A Weekend Project: Yes, Your Mobile Carrier Is Probably Spying on You, But You Can Do Something About It thumbnail

A Weekend Project: Yes, Your Mobile Carrier Is Probably Spying on You, But You Can Do Something About It

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By C. Mitchell Shaw

In the world that exists after Ed Snowden’s 2013 revelations, it is well-known that government agencies routinely spy on American citizens. But many seem to not know that tech companies make large profits doing the same and selling private data to advertisers.

That ignorance is on full display in an article published in the Washington Post’s “Help Desk” section on April 22. Tatum Hunter answers a query from a reader about whether or not mobile carriers harvest users’ data for profit. She admits, “I had no idea wireless carriers were in the business of peeking in on my activities and using that information to market to me.”

Her admission comes in the wake of her discovery that such surveillance is a common business practice in the industry. She writes:

At Help Desk, we read privacy policies so you don’t have to. This week, a curious reader inspired us to dive deeper into cell carriers (thanks, Ron from Houston!). I read privacy policies from the three major wireless carriers — Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile — and my eyeballs are only bleeding a little. All three carriers have some less-than-great privacy practices hiding in plain sight. Depending on the carrier, they can draw on your Internet history, app use, location, and call history to learn things about you and nudge you to spend more money on products from themselves or third-party companies.

Hunter mentions Verizon’s “Custom Experience” as an example of such programs. But she also points out that other companies have similar programs. It turns out that surveillance is big business for mobile carriers. And since literally everything people do on their mobile phones is passed through their carriers’ networks, everything is within their reach. Browsing, messages, e-mails, calendars, maps, notes, and more are sent straight from your phone to your carrier.

At least that is the default.

But though the Washington Post’s Help Desk seems to have finally figured out that mobile carriers make big bucks snooping on their customers’ data, they have not yet figured out that simply asking your provider not to is not enough. Hunter writes, “Some good news: You can opt-out whenever you want, and we’re going to show you how.” She describes the process for “opting out,” writing:

Verizon customers appear to be automatically opted into the company’s “Custom Experience” program, which means the company can use your browsing history and data from your apps to help target ads. The company says it “makes efforts” not to target you based on adult sites you visit, health conditions, and sexual orientation. (Thanks, Verizon.) If you said “yes” to “Custom Experience Plus” at any point, the company can also use your location and call logs.

AT&T’s “Relevant Advertising” program works similarly. Customers are automatically opted in, and the company draws on information including your browsing history and videos you’ve watched to help show you targeted ads. If you sign up for “Enhanced Relevant Advertising,” your device location and call history are also fair game.

In comparison, T-Mobile’s data-crunching seems relatively tame: It says it doesn’t use any web-browsing, precise location, or call history data for its ad program, but it can use your “mobile app usage” and video-viewing data, according to its website.

And:

Verizon customers can opt out of Custom Experience by going to their privacy settings in the My Verizon app or by following this link. (While you’re there, check that you haven’t said yes to “Custom Experience Plus,” either.)

AT&T customers can opt out by signing into att.com, navigating to the “AT&T Consent Dashboard” and scrolling to the section “Control how we use your data.” (Or follow this link.) Opt out of “Relevant Advertising” and check that you’re not signed up for “Enhanced Relevant Advertising.”

T-Mobile says customers can opt out this way: In the app, go to More -> Advertising & Analytics -> Use my data to make ads more relevant to me. Turn the toggle off so that it turns gray. On the website, go to My Account -> Profile -> Privacy and Notifications -> Advertising & Analytics -> Use my data to make ads more relevant to me. Turn the toggle off.

It would be nice if it were that easy. But that assumes that the company that opted you into being spied on without any clear consent is simply going to stop harvesting your data just because you asked. Perhaps they will, but this writer thinks not. Call me jaded, but if a company is making jillions of dollars stealing your data, I find it hard to believe that asking them to stop comes with any assurance they will. Besides that, your carrier is not the only company spying on your mobile traffic. Other companies — including app developers, websites, and those offering “free WiFi” — harvest your data as well.

However, to borrow a phrase from Hunter, “Some good news: You can opt out whenever you want, and we’re going to show you how.” And no, it is not by asking your carrier to do something they should not be doing in the first place.

The simple truth is that it is your data and you are going to have to protect it. I recommend a few simple steps. First, keep your devices and apps up-to-date. Security vulnerabilities arise and phone manufacturers, carriers, and app developers issue patches to close those vulnerabilities. If you get an update, install it.

Also, pay attention to all app permissions and do not install any app that asks for permissions it should not need. A calculator app, for instance, should not need to see your contacts or call log. You get the idea — ask yourself, “Does this app need that permission to do what I want it to do?” If not, find another app that does the same thing but without asking for hinky permissions.

Next, slim down on your apps. If you are like most people, you have three times the apps you will ever use, and most of them you never use. Delete them. Less is more.

Speaking of apps, avoid social media apps on your phone. If you must use social media, use it in the browser. The apps are notorious for leaking data back to the company that created the app. Sure, the mobile version of social media sites offers fewer features, but there are two important points to observe about that fact. First, those companies could easily build the same features into their mobile sites as they do in their desktop sites and apps. So, why don’t they? Because they want you to need the app so that they have greater access to your device. Second, if you are out and about, you may feel that you need to check your social media feeds (you probably don’t need to, but you think you do), but the mobile site in the browser will at least give you the bare-bones experience. After a while, you likely won’t miss the apps at all.

The next step in keeping your data safe is to only connect to trusted networks. That means that “free WiFi” that just pops up when you are shopping at the mall is out. Unless you know who controls the network, don’t trust it with your data.

One app you should consider installing is a trustworthy VPN. Essentially, a VPN (Virtual Private Network) reroutes all of your data through a network other than your carrier or WiFi. But beware: not all VPNs are created equal. Since you connect to the VPN, the company running that VPN could have the keys to your digital kingdom. A good rule of thumb is that “free” VPNs are simply spyware. But a good VPN — one that is operated by a trusted company and encrypts your data before sending it from your device — is different. One example is ProtonVPN — a product of the same company that offers ProtonMail. ProtonVPN is end-to-end encrypted using zero-knowledge protocols. That means that not even the folks at Proton have access to the un-encrypted data. Another benefit of using a good, trustworthy VPN is that if you do need to use a “free” WiFi connection, your traffic is gibberish even to the people who own the router.

Those steps should go a long way to keeping your data in your hands. As long as there is a profit to be made spying on people’s data, there will be people and companies who will do that spying. Take back control of your data by protecting it yourself. And, with one final nod to the Washington Post’s Help Desk, go ahead and click all those “opt out” buttons if it makes you feel better. It likely won’t help, but it won’t hurt, either. Oh, and forget Hunter’s plug for Help Desk reading privacy policies “so you don’t have to.” It’s your privacy — read the policies yourself.

*****

This article was published by The New American and is reproduced with permission.

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‘Defund the Police’ Movement Triggered Massive Spike in Murder of Black Americans. So Much for Equity. thumbnail

‘Defund the Police’ Movement Triggered Massive Spike in Murder of Black Americans. So Much for Equity.

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By Jarrett Stepman

The political aftermath of George Floyd’s death produced a surge in murders of black Americans, but it wasn’t at the hands of the police.

The numbers are shocking, but not surprising.

The FBI previously reported that murders increased by 30% in 2020. But there is more to that story.

According to a recent report by Fox News, FBI data demonstrates a sharp uptick, specifically in black Americans being murdered in the last few years compared to other racial groups. The surge began almost immediately after Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police in 2020 and the subsequent riots that rocked cities across America.

“In 2019, at least 7,484 black Americans were murdered. That number shot up to at least 9,941 murders in 2020, meaning there was an increase of 2,457 black Americans murdered over the previous year,” Fox News reported.

Violent crime has notably increased in the last few years, but it appears to be disproportionately hitting black Americans.

Between 2010 and 2019, there was an average of 5,954 white murders, which is roughly 16% lower than the 10-year average of black murders. During that same time period, an average of 6,927 black Americans were murdered each year, meaning black murders shot up by 43% in 2020 compared to the previous 10-year average.

Fox News further put the numbers in perspective: “The figures are more staggering considering White Americans make up 76% of the population compared to black Americans representing only 13%, according to Census data.”

Where are the Black Lives Matter founders during this appalling violent crime explosion?

Toasting champagne in a multimillion-dollar mansion purchased with money from their donors.

So much for “equity.”

The “defund the police” movement appears to be mostly the product of elite progressive activists who drive the policies of the Democrat Party. Some are genuine, others apparently less so. One way or another they had an outsized impact on media and political rhetoric and local policies.

There appears to never have been a general desire to gut police departments in America, but the crusade went on regardless. Cities and municipalities defunded the police and generally supported moving away from traditional policing in favor of replacing cops with social workers.

It hasn’t worked out.

The collective result of this anti-police movement led to what is called the “Ferguson Effect” or the “Minneapolis Effect.”

FBI crime data shows a distinct upswing in violent crime following the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Floyd in 2020. Both those incidents triggered mass demonstrations, then riots, then a concerted effort to curtail police activity.

In Minneapolis, there was even a failed effort to outright abolish the police.

Instead of creating police departments that function better and protect communities, we now have countless beleaguered, understaffed, and demoralized departments dealing with the largest surge in violent crime in a generation.

Following Floyd’s death, the left went all-in on a “racial reckoning,” targeting American history and nearly every elite institution to trigger a cultural revolution against the “white supremacy” at the root of all things in America.

In city after city, many of which actually went through with defunding their police departments, we’ve seen historic increases in violent criminality. In this case, it seems that minorities really are suffering the most.

So, will the left ever face a reckoning for triggering the largest spike in black murder in recent history?

A few have admitted to the “defund the police” mistake but don’t expect a grand mea culpa or an inner re-evaluation of the ideology that brought them to pursue one of the more astoundingly terrible ideas in recent memory. They will argue that even pointing out this catastrophe makes you a racist. Their politicians will just deny it happened or blame the right and they will move on to other causes.

Unfortunately, it may be a long road back from the damage the defund the police movement caused. Americans—of any background—shouldn’t have to live in perpetual fear of violent crime and victimization. That’s what many will now suffer due to misguided ideology and reckless leadership.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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The Grave Dangers of Politicizing Medicine thumbnail

The Grave Dangers of Politicizing Medicine

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By Joe Wang

For the past 20 years, medical practitioners (nurses and doctors) were ranked the most trusted professions by the Gallup Honesty and Ethics poll. When a patient visits a doctor, he or she can assume that the doctor will only consider treatments benefiting the patient. This is because hundreds of years of medical practice have established a tradition of trust in which the patient believes that the doctor adheres to the ancient Hippocratic Oath (first do no harm) and the modern-day Declaration of Geneva, the ethics of medical practice published by the World Medical Association.

The Declaration of Geneva’s Physician’s Pledge states in part: “I will not permit considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient.”

Political affiliation should not be a consideration when a doctor sees a patient.

Of course, things are seldom as simple as they seem. Politics and medicine have been around as long as human civilization, and the two have been intermingled at the individual level since ancient times. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the Western world particularly, we have started to see the politicization of medicine at the institutional level, and this should worry us all.

About 1,800 years ago, in ancient China’s Three Kingdoms era, warlord Cao Cao invited renowned doctor Hua Tuo to treat his chronic headaches, thought to be caused by a brain tumor. Hua wanted to open up Cao’s skull to remove the tumor, but Cao suspected that Hua was hired by his political enemies to kill him, so he had Hua imprisoned. Eventually, Hua died in prison, and Cao died from the tumor that Hua had sought to remove.

When politics intersect with medicine, the trust between doctor and patient breaks, and both parties suffer.

Fast forward to 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became the ruling regime in China. Under the CCP, suspicion such as Cao’s became policy, and everything was politicized. They took control of every aspect of people’s lives, from the cradle to the grave.

Amid COVID, authorities in the West have been making medical decisions for millions of its citizens, some even without solid scientific support. As a Chinese Canadian who grew up in communist China, I would like to warn people of the dangers of this unprecedented approach.

My Body, the CCP’s Choice

The CCP even makes a woman’s womb political.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when Mao wanted to increase the Chinese population so that he would have more people to fight American imperialism, women were encouraged to have more babies. I was born during that time, the ninth child in my family.

But in the 1970s, the CCP decided that Mao was wrong, and China had too many people, so they implemented the brutal one-child policy, with forced abortions killing millions each year. That went on for four decades.

Then in 2016, when the regime saw population decline as a threat to China’s economy and to its own power, it wanted women to have more babies again and changed the one-child policy.

The CCP’s flip-flop “family planning” practice is not only inhumane, but it also failed to achieve the intended goal in some ways. In my case, I was born as part of Mao’s desire to have more people fighting the Americans, but here I am siding with the Western democracies against the CCP’s authoritarian policies.

COVID: a Political Opportunity for the CCP

Similarly, when SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, the CCP immediately treated the outbreak as political. Facts became irrelevant; Beijing’s political narrative was paramount.

On Dec. 30, 2019, when Dr. Li Wenliang took to his personal social media platform to alert a few friends and colleagues about this new pneumonia he was seeing in Wuhan, he was punished by the authorities as what he wrote was not politically correct. He later tragically died from COVID-19 himself.

The politically correct narrative at that time was that the new pneumonia cases in Wuhan did not exist. A couple of weeks later, when the CCP could not deny the existence of the cases, they told everyone, including the World Health Organization, that the virus was not transmissible from human to human.

Then, from late January 2020 to March 2020, the CCP’s lies became so crazy that their narratives would contradict one another. On one hand, they locked down Wuhan and prevented domestic travel from the city to the rest of China; on the other hand, they continued to allow international travel from Wuhan to the rest of the world, while accusing anyone suggesting a travel ban from Wuhan as being racist.

Many now believe it was the CCP’s political intention to spread the virus to the rest of the world while trying to control it in China.

The question must be asked: If an international travel ban had been implemented, could the virus have been contained inside Wuhan, thereby avoiding the pandemic and the deaths of more than 6 million people worldwide?

In any case, the CCP’s behavior cannot be explained scientifically—it only makes political sense. And it was aligned perfectly with the regime’s global view. The pandemic could serve as an opportunity to prove to the Chinese people and the world that the CCP system is superior to Western democracy. Through stringent and even draconian lockdowns, and through lies and total media control, the CCP was able to convince the Chinese people that it had stopped the spread of the virus in China. At the same time, the media played up the inefficiency of western democracies as being incapable of controlling the spread of the virus, leading to millions of deaths.

Zero Omicron, Lots of Xi

It has been two and a half years since the start of the pandemic, and during that time the CCP has boosted its model of pandemic control. Up until last month, it seemed that the CCP was able to control the spread of the virus—even with the fast-spreading Omicron variant and holding a big international event like the Beijing Winter Olympics. Xi Jinping claimed that the achievement was made possible under his personal vision and leadership. The core of his strategy is zero COVID—eliminate the virus with all of the mighty power of the CCP.

Then late last year, COVID appeared in Xi’an, a city of 13 million people. The city was locked down from Dec. 23, 2021, to Jan. 24, 2022, with a total of only 2,053 COVD cases detected. Although there is no official statistics on the deaths caused by the lockdown, individual cases of death were reported due to a lack of access to health care. It was clear that the damage of the lockdown was more severe than the disease itself.

In early March 2022, COVID arrived in Shanghai, China’s biggest city. As no deaths were reported at that time, top scientist Dr. Wenhong Zhang, head of the city’s COVID task force, advocated coexistence with the virus. Given the lessons learned from Xi’an, one would think a lockdown, with all the hardship it brings for people, would not be implemented in Shanghai. Unfortunately, the whole of China is under Xi’s personal leadership, and Shanghai is no exception.

Starting April 3, more than 20 million residents in Shanghai were barred from exiting their homes, leaving many struggling to obtain food, water, and medical care. Stories of deaths occurring as a result of the hardline measures were circulated online. By April 12, at least 15 million residents were still being locked in their homes.

