive trains and bodies, to actually making the components and finished vehicles, every step requires oil, natural gas, or coal.

Not in California or America perhaps, but elsewhere on Planet Earth, most often with Chinese companies in leading roles.

From commonplace iron, copper, aluminum, and petroleum-based plastics – to exotics like lithium, cobalt, and multiple rare earth elements – these materials are dug up and turned into “virtuous” EVs, wind turbines, and solar panels with little or no attention to child labor, fair wages, workplace safety, air, and water pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, endangered species or mined land reclamation.

How long can we let our environment, working conditions, prosperity, and efficient travel needs take a back seat to EV mythology?

*****

This article first appeared on March 3, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the Committee For A  Constructive Tomorrow. 

President Biden: You Will Love George Will’s Immigration Stance

Many mainstream Republicans have watched as elements of the party have changed, particularly with the desertion of the non-public union middle class from the Democrats. Some like George Will display a level of discomfort with the new elements of the party that were particularly attracted to our last President. Will’s January 22, 2021, column epitomizes how his ilk has no comprehension of what the party believes while he fuels the minds of the Republicans’ political opposition.

He starts his column by saying that immigration is the sincerest form of flattery. Thank you, but we all know that. The question has been how and how many. That question has been the overarching concern for Republicans for at least 50 years or since the 1965 passing of Ted Kennedy’s Immigration Bill. That bill radically changed both the number and nature of our immigrants despite being pitched as maintaining existing standards.

Will goes on to tell his readers that Republicans are out of the mainstream. He reveals to us a Gallup poll saying 77% of Americans think immigration is a good thing. That is not surprising because poll participants probably know an immigrant and know immigration is a good thing. But Gallup probably did not define who chooses our new immigrants for the most part (their relatives), the cost of immigrants who use government services, or how many are coming here.

Then he goes on to tell us that the illegal immigrants here did not come in such a bad way. They just overstayed their visas. That supposedly totals 40% of the country’s 11 million illegals. How does he or anyone else know how many illegal immigrants are currently in the country? It is not as if these people lined up to let everybody know they are here. To assert how many illegals are currently in the country is a mirage. No one knows.

Biden has thrown out the same number (11 million) and wants to give them a path to citizenship. What if the number is 23 million as some surveys have stated? No one has any idea until they show up at government offices, declare themselves, and start the process. Even then we don’t know how many will not participate and that could be in the millions. Here is an idea — why don’t we make the decision after we have an accurate count.

We have been lied to about numbers on every prior immigration bill. There is a good chance we will be lied to again on this one. We were told the 2.7 million illegals legalized in 1986 was the end of it. We would have border protection. That worked well. Now 35 years later, they want to legalize a new and larger batch.

The one thing Republicans stand by and George Will ignores is this point: Biden’s bill has no mechanism for border security. No method to track and kick out people who overstay their visas. Will does not argue for these matters; he just argues for cleaning up the current mess.

Will talks about Biden reigniting a debate. He is not “reigniting” a debate. The debate is the same one since the last two bills. It has not changed one bit. Will is just high-minded enough to side with Biden. Will states illegal immigrants here need to be addressed and if we do not (Republicans) are leading us into a “dark current of 21st-century politics.” With friends like George, who needs enemies?

Then Will thrusts himself totally into the Democrat argument. Republicans are anti-immigrant. Mr. Will, if you had any clue about the party you would know better. Just like a good Democrat he conflates people who come here legally with illegal immigrants. Republicans want two things: zero illegal immigrants and a review of the procedures we currently use for immigration that were established 35 and 55 years ago. That is not anti-immigrant. That is saying we have borders and we get to choose what goes on within those borders.

People like Will never actually talk to people who have come here legally. They despise our current immigration system that allows so many illegals/everyone showing up at our border who claim to be refugees. These immigrants know those people are scamming the system which allows them to get in and then disappear into our large country.

Will lays out another argument that Biden makes. The population density of our country is low. We should be more like other countries and squeeze more people into small spaces. He may like that, but he will never have to suffer the consequences. He based that on another fake survey purporting how we should run our country.

