MMT Is Dead. It Must Now Be Buried for Good thumbnail

MMT Is Dead. It Must Now Be Buried for Good

/in , , , , /by

By David Sukoff

In the late 1960s Milton Friedman clarified his famous quip by stating that “In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, nobody is any longer a Keynesian.”

In the first part, we are all Keynesians because the government’s out of control spending has forced us to be. In the latter sense, we are not Keynesians because that spending has decimated our financial well-being. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is essentially an offshoot of Keynesianism in that government can spend ad nauseam and commensurately print money without any ill effect. With the historic inflation we are now experiencing, MMT has been thoroughly repudiated. MMT is dead–it must now be buried.

In his basic economic textbooks, Professor Paul Krugman preaches Keynesianism. He teaches students about a government spending multiplier. In his fairy tale, the government spends a dollar and the economy grows by more than a dollar. The student’s first question should be: Where does that dollar of spending come from? The student’s next question should be: If this mystical multiplier were in fact real, then why not spend and spend and spend? The answers are straightforward and form the basis of the repudiation of MMT. A dollar of government spending must come from a dollar of taxation, at some point. On the second, the federal Government believed in both Krugman’s myth as well as MMT, and spent as much as they possibly could. Eventually, the inevitable ending came, and it was not a fairy tale.

If there were no discernible consequence to government spending, then the incentive for any government would be to spray money in every direction. Keynesianism, Krugman’s multiplier, and MMT all attempted to provide cover, and enable government to spend. It is simply impossible, and not in dispute, that at some point, that dollar of spending must come from a dollar of taxation. If there is a budget deficit, the government borrows dollars to make up the shortfall. The government mostly borrows dollars by issuing government bonds. To sustain its insatiable desire to spend money, and to not raise current taxes to unappealing levels, the government issues substantial debt.

In recent years, the debt to GDP ratio has crossed the 100 percent level and is now at a historic high. This creates numerous problems, not least of which is rising interest rates. If the government adds to the supply of bonds, the price should go down, and the yield (interest return) would go up. With that gargantuan debt, rising yields would force the government to spend even more on interest payments, resulting in all kinds of other negative effects on the overall economy.

Enter the magic of Quantitative Easing (QE) and MMT. The Government wants to spend, but not raise taxes too much. It then must issue debt, but not cause interest rates to rise. Well, the Federal Reserve can just step in and buy bonds! Sounds perfect – certainly to government officials who want to spend, and claim they are stimulating the economy. Even better, there is no real limit to how many dollars-worth of bonds the Fed can buy. Trillions upon trillions are possible. The Fed balance sheet rose by approximately $8 trillion over the past 20 years, with more than $4 trillion of that in the last two years alone. There is a crucial problem, and this is where MMT is used to obfuscate: When the Fed buys bonds, it is printing money.

It is a rather straightforward printing press. The Federal Reserve purchases a bond from a seller. The seller delivers the bond to the Fed, and the Fed hits a button to deposit money into the seller’s account. That money is created with a keystroke. The sound of this printing press is Enter-Enter-Enter, click-click-click. And just like that, in the last two years, the Fed “printed” $4 trillion new dollars. The Fed is also by far the largest holder of United States Treasury bonds – with a current balance sheet of more than $8 trillion. But MMT said this is not a problem, and for years and years it seemed to be correct as the Fed was growing its balance sheet with no discernible sign of inflation.

But there was inflation. It simply manifested itself in other places besides consumer prices. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It is basic math. If new dollars are added to the total supply of dollars, then the price of everything a dollar can be exchanged for must go up. That is just a mathematical fact – not an economic theory like a multiplier, or printing and spending ad nauseam. Dollars are added, prices in dollars go up. While the Fed was performing QE by adding to its balance sheet and printing dollars, the price of financial assets was shooting to the moon. We witnessed one of the greatest transfers of wealth imaginable to holders of financial assets, from the public at large. Ironically, many who promoted Keynesianism and MMT are the same who grouse the loudest about the wealth inequality that their policies directly caused. Bubbles are inflated with dollars. And since the implementation of QE was the cornerstone of Fed policy, that bubble was not in danger of bursting, because the Fed would simply buy more bonds, and print more money. MMT said it was okay.

Like water, though, money eventually finds its way and breaks the dam. With stocks and crypto and real estate headed to the moon, it was only a matter of time before all that money found its way to consumer goods. Inflation, as we commonly understand it, had arrived. It was mathematically pre-ordained, and yet still somehow unexpected. Historically high. We’re talking 1970s high. Family budget-busting high. Economic growth-crushing high. And all because of the failure to loudly ask and understand those two very basic questions: Where does the money come from, and if the theory actually worked, shouldn’t the government just spend infinite money?