We have no way of knowing how many lives were lost due to the lockdown, but it’s probably in the thousands given the size of the population. Here is one example. Professor Larry Hsien Ping Lang, a Wharton graduate, well-known economist, and TV host in Shanghai who openly endorses Marxist ideology, could not help his mother. She died outside a hospital as she waited for hours for her COVID test result, which she needed to enter the hospital for her routine treatment. The brutal lockdowns affect everyone, including the CCP elites.

Just as Mao’s policy didn’t succeed in forcing me to become a CCP-loving anti-American soldier, Xi Jinping’s lockdowns lack common sense given that the measure has now proven to be useless in fending off Omicron. As a result, we are witnessing another man-made catastrophe happening in Shanghai and possibly other Chinese cities. One can only hope that the zero-COVID lockdown madness stops before more people die. The Chinese people have suffered enough.

Stop Politicizing Medicine in the Free World

With most of the population vaccinated or naturally immune from having been infected by SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 has become a manageable disease in the United States and Canada. Although it can still be deadly, this now-endemic flu-like disease could be managed with minimal deaths, while society returns to normal life.

In some jurisdictions and sectors, however, masking and vaccination are still mandatory. But why? It doesn’t make any sense at this stage of the pandemic.

In fact, it was the CCP’s tactics that fueled the politicization of COVID, not only in the United States and Canada but pretty much worldwide. This led to the lockdowns, dividing people against one another, governments strong-arming their mandates, and public health officials having far too much control.

We also had the Donald Trump factor. Americans seemed to be divided into two opposing camps: Trump supporters and never Trumpers. With the legacy media in the never Trumper camp, anything Trump supported became controversial, particularly advocating for drug therapy to treat COVID-19.

How far are we from the CCP’s complete politicization of everything in our lives? Warlord Cao’s suspicious approach was passed on to generations of Chinese, but it never became an institutional practice to completely destroy the trust between doctor and patient. When the CCP took control, however, they proceeded to politicize everything and destroyed the doctor-patient trust in just a few short years, because they did it with state power.

If the authorities in the West make politicizing medicine a policy, it could quickly destroy the doctor-patient trust beyond repair. We should never allow what the CCP did in China to happen in the free world. We still have some time. We should remain aware and be willing to fight to preserve the integrity of modern medicine.

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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The Border Invasion is an Existential Crisis for America thumbnail

The Border Invasion is an Existential Crisis for America

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By Thomas C. Patterson

The invasion crisis on our southern border is baffling. How could this outrage be happening?

The White House wants you to believe that they’re powerless to stop it. They’re willing to appear negligent and/or stupid to keep the wheels turning.

But there’s only one possible explanation that holds water: it’s a plan. And it’s working, as the border zone is flooded with millions of illegal immigrants, almost all of whom will stay permanently and lay the groundwork for an invincible voting bloc in the future.

If they sincerely wanted to do something about it, officials wouldn’t have to do any complicated thinking. Just stop egging on illegal immigrants to come and reinstate the Trump-era policies that were at least somewhat helpful.

You have to almost admire the masterminds of this catastrophe for persevering in the face of growing bipartisan revulsion at this inhumane tragedy. They are playing the long game even at the price of taking short-term political hits.

In contrast to the helpless-to-resist image they’re trying to peddle, they’re contemplating the revocation of Title 42, a Trump-era rule allowing migrant crossings to be turned away for public health reasons. Homeland Security projects ending Title 42 would result in an inconceivable 18,000 migrant crossings daily, up from our already unmanageable 7000. At that rate, by the end of Biden’s term, one in five American residents would be here illegally.

Americans don’t need to be told the results of massive illegal immigration. We live it daily. Illegal immigrants by law have access to our emergency rooms. Over half of the newborns at LA County Hospital are newly minted American citizens born to illegal immigrant parents at taxpayer expense.

Illegal immigrants crowd our schools, forcing our already stressed educational system to divert focus to ESL instruction. Moreover, they undercut unskilled American workers and drive down their wages.

They also contribute to our burgeoning crime problem. The number of criminals who have evaded Border Patrol is obviously unknown but over 40 migrants on the terror watchlist have been apprehended in addition to those who have slipped through. Enough fentanyl has been imported for every single American to have taken a fatal overdose.

But America’s greatest threat from massive illegal immigration isn’t the effect on our safety, our education nor our healthcare.  It’s not the welfare and correctional services illegal immigrants consume. The greatest danger is losing our nationhood.

America is uniquely a nation based not on geography nor blood but on its values and ideals. We have amply demonstrated our ability to absorb large numbers of immigrants who love America, who come because they want to be Americans and share our values and ideals, established in our Declaration and Constitution.

Illegal immigrants, by contrast, begin their relationship by defying a foundational principle that has made the US a magnet for immigrants since its creation: the Rule of Law.  This is the belief that we are ruled by laws, not men (people), and that each of us stand as a free and equal individual before the law.

Unfortunately, this tsunami of immigration from socialist autocracies where corruption is the norm is occurring at a time wherein America is struggling with growing levels of tribalism. E Pluribus Unum is fading as many Americans now identify primarily as members of a political, racial or other groups that competes for favors from government.

Assimilation is now scorned as a micro-aggression.  America is regarded by its own citizens as oppressive and bigoted.

Tens of millions of illegal immigrants who neither know nor care about America’s defining values don’t bode well for our future. In a decade or two, we’ll undoubtedly begin to hear about how they “deserve“ citizenship, they’ve been here a long time, don’t have any other home, and so on.  Our unity as Americans will become more fractured.

Americans are historically compassionate and resilient.  But it is past time for Americans to reinforce the crucial distinction between illegal and legal immigrants.

It’s not racist or xenophobic to protect our borders from those who ignore our principles but want to enjoy the fruits of our success. It is crucial to the survival of America as we know it.

*****

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.

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Resurfaced Interview Reveals McCain Associate’s Leak To Buzzfeed Was Alleged ‘Hail Mary’ To Prevent Trump Inauguration thumbnail

Resurfaced Interview Reveals McCain Associate’s Leak To Buzzfeed Was Alleged ‘Hail Mary’ To Prevent Trump Inauguration

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By Shelby Talcott

Editors’ Note: As the Durham investigation continues to unravel the conspiracy to subvert the campaign, and later the Presidency of Donald Trump, it is worthwhile to remember that Republicans were part of this cabal as well. This was more than just inter-party rivalry, an emotional reaction to an insult, or a clash of personalities. They were trafficking with known falsehoods, developed for foreign espionage operatives, funded by Democrats. The purpose was not only subverting the Trump campaign, they were subverting a legally elected President. In this sense, they were also subverting the will of the voter and that act of arrogance should not be forgotten. Unfortunately, the Senior Senator from Arizona, and his family, were part of this display of perfidy, and it was shameful. It significantly diminishes his memory.While the Senator is now gone, his role should not be forgotten nor forgiven. We further need to remember that elements of the McCain political machine that participated in this political caper, still reside and operate in Arizona to this day. These individuals need to be identified, held accountable,  and isolated from party leadership positions. Of course, party officials should be free to disagree on policy and robust debate is both desirable and necessary. But treachery is not desirable and they are not free to break the law or subvert the democratic system because they may feel slighted, offended, or jealous. And, if they wish to join the Democrat Party, that too is permissible.  However, joining forces with Democrats secretly, while pretending to represent the interests of Republicans, is a betrayal of the highest order.

A recently resurfaced NPR interview suggests the individual responsible for leaking the Steele Dossier to Buzzfeed in 2017 did so as a “Hail Mary” attempt to prevent former President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

News of why the dossier was apparently leaked was met with little fanfare or headlines at the time. What’s more, the revelation from NPR’s interview indicates the media played a key role in the alleged plan to stop Trump from taking office.

David Kramer, a former State Department official and associate of late Arizona Sen. John McCain, leaked copies of the dossier – authored by former British spy Christopher Steele – to Buzzfeed News and multiple other networks.

Buzzfeed subsequently published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017, about two months after the 2016 election was called for Trump, but prior to his inauguration.

NPR later conducted a 2019 interview with Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the duo responsible for hiring Steele on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The interview uncovers a revelation regarding the timing of the leaked dossier. According to Simpson and Fritsch, the Steele Dossier was leaked to Buzzfeed News in the hopes that it would “thwart” Trump’s upcoming inauguration. (RELATED: John McCain Associate Gave Dossier To BuzzFeed)

From NPR’s interview, hosted by Terry Gross and titled “Fusion GPS Founders On Russian Efforts To Sow Discord: ‘They Have Succeeded’”:

GROSS: Refresh our memory about when BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier.

FRITSCH: BuzzFeed published a dossier on – excuse me – January 10, 2017.

GROSS: So it was after the election. It could no longer affect the outcome of the election.

SIMPSON: That’s correct. But it was before the inauguration. So what we say in the book is that the person who has now admitted to leaking the dossier was apparently trying to do was to thwart the swearing-in of Trump. And he believed that if this information got out, it might lead to – somehow to Trump’s inaugural being put off.

FRITSCH: The ultimate Hail Mary pass and ill-advised.

GROSS: Who was the leaker?

FRITSCH: So there was a John McCain – a person who was close to John McCain by the name of David Kramer, who’s a former – worked in the State Department for human rights for many years and is a – an avowed Russia hawk. He became aware of the document via Christopher Steele and his network and his former colleagues in MI6. They met with Senator McCain at the Halifax forum, which is an international forum not unlike the Aspen Institute Forum. They decided that they needed to pursue this. David Kramer flew to London; met with Christopher Steele, who showed him the dossier. Mister – Chris was wary of giving the document to David Kramer to carry on an airplane, so he asked us to hand it to him, which Glenn did.

Buzzfeed News did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller regarding its publication of the dossier.

Later on in the NPR interview, Gross reiterated the news of Kramer’s alleged plan, asking if it was “ironic” that a McCain “aide” made the dossier public. (RELATED: WaPo Issues Massive Correction About Steele Dossier, Says It Can Not Stand By The Accuracy Of Two Stories)

“Do you find it ironic that it was an aide of John McCain’s who made the dossier public in the hopes of preventing Donald Trump from actually getting inaugurated?” Gross asked. “And it’s Lindsey Graham, one of McCain’s closest friends, who has been one of the leaders trying to question the Mueller report, trying to question the research that you did and supporting Donald Trump?”

“I think it’s ironic,” Simpson responded. “I think it’s hypocritical. And I think it’s depressing that a lot of people who know better are now standing up for Donald Trump. So yes, I think – you know, the Republicans paid for the first half of our investigation, and now they’re claiming it was all a Democratic hoax. It doesn’t make sense.”

The Steele Dossier contained a number of inaccurate Russia–Trump allegations. Authorities arrested Russian-born Igor Danchenko, identified in 2020 as the dossier’s primary researcher, in 2021 and made his indictment public.

The indictment cited a number of lies and falsities used throughout the dossier’s construction.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

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Liberal Corporations Are Confused and Scared Because Conservatives Now Fight Back thumbnail

Liberal Corporations Are Confused and Scared Because Conservatives Now Fight Back

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By Kurt Schlichter

It’s always fun when progressive jerks try to leverage their bizarre perceptions of our beliefs to get us to do what they want. It can be some smug Twitter blue check informing us that “Actually Jesus was a socialist who would want us to cancel student debt for spoiled rich kids who got degrees in Transgender Visual Arts” or, more recently, some newly-minted Milton Friedman acolyte goofsplaining that we must submit to the skeevy whims of California corporations and accept the imposition of grooming mandates because, after all, they are private businesses. And sometimes it works, even on alleged conservatives – David French has made whatever passes for his C-list career out of striving to twist conservatism to conform to his lib masters’ version of it.

But this cheesy ploy is not working anymore, at least not on the rest of us.

Ron DeSantis, the Scourge of Odd sitting on his growing throne o’ skulls in Tallahassee, is fresh from laughing off the howls of broken libs enraged that he gerrymandered them in Florida like they gerrymandered us in New York and Illinois. Ron is not one for accepting two sets of rules, one for the ruling caste and another, crappier one for us peasants. He identifies the applicable rule and applies it good and hard. It’s about time the left learns that norm-breaking has consequences. And one consequence is frequent broken-norm suppositories.

And in the case of Disney, it was so objectively insane that you had to wonder about the thought process, but only for a moment until you realize that this is 2022 and everything is utterly stupid. Disney got welcomed into America’s homes and hearts by purveying safe and wholesome kiddie fare to American families and has decided, to please a pack of mutant employees, to administer a coup de grace to that rep by leaping into the arena to fight against a law that all normal people agree is so manifestly proper that it really should not have to be a law at all – that pervs can’t talk to little kids about sex in schools. But no, Disney had to weigh in on the side of groomers because the consensus in the rarified circles its leadership circulates in and among the weirdo contingent on its staff is that the world must be made safe for bizarre sexuality.

Oh, and it did not help that a bunch of Disney employees recently got swept up in a child porn sting, and that the strange-os in its bureaucracy decided to brag on leaked Zoom calls about how they were injecting their freak show gender nonsense into its once sacrosanct movies and shows. You know what Buzz Lightyear was missing? Some not-hot girl-on-girl action. We are one revision away from changing the title of “The Lion King” to “The Otherkin Non-Binary Member of the Royalty.” “Hakuna matata” is supposed to mean “No worries,” not “It’s okay to lop off your junk if you’re not feeling like a boy today.”

So DeSantis decided that Disney needed some discipline, and that stepping to him (and, therefore, us) cried out for a response. Some folks worry that this is an attack on the First Amendment, but this was not just because Disney chose to weigh in on an issue (though it’s unclear why you are obligated to continue providing juicy tax breaks to political opponents – the Founders would have tossed you in a madhouse for arguing that). No, Disney has launched a broad offensive against normal people using political, cultural and economic power to change our society without our permission. This is not just about Disney expressing an opinion, though its groomer-tolerant opinion is creepy and gross.

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TAKE ACTION

America is on to the LGBTQ…., transgender, gender fluidity, sexualizing agenda the Walt Disney Company is openly grooming our nation’s children with. It is timely and imperative that we inform Disney of our rejection of their indoctrinating, far leftist and godless attempt to sexually groom our youngest generation…

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Why Is the Biden Administration Determined to Help Terrorist Iran Get a Bomb?

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By Majid Rafizadeh

    • Why would any administration in its right mind permit an official state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to have nuclear weapons, as well as billions of dollars that will assuredly not be used for a “GI Bill for returning members of the Revolutionary Guard”?
    • Just this week, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called Iran, a “sponsor of terrorism.”
    • With Biden’s deal, restrictions on the regime’s nuclear program would be lifted only two years after the agreement is signed, permitting the regime to enrich uranium at any level it desires and spin as many uranium enrichment centrifuges as it wants.
    • Astonishingly, Russia will be trusted to be the country that stores Iran’s enriched uranium, and Moscow will get paid for this mission. More uranium for Russia? How nifty: maybe Putin can use it for his next “Ukraine” — in Poland, Sweden or France?
    • The new deal will not address Iran’s ballistic missile program, meaning that the Tehran regime will continue attacking other nations with its ballistic missiles, provide missiles to its proxy militias in other countries, and advance the range of its intercontinental ballistic missiles to reach the US territories. Iran could even use shorter-range ballistic missiles to reach the US, perhaps launched from Venezuela or Cuba, where Iran is already deeply entrenched.
    • To meet the Iranian leaders’ demands, the new deal will most likely include removal from the terrorist list of the IRGC, which has killed countless Americans, both on American soil and off.
    • The Islamic Republic of Iran began murdering Americans in Beirut in 1983, and also had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.
    • The Biden administration, if it actually cares about peace in the region — a subject that seems open to question — would do well to listen to the warnings of these many US military leaders and Congressmen, and refuse to revive the disastrous nuclear deal. It will only make even more dangerous a country that the US State Department itself has called “the world’s worst sponsor of state terrorism,” as well as frankly creating an unnecessary security threat in the region, Europe and the US.
    • Why would any administration in its right mind permit an official state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to have nuclear weapons, as well as billions of dollars that will assuredly not be used for a “GI Bill for returning members of the Revolutionary Guard”?Just this week, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called Iran, a “sponsor of terrorism.”Calls and warnings against reviving the 2015 nuclear accords, however, seem to be falling on deaf ears, as the Biden administration appears determined to reach a deal that would enable a state that has been trying to take over the entire Middle East for decades — and already controls Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq — to have nuclear weapons, the ballistic missiles to deliver them, and billions of dollars to further its well-documented terrorism.Last week, 45 retired US Generals and Admirals sent an entreaty, titled “Open Letter from U.S. Military Leaders Opposing Iran Nuclear Deal”, to the Biden administration, warning against reviving of the nuclear deal. They wrote:

“In Ukraine, we are bearing witness to the horrors of a country ruthlessly attacking its neighbor and, by brandishing its nuclear weapons, forcing the rest of the world largely to stand on the sidelines.