It often seems like Will is making Biden’s arguments for him. The only thing Will does not argue is that we should change and call every immigrant here a “noncitizen.” The terms “illegal alien,” “resident alien” and “nonresident alien” hurt their ears. Like everything else, they want to change the names to protect the guilty. We guarantee you if this new term is adopted, it will become tarnished faster than you can blink. It is the process and the end results that matter, not what we call people.

It is no wonder many Republicans have become disgusted with people like George Will. While telling us we do not have lofty enough positions, they adopt positions we find appalling.

Biden’s immigration bill is a disaster. It has no means to stop the failed process we already have. In 10 years, we will be in the same place – flooded with illegal immigrants. Will used to understand that. He has lost his way. We have not.

One Last Point – Parents in Central America are sending their children unaccompanied across dangerous terrain in the hands of unscrupulous people who are paid to sneak them into the United States. We have no idea how many children die along the way. That is never reported. We can only guess that these parents hope the children will become anchors for bringing in their siblings and their parents. And if we don’t take in these children we are the evil Americans. There is only one way to end this travesty – Just Say NO. We have to put a stop to this happening and it stops at our border and letting people throughout Central America know that if they send their kids they will be stopped and turned around. It is probably far-fetched to imagine the Biden Administration enacting this policy, but it is actually more humane.

*****

This article appeared on March 7, 2021, at Flash Report and is reprinted with permission from the author.

I Do Not Like This Woke Flimflam

The left bans books by Dr. Seuss and Ryan Anderson, showing they’ve become more theocratic than progressive.

When I was a boy in school, we were often encouraged to read banned books. Back then, to censor anyone was about the least hip thing you could do, the province of the glowering churchman and the cordless phone-wielding parent, the least cool of 1990s archetypes. Pitted against them was the heroic liberal-minded librarian, who would sooner raise her voice in the study section than deny a book to a curious student. “READ!” cried colorful signs off of every classroom wall. And if you wanted to READ! Judy Blume, Alice Walker, or William Golding, well, then, far be it from anyone else to stop you.

It was a healthy attitude, I think, even if it was a bit precious and overdone. For all of Holden Caulfield’s necking and socking in the jaw, The Catcher in the Rye was not only the most censored book in public schools, it was also the second most assigned. I read it in English class without anyone ever complaining, along with Lord of the Flies and Brave New World. Those puritanical censors never did descend. And while today there’s even a Banned Books Week to revel in that which you’re not supposed to READ!, it would be almost unthinkable for anyone with any cultural power to try to silence Myra Breckinridge or even Lolita.

Last week, Amazon quietly scrubbed a book from its online store called When Harry Became Sally. Written by conservative author Ryan T. Anderson, it’s a measured critique of trans ideology that had previously been available on Amazon.com for three years without issue. Amazon has long had a policy against selling anything deemed to be “hate speech,” yet prior to now, that had mostly meant the likes of Holocaust denial and fringe conspiracy theories. The de-platforming of Anderson’s book suggests that the retail giant has significantly enlarged its definition of “hate speech,” making it much more, shall we say, woke.

If that’s true, then it raises a serious question: are conservative books now banned? And I do mean banned—Amazon is a far more authoritative censor than any single library or public school. About 72 percent of new adult books are sold in its online store; to be yanked off its virtual shelves is a literary death sentence. And what happened to When Harry Became Sally seems like a pilot run, a sign of things to come. I don’t mean that Amazon is about to sweep away en masse all conservative literature, that Deliver Us From Mail-In Ballots or whatever Sean Hannity’s latest book is called won’t be available for purchase next week. I do mean that the books that pose the most serious challenges to left-wing identity politics, like Anderson’s, are also those that fall most neatly under that “hate speech” rubric.

And then what? What happens if critiques of the ruling ideology are no longer easily accessible? What happens when it isn’t the offensiveness of the opposition tract that determines whether it’s allowed but the effectiveness? This is the reality we now confront. You don’t need government to pass a law to shut somebody up; you need only to capture the relevant cultural gatekeepers. Likewise did the company that publishes Dr. Seuss recently announce that six of his books will no longer be sold. It doesn’t matter that these titles—And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Scrambled Eggs Super!—were already more difficult to find than, say, The Lorax. Some of the racial depictions therein were deemed to violate woke standards and practices, and so they were, not criticized, not taken off a curriculum, but removed from publication.