Perhaps those in government simply did not want to ask or understand those questions. It was fun, for some, while it lasted. But it’s over now. Those questions need to be asked, over and over again. Because the answers are obvious, and clear, and indisputable. Sadly, so is the painful solution to our current inflation crisis. The government needs to dramatically reduce spending, and the Fed needs to unwind its balance sheet.

Weaning the government and the Fed off spending and printing will be a lengthy and agonizing process. And entirely necessary. Nobody should be a Keynesian anymore. Certainly not if the goal is to reduce inflation and have a growing, robust, and free economy.

Keynesianism, Krugman’s multiplier, and MMT have all been empirically, logically, mathematically, and thoroughly repudiated.

*****
This article was published by FEE and is reproduced with permission.

Dem Rep Who Opposed New China Committee Serves On Non-Profit That Shares Staff With Alleged Chinese Intel Front Groups thumbnail

Dem Rep Who Opposed New China Committee Serves On Non-Profit That Shares Staff With Alleged Chinese Intel Front Groups

/in , , , /by

By The Daily Caller

A Democratic congresswoman serves on a non-profit which has shared multiple personnel with alleged Chinese intelligence front groups, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.

California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu joined the All America Chinese Youth Federation (AACYF) in 2012 and remains listed as “honorary president” on the 501(c)(3) non-profit’s website, according to a DCNF translation. During Chu’s tenure at AACYF, its leadership has included multiple individuals who’ve belonged to China-based organizations that allegedly operate as front groups for a Chinese intelligence service.

The DCNF located Chu’s Chinese name, Zhao Meixin, within a New York Times article and matched it with AACYF’s records to determine her membership. Chu did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Although it remains unclear what specific responsibilities Chu has as AACYF’s “honorary president,” the congresswoman has led events held by the organization, such as during a November 2013 Silicon Valley tech summit where Chu served as “chairman,” according to a DCNF translation of AACYF’s website.

Five of AACYF’s leaders who’ve served at the non-profit during Chu’s tenure have belonged to organizations allegedly serving a Chinese government agency tasked with overseeing and coordinating CCP influence operations, the DCNF determined. The so-called United Front Work Department (UFWD) has been identified by government agencies, legislative bodies and experts as a central organ of CCP influence efforts, and experts also say UFWD works in concert with Chinese intelligence operatives.

“There is no exact counterpart in the United States for what [the UFWD] does,” Dr. John Lenczowski, former director of European and Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan, told the DCNF. “There is a strategic integration between the intelligence services and the UFWD in a way that has no parallel between U.S. intelligence, and, say, the National Endowment for Democracy, or even the State Department in its public diplomacy activities.”

“The reality of it is that the Chinese have been conducting a Cold War and we’ve not,” Lenczowski said.

The CCP’s UFWD “cultivates and controls pervasive networks of affiliates around the world” and has thereby secured “unchallenged direction” over large numbers of overseas Chinese “organizations and Chinese-language media, providing infrastructure for corruption, political interference and malign influence,” the 2020 House China Task Force report stated.

“This is what the communists do,” Brandon Weichert, a consultant to the U.S. Air Force, told the DCNF. “They create front organizations in countries that are open societies, like ours, to try to surreptitiously influence events, businesses and leaders in those countries to shape them into acting in accordance with China’s national interest and strategic needs.”

“In many cases, the players involved are sort of useful idiots or willing dupes. In some cases, they’re fellow travelers,” Weichert added.

‘Facts and Reality’

Rep. Chu recently voted against the formation of the House Select Committee tasked with examining, among other things, Chinese influence in the United States. In defense of her vote, Chu claimed that the initiative could lead to anti-Asian violence, according to a statement released by the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC), which Chu chairs.

CAPAC did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

California Republican Rep. Mike Garcia told the DCNF that Chu’s vote against the formation of the select committee on China ignored “facts and reality.” Garcia told the DCNF that the new committee, which Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher is slated to lead, will “combat the CCP, not the Chinese people.”

“The vast majority of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle supported the creation of this committee,” Garcia said, referring to the resolution which passed 365-65.

The United Front

Chu appears to have served as AACYF’s “honorary president” alongside Chi Honghu, who is listed as an “honorary adviser” on the organization’s website, a role he has held in various forms since at least 2009, according to a DCNF translation.