“The new Iran deal currently being negotiated, which Russia has played a central role in crafting, will enable the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism to cast its own nuclear shadow over the Middle East.

“As retired American military leaders who devoted their lives to the defense of our nation, we oppose this emerging deal that is poised to instantly fuel explosive Iranian aggression and pave Iran’s path to become a nuclear power, threatening the American homeland and the very existence of America’s regional allies.”

While the Biden administration is indefatigably trying to appease the ruling mullahs by lifting sanctions against the Iranian regime, the Islamic Republic has been ratcheting up its threats and attacks against the US bases and its allies, presumably as a nudge.

In addition, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, recently commended “Palestinian martyrs” and threatened Israel as well:

“We are in the middle of the battlefield. The Islamic Republic of Iran is at the forefront of the scene against global arrogance and international Zionism, and we will continue on the path of their honor and greatness, thanks to the martyrs.

Qaani also boasted about the Houthis’ access to weapons:

“Today, the heroes of Yemen and the new sons of the revolution are building the major weapons they use inside their country… they build missiles with a range of over 1,000 kilometers and drones with a range of over 1,500 kilometers, and all of these operations are carried out using tools and facilities in tunnels and basements, under enemy bombardment…”

The Biden administration is not only empowering the ruling mullahs of Iran and its militia groups but grievously alienating US allies in the region. As the retired American US Generals and Admirals accurately stated in their letter:

“America’s closest regional partners, attacked regularly by Iran, already strongly oppose the proposed deal. If we will not help protect them against Iran, we cannot expect their help addressing threats like Russia and China. We instead support diplomacy that would genuinely end the threat posed by Iran’s military nuclear program and counter Iran’s regional aggression, backed up by credibly drawn and enforced redlines against Iranian nuclear and regional escalation.”

Worse, the Biden administration’s new deal with the Iranian regime is much weaker than Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. With Biden’s deal, restrictions on the regime’s nuclear program would be lifted only two years after the agreement is signed, permitting the regime to enrich uranium at any level it desires and spin as many uranium enrichment centrifuges as it wants.

The new deal will not force the Iranian regime to reveal its past nuclear activities, which had military dimensions.

Astonishingly, Russia will be trusted to be the country that stores Iran’s enriched uranium, and Moscow will get paid for this mission. More uranium for Russia? How nifty: maybe Putin can use it for his next “Ukraine” — in Poland, Sweden, or France?

The new deal will not address Iran’s ballistic missile program, meaning that the Tehran regime will continue attacking other nations with its ballistic missiles, provide missiles to its proxy militias in other countries, and advance the range of its intercontinental ballistic missiles to reach the US territories. Iran could even use shorter-range ballistic missiles to reach the US, perhaps launched from Venezuela or Cuba, where Iran is already deeply entrenched.

To meet the Iranian leaders’ demands, the new deal will most likely include removal from the terrorist list of the IRGC, which has killed countless Americans, both on American soil and off.

The Islamic Republic of Iran began murdering Americans in Beirut in 1983, and also had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.

Last but not least, economic sanctions will be lifted against the Iranian regime and will facilitate the flow of billions of dollars to the ruling mullahs. This will further assist the terrorist regime of Iran to destabilize the region, targeting and attacking US allies, and continuing arming, funding, and sponsoring its militia and terror groups across the world.

The Biden administration, if it actually cares about peace in the region — a subject that seems open to question — would do well to listen to the warnings of these many US military leaders and Congressmen, and refuse to revive the disastrous nuclear deal. It will only make even more dangerous a country that the US State Department itself has called “the world’s worst sponsor of state terrorism,” as well as frankly creating an unnecessary security threat in the region, Europe, and the US.

*****

This article was published by the Gatestone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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The Coming Campaign Deception

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By Bruce Bialosky

I gravely dislike our constant campaign mode democracy. As soon as we finish a presidential election talk begins about the opposition party’s candidate four years hence. As soon as a member of Congress gets installed, they start raising money for the next election cycle. Incumbent senators squirrel away millions significantly in advance of their six-year term ending. Often this leads to deceptions. This 2022 campaign is unique in that it will be filled with deceptions that have been made public and intentional.

Every campaign has its deceptions. The last presidential election was chock full of them. Opponents of Donald Trump believe nothing he says. On the other hand, the prime deception in 2020 centered around the Hunter Biden laptop. Fifty-one “intelligence community experts” were touted by Joe Biden to state that the evidence was “Russian disinformation.” Sixteen months later the New York Times fessed up that its fellow New York paper – The Post –was accurate in reporting the Hunter Biden story that likely would have turned the election.

This round of elections is distinct. After 15 months of the Biden presidency, his poll numbers are in the toilet. The issues of inflation, crime, homelessness, and more have the Democrats on their heels, attempting to figure out how they survive a projected bloodbath. Representative Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chair, did what politicos do today – commission a poll. The poll told him some fascinating facts about his party and determined his strategy for the November elections — a political lifetime from now.

The research found that Democrats are “preachy, judgmental and focused on culture wars.” Nothing of that is shocking except for them being judgmental. It used to be the hippie set of the Left that believed in “live and let live.” The new Left wants to tell you what to believe and when to believe it. We all know what happens when they do not agree with you. They do not just disagree; they want to dismember you or at minimum, they want to suppress what you say and don’t want to hear your thoughts.

The poll also found that the political arguments by the opposition focused on public safety (crime), critical race theory and the related issue of parental rights in the educational system are as the pollsters characterized “alarmingly potent.”

Maloney wants to go on the offensive which makes political sense. He wants them to argue for support of the police, against open borders and/or amnesty and focus on issues of border safety. This is where the deception comes into play.

The Democrats can mouth all these policies like they are in support of police, but no one is going to believe them. Already 80% of self-identified swing voters in competitive districts believe Democrats want to defund the police. There is only one way to reverse that perception and it is not campaign ads where a Congressional candidate is shaking hands with a cop. It is for them to not only sponsor legislation to reverse their naïve post-George Floyd actions but to get the legislation passed.

Another action is to come out in favor of recalling these criminal DAs who refuse to enforce the laws they were elected to administer. The problem is that none of this is going to happen because the Democrats believe in the policies that the voters gravely dislike.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that “My purpose right now is to just win the midterm elections. Nothing less is at stake than our democracy.” Pelosi added, “Our party is unified in its empathy for America’s working families.” These are the kind of platitudes that will resonate with the American people in an unintended manner. They confirm that the Democrats are clueless about the real issues facing their constituents and that their leader and their team are out of touch with middle America. Additionally, if the Congressional Democrats are voted out in November and the Republicans are put in charge, Ms. Pelosi stated that the democratic act is a threat to our democracy. That is an interesting take from the third most powerful person in our country.

Another thing Mr. Maloney will argue is that the Democrats nominate people who believe in the police and lawfully enforced borders against a flood of illegal aliens. The problem is that they will be such a minority in the Democrat Congressional caucus that they will be rolled once again to support policies that contradict those beliefs. We have seen this movie before where the so-called moderate Democrats end up as cannon fodder for the party leaders.

My suggestion is to evaluate which party believes in enforcing criminal laws, controlling our Southern border, supporting legal immigration, ensuring parents have a right to know what is being taught to their children in public schools, or better yet, they should be able to choose to go to another school. Then vote for those candidates.

Please do not fall for Mr. Maloney’s planned campaign misrepresentations. You will end up with the same mess we currently have.

*****

This article was published in Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

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Legacy Media’s Most Influential Newsletters Are Funded By America’s Biggest Corporations

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By Dylan Housman

Many of the most influential sources of news in Washington, D.C. are funded by America’s biggest corporations, which often have a direct interest in the news they’re sponsoring.

Leading D.C.-insider news outlets, including Politico, Axios and Punchbowl News, rely largely on newsletters with integrated advertising and sponsorships to distribute their content to key decisionmakers in American politics. Those newsletters are frequently sponsored by Big Tech firms, defense contractors, Chinese mega-companies and other corporate interests.

Politico’s Playbook, the original digital newsletter for Washington insiders, is read by tens of thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, political staffers, lobbyists, and consultants every morning. Monday’s edition was sponsored by Google, with integrated blurbs touting the company’s efforts to help small businesses and woman-founded startups. Other Playbook posts within the past month have been presented by Facebook, the American Beverage Association (a lobbying group), and Amazon.

Axios, a Politico rival founded by former Politico employees, has its own Playbook Rival, Axios AM. Last week’s editions were presented by Bank of America. The week before that, Google. Punchbowl News, a newer competitor in the D.C.-insider news landscape, has had its flagship newsletter sponsored by Facebook, Alibaba (a Chinese eCommerce giant), and Blackstone in the past week.

There’s a trend not only of these news services read by America’s most powerful being funded by major corporations, but oftentimes by the same corporations: just recently, Google and Facebook. Perhaps even more striking is that the policy-specific newsletters offered by outlets like Politico and Axios are sponsored by corporate interests competing directly in those spaces.

For instance, Monday’s Politico Morning Energy newsletter was sponsored by Chevron; Politico Morning Money was sponsored by Blackstone; Politico’s Pulse and Prescription Pulse healthcare newsletters are presented by PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) and PCMA (Pharmaceutical Care Management Association).

Axios readers are treated to Axios Generate presented by ExxonMobil, Axios Vitals presented by the American Hospital Association, and Axios Login presented by Ericsson, a 5g equipment provider. (RELATED: Corporate Media Goes Into Full Panic Mode After Travel Mask Mandate Ends)

Politico previously scrubbed any evidence of sponsorship of its national security newsletter by Lockheed Martin, America’s biggest weapons manufacturer. The branding deal was widely criticized after being highlighted on social media. More traditional media isn’t immune to similar conflicts of interest, though — last year, The Washington Post ran an op-ed criticizing the prospect of withdrawing from Afghanistan, without disclosing the fact that the author was on the board of Raytheon, a leading defense contractor.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

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U.S. Supreme Court To Hear Arguments in Lawsuit Seeking Reinstatement of Remain in Mexico Policy

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By Bethany Blankley

Editors’ Note (Restated from 4/25): The following article is an excellent description of the southern border crisis, an open border threatening all citizens and the national security of the United States. The statement is often made that the Biden administration doesn’t have an effective policy to address this crisis. Our national headlines should be shouting that this crisis and invasion of our country is exactly the administration’s policy. With large numbers of Hispanic American citizens leaving the Democrat party, the radical leftists running the executive branch want many millions of non-skilled, unvetted illegal residents flooding into the country who will be highly dependent on government services and ultimately Democrat voters, whether legal or not, in the decades to come. Damn the fentanyl, the criminals, the terrorists, the cartels or any other factor undermining our national security and sovereignty – just flood the nation (yes, all fifty states) with illegals and the hell with American citizens – whatever it takes to maintain Democrat power is the goal. The previous America First policy controlling and protecting our southern border is now the Americans Last policy of the Biden presidency.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt are heading to the U.S. Supreme Court again on Tuesday, arguing the Biden administration must follow federal law and fully reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols, otherwise known as the Remain in Mexico policy.

It’s the second time they’ve argued before the court in a lawsuit they filed against the administration since last April. Last August, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s request to stay a lower court’s ruling requiring it to reinstate the MPP.

“Missouri and Texas filed suit after the Biden Administration suspended the policy and obtained a permanent injunction in federal court, and then successfully defended that injunction in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States,” Schmitt told The Center Square. “We look forward to presenting our arguments in front of the Supreme Court and continuing our winning streak against the Biden Administration,”

Last August, U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas ordered the administration to reinstate the MPP, ruling that halting it violated the Administrative Procedures Act. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Kacsmaryk’s ruling more than once, determining the administration also violated federal immigration law.

The administration argues the MPP is inhumane and has fought the AGs in court even after the Supreme Court’s decision. In its most recent filing with the Supreme Court, it argues that courts ordering the Department of Homeland Security to reinstate the MPP is “unprecedented.”

The MPP, enacted in 2019, applies “to aliens who have no legal entitlement to enter the United States but who depart from a third country and transit through Mexico to reach the United States land border.” It requires those seeking to enter the U.S. to remain in Mexico while their immigration applications are considered, which can take years.

On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, DHS announced it was no longer enrolling illegal immigrants into the MPP effective Jan. 21, 2021. Last February, DHS began processing MPP enrollees in Mexico and releasing them into the U.S.

Doing so, it said, was “to reform immigration policies that do not align with our nation’s values.” This was also part of a “first step in a phased approach to restore safe and orderly processing at the Southwest Border,” it said.

But the administration’s approach isn’t safe or orderly, it’s created chaos, Schmitt and Paxton argue.

“Before the Migrant Protection Protocols, illegal immigrants were released into the interior with a court date, never to be seen again,” Schmitt told The Center Square. “The Migrant Protection Protocols was a successful tool for curtailing the influx of illegal immigrants and securing the border.

“Because of the Biden Administration’s lax border policies, illegal drugs like fentanyl are streaming across our border and human traffickers are thriving,” he said, endangering and killing Americans in the process.

In addition to leading to increased criminal activity, Biden’s border policies are draining resources, Paxton said.

“President Biden could immediately remedy the influx of crime pouring across our border by reinstating the Migrant Protection Protocols,” Paxton argued when he filed the lawsuit. “Dangerous criminals are taking advantage of the lapse in law enforcement and it’s resulting in human trafficking, smuggling, a plethora of violent crimes, and a massive, unprecedented burden on state and federal programs for which taxpayers must foot the bill. We cannot allow this lawlessness to destroy our communities any longer.”

By last June, DHS expanded its criteria for MPP enrollees to be processed and released into the U.S. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas also implemented a wide range of policy changes to effectively halt most deportations and directed CBP and Border Patrol agents to release illegal immigrants into the U.S. en masse.

Most of the 15,000 Haitians who initially arrived in Del Rio, Texas, last September and many of the two million illegal immigrants encountered or apprehended by Border Patrol during Biden’s first year in office, for example, wouldn’t have been released into the U.S. if the administration had complied with Judge Kacsmaryk’s order, the AGs argue.

Under the Biden administration, enforcement mechanisms don’t exist to ensure that illegal immigrants attend immigration hearings once they’re in the U.S., the AGs argue, and those with deportation orders aren’t being deported.

Last year, the administration acknowledged that more than 50,000 people released into the U.S. failed to report to their deportation proceedings and that court information was missing for 40,000 people in just a five-month period last year.

According to court filings, more than 1.2 million people with court orders for deportation were still living in the U.S. as of last February.

With the administration estimating that roughly 18,000 people a day will enter U.S. custody once Title 42 is repealed in May, the AGs argue forcing the administration to follow the law is imperative for the safety of Americans. Both Paxton and Schmitt have sued separately to keep Title 42, a public health authority that enables federal agents to quickly expel illegal immigrants during a public health emergency, in place. They’ve both called for Mayorkas’ resignation.