Mark Twain’s novel, of course, doesn’t reinforce racism but skewer it, by depicting it in all its antebellum ugliness. But blaspheming the woke cannot be permitted even if it’s in the service of an approved point. Think again of that glowering churchman, only put him in a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt with a trans flag poking out of his JanSport. The impulse that drives these cancellations isn’t progressive and it certainly isn’t liberal. It’s theocratic. Wokeness treats its hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation as unquestionable dogma, with everything else—discourse, literature, art, math—subordinated to its tenets. The left has thus become everything it once claimed to hate. They’re the book banners now, the quaking prudes, the reverend from Footloose, the Savonarola.

Which has put conservatives in the strange position of creatives demanding freedom of expression against an established religion. There are some on the right who say classical liberalism is dead; we should hope not. If it is, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble. It’s telling that even at their most illiberal, conservatives still wave around their First Amendment rights, both against the government and on big tech social media platforms. That says a lot about where both left and right are today. Still, what of Seuss and Huck? Racial stereotypes and slurs are bad, of course, and must be stigmatized. But how do you convey their severity if you hide every example of what we’re no longer supposed to do? How do you teach about the passé insensitivities of history and art if your paramount goal is to never offend any sensitivities?

Abolish the past and you impoverish the present. The old liberal idea says that if even one person was to hold an opinion, he should have the right to express it since society might benefit if only in rejecting it. Whatever you think of the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, that principle seems worth defending today. There’s a corollary too: ban that one-person opinion and you might suddenly find it catching on. Here’s something no teenager has ever said: Mom told me I’m not allowed to watch this so better change the channel to PBS. There’s nothing quite like breaking a taboo; some people even elected a president in part because he stomped all over them. In which case, for its own good, maybe the left ought to recognize that argument is better than censorship.

*****

This article first appeared on March 4, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

16 States Are Now Following The Science

It took an entire year, but lockdowns and mask mandates are officially incredibly unpopular with half of the country, to the point that governors are rapidly making sweeping changes to their year-long COVID-19 policies.

Jumping onto the coattails of pro-individual freedom leaders like governors Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) and Kristi Noem (R-SD), the governors of Mississippi and Texas decided Tuesday to announce an end to business restrictions and statewide mask mandates.

Both Tate Reeves (R-MS) and Greg Abbott (R-TX), who had long taken a nanny state approach to the COVID-19 crisis, acted almost simultaneously to announce the end of statewide restrictions.

The centrally planned solutions to COVID-19 have failed spectacularly, and the American people have taken notice of this reality. Hundreds of millions have now been through a full year of government-imposed tyranny on both a federal and state level. Whether it was a travel ban, an endless series of lockdowns, mask mandates, countless emergency orders, business closures, and the like, not a single top-down order from the federal or state level did anything productive for the well-being of Americans.

None of it worked. All of it served as a net negative. The people have noticed.

Now that their constituents have had enough, politicians on the Right are fast departing from the COVID tyranny and attempting to secure what is left of their political aspirations.

Abbott and Reeves are not the only GOP governors moving fast in ending the restrictions. Several other governors have recently acted to roll them back.

On February 12, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte lifted his statewide mask mandate.

On February 8, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds lifted Iowa’s statewide mask mandate along with several other restrictions.

On February 22, North Dakota took it a step further. Its legislative body took the bold step in voting to make mask mandates illegal.

As of March 2, there are now 16 states that no longer have statewide mask orders.

However, across the political divide, there remains no end in sight to the corona madness. Much of the Left continues to embrace and root on endless COVID-19 restrictions, and the hijacking of individual rights in the name of a virus.

Governor Gavin Newsom of California took to Twitter in describing the end of restrictions as“absolutely reckless.”

It took long enough, but it’s now official: Governors who continue to impose lockdowns and mask mandates are fast becoming as popular as Red Sox fans in the Yankee Stadium bleachers, at least in half of the country. The internal polling is out, and the draconian restrictions are being abandoned in droves. History will not be kind to the remaining high-handed holdouts.

*****

This article first appeared on March 3, 2021 and is reproduced by permission of AIER,  American Institute for Economic Research.

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