However, just before joining AACYF, Chi apparently spent the previous decade or so as “director” of the China Overseas Friendship Association (COFA), according to a DCNF translation of COFA’s website and Chinese government records.

COFA was founded by the CCP’s Central Committee and the UFWD in 1997 and has been listed as a UFWD “work unit,” according to DCNF translations of archived versions of those organizations’ websites.

In 2018, the U.S.-China Economic Security and Review Commission (USCC) identified the group as a UFWD intelligence operation, referring to it as “the UFWD China Overseas Friendship Association.”

After Rep. Chu’s colleague, Chi, joined AACYF, he was also identified as an “adviser” for the China Overseas Exchange Association (COEA) within a series of Chinese government announcements beginning as early as 2010, according to a DCNF translation, and apparently continued to serve in this capacity until at least 2018.

Several experts on Chinese intelligence operations have identified COEA as a UFWD front group, including Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, who characterized COEA as a “UFWD agency” in their 2020 book on Chinese intelligence, “Hidden Hand.”

Similarly, Geoff Wade, a China-focused historian at Australian National University, also identified COEA as a UFWD front.

“[COEA had] the same address as the [Overseas Chinese Affairs Office],” Wade told the DCNF, which he claims indicates that the Chinese government agency controlled COEA.

Chi and AACYF did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

‘Directly Subordinate To The UFWD’

Several Chinese government announcements running from 2011 to 2018 also identified another current AACYF “honorary president,” Florence Fang, as having held various positions with COEA, according to a DCNF translation.

Fang formally served as “executive director” of COEA’s 4th Council between 2009 and 2013, the DCNF determined after reviewing Chinese government records and the Florence Fang Family Foundation’s website. The DCNF matched Fang’s Chinese name, Fang Li Bangqin, which is listed on her foundation’s website, with Chinese-language records in order to establish her various roles with COEA.

Fang has served as AACYF’s “honorary president” alongside Rep. Chu since 2012 and has held the position since at least 2006, according to a DCNF translation of an archived version of AACYF’s website. Fang’s tenure at AACYF overlapped with her time as COEA’s “executive director” between 2009 and 2013 and also overlapped with her role as COEA’s “consultant” between 2013 and 2018.

In 2019, Fang also appears to have attended COFA’s 5th Council meeting in Beijing, according to Chinese government records. At the event, Fang appears to have sat just seats away from General Secretary Xi Jinping during a group photo and applauded the communist dictator as he shook hands with other members of the alleged Chinese intelligence front group, footage from Chinese state-run media CCTV revealed.

Fang is also the “founding president” and current “honorary chairman” of the Northern California Association for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China, an organization which opposes Taiwan’s independence, a DCNF translation of her foundation’s website reveals.

The 2018 USCC report identified Fang’s association as one of “33 chapters in the United States” listed on the website of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification (CCPPR), an organization the USCC said is “directly subordinate to the UFWD.”

Fang has fundraised for Republican Jeb Bush, as well as several California Democratic politicians including Sen. Dianne Feinstein and representatives Barbara Lee and Nancy Pelosi, the DCNF found.

Fang did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

In addition to Chi and Fang, several other AACYF colleagues of Rep. Chu also belong to an alleged UFWD anti-Taiwan independence front group, the DCNF determined.

AACYF’s current “director general,” Zhu Bingfeng, as well as the organization’s “president,” Ren Xiangdong, have belonged to Chu’s organization since at least 2006, DCNF translations of AACYF’s website determined.

Yet, both Zhu and Ren apparently also hold leadership roles at the American Chinese Youth Federation for the Peaceful Reunification of China, according to DCNF translations of the websites of AACYF and the alleged UFWD front group CCPPR.

As with Fang’s anti-Taiwan independence organization, Zhu and Ren’s organization is also listed as one of the “33 chapters in the United States” that the 2018 USCC report identified as belonging to CCPPR.

Zhu and Ren did not respond immediately to the DCNF’s request for comment.

‘Thousand Talents’

AACYF has also interacted with and supported several UFWD front groups during Rep. Chu’s tenure at the non-profit, the DCNF discovered.

Just months after Chu became an “honorary president” at AACYF in October 2012, the group began advertising a recruitment drive on behalf of the “Thousand Talents Plan” in March 2013, according to an archived version of the Chinese-language website.

The Thousand Talents Plan is a Chinese government program originally designed to recruit “high-quality overseas experts” and allegedly incentivize them to transfer U.S. intellectual property to China, according to Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman, ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

An archived version of the Thousand Talents Plan’s website states the program is managed by the Western Returned Scholars Association, which is a UFWD front group, according to the USCC. The Thousand Talents Plan is also a means of economic espionage, FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a 2020 event held at the Washington, D.C., Hudson Institute concerning Chinese government influence operations.