DHS announced it was reinstating the MPP in “good faith” last December but also argued that DHS has the authority to parole illegal immigrants, allowing them to stay in the U.S. while their cases progress.

The Fifth Circuit rejected the administration’s arguments.

Judge Andrew Oldham argued federal immigration law “… requires DHS to detain aliens, pending removal proceedings, who unlawfully enter the United States and seek permission to stay.”

Because DHS lacks the physical capacity to hold the volume of people entering the U.S. illegally, the MPP was implemented. The statute directs the government to return individuals to contiguous countries while their cases are pending, Oldham explained.

“That safety valve was the statutory basis for the protocols,” Oldham argued. “DHS’s termination decision was a refusal to use the statute’s safety valve. That refusal, combined with DHS’s lack of detention capacity, means DHS is not detaining the aliens that Congress required it to detain.

“The idea seems to be that DHS can simply parole every alien it lacks the capacity to detain. But that solves nothing: The statute allows only case-by-case parole. Deciding to parole aliens en masse is the opposite of case-by-case decision making,” Oldham argued.

The administration’s stance would have implications for the separation of powers, Oldham said.

“The Government also says it has unreviewable and unilateral discretion to ignore statutory limits imposed by Congress and to remake entire titles of the United States Code to suit the preferences of the executive branch. And the Government says it can do all of this by typing up a new ‘memo’ and posting it on the internet. If the Government were correct, it would supplant the rule of law with the rule of say-so.

“We hold the Government is wrong.”

The AGs are hoping the Supreme Court agrees with Oldham and upholds Kacsmaryk’s ruling.

*****

This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

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What Can Be Done About Troubling State of Our Elections? Deroy Murdock Has Ideas

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By Douglas Blair

Election integrity is essential to a functioning country. Americans deserve to know that their elections are being conducted fairly and that their votes count.

Unfortunately, many have reason to think our elections aren’t secure.

Deroy Murdock, a Fox News contributor and senior fellow at the Atlas Network, says he sees election integrity and voter fraud as issues that will determine the continued existence of America as we know it.

“We can’t even tolerate the appearance of vote fraud, because even the mere appearance of vote fraud causes people to lose confidence in our leadership and in our system,” says Murdock, whose columns appear regularly in The Daily Signal. “And pretty soon, our constitutional republic starts to dissolve.”

Murdock joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the issue of clean and honest elections, and how we can make them more secure.

The lightly edited transcript is below.

Doug Blair: My guest today is Deroy Murdock, a Fox News contributor and senior fellow at the Atlas Network. Deroy, welcome to the show.

Deroy Murdock: Doug, great to be with you.

Blair: I want to talk to you about election integrity. You gave a speech at The Heritage Foundation about some of the wild intricacies of how election integrity has fallen by the wayside in America these days. Where do you see that as being the biggest problem?

Murdock: Well, it’s a big problem in a lot of states where people are not doing what they need to do in order to make sure that our elections are clean, honest, reliable. I think a lot of this, unfortunately, came out of the COVID emergency.

And people on the left said, “Well, we can’t have people go to the polls because they might get sick or they might get people sick. So let’s have mass mail-in ballots so people can stay at home. And we can’t expect them to turn their votes over at the election board so we’re going to have ballot harvesting so we’ll go pick up their ballots for them. And we’ll have drop boxes. They can drop their ballots in these unsupervised boxes, maybe at 3 in the morning so they won’t get COVID.”

… As Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago, said, “Never let a great crisis go to waste.” And boy, they didn’t. And they weaponized this disease to change the way we vote. And unfortunately, now, a lot of that stuff still sticks.

There’s been an effort by some states to roll back some of this nonsense. A lot of us fear that there’s going to be what we call the “midterm variant.” Right about Labor Day, there’ll be another variant of COVID and they’ll say, “Oh my God, we got to lock the thing down.”

And they’ll say, “Well, we got to do the mass mail-in ballots,” and go through all the nonsense we did in 2020 that tainted that election, I think, truly, fatally.

But I hope that we will get over this nonsense, get COVID behind us, and get the COVID-related very negative changes in our voting system behind us and in the history books and go back to what we should be doing, which is as much as possible vote in person.

If you’re going to vote absentee, it’s because you’re actually sick or you’re out of town, not just because you feel like it. And we’re going to have the ballots come in—unless they’re in the military or something like that. All the ballots have got to be in on election night, not two weeks after or two and a half weeks, just drifting in whenever they want to.

And we really need to go back to the concept of Election Day, where you get up on Election Day, get off your BarcaLounger, put on some clothes, and go down and vote with your neighbors. And decide who’s going to be your mayor, who’s going to be your governor, who’s your congressman, who’s your senator, and who’s the president of the United States.

Rather than what we’ve got now, which is you stay home. You vote in a bathrobe, or maybe with a towel around your waist. It’s just another casual activity. It’s not that important. Who cares?

And I think the whole quality of our democracy suffers when people think voting is just something you do while you’re waiting for dinner to be served rather than something that you take seriously and you and your neighbors go and decide who is going to lead this constitutional republic of ours.

Blair: Deroy, there was a lot to unpack there. I want to start with some of those policies that you mentioned. It sounds like these are policies that have been intentionally created to make voter fraud or election irregularities easier to propagate. Is that accurate, that it’s intentional?

Murdock: I think so. Now, some people will say, “Well, these people really meant well and they just were trying to keep people from getting infected.” I think that’s maybe the innocent explanation.

My sense is that there are people who want to be able to make life as easy to cheat and keep the system loosey-goosey and unfocused and not buttoned up. And that makes it a lot easier to cheat, a lot easier to steal elections. And I think that there are people who do that.

I also think, even if there are honest people and they mean well, that this sort of thing just a bare minimum creates the perception of vote fraud.

And even if there is no actual vote fraud, but people think, “Oh boy, that looks fishy,” then you look at the person who benefits from it, the person that was elected, and you think, “Oh, that’s not really the president United States. That’s not really my senator. That’s not my governor—or whatever it is.”

And I don’t think we can tolerate vote fraud. We can’t even tolerate the appearance of vote fraud because even the mere appearance of vote fraud causes people to lose confidence in our leadership and in our system. And pretty soon our constitutional republic starts to dissolve.

Blair: The secondary angle to that was this idea that voting has become something you do while you’ve gotten out of the shower. Like, “Oh shoot, I forgot to vote. I’ll just fill out my ballot really quickly.” How does that idea, that voting has become a more casual activity, affect the voting process?

Murdock: I think what it does is that people just take it less seriously.

If you know you’re going to go on Election Day—not three weeks before Election Day or early voting or all this other nonsense, but you’re going to go on Election Day—and you and your neighbors are going to go to somewhere, whether it’s the fire station or the elementary school or the church basement, wherever you go, and you vote, I think you take it more seriously if you’re going to go out there and physically go present yourself and vote.

And I think you’re probably going to research more. I think you’re going to look at the ballot propositions more, think more carefully about the candidates who are aiming to represent you.

Versus if you’re just sitting around in the easy chair with your feet up on the ottoman, thinking, “Oh, well, I read the sports page and I’m about to watch some exciting drama on Netflix. So I’ve got 10 minutes before the thing starts. So let me fill out my ballot real quick.” I don’t think it’s really a way we ought to be operating as a people.

There’s also another big problem with this business of what the Democrats and the left really have done. They like to say, “Oh, the Republicans are beating up our democracy.” Look, there’s nothing more central to democracy than the secret ballot.

Going into the polls, you close the curtain behind you, and it’s only you and the ballot. Your boss isn’t there. Your husband’s not there. Your wife’s not there. Your boyfriend, girlfriend, kids, grandkids, nobody’s there but you. And you pick the person or the people you want to represent you and you vote yes/no on whatever the ballot measures are.

When you vote at home, you’re sitting there and you could have your husband or wife or somebody saying, “Well, if you vote for that person, I’m going to clock you over the head with a skillet,” or, “Grandpa, if you don’t vote the way we want, we’re not going to give you any penicillin for a couple of days. Let’s see how you feel.” You don’t need to be putting people in that situation.

Hillary Clinton said that the reason she lost in 2016 is a lot of pro-Trump husbands pressured their wives not to vote for her. And a lot of people laughed.

I think it’s probably more paranoia, but I bet you there may be some examples of some husbands that said, “Honey, you vote for Hillary, you’re in big trouble.” And there are probably some people who said, “Honey, you vote for [Donald] Trump, you’re in trouble.” You don’t want that situation. You don’t need that.

And maybe it’s not, “I’m going to knock you over the head with a pipe.” It might just be, “I don’t want to be grumbled at and have somebody make faces at me for the next four years, so I’m not going to vote the way I would otherwise,” or what have you.

People shouldn’t be operating under that kind of pressure. People shouldn’t be voting at home with that kind of nonsense going on.

I know somebody who had accompanied a voting party in California. And they had everyone from the office come in and sit around the conference table and fill out their absentee ballots.

This person is married to somebody who’s not an American citizen, she’s a citizen of a country overseas. And they handed her a ballot and she actually thought, “Well, gee, I could fill this out and vote in this election.” And to her credit, she said, “No, I’m not an American citizen so I’m not going to vote.”

But she had every opportunity right there with a ballot that I think had been an absentee ballot that somebody found it just sitting around. Because it was mailed to somebody, that person moved away or died, and that person’s ballot was there and said, “Hey, you want to join in, too?”

And if she wanted to, she could have filled out that ballot and sent it in. And she would’ve voted it in the last election, in 2020, even though she’s not an American citizen.

This is absurd. This is horrible. This needs to stop—and this business of just sending out ballots as if they were confetti, having them land next to people’s mailboxes because they’re not there, they’ve moved away.

So, the post office drops them off and the people either pick them up or they pull them out of the trash. If they’re good citizens, they mail them back or they tear them in half so they can’t be used. But I’ve no doubt people picked them up, said, “Oh, good. I can vote two or three times for president now.”

And especially with things like drop boxes. You don’t have to go and hand this into a poll worker at the polls. Put it in the dropbox at 4 in the morning and nobody’s any the wiser.

There’s a movie coming out by Dinesh D’Souza called “2,000 Mules.” I believe it premieres May 2, if I’m not mistaken. And it’s about this exact problem.

Apparently, they have security footage of folks who were going up to these unsupervised drop boxes and dropping in not one or two ballots—mom’s ballot, grandpa’s ballot—but no, a fistful, fistful of ballots being stuffed into these drop boxes.

And these people were driving around and going to dropbox A, dropbox B, dropbox C, and just stuffing in just handfuls of ballots. And they were able to use both the security footage and also cellphone tracking data to follow these people around.

And I’ve not seen the movie yet, but I’m looking forward to it. And what I sense is it shows a very, very elaborate conspiracy to stuff the ballot box on behalf of the left.

… Look, I think if you could just move around 44,000, 45,000 votes in just the right states, it goes from a Trump victory to a Biden victory. And it’s entirely plausible that those people stuffed the ballot box and got Joe Biden into the White House that way.

Blair: To play devil’s advocate for a second, let’s assume that did happen and that we are seeing this massive amount of voter fraud. Are there not prevention measures when the ballots are counted to say, “Oh, well, this person isn’t a citizen, so their ballot shouldn’t count,” or, “This person’s dead, that shouldn’t count”? Is there any form of prevention to make sure that doesn’t happen?

Murdock: Well, it’s limited. Some of that stuff might be able to be caught, but when you put in—

I’ve actually seen in Colorado a couple of years ago, when they moved to all mail ballots, the signature check, I think people have the idea in their heads that people are taking the ballot with a signature and comparing it to the ballot that’s on vote rolls, and getting a magnifying glass out and a measuring tape and all.

No, these things fly through very quickly.

Have you ever seen the machines that the post office uses to cancel stamps, and you see the letters just flying through at top speed? OK. It’s like that.

So it’s not graphologist A and graphologist B looking at the signature on the ballot and the signature that’s on the vote rolls. It’s not like that. These ballots are going by like this. And on election night, they’re going by like so, and good luck catching anything like that.

To make matters even worse, in some states, the way these systems work, they will look at a signature and they compare, I suppose, the size of the curves and the loops and the angles. And they’ll say, “OK, well, the signature on the absentee ballot is 85% similar to the one that’s on the records.”

They actually lowered in some states, lowered the similarity required in order for the ballot to be accepted from 90% similar to 80% similar down to 70% or 60%. And they were lowering the similarity level to make it easier for a signature that didn’t match to be accepted.

Again, why would you do that unless you’re trying to make it easy for people to cheat?

Blair: Now, as another common refrain we hear amongst the left, they say, “Maybe there’s voter fraud, but it’s not widespread, right? These aren’t widespread voter fraud incidents that are happening, it’s isolated incidents.” What are your thoughts on that?

Murdock: Yeah. There’s this notion that, “Well, there’s no widespread vote fraud.” OK. No. 1, how much is acceptable? Ten thousand fraudulent ballots—is that widespread enough so we have a problem? One hundred thousand ballots? A million? Ten million? Please give me a number where you can say, “Yeah, the vote fraud’s widespread, so it’s a problem.”

They’ve never given any indication of what their tolerance for widespreadedness is, if you use that term.

The second is that you don’t need widespread vote fraud, particularly talking about a presidential election.

You don’t have to have fraud from Malibu to Montauk and from Seattle all the way down to Key West. You basically need fraud in a handful of cities. In Atlanta; in Las Vegas; Madison, Wisconsin; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; … and probably Detroit.

If you can have fraud in just those places, what you do is you pump up the vote for the cheating candidate—unfortunately, usually Democrat.

And as those numbers go up, you end up winning not just that city, you win that whole state. Because there are enough members there, so you win the state, Electoral College being winner-take-all. And if you just have the fraud in those places, you get enough Electoral College votes, you win the election.

So there’s no reason to have, here’s our Washington state fraud program and here’s our New Mexico fraud program, you just need it in those four, five, six swing states. And if you can swing those cities, or sometimes just those precincts, with big enough numbers, you up winning the whole state, all the electoral votes. And once you hit 270, you get the Oval Office.

Blair: You mentioned, during your speech at The Heritage Foundation, Georgia as an example of how this could possibly play out. Would you be able to go in-depth about how that might’ve worked?

Murdock: Absolutely. Well, I refer to a very good book called “Our Broken Elections” written by John Fund of National Review and also Hans von Spakovsky, your colleague here at The Heritage Foundation.

They wrote an excellent book, which deals with both the 2020 election, specifically, and electoral election fraud, vote fraud more broadly. And they get into the history of vote fraud going back into the 20th century, maybe even the 19th century, if I remember correctly.

But they have a specific chapter where they get into the whole mess in Georgia. And you need to remember how small the margin of victory was for Joe Biden, 11,769 votes, just under 12,000 votes. And they list this incredible series in that chapter of things that went really quite sideways in Georgia. And just keep that number, just under 12,000, in mind.

And here are the things that took place, among others: 13 unregistered people voted with absentee ballots; 92 people cast absentee ballots before they even requested them—how’s that possible?; 217 people voted via absentee ballots that were applied for, issued, and received all the same day. Wow, that’s a really high level of public service. Isn’t it?

2,423 people voted who were not on Georgia’s voter rolls, so they shouldn’t have voted at all; 2,560 felons cast ballots before their voting rights were restored—they shouldn’t have voted either; 2,664 absentee ballots were sent out before the first day that they could be distributed legally. That should not have happened. This should not have happened.

10,315 dead people voted on Election Day. And among them, 8,718 were registered as dead before their ballots were accepted. So those ballots should not have gone out in the first place. And then 305,701 individuals applied for absentee ballots after the 180-day pre-election deadline.

Now, if you add all that up, we’re talking 323,985 fraudulent votes. Almost 324,000 fraudulent votes, just among those examples. Now, do you think it’s possible Joe Biden was able to extract 11,769 ballots among those, which was his margin of victory in Georgia? I think that’s entirely possible and I think that’s actually what happened.

Blair: So we’re saying that it’s not just a matter of, oh, this is a local election happening. It could be that standard, it could be a presidential election?

Murdock: Absolutely, correct. Which is part of the problem, is you might say, “Well, look, it’s just local. Who cares? People in Georgia are going to do whatever they do.” Well, it can come down to those people in Georgia being the decisive factor in the election.

We certainly saw in the year 2000, in the Bush versus Gore situation, the entire presidency came down to 500—I think the number is 537 votes in the state of Florida.

Now, if 538 votes had gone the other way, Al Gore would’ve been president of the United States. I’m sure it would be a very different country than we have today. Some people might say for the better, some people might say for the worst, but it would’ve been very, very different because of the situation in that one state.

That one state, the state of Florida, was a tail that wagged the entire dog in the United States of America.

So that’s why we have to have zero tolerance for vote fraud. It’s not cute. It’s not funny. There’s nothing good about it. And certainly, when you’re dealing with the presidential elections, a little bit of vote fraud in one state can go a long way, and it can go all the way to the White House.

Blair: When conservatives and Republicans push legislation that might help with voter fraud, such as, for example, voter ID, we’re often accused of being racist or attempting to push down on people’s ability to vote. What are your thoughts on that rhetoric?

Murdock: I think what’s really racist is the policy and the arguments some people on the left have, a lot of Democrats, who say, “Well, we just can’t expect black people to have voter ID.” What a racist, bigoted, disgusting anti-black thing to say.

I walk around all day long and I see black folks driving cars. Are those people all driving around without licenses? I get on planes, I see black people. Are they not allowed to get on planes without voter ID?

When I go to the airport and hop on a plane—and I travel a lot—nobody ever says, “Oh, you’re black. You don’t have to show a voter ID.” I’ve got to show a voter ID just like every other white person or person of Hispanic background or Asian background getting the plane.

So the idea that somehow black people are just too confused or stupid or disorganized to be able to expect them to be able to show voter ID at the polls, I think it’s a deeply bigoted and racist and disgusting notion. And you hear it out of the mouths of Democrats and the left. You don’t hear it out of the mouths of Republicans and the right.

Blair: So this is more of a Democratic problem?

Murdock: In that sense, absolutely. And the people on the left and Democrats, “Oh, we speak out for black people. We’re the black people’s best friend.” Oh, really? Well, if that’s true, why do you think we’re that stupid that we can’t get our hands on a voter ID?

And by the way, it’s funny how we’re expected these days to get your COVID vaccine and show your proof of vaccination. Usually when you show your proof of vaccination, you have to show an ID card as well.

So the same Joe Biden who says it’s Jim Crow 2.0 and the equivalent of Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis, the head of the Confederacy, to expect black people to show ID at the polls, is the same Joe Biden who’s expecting us all to get our vaccines and show our vaccine cards when we have to go into restaurants or do anything else.

And so that’s OK then, with COVID, that’s fine. But if you expect it at the polls, then you’re just like George Wallace and the segregationists during the Jim Crow era. I mean, the level of inconsistency and hypocrisy and total lack of self-awareness on the part of these people is truly breathtaking.

Blair: Now, we’ve gotten this acknowledgment that voter fraud and election integrity are issues that we need to care about. You mentioned a couple of solutions at the very top of this interview about what can be done about it, but what do you think would be some effective solutions we could put into place today that would affect elections going forward?

Murdock: Well, again, I think voter ID is probably the easiest, and most popular, I should say. There’s a poll by CBS News in July of last year, and 80% of blacks and 80% of Hispanics favor voter ID. Among whites, the support is 81%. And what is that extra 1%? Racism, clearly.

But look, this is very popular and activists on the left don’t like it, but everybody thinks voter ID is perfectly fair. So just, are you the person who you say you are? There’s nothing inappropriate about that. So that’d be an easy thing to do.

Secondly, voter rolls need to be cleaned up. There are voter rolls that have dead people on them, names of people who’ve moved away—they’ve left the state or moved elsewhere, from one location, west side of town, east side of town, whatever it might be. And that needs to be cleaned up.

That’s required under the so-called “motor voter” law and also, the Help America Vote Act. Both those laws require you to clean up your vote rolls. That should be done often.

There has been pushback by the Department of Justice under [then-President Barack] Obama. Attorney General Eric Holder actually sued the state of Florida when they tried to clean up their voter rolls and take 51,000 dead people off the voter rolls.

And again, the motor voter law and the Help America Vote Act, both federal laws, require that to be done. And when then [then-Florida] Gov. Rick Scott tried to do this, the attorney general, Eric Holder, under Obama came in to stop him.

Why would you want to do that unless you want to have a loosey-goosey situation, which people can take advantage of and do things they shouldn’t?

I think I would put an end to mass mail-in ballots. If you are sick or you’re going to be out of town, or you are paralyzed, or you have some inability to get to the polls, that’s one thing, fine. We’ll get you an absentee ballot. But the idea that we’re just going to send … tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of ballots around, even when people don’t ask for them, there’s no need for that. That just creates all sorts of problems.

I think related to that is this whole business of ballot trafficking or ballot harvesting. We should put an end to that. If you are infirm and you can’t make it to the polls and you want your grandson or your uncle or your next-door neighbor to take your ballot in, fine.

And when it’s accepted, we should know the voter’s name, the name of the person dropping it off, that person should show ID, and it should only be your close relatives or your neighbors if you’re shut in, or something like that.

This business of people coming in with just handfuls of ballots and dropping them off—OK, here are 100 ballots, here are 300 ballots, here are 500 ballots—we don’t know who these people are.

Are they honest people who picked up the ballots and dropped them off or do they sift through them and say, “Oh, I don’t like that guy. There goes that ballot.” “I don’t like this person. Oh, OK, it’s not sealed shut. Let me fill in those extra bubbles for those people who I want to see elected and then drop.”

You have no idea of knowing what’s going on here. Again, if it’s corrupt, it needs to stop. If it’s not corrupt but it looks funny, it creates the perception of fraud and that’s not healthy either.

So I’d start with those things. And there are more spec-specific reforms, but at a minimum voter ID, clean up the vote rolls, put an end to mass mail-in ballots. And I also think we need to get back to Election Day rather than election month or election quarter.

In 2016, you had people voting in North Carolina two weeks before the very first Hillary Clinton/Donald J. Trump presidential debate. I think that’s sick and I think that’s un-American.

We ought to go back to Election Day where people vote after you’ve seen the debates, watched the ads, read the articles, and you can go into the polls with a full, clear head of all the pros and cons about the people who are on the ballot and then you make a decision accordingly.

Blair: As we wrap-up here, as I think we’ve seen in polling data and as you just discussed a little bit here, if Americans don’t trust their voting results, if they don’t trust the results of their elections, that has pretty dire consequences for the country. Do you think the fact that Americans are starting to question the results of their elections, they are not confident that their votes are counting, means that we’ll start to see this type of legislation get passed?

Murdock: Well, with any luck, we will see this sort of legislation passed so people actually can have confidence in the polls.

I think one of the reasons that the two senate elections in January went the way they did is you had some Republicans who figured, “Well, it’s a rigged system and Stacey Abrams rigged it. And [Georgia] Secretary of State [Brad] Raffensperger and [Georgia] Gov. Brian Kemp went along. And so my ballot’s not going to be counted, so I won’t bother casting it.”

And you actually had some people running around and saying that sort of thing, which I thought was completely irresponsible. And so I think that actually reduced GOP turnout, because they figured, “Why waste my time voting if my ballot’s not going to be cast?”

Again, that’s not good for the system if people think that sort of thing. So I think we do have to get back to a system where people can have faith in the system itself. And they might say, “Well, look, I’m glad my candidate won,” or, “I’m sorry my candidate lost,” but at least we both, losers and winners, can say, “All right, it was a fair process. It was not a rigged system. It was a decent, just, clean, and honest system.” And we all can walk away, some happier than others, but all of us satisfied that the system itself is OK. I don’t think we’re there now.

And if we have another election like we had in 2020, it’s going to be even worse. And confidence in the American constitutional republic will continue to dissolve even further.

Blair: That was Deroy Murdock, a Fox News contributor and senior fellow at the Atlas Network. Deroy, very much appreciate your time.

Murdock: Great to be with you. Thank you very much.

*****

This article was published in The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Endgame For the Fed: Is Checkmate Coming? thumbnail

Endgame For the Fed: Is Checkmate Coming?

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By Mark Wallace

For more than 40 years, the Federal Reserve has fostered, encouraged, and otherwise helped to create the most reckless credit expansion in the nation’s history. Total credit market debt of all varieties — federal, state, local, household, financial and nonfinancial – has ballooned from 330 percent of gross domestic product in 1960 to over 900 percent of gross domestic product in 2021. Adjusting for the size of the economy and for inflation, we now have three times as much credit and debt as we had in 1960.

In many ways, credit can be a wonderful thing. It can enable a worker of meager financial means to acquire a motor vehicle that will allow him to take a job otherwise inaccessible to him via public transportation. It can enable a young married couple to buy a house and to build equity in that house over the 30-year term of the mortgage or deed of trust. Credit can enable an entrepreneur to buy a business and to do a better job of running the business than the previous owner was able to do.

The expansion of credit on a nationwide scale is expansionary in economic terms because virtually no one borrows money to put it under a mattress. People borrow money to spend it, whether on goods and services or on investment assets. The spending of borrowed money on goods and services buoys the real economy, creating demand for a product that would not otherwise exist. It also buoys investments, such as stocks, bonds, and real estate. For example, real estate rises in price because of the availability and price of credit. If you doubt this, ask yourself this question: if it were totally impossible to borrow money to buy a house if you could buy a house only by paying the full purchase price in cash, how much would houses sell for? The answer is obvious, isn’t it? They would sell for far, far less than they sell for today.

Although taking on more debt puts money into a borrower’s pocket, debt service — paying interest and principal — takes money out of that borrower’s pocket. That means less money the borrower has to buy goods and services or invest. Overall economic effects on the nation, though, are determined not on an individual borrower basis but on the basis of all the borrowers and lenders — on a nationwide basis, in other words. As long as credit and debt are expanding on a nationwide basis, expansionary economic policies remain in effect. The economy remains robust, unemployment rates remain low, and for the stock and bond markets it’s “party on, Garth.”

But what happens if, for whatever reason, credit and debt (the mirror side of credit) begin to decline on a nationwide basis? Should that occur, the amount of money flowing into goods and services into the purchase of goods and services would decline, as would the amount of money flowing into investment assets. In economic terms, this is contractionary. Because the amount of credit and debt outstanding is in the trillions, if the magnitude of the contraction in total credit outstanding were sufficiently severe, the resulting economic contraction could quickly turn into an economic depression far exceeding anything this country or any other country has ever experienced. Society would unravel.

The Fed has striven mightily to prevent this from ever occurring. The Fed’s response to economic developments in 1987, 200-2002 and 2007-2009 has been the same: “flood the market with liquidity.” Do whatever needs to be done to keep total credit from contracting, because that will spell disaster. If credit does indeed contract in large amounts, the Fed will be exposed as having run the greatest Ponzi Game in history. The truly massive amount of debt it has created — measured not in the billions but in the tens of trillions — will be the fuel for a giant crash. As Warren Buffet famously said, it’s not until the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked. It’s no accident that Ponzi games such as Enron and Madoff Securities are not exposed until the stock market crashes.

The Fed’s tools to prevent a devastating credit contraction and crash — flooding the market with liquidity — don’t work to curb rising inflation. Flooding the market with liquidity would only make inflation worse. The Fed’s tool to combat inflation is to raise interest rates — to raise debt service requirements. That is where the Fed is now. Consumer price inflation is bubbling along at an 8.5 percent rate (the highest in 40 years). Producer prices are galloping at an even higher rate: more than 11 percent. When inflation was 7.6 percent in 1978, the Fed pushed the federal funds rate to 8.5 percent. And now, with inflation higher than it was in 1978, where is the federal funds rate? At 9 percent? No. At 8 percent? No. At 7 percent? No. It is at 0.33 percent!

The Fed is hugely behind the curve. The most recent rise was a paltry one-quarter of one percent. The Fed is clearly terrified at the prospect of raising interest rates, otherwise, the rate increase would have been at least one full percentage point or more. The Fed is demonstrating by its actions that it is not serious about fighting inflation. It is gambling that inflation will subside of its own accord, with little help from the Fed.

If over the next six months to one year, inflation does indeed subside, with the federal funds rate rising to perhaps 1 percent or 1.5 percent, the Fed will be shown to have made the correct decision. But no one has a crystal ball in that regard.  If the inflation rate keeps advancing, and we have double-digit consumer price inflation six months or one year from now, the Fed’s hand will be forced. Serious interest rate increases will be required. In that scenario, the probability that the Fed will err, either on the upside (raising interest rates too high and creating a market panic and resulting crash) or on the downside (runaway, Weimar-style inflation as a result of tepid interest rate boosting) hugely increases.

The historical precedents here are strongly against the Fed. The market can panic more quickly than the Fed can counter the decline by lowering interest rates and engaging in “quantitative easing.” Note that 2000-2002 was a more serious downturn than 1987 and that 2007-2009 was more serious than 2000-2002. The trend is clear. The next downturn likely will be far worse than 2007-2009 if the Fed errs in the direction of raising interest rates too far or too fast. The reason for this is that declines are generally roughly proportional to the amount of total credit market debt outstanding.

To date, the equities markets have come back after each drubbing, but if a decline goes far enough, that pattern may not necessarily repeat. Instead, we may end up in a Japanese/Nikkei scenario where equity prices in 2050 or 2060 are lower than they are today. Note that the Nikkei is lower now in 2022 than it was 33 years earlier in 1989. In Great Britain, following the disastrous South Sea Bubble, equities went into a more than 50-year bear market.

The historical precedents are not any better if the Fed errs on the downside and allows inflation to really get out of control. Inflation has a way of accelerating, as the Weimar experience shows. (The source of the data that follows is “The Great Disorder” by Professor Gerald D. Feldman, a 900-plus page tome that will tell you more about Weimar Germany than you ever wanted to know). In August 1914, the dollar exchange rate of the paper mark in Berlin was 4.21— one U.S. dollar would buy 4.21 marks. At the time of the Armistice in November 1918, it was 7.43. Things became steadily worse after that. By January 1922, one U.S. dollar would buy 191.81 paper marks. Relatively speaking, though, that had been a walk in the park compared to the complete and utter disaster —- resulting in the total destruction of the mark, and I do mean total —that unfolded beginning in August 1922 and finishing up a mere 16 months later in December 1923.

In August 1922, one dollar bought 1,134.56 paper marks. By June 1923, one dollar was buying 109,966 marks. Was that the end of it? No, things got worse, much, much worse. Two months later, in August 1923, one dollar would buy 4.6 million marks. One month after that, in September 1923, a dollar would get you almost 99 million marks. In October 1923, the exchange rate was 25 billion paper marks for one U.S. dollar. By December 1923, one dollar would get you 4.2 trillion marks.

One conclusion that may be drawn is that it took only about five years for inflation to destroy the mark. Another is that when things really get out of control, as they did for Germany beginning in August 1922, the end is nigh, as little as 16 months away.

In conclusion, the Fed is now sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, between the monster of a stock market crash and resulting depression on one hand and the whirlpool of runaway inflation on the other. Despite an 8.5 percent inflation rate, the U.S. dollar has remained strong. Across the Pacific in Tojo-land (Japan), the Japanese yen has been rapidly depreciating. Japan is even farther along the economic-profligacy scale than the U.S. is. The ratio of debt to GDP is far higher. The Japanese economy has been aptly described as “a bug in search of a windshield.” Keep an eye on Japan: it may provide an important clue of what finally happens when monstrous credit and debt expansion over decades (especially sovereign debt) goes off the high board.