“Perhaps Representative Chu’s concerns and those of like-minded colleagues would be eased by spending more time engaging those constituents and less associating with groups linked to the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party,” Steve Yates, a former Chinese language analyst for the National Security Agency, told the DCNF.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

AUTHOR

PHILIP LENCZYCKI

Daily Caller News Foundation investigative reporter, political journalist, and China watcher. Twitter: @LenczyckiPhilip

RELATED ARTICLE: US Media Outlet Has Extensive Partnerships, Financial Dealings With Orgs Tied To Chinese Communist Party Influence Operations

RELATED VIDEO: Elon Musk Just Exposed All Barack Obama And Joe Biden’s Corruption! In 2022

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

COVID Policy: Outrage Upon Travesty Upon Falsehood—Part 2 thumbnail

COVID Policy: Outrage Upon Travesty Upon Falsehood—Part 2

/in , , , , /by

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Today, I promised to tell you more about the government’s phony COVID narratives and misguided policies, and how they hurt people.

The whole vaccine thing was as phony as a three-dollar bill.  This was not the bubonic plague; only a tiny percentage of the population was affected by COVID.  There was no fire.  But the government jumped into the vaccine game with two feet and paid media outlets a billion dollars to hype the vaccines.  But what we didn’t know until recently was that Trump COVID advisor Dr. Deborah Birx – the scarf lady – now admits to deliberately lying about the COVID vaccines to manipulate the American people.  “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection and I think we overplayed the vaccines …,” she said.  She also admitted to disobeying orders and altering reports to change the guidance that was being given from the government.

She’s not the only one lying through her teeth about COVID.  More people are admitting what I told you a long time ago – that hospitals are overcounting the number of COVID deaths.  For those of you who won’t believe it until you read it in the Washington Post, it’s now in the Washington Post:  Hospitals have been failing to distinguish between deaths FROM COVID and deaths WITH COVID, wildly inflating the death count and needlessly panicking the public, as a result.

More lies were found in emails.  State and local officials in Washington state knew COVID vaccinations were not as effective at stopping the spread of the virus as they were making them out to be.  But they went right ahead with their narratives and mandates, anyway.

There were others telling the American people bedtime stories about COVID – prestigious university professors and Twitter (until recently) among them.  A participant at the World Health Summit in October admitted the lockdowns “were not based on science,” but were just in reaction to events.  He also admitted the vaccines don’t stop COVID from spreading.  Another official not ‘following the science’ was Mr. ‘I Am Science’ himself, Dr. Anthony Fauci.   He said in a deposition recently he publicly dismissed the Wuhan lab origin theory of COVID because he was worried the backlash might “increase tensions” with China.  So he made the sophisticated calculus to lie to us for our own good, science be damned.  Tricky guy.  Not exactly straightforward, is he?

Then there’s the whole Ivermectin cover-up.  Federal health officials completely misrepresented the drug’s safety and efficacy against COVID.  If you aggregate all the studies, it’s indisputable Ivermectin cuts COVID mortality in half and is 80 percent effective in preventing symptoms if taken prophylactically.  But the feds were out there telling phony stories and got others to play along.  An HEB grocery store in Texas made up fake side effects to scare people away from Ivermectin.  It will make you go blind and make your intestines fall out, the store said.  How many people died as a result of these deliberate lies, that’s what I want to know.

So why were all these fairy tales told?  I can only speculate about motive.  Maybe it’s as simple as people on the take in government helping drug companies make money on vaccines and expensive treatments.  A Pfizer executive was just caught on tape admitting the drug company is working on mutating COVID through ‘directed evolution’ so vaccines will be needed forever.  Or maybe the explanation is authoritarian government officials getting their jollies by telling the rest of us what to do.  A judge in New York recently shot down the state’s vaccine mandate for health workers, ruling the state and the Governor had overstepped their authority.  There’s also a theory circulating out there the national security establishment – the Defense Department and intelligence agencies – convinced federal health officials we needed a quick way to react to future bioweapon attacks.  The mRNA vaccines were the answer because the platform is already built and all you need to do is put in a new payload each time.   The COVID pandemic was the perfect opportunity to put it all in place.