Amid Public Concern About Grooming Kids, American Library Association Picks ‘Marxist Lesbian’ As President thumbnail

Amid Public Concern About Grooming Kids, American Library Association Picks ‘Marxist Lesbian’ As President

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By Joy Pullmann

Amid growing concern about libraries connecting children to sexually explicit activities, the American Library Association is doubling down.

A large organization that drives the training of U.S. librarians and their use of public funds has chosen a self-described “Marxist lesbian” as its next president amid growing concern about libraries actively connecting children to sexually explicit activities and materials.

Emily Drabinski was elected president of the American Library Association last week by the organization’s members. She will take office in July 2023.

ALA’s approximately 54,000 members include librarians, libraries, library graduate schools, members of library boards and associations, and library students. The vast majority of its membership fees, therefore, are provided by taxpayer funds.

Drabinski won with 5,410 votes from such an electorate, compared to her opponent’s 4,622 votes, according to an ALA press release. The election was conducted online.

The interim chief librarian of The Graduate Center at City University of New York (CUNY), where she was previously the “critical pedagogy librarian,” Drabinski posts openly on her Twitter feed in support of sexually exposing children, union-led political strife, socialist politicians, and libraries pushing explicit and far-left material on unwilling taxpayers.

On a personal web page, Drabinski touted multiple endorsements from labor and LGBT activists in her bid for the ALA presidency, including from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union.

“I so value Emily’s work in intentionally bringing a class, labor, and queer consciousness to her efforts as an anti-racist ally,” wrote fellow ALA member April M. Hathcock in a public endorsement of Drabinski.

For more than a century, labor unions have often functioned as a recruiting and muscle operation for the Communist Party and its fellow travelers and shell operations.

In a TV interview with a Boise station last week about her ALA election, Drabinski conveyed surprise at public concerns about libraries making pornographic materials available to children and buying them with taxpayer resources.

“It’s like concerted political efforts to sort of push this, sort of story about what libraries do which seems very, you know, it’s anathema to what libraries actually do, that we are, sort of pushing pornographic materials on our patrons and it’s really not what we do at all,” she claimed. “…There’s no big library agenda.”

Contrary to her claims in that interview, however, Drabinski’s other YouTube videos are replete with teaching other librarians how to “subvert” and inject hard-left politics and sexuality into their publicly funded work. For one example, consider one of many such lectures she gave to other librarians on July 6, 2021, titled “Teaching the Radical Catalog.”

In the lecture, Drabinski discussed her homosexual coming out experience and how saturating in a campus environment of proliferating sexual identities changed how she approaches being a librarian. At her first librarian job, “At Sarah Lawrence, absolutely everybody was queer. … There were so many ways to be gay. … And it was my job to teach those students how to find themselves in our library catalog,” she said. She described queering the library as “critical thinking” and “thinking critically about the catalog.”

Here’s a slide from that presentation showing the sexuality sections of the Library of Congress catalog. In it, you can see the Closed Captioning of what Drabinski is saying while showing the slide, which includes affirming the idea that “queerness includes the subversion of those kinds of normal family types.” She’s referring to the family types that naturally produce children — i.e. a married man and woman.

In the rest of the presentation, Drabinski went on to teach librarians how to change how visitors find books about sex, contradicting her claims to the Boise reporter that librarians don’t work to get sexual material into patrons’ hands. This very effort has been a part of Drabinski’s public professional work for decades, by her own public attestation.

“We can equip our students with the capacity to wring what they need out of library structures, and wringing what you need out of systems that exclude you is a necessary life skill for survival and revolution,” she concluded in her talk. “And we can also help build a way of shaping students as agents of change both inside the library and out.”

So while Drabinski tells the general public that librarians aren’t trying to help minors access pornography, by her own admission elsewhere that’s exactly what she has focused her professional career on doing, with taxpayer resources. In their endorsements, fellow ALA members and leaders said, as did “former ALA Council member” Jenna Freedman, that Drabinski’s professional “accomplishments” include “queering the landscape of library publishing and scholarship.”

This is supported by her Google Scholar page, which ranks Drabinski’s 2013 article “Queering the Catalog” as her top-cited work. In that article, she notes “the first program of ALA’s Task Force on Gay Liberation was called Sex and the Single Cataloger, a session about the trouble with headings for gay and lesbian materials.”

That ALA task force was founded in 1970, and was the first formally organized professional U.S. organization to push LGBT preferences. That task force now annually presents the Stonewall Awards for LGBT-themed books. Such recommendations are essentially “buy list” excuses for public libraries that ensure major taxpayer subsidies for often obscene, and what would otherwise be mostly obscure, books that few people ever saw or requested from libraries.

In the 2013 article, again flatly contradicting her representations to the Boise TV station, Drabinski developed a “strategy [that] suggests the possibility of a queer library politics.”

“Queer theory provides a useful theoretical frame for rethinking the stable, fixed categories and systems of naming that characterize library organization schemes and strategies for helping users navigate them,” Drabinski wrote. She essentially explained “queer theory” as the rejection of the existence of truth, either in language or in anything: “Viewing cataloging and classification from a queer perspective [is] — one that challenges the idea that classification and subject language can ever be corrected once and for all.” She argued that since gender identities are fluid, so must be library classification systems and stacks.

This is a rejection of Western thought and civilization, which is built on the search for truth. A search for truth presupposes that truth exists and can be at least partially known. This also implies the world has an intrinsic, natural order that can, and indeed must, be acknowledged (i.e., the natural law). So it’s no surprise that a woman who opposes truth, and instead deifies self-created and unnatural identities, calls herself a Marxist.

Whether in its predominantly economic or cultural forms (which, as they say, intersect), Marxists are committed to overthrowing the West, including all of its organizing ideas and accomplishments. In addition to lies and deception, Marxists use sexual chaos as a deliberate strategy of cultural destruction. The “queer theory” in which Drabinski specializes openly aims to destroy the West by destroying the natural family, natural sex, natural relationships between the sexes and the children those sexes produce only heterosexually, natural distinctions, natural hierarchies, and order itself.

The United States, especially in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that gave this great nation its birth, is the chief modern example of Western achievement. Its achievements are precisely in recognizing and attempting to adhere to the natural order as closely as possible. And now those who hold the keys to its so-called institutions of learning use their positions and resources to erase truth and the natural law, which are the very foundation of Western society.

Like other Marxists, Drabinski also makes politically exclusionary statements that show she doesn’t approach non-leftists with good faith, instead desiring to wage political war against people who disagree with her with whatever resources she can muster.

For example, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books in December 2019, Drabinski wrote, “The [political] right is interested in maintaining the status quo, preserving white supremacy and the continuing consolidation of wealth into their hands and no one else’s. … Like the United States itself, the right is enriched by capitalism, racism, and patriarchy.”

On that issue, at least, she was willing to tip her hand to the very accomodating Boise journalist: “I think we have legacies of racism to undo,” she commented while on another subject. To her, however, as to so many others now atop our commanding heights, dismantling “racism” means “dismantling America.” One pervy picture book and publicly-funded twerk at a time.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Fifth Circuit Rules Against New Jersey in 3-D Gun Ban Case

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By Editors at Second Amendment Foundation

The Second Amendment Foundation and Defense Distributed today are celebrating a court victory in a long-running battle to allow online publication of information related to the 3D printing of firearms, thanks to a ruling by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that returns claims against the New Jersey attorney general (NJAG) to its jurisdiction.

A district court order had wrongly severed the case against the NJAG, from a lawsuit filed by the plaintiffs, and transferred it to a federal court in New Jersey. Today’s ruling in the Fifth Circuit directs the district court in Texas to “request retransfer from its counterpart in New Jersey.”

“It’s a huge victory for us,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “because New Jersey wanted to be severed from our legal action in their effort to prevent publication of the information by Defense Distributed, thus violating the company’s and SAF’s First Amendment rights to promote the exercise of Second Amendment rights.”

This effort began when anti-gun-rights attorneys general, led by Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, filed suit in the Western District of Washington to enjoin the State Department from authorizing the release of Defense Distributed’s files on the internet under a settlement from a previous SAF and Defense Distributed lawsuit. That effort was an offshoot of attempts by then-New Jersey AG Gurbir Grewal and several of his peers to prevent the plaintiffs’ distribution of materials related to the 3D printing of firearms.

Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge Edith H. Jones stated, “Correctly assessed, the NJAG did not carry its burden to clearly demonstrate that transfer is clearly more appropriate than the Plaintiffs’ choice of forum. The district court erred legally and factually in virtually every aspect of this issue, and its decision, which has unnecessarily lengthened this litigation, even more, represents a clear abuse of discretion for which mandamus is an appropriate remedy.”

An earlier ruling by a Fifth Circuit panel held that the NJAG is “subject to the jurisdiction of Texas courts” in this case because Defense Distributed is a Texas-based company. Today, the Fifth Circuit ruling directs the district court to:

  • Vacate its order dated April 19, 2021, that severed Defense Distributed’s claims against the NJAG and transferred them to the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey;
  • Request the District of New Jersey to return the transferred case to the Western District of Texas, Austin Division; and,
  • After return, to reconsolidate Defense Distributed’s case against the NJAG back into the case still pending against the State Department.

“This case has dragged on for years,” Gottlieb noted. “What today’s ruling clearly demonstrates is that attorneys general who violates our First and Second Amendment rights will be held to answer by the courts, wherever the violations occur.

“NJAG wanted their case severed and transferred,” he added, “and now that will not happen. It’s unfortunate that justice has been delayed so long. It’s time to move forward. This is a case we fully expect to totally win.”

*****

This article was published by The Second Amendment Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

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State Supreme Court Reaffirms Arizona’s Nation-Lowest Flat Income Tax

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By Cole Lauterbach

Arizona’s high court has pulled a ballot question from the November election that could have erased the state’s largest-ever income tax cut.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a veto initiative to repeal a gradual change from Arizona’s progressive income tax to a flat 2.5% wasn’t appropriate for the ballot process. The court didn’t immediately offer an analysis of the opinion.

Lawyers representing the Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC), a taxpayer advocating nonprofit, argued before the court that the state’s constitution bans government functions such as tax cuts from being challenged at the ballot box.

“Today’s decision from the Arizona Supreme Court is a big win for taxpayers in our state,” said AFEC President Scot Mussi. “The legislature passed historic tax cuts last year that benefit all Arizona taxpayers. It’s time for Invest in Arizona and out-of-state special interest groups to accept this reality and stop making a farce of the referendum process.”

Invest in Arizona, a union-sponsored nonprofit based out of Phoenix and affiliated with Portland-based Stand for Children, was primarily responsible for gathering signatures to get the measure on the ballot.

Passed in 2021, the law reduced individual income tax rates for all taxpayers by gradually reducing the state’s four income tax rates to one 2.5% rate by 2022. With the court’s opinion, the rate is now in effect.

David Lujan, president of the Arizona Children’s Action Alliance, said the court is protecting the state’s ultra-wealthy.

“Let’s be clear about who wins with these tax cuts – the richest 1 percent of Arizonans who will get an average tax cut of more than $19K,” he said. “Household making $64K annually gets avg tax cut of $47 and our state loses billions for education and other needs.”

Republicans hailed the opinion as relief for taxpayers facing the nation’s most severe inflation.

“This ruling is another big win for our state’s taxpayers and it couldn’t have come at a better time,” Gov. Doug Ducey said. “With inflation hitting Arizonans hard, this decision ultimately means more of their hard-earned dollars can stay in their wallets.”

House Majority Leader Ben Toma, R-Peoria, said the ruling means surety for taxpayers.

“In 2021, Republican legislators provided historic tax relief to all Arizona taxpayers. The Supreme Court’s decision provides clarity and certainty that Arizonans will get this relief at a time when they need it most,” he said.

*****

This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

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Encountering the Natives of Flyover Country

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By G. Patrick Lynch

In the late 19th and early 20th century, it was commonplace for newspapers in the US and Europe to hire what were known as “stringer” journalists who would work on commission to produce stories about the lives of foreigners in distant lands. They might go to Africa or the West Indies, or describe cowboys and Native American tribes on the American frontier. Some, like the renowned German writer Theodor Fontane, traveled all over Europe producing columns for the people back home. As literacy and print media grew, so did the demand for exotic stories.

Glenn Hubbard, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors (2001-2003) and now a professor at Columbia University, has in some ways copied this older style. Hubbard’s book, The Wall and the Bridge, is a sort of mish-mash of superficial economic history and recycled public policy ideas. But at its core, this book is a form of stringer journalism about the far-off and exotic land of Youngstown, Ohio.

Hubbard bravely takes a group of MBA students into the wild and savage-filled lands west of New York City to encounter that creature all but extinct on the civilized streets of Manhattan or Brooklyn: the Trump voter. His is not the drama-filled tale of JD Vance, nor the fictional account of Claas Relotius. Instead, Hubbard tries, unsuccessfully in this reviewer’s mind, to craft economic policy prescriptions based on his “experience”  visiting the once-thriving steel manufacturing city. Hubbard wants to use the example of Youngstown to help salvage the prestige and credibility of East Coast intellectual elites like himself, that was lost with the rise of populism in the US and elsewhere.

What this method reveals about Hubbard and his ilk may be far more interesting than the policies he’s proposing. Hubbard first suggests offering job retraining to American manufacturing workers displaced by growing globalization. He awkwardly labels this “reskilling” and “opportunity policy.” None of this is particularly original except for his tired use of awkward terms from public policy. Politicians have been discussing job retraining and education since the 1980s and little of it has translated into widespread success in the American Rust Belt. Furthermore, it’s obviously self-serving for a college professor to trumpet education as the solution to this problem (let’s help these workers by throwing more money at my profession!). On several occasions, Hubbard mentions time spent at seminars at Youngstown State University and speaks highly of the institution. Does he seriously believe “reskilling” steel workers to become psychologists and Women’s Studies majors to be a solution? Additionally, such education programs can only succeed if those prescribing the “reskilling” can accurately predict which jobs will be good and secure, as well as guarantee that workers in places like Youngstown will be able to get them locally.

Second, he proposes expanding “social insurance.” Anyone familiar with Washington-speak, and skeptical of government programs, can understand what Hubbard is proposing here. He’s arguing for the creation of a new welfare program for Trump-landia to help buy them off. Setting aside for a moment the fiscal implications of such a proposal during an era of high inflation, exploding government spending and debt, it is fanciful to imagine that we can arrest support for populism simply by writing checks to rural America. This proposal grossly oversimplifies what’s going on in areas where President Trump won large majorities in 2016 and 2020.

By way of justifying this approach, Hubbard offers a profoundly superficial review of the work of Adam Smith. He correctly notes that among Smith’s more prominent targets in his writing were the mercantilists who supported protective tariffs and the British colonial system, based on a flawed understanding of the nature of national wealth and prosperity. He also accurately describes Smith’s views on the vital role some government policies, such as rule of law, can play in maintaining the market order.

But from there, things go horribly wrong. Hubbard claims that Smith was writing in response to Hume, which is completely wrong—if anything Smith was replying to Mandeville in much of his work. Hubbard proceeds to discuss “neoliberalism,” a term he seems to use in much the same way as those on the modern left, to describe a heartless anarcho-capitalist system. This “neo-liberal” night watchman state would be completely indifferent to the needs of those displaced by the creative destruction. Hubbard compares two “neoliberals,” Hayek and Friedman, to the more nuanced Smith who, for example, supported universal education and public goods such as national defense. Smith’s broader understanding of a widely-shared prosperity, he claims, is the only reasonable foundation for a free market economy in a representative political system.

Sympathy, for Smith, helps explain why we can rein in self-interest and connect with individuals outside of our kinship networks and local communities.

Smith was completely silent on the issue of social welfare or “reskilling” and had significant reservations about manufacturing and industrial work. Hayek in fact supported a limited safety net in The Constitution of Liberty for the exact reason that Hubbard cites. Of course, knowing that that would have involved actually reading more of Hayek, rather than casually labeling and caricaturing him. At the very least, Hubbard is playing fast and loose with both thinkers.

Making matters worse, Hubbard appears to have little understanding of Adam Smith the complete scholar. One really can’t understand the Wealth of Nations without tackling Theory of Moral Sentiments and Hubbard in particular could have benefited from spending some time with Smith’s moral theory.  Smith was first and foremost a moral philosopher, not merely a cold, calculating economist. Smith’s complex explanation of how human social order evolves and functions would take pages to flesh out, but at its core, the argument is based on what Smith called sympathy, what today we’d refer to as empathy. Sympathy, for Smith, helps explain why we can rein in self-interest and connect with individuals outside of our kinship networks and local communities. Sympathy helps curb the external manifestations of self-interest in our social and personal interactions. We listen and try to understand the plight and position of others when we are not interacting with them in market settings.

Hubbard claims that he and his cadre of MBA students sat down and listened to the stories and concerns of displaced steel workers in Youngstown. But when we consider how Hubbard approaches the “problem” of populism among the people of Youngstown, all we see are Hubbard’s own biases and preferences as a neoclassical economist. We don’t see much Smithian sympathy.

Modern economics, with its reliance on simplified models of human choice, struggles to understand why people don’t simply leave Youngstown, or other areas in which support for populism has been robust. Economists like to view the world strictly in terms of mechanical choices and decisions based on material gains and costs. That perspective provides the kinds of “solutions” that Hubbard is proposing here. He does not tell himself that, “these people are making subjective evaluations to stay in Youngstown and we should try to understand why they want to stay and support folks like Trump.” Instead, he reasons that “these people are materially constrained to make bad choices because they can’t afford to make better decisions.” His solution is to lower the costs of leaving or “reskilling” in their decision-making to allow them to make the “correct” choice.  

But is that the solution to the problem, if there really is a problem here? People understand they are materially worse off but choose to stay. Hubbard and his students listened to the people of Youngstown as neoclassical economists. The biases of their training did not allow them to think about their support for populism through a lens of subjective decision making rather than purely materialistic concerns.

A Smithian sympathizer would have gone beyond the economic lens of Hubbard to consider non-pecuniary factors in understanding the people he met. The job losses that Hubbard is addressing here did not just happen in the past few years. Plant closures and steep job cuts began during the Carter administration. The individuals who are still living in Youngstown are not there because they are unable to leave for economic reasons. Like most of the folks living in smaller towns throughout the Rust Belt, they simply prefer to stay. Their world views on topics such as family ties, religion, immigration, sexual norms, social values, and such are as important, if not more so, than economics. They are not trapped by material forces in these areas. They are making choices that a mechanical choice model simply can’t account for.  

Noble Laureate James Buchanan explained the limits of the neoclassical approach in his essay “Is Economics a Science of Choice” by noting that economists want to limit choice to the action of “choosing” a lower objective cost. This removes choice from the process and makes it seem purely objective in terms of economic calculation. Buchanan rightly points out that

[i]n the logic of choice, choosing becomes a subjective experience. The alternative for choice as well as the evaluations placed upon them exist only in the mind of the decision maker. Cost, which is the obstacle to choice, is purely subjective, and this consists in the chooser’s evaluation of the alternative that must be sacrificed in order to attain the which is selected. This genuine opportunity cost vanishes once a decision is taken. By relatively sharp contrast with this, in the pure science of economic behavior, choice itself is illusory. In the abstract model the behavior of the actor is predictable by an external observer.

And make no mistake, Hubbard is assuming away non-economic choice for those people in Youngstown. His book focuses exclusively on that approach and completely misses any possible impact social or cultural factors may have had in the election. In explaining his model early in the book he mentions that manufacturing job losses in rural parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were critical in deciding the election. No one doubts that economic changes played a role in those areas, but Hillary Clinton spent little time campaigning in those states and even less time addressing the non-economic policies that were important to those voters. Nor does he, or really any elite, to this day acknowledge that Clinton lost the female vote for non-college-educated white women, few of whom were employed by manufacturing plants in those areas. Economics was part of a larger story, but it alone doesn’t determine the choices made. Social issues did and continue to play a huge role.

It is perhaps too much to expect an explorer in New Guinea to place himself into the mind of tribes that practice cannibalism. It is not too much to ask an intelligent and highly educated academic with significant political experience to take seriously the idea that economics is only part of what is driving the rise of populism. Voters have reasons for rejecting elite control over policy. One gets the sense that Hubbard, observing a group of natives feasting on human brains, might have concluded that “reskilling” the locals towards tofu factories and organic farming would have solved the problem. I for one have my doubts about this approach.

*****

This article was published in Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

Weekend Read: A Witches’ Brew of Negative Trends thumbnail

Weekend Read: A Witches’ Brew of Negative Trends

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By Neland Nobel

So, the witches’ brew in summary is sky-high stock valuations, extraordinarily high debt burdens, rising interest rates, rising inflation rates, inverting yield curves, a bond bear market, supply chain crisis caused by lockdown, energy price shock, food price shock, war, radical social change, monetary regime upheaval, and poor political leadership.

Having spent almost all of a professional career in financial services dealing with clients, it is easy to attest that almost all periods of time have hazards for the investor. It was always worthwhile to remind investors, who longed for what they thought were the “good old days” that it always has been difficult.

There are always adverse trends and perverse political developments. But within that, there continues to be human progress. Much of it has been technological, but unfortunately little of it has been social or moral progress.

Living through this period was instructive, but if you are younger, you will need to read some history to fully understand.

Just a brief history should remind us all that the “good old days” were full of difficulties such as raging inflation and war in the 1960s and 1970s.  Remember how unsettling The John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy assassinations were? You can add to that race riots, Watergate, defeat in Viet Nam, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Crash of ’87?

Or how about the Russian default, the Thai-Baht crisis, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the tech bubble of 1999, or the crash of 2007?

Along the way, we had several large wars in the Persian Gulf.

You might remember we got a twofer in 2007-2008, the dual pleasure of a housing bust and banking crisis, followed by a stock market bear crash.

Go back even further and you have Sputnik, the U-2 incident, the Suez Crisis, Hungarian Revolt,  the Korean War, and two World Wars.

The stock market peaked in 1966 and did not return to those highs in inflation-adjusted constant 1966 dollars until 1995. Much of this occurred in what many regard as a better time in the country’s life.

In an earlier period, if one had purchased stocks in 1928, it took until 1956 to break even in inflation-adjusted terms.

Since the crash of 2008, we have had an uncommonly good run in stock values, including inflation-adjusted levels. The last few incredible years are not even shown on the chart.

The point is the “triumph of the optimists” has always carried both the stock market and economy eventually higher, although the progress was uneven. Sometimes there is a pause for years, even decades. Only in hindsight does it seem easy.

Thus, in the long term stocks, and the nation, have persevered. But there can be setbacks that take years to mend. This is particularly dangerous for older people who don’t “have the long term.”

Markets cycle. That is what they do. They go up and down, but generally more up than the down. The same is true of the economy in general.

Having set the context, we admit it would be hard to think of a similar period that had more toxic trends to deal with than the one we face today. And remarkably, almost all of them are the product of deliberate policy choices.

The question before us then is this: will this toxic brew of problems seriously set back the stock market?

What is truly scary is that any one of the trends we are about to mention, by themselves, has often caused a recession. But rarely do we see such a cluster of such potentially powerful adverse trends together, reinforcing one another when just one of these is dangerous enough on its own.

Right now, investors face a historically overvalued stock market and real estate market. Yes, expensive markets can surprise and just get more expensive. But expensive markets are also vulnerable and once they turn, the downside risk is magnified because of the gross departure from reasonable historic value.

If there is one “iron law” in market history, it is a reversion to the mean. Remarkably, so far the stock market still hovers not far from its highs and has taken only a mild correction.

Rapidly rising interest rates, especially when accompanied by inversion of the yield curve (short-term rates move above long-term rates), have reliably signaled recession. We are now seeing that as the FED must regain some credibility after uncorking the worst inflation in 40 years. Either they raise rates sufficiently high to kill off inflation by reducing demand (a recession), or we let the inflation fires burn uncontrollably for years. This is not a very good set of choices.

The rise in rates has been so far been largely disregarded by the stock market but the bond market is being hit hard. The bond market is much larger than the equity market so this loss is certainly just as important as what goes on in the stock market. But, it does not get the attention of the public.

Debt levels are far worse than they were 40 years ago. In 1980-1982 when Reagan and Volker were driving rates to nose bleed levels, Federal debt as a percentage of total output was about 30%.

Today, debt to GDP is 130%, or more than four times greater relative to output, and in many countries, it is substantially higher than that.

The cost of debt service is a function of two things: the amount of debt and the interest rate paid to borrow. Today the amount of debt is so much higher than before that interest rates well below the 1980 peak could clobber the economy and the Federal budget. How high do they go before they hurt?  Who knows?

Whether the borrower is a government or a business, or a homeowner, rising rates on a huge pile of debt normally create default at the margin. Credit spreads (the interest rate between secure paper and speculative paper), are widening, indicating rising rates are beginning to bite and induce distress.

So far one country, Sri Lanka, has gone bankrupt. We fear they won’t be the last or the biggest.

During the prior periods previously mentioned, the world went through several flu epidemics and the polio crisis. The government never quarantined the healthy, such as the lockdown policies we have seen over the past two years. We also never saw the government print $7 trillion dollars and hand out money to anyone who could fog a mirror.

Lockdown has royally screwed up the world’s supply chain because except for perhaps Sweden, most of the world followed the U.S. model, which in turn, followed the model of China. As the West now emerges from lockdown, China, the manufacturing hub of the world, is once again going back into lockdown in their most populous city. That is not going to help the supply chain crisis.

Then along came Russian aggression in Ukraine, which is upending the world’s energy and food markets, and increasing defense spending. Usually, a rapid rise in energy costs alone can cause a recession. Now we get to add to that a food crisis.

For reasons cited in previous articles, the West’s response to Russia, the sanctions but particularly the seizing of central bank assets, is likely to induce a change in the international monetary structure. Once again, simply this painful adjustment, has often by itself, been sufficient to cause a recession.  The monetary crisis of 1971, preceded the 1973-1974 stock market crash, which was the worst at the time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Again, it is not surprising that these difficulties came during a time of political upheaval (Watergate). Weak political leadership often occurs during economic crises. Inflation raged under Carter, a weak and indecisive President.

Clearly, political leadership is weak today, or perhaps even worse, it is senile.

We won’t even go into social and moral upheaval although many students of history point to 1966-1968 as a similar period. As mentioned before, the stock market peaked and did not recover to its previous highs for almost 30  years. We seem to be moving from men and women wanting to have sex without restraint (the sexual revolution born in the late 60s) to the abolition of what male and female even mean. Where will this trend end and how much damage will it do to society?

The changes in social conditions in “The Roaring Twenties”, also gave birth to the sober 1930s with the onset of the Depression.

Do social and moral upheaval cause these economic problems? It is unlikely they are the cause, but moral confusion does seem to accompany economic upheaval. We will leave that one to the social historians but that the two trends tend to come together is of concern.

So, the witches’ brew in summary is sky-high stock valuations, extraordinarily high debt burdens, rising interest rates, rising inflation rates, inverting yield curves, a bond bear market, supply chain crisis caused by lockdown, energy price shock, food price shock, war, radical social change, monetary regime upheaval, and poor political leadership.

If that list is not sufficient, we have one more to add that seems unique to economic history. In the past, when faced with difficulties, political parties tended to compromise for the benefit of the country and its citizens.  After all, people elect politicians and politicians often are pragmatic.

Today’s Democrats are such harsh ideologues, especially the fanatical environmentalists, that things we could normally do as a society to ease the pain (such as drill for more energy while Russia is using energy as a weapon), cut more timber to lower construction costs, plant more acreage to grow food, and mine more metals to reduce our dependence on hostile sources like Russia and China, are taken off the table. They simply can’t be considered for ideological reasons.

Today’s Democrats would rather starve the world than bend at all on their quasi-religious belief that all climate change is caused by man’s activities. There is a strong anti-human element that has converted reasonable conservation into a religion that puts the earth first and mankind second.

Their central planning instincts have gone manic. Hubris has run amok. Unable to even clean up homeless encampments or keep the streets safe, or stop the spread of Covid, they earnestly believe they can actually change the climate of the earth in 100 years. That the earth’s climate is always changing for a variety of reasons is lost on them. They believe that they, and they alone, are responsible for altering something as complex as the earth’s temperature cycles.  

Their false belief that our economic activity is an existential risk to the earth is now a real existential risk to our safety,  freedom, national security, and standard of living.

Can you imagine during World War II, a political party arguing that we should not produce more energy because losing to Hitler is better than increasing carbon emissions? But indeed, Democrats are maneuvering us into energy and mineral dependence on both Russia and China, which will sacrifice our freedom and standard of living, to their earth god.

Whether they intend this policy straight jacket or even realize this, is immaterial. But their heated and fervent resistance narrows greatly possible responses to problems.

This development imposes a paralysis on possible policy options that transcends political disagreement and gets into the realm of religious war. It is hard to compromise on religious beliefs especially when they become government policy and are thus forced on others by law. Indeed, that is what has caused religious wars.

What is also baffling is that their religious practice is imposed on us, while giving rivals like China, Russia, and India a free pass. Why is Chinese carbon better than ours?

This is hardly helpful in dealing with the toxic brew of negative trends that we must respond to. Dealing with inflation has always been difficult enough without the complication of religious war over the earth god. The price of energy is being deliberately driven higher, and thus inflation higher, to force the world to adopt the policy proscriptions of the rabid environmentalist.

If the stock market can get through recent highs, and the nation avoids recession, it will be remarkable. The question remains:  is that a bet we are willing to make?

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Why Big Media Is so Unoriginal and Shallow

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By Craig J. Cantoni

Media consolidation and interlocking directorships are the reasons.

If you want to know why Big Media on the left and right is so unoriginal and shallow, a couple of left-leaning sources have the answer.

The sources also explain why the residents of most cities and towns across the country no longer have locally-owned news outlets and thus have to rely on media conglomerates headquartered elsewhere. In-depth investigative reporting on local issues is not in their corporate DNA.

My adopted hometown of Tucson is an example. In a metro area of nearly 1.1 million people, Tucson’s major newspaper, the Daily Star, is owned by out-of-state Lee Enterprises (which will be covered more extensively later in this commentary).

It was the same when I lived in Phoenix and had a column in the Arizona Republic, which is owned by Gannett. And when I had a Texas newspaper as a client of my strategic planning consulting business, the most pressing strategic issue facing the 100-year-old family-owned newspaper was whether it could survive without selling to an out-of-state conglomerate.

There are two reasons for these negative developments: media consolidation and interlocking directorships. 

A lengthy article on these developments can be found at the following link. Click here to open the link.

Excerpts:

. . . whereas 50 companies dominated the media landscape in 1983, that dwindled to nine companies by the 1990s. It got worse from there.

Today, just six conglomerates — Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, and Paramount Global (formerly known as ViacomCBS) — control 90% of what you watch, read, or listen to. To put this into perspective: that means about 232 media executives have the power to decide what information 277 million Americans are able to access. In 2021, the “big six” banked a total of more than $478 billion in revenue. That’s more than both Finland’s and Ukraine’s GDP combined.

The issue extends to print media and radio giants, too: iHeartMedia owns 863 radio stations nationwide, while Gannett owns more than 100 daily U.S. newspapers and nearly 1,000 weeklies.

As the pool controlling the media keeps shrinking, so does the breadth of the information reported. Hence why today’s thousands of news outlets often churn out embarrassingly duplicative content.

Nowadays, there are entire cities and towns across the country with no local coverage. According to a 2018 study, more than 2,000 U.S. counties (63.6%) have no daily newspaper, while 1,449 counties (46%) only have one. Meanwhile, 171 counties — totaling 3.2 million residents — have zero newspapers whatsoever.

But this consolidation of power extends beyond just monopolies and mergers galore — compounding the issue are shared board members. All media corporations have a board of directors, which is responsible for making decisions that support the interests of stakeholders.

When someone sits on the board at multiple companies, that creates an “interlock.” Scroll through The New York Times board of directors, for example, and you’ll find a certain member is also on the board for McDonald’s and Nike and is chairman of Ariel Investments. Up until last year, a Disney chairwoman happened to be on the board for private equity giant The Carlyle Group.

A 2021 study published in Mass Communication & Society (MCS) revealed that publicly traded American newspaper companies were interlocked by 1,276 connections to 530 organizations. The data showed that about 36% of these connections were to other media organizations, 20% to advertisers, 16% to financial institutions, 12% to tech firms, and 2% to government and political entities.

More specifically, a 2012 list compiled by FAIR revealed the following interlocks:

CBS/Viacom: Amazon, Pfizer, CVS, Dell, Cardinal Health, and Verizon

Fox/News Corp: Rothschild Investment Corporation, Phillip Morris, British Airways, and New York Stock Exchange

ABC/Disney: Boeing, City National Bank, FedEx, and HCA Healthcare

NBC: Anheuser-Busch, Morgan Chase & Co., Coca-Cola, and Chase Manhattan

CNN/TimeWarner: Citigroup, American Express, Fannie Mae, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton Hotels, PepsiCo, Sears, and Pfizer

The New York Times Co: Johnson & Johnson, Ford, Texaco, Alcoa, Avon, Campbell Soup, Metropolitan Life, and Starwood Hotels & Resorts

The 2012 FAIR report mentioned above can be found at the following link. No doubt, the directorships have changed since then.

The aforementioned 2021 academic study examined whether interlocking directorships have an influence on news coverage and determined that they do. A link to the study and the study’s abstract are pasted at the end of this commentary.  The abstract mentions Lee Enterprises.

My final thought is that the study misses a larger point.  As I know from a lot of personal experience, the boards of directors of America’s largest companies tend to think alike, see the world alike, and look alike, regardless of their race or gender. Most directors are cut out of the same mold and interchangeable unless they were founding entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk. If you doubt that, pull up the websites of the biggest companies in America and read the platitudes, banalities, and blather about race, gender, community, the environment, and other subjects du jour. They all sound the same. When a CEO of one of the companies joins the board of another company, the executive has basically gone from one echo chamber to another. Such uniformity is bad enough in the industry but particularly harmful to a free press.

Anyway, here’s the link and abstract for the study:

Today’s media companies seem to be more intertwined than ever. But are they? Do these “interlocks” affect editors and the content journalists produce? This study uses a three-method design to examine the connections among newspaper organizations and corporations. The network analysis examined the interlocks among news-paper companies’ directors. The second phase surveyed editors of newspapers owned by these companies to assess the influence on the newsroom from the board and parent company. In the third phase, news coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations was con-tent analyzed for newspapers whose editors perceived pressure “from above.” The network analysis results suggest a monolithic interlocking structure that previous scholars feared. For one-third of survey respondents, corporate parents and the boardroom were seen as influencing the newsroom. These “pressured editors” perceived significantly stronger pressures from the boardroom, “ownership/upper management,” and business interests than editors who did not indicate pressure from above. So, how did pressured newsrooms cover ownership and directors? Routine coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations was lacking. Disclosure of a relationship between a director or affiliated organization and the newspaper was disclosed half of the time and traditional journalistic scrutiny was applied less than half of the time.

Lee Enterprises, for instance, had 20 directors connected via their membership on other boards or work histories to 196 other organizations such as the Associated Press (AP). The AP, unlike Lee Enterprises which was on the seed list of media and parent companies, was connected to 12 organizations. As Figure 1illustrates, directors on the AP’s board were also on the board (solid line) of New Media Investment Group, The New York Times, and News Corp, and some directors had employment ties (dashed line) to Lee Enterprises. Organizations with more connections are more central in the interlock network. Connections among the organizations created a network with four distinct components. The main component included 430 organizations such as Lee Enterprises, Tronc/Tribune, The McClatchy Company, News Corp, and The New York Times. This component illustrates news media organizations’ reach to others and the concentration of ties among media organizations. The three other distinct components were isolated from the main component and centered around Digital First Media, hedge fund Alden Global Capital, and Civitas Media, respectively. Alden’s predatory business“ strategy” for its news organization investments is notorious in professional journalism (Doctor, 2019; Pickard, 2020). RQ2 directed attention to the composition.

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The Urge To Spend

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By Thomas C. Patterson

Loma Verde, California is building a $24 million recreation center with a pool . Forest Lakes , Minnesota is getting a $1.5 million golf clubhouse, while San Antonio is purchasing a $15 million theme park.

These may seem frivolous when rampant inflation is threatening, but never mind, they’re all “free“, a synonym for “paid for by the feds“.

America is awash in cash. Hundreds of other communities are enjoying similar goodies. States in no fiscal difficulty whatsoever have been given billions in budget boosts. 

Checks for thousands of dollars have gone to citizens not even claiming to be in need.  Millions of Americans receive enough government cash that they can now avoid the inconvenience and degradation of work.

These are outcomes from President Biden’s $1.9 trillion dollar American Rescue Plan, although the link to Covid may seem obscure to some. But the bigger point is that our governing culture today sees government spending as a positive good, which may be prompted by any excuse or none at all.

This is a continuation of the age-old argument over the role of government. For those who see government as a benign force that can efficiently, by use of its taxing power, address the common welfare and assure equitable outcomes, every dollar transferred from private to public hands is a positive.

Moreover , Big Government clearly increases the power and prestige of government officials. It creates beneficiaries highly likely to vote for those politicians who “cared“ enough to send Other Peoples’ Money their way.

Vastly expanded government has also affected the attitudes of Americans toward the role of government in their lives. To an extent unthinkable to earlier generations, Americans now assume the federal government will take responsibility for such matters as healthcare, education, childcare and aging parents.

The founders of our Constitution would not be pleased. Their original intent was to create a more just and independent society than the autocracies which had plagued mankind for millennia. Regrettably, Americans have blandly looked on while much of their birthright has been stolen. 

Much of the recent confiscation of our nation‘s economic output has come under the pretext of Covid spending. But remember that the Covid financial crisis was a self-inflicted wound. The lockdowns were unprecedented and proved ineffective as a pandemic response strategy, but they precipitated a huge expansion of government power.

America has so far spent $6.4 trillion in Covid relief bills. The $1.9 trillion in the 2021 American rescue plan alone was enough to buy every Covid vaccine, ventilator and hospital in existence. But much of the money went to beyond-obvious pork and to support Democratic political constituencies.

New York, among others, is reportedly sitting on $12.7 billion in unneeded Covid funds that they hope will revert to “unassigned“ dollars. The money was pushed out so carelessly that the Labor Department IG estimates $163 billion of the $872 billion in Covid unemployment funds were dissipated in fraud.

The consequences of all this unnecessary spending are predictable and enormous. In 2009, then-President Obama warned against continuing deficits when the debt had doubled from $5 trillion to  $10 trillion under his predecessor.

It was $20 trillion by the time he left office, stands at $30 trillion today and will reach $45 trillion by 2032 according to Biden’s own budget projections.

But trifles like stifling debt and lack of need can’t suppress the political urge to spend. With Covid receding and no extraordinary expenses pending, Joe Biden’s new budget proposal rings in at $5.8 trillion, fully 31% higher than in 2019.

Federal revenues rose 18% in 2021, then 26% this year but it’s not enough. Biden‘s $2 trillion projected deficit means the debt will have climbed $7 trillion in just the last three years. Multi- trillion dollar deficits have effectively been normalized.

It could be worse. We narrowly escaped passage of the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better boondoggle. Yet now Biden has the gall to demand $30 billion more for Covid expenses when at least $500 billion from the last Covid relief bill is still unspent.

The mindless, immoral imperative to spend more knows no bounds. Time is running out to reverse course. When will we come to our senses?

*****

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.

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Failed Nation-Building In Mexico

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By Phillip Linderman

The Merida Initiative is another failed project of America’s foreign-policy establishment.

As the media and White House draw the national attention to Ukraine and other faraway regions, conservatives are right to insist that our lawless and vulnerable southern border be Washington’s first order of business. Until the Trump administration put a real spotlight on the border, security policies both in Washington and Mexico City had been aimed at the Mexican interior.

The “Merida Initiative,” launched in 2007-08, aimed to help Mexico rebuild weak institutions like its police and courts, and to assist Mexican security forces in fighting drug cartels. However, this long-running initiative failed to secure either country: Mexico continues to suffer from failing institutions and appalling levels of violence, while narcotics and illegal migrants stream into the United States through the unsecured border.

Last fall, Biden administration officials and their Mexican counterparts quietly ended the Merida Initiative, announcing instead a new “Bicentennial Framework” for security cooperation. The announcement was a diplomatic concession to Mexican President Lopez Obrador (AMLO), who had signaled since taking office in 2018 that robust cooperation against the cartels was over. Both sides are back at the drawing board with no new ideas.

Now is the time for American policymakers to once again learn a crucial foreign-policy lesson: ambitious multi-year institution-building plans, particularly in complicated countries like Mexico, and struggling with a formidable combat foe in the field do not provide a positive return on investment—either for the United States or the partner. We need to understand why Merida failed.

With Merida, there was too little skepticism about what country-wide government engagement could actually achieve. U.S. officials, armed with multi-year funding and a “can-do” attitude, tend not to forecast mission failure but a path to success—the same syndrome that kept us engaged for 20 years nation-building in Afghanistan. Merida once again teaches Washington the bitter lesson that rebuilding institutions is not a task for foreign nations. Successful reform, when it happens, is led and owned by national authorities.

President Trump’s instinct to focus on our southern frontier was more fruitful for the security of both countries than a dozen years of Merida cooperation. If the U.S. makes the border a national priority, the border will become a national priority for Mexico. Trump demonstrated that a White House committed to border issues could in fact push skeptical Mexican leaders to focus on a region they tend to ignore.

It was just a start, but Trump’s success in convincing even AMLO—despite the Mexican president’s deep suspicion of the U.S.—to accede to the Migration Protection Protocols (or “Remain in Mexico” policy) shows what can be done if Washington pursues attainable goals. Securing effective U.S.-Mexican cooperation in the lawless frontier region is difficult (and beyond the scope of this analysis), but such efforts should be the centerpiece of any future bilateral security strategy.

When launched, the Merida Initiative (sometimes called Plan Mexico) promised U.S. support for large-scale Mexican operations against the drug cartels (“transnational criminal organizations,” or TCOs). During the Obama administration, Washington provided the typical foreign-assistance mix of law-enforcement activities and development projects.

The Merida Initiative was possible because Mexican President Felipe Calderon sought unprecedented U.S. assistance and cooperation, opening a door U.S. diplomats and aid planners could not resist entering. Not only did Merida include law-enforcement assistance against powerful TCOs, but U.S. officials also took on intractable issues like human-rights violations and corruption, as the gringos attempted to help Mexico rebuild its entire criminal-justice system. On paper, Merida also addressed border security, but this “pillar” of the plan was largely ignored as the mammoth undertakings of breaking the drug cartels and rebuilding the criminal-justice system consumed valuable political will and operational trust on both sides.

Advocates argued that the Merida Initiative would provide results for Mexico similar to those of Plan Colombia (the success of which can also be debated). Yet Latin American nations are not interchangeable. The harsh truth is that U.S. efforts to rebuild key Mexican institutions, despite more than a dozen years of valiant efforts from hardworking officials, yielded results that looked less like the experience of Colombia in the 1990s than that of South Vietnam in the 1960s.

Although it was a noble aim to help Mexico tackle its corrupt institutions, to vet and train its police, and fight human-rights violations, Washington simply did not have the firepower to make the difference. Moreover, expending valuable political will on grappling with Mexican institutions distracted us from bringing more security to the southern border, which should have been Washington’s primary objective.

The United States spent around $3.3 billion on Merida over a dozen years, while the Mexicans dedicated $10-$15 billion annually to security activities under the plan. After all that engagement, however, Mexican TCOs are just as entrenched, if not more so, while Mexican law-enforcement authorities—particularly prosecutors, judges and the criminal courts—remain dysfunctional and mired in corruption. Mexico’s national homicide numbers continue to be alarmingly high—approaching 30,000 a year. Incredibly, over 200,000 Mexicans have been killed or disappeared since 2007. And today, under AMLO, no one talks about the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel as the carnage drags on and increasingly moves north toward the United States.

Early on, after launching their war on the drug cartels, Mexican officials themselves realized they had badly underestimated the challenges they faced. The United States assisted with professional training, high-tech weapons (like helicopter gunships) and intelligence. American advisors advocated “decapitating” TCO leadership (either by killing or arresting and extraditing them) as an effective strategy with whose success can be measured.

Yet though this “kingpin” strategy did eliminate many drug lords, it failed to cripple the criminal enterprises. TCOs splintered but proved adaptable and survivable in defiance of the experts, as new would-be “El Chapo” types could and did emerge, often after bloody turf wars. The lure of fast wealth from this criminal lifestyle drew in seemingly innumerable new recruits. When the Mexican military sometimes made successful strikes in TCO-dominated territory, local police and prosecutors could not follow up and hold these gains. Ruthless cartel tactics—“plata o plomo”—had broken local officials, who take bribes and look the other way to protect themselves and family members from certain murder.

Criminal-justice reform, perhaps our most ambitious Merida-related undertaking, was equally ineffective. In 2008, encouraged by the State Department, Mexico enacted a constitutional reform aimed at transforming the legal system from its inquisitorial approach modeled on Roman law to one based on Anglo-American adversarial procedures. U.S. and international experts fundamentally rewrote Mexican federal and state legal procedures, while fanning out across the country to retrain judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and law-school professors. The reformed system was to be a close hybrid of its American cousin, but the rebuilding enterprise was every bit as daunting as it sounds.

The new system empowered prosecutors, assisted by police investigators, to present a criminal case at an oral trial using witnesses, cross-examination, and evidence. The plan built in several modern security features, including the videotaping of courtroom activities and the safeguarding of judicial records. All good in theory, but the central shortcoming of this vast institutional remake was its underappreciation of the vulnerability of human actors: namely, that if the practitioners (judges, attorneys, police, and legal staff) of any legal system can be intimidated or bought off, that system will be corrupted. However superior the Anglo-American adversarial system, if indeed it is, its superiority was not enough to overcome cartel intimidation and corrupt practices—the reality that pervades criminal justice most everywhere in Mexico.

Unlike in Afghanistan, the end of Merida featured no dramatic airport-evacuation scenes, but U.S. efforts in both countries are examples of Washington’s overextended security commitments, which have done little if anything to make Americans safer at home. Both are examples of America’s foreign-policy hubris, its unrealistic attempts to effect change beyond our capacity in difficult environments. Unlike Afghanistan, however, Mexico is our neighbor and directly linked to vital U.S. national interests. It is the conduit through which hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants enter our country, along with enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans in overdoses annually.

We wish our friends in Mexico Godspeed in dealing with their serious national challenges, but Merida has illustrated convincingly that we have no magic bullets for them. The lesson from Trump’s efforts is that a border-security strategy with Mexico—not one that unrealistically seeks to remake Mexican national institutions—is the policy road we should have taken in 2007-08, and the one we should take today.

*****

This article was published in The American Conservative and is reproduced with permission.

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