Whatever motives brought them about, the phony narratives are falling apart.  They can’t hide all the problems with the vaccines.  The truth is coming out, a little more every day, including the more than 33,000 deaths associated with the vaccines in the U.S. alone.  The demand for unvaccinated blood is soaring.  So to all who spun or believed the phony narratives and criticized people like me who questioned them, I say take your certitude and shove it!  You have a lot to answer for.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

RELATED ARTICLEs:

The death records show the COVID vaccines are shortening lifespan worldwide

Pfizer Executive Says Company to ‘Mutate’ COVID via ‘Directed Evolution’ to Continue Profiting Off of Vaccines

Death—Courtesy of the Israeli Supreme Court thumbnail

Death—Courtesy of the Israeli Supreme Court

/in , , , , /by

By Martin Sherman

The initiative by the newly elected government to enact a far-reaching reform of the legal system is an inevitable result of the ongoing process of erosion of public trust.

According to the University of Haifa’s annual index for public sector performance, the public’s level of trust in the Israeli judicial system is at the lowest level since the index was first published in 2001.—i24News, Nov. 6, 2018.

After a decade in which left-wing voters expressed a 44 percent confidence in the judiciary, their confidence has eroded since 2017 to 25 percent in 2020.—Haaretz, Jun. 4, 2020.

Today, Israel is engulfed in a tumultuous public dispute in the titanic clash between the advocates of a direly needed reform of the country’s system of law enforcement on the one hand, and its increasingly strident opponents on the other. Waxing evermore vehement and venomous, these opponents are engaged in a desperate last-ditch effort to preserve the remaining vestiges of their waning political power, by freezing the current distorted reality that still allows them—despite their minuscule (and diminishing) electoral support—to control much of the national decision-making process in Israel today.

A litany of travesties

The arrogance and blatant double standards of the legal establishment in general, and the judiciary in particular, together with an increasing number of verdicts that fly in the face of common sense—and any commonsense perception of natural justice—have led to a steep and ongoing erosion in public confidence in the impartiality of the courts—including the Supreme Court itself. Indeed, the catalog of mystifying decisions is as long as it is disconcerting.

The following is a far from exhaustive list:

  • The trampling of the right of the opponents of the 2005 Disengagement to protest;
  • The disregard of the fact that the investigation against Prime Minister Netanyahu was launched in flagrant disregard of explicit legal requirements—not to mention a litany of brazenly improper (to be charitable) police/prosecution measures during the investigation itself;
  • The discriminatory prohibition of demonstrations during the COVID-19 epidemic, preventing gatherings by the Ultra-Orthodox while allowing those by the anti-Netanyahu protesters outside his Balfour Street residence;
  • The repeated overturning of government decisions aimed at stemming the flood of illegal infiltration on the country by African migrants, and the detrimental effect this was having on the lives and livelihoods of less affluent neighborhoods in South Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

“Blaming everyone but itself…” 

Thus, the well-known social activist and left-leaning law professor Yuval Elbashan, warned as recently as last December: “Confidence in Israel’s justice system, once so high, has slumped, and the time has come for the system to stop blaming everyone but itself.”

Indeed, over a decade earlier, in a book entitled “Towards Juristocracy” published in 2004 by Harvard University Press, Ran Hirschl, Professor of Political Science and Law, at the University of Toronto, cautioned: “In Israel, the negative impact of the judicialization of politics on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is already beginning to show its mark. Over the past decade, the public image of the Supreme Court as an autonomous and impartial arbiter has been increasingly eroded.”

He cautioned “…as political arrangements and public policies agreed upon in majoritarian decision-making arenas [such as the parliament and/or government-MS] are likely to be reviewed by an often hostile Supreme Court… the court and its judges are increasingly viewed by a considerable portion of the Israeli public as pushing forward their own political agenda…”

The current initiative by the newly elected government to enact a far-reaching reform of the legal system is thus, an inevitable result of the ongoing process of erosion of public trust.

Victims of judicial intervention in policy

But the appalling harm that the current system inflicts on Israeli society can take on far more tangible and tragic forms. Perhaps, the most horrific (and I use the term with careful deliberation) illustration of this is the following:

On May 2, 2004, a young social worker, Tali Hatuel, who was eight months pregnant with her fifth child, was driving home with her four children aged 2 to 11 years old.

On the way, they were ambushed by two Palestinian terrorists, lying in wait in some roadside building. From their hiding place, they opened fire on the young mother and her children, forcing them off the road. The terrorist then approached the vehicle and slaughtered all the occupants from point-blank range.

What is both staggering and infuriating about this appalling tragedy is that the army had intended to demolish the buildings, which afforded cover to the murderers, because they had been used previously by terrorists to kill both Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.

However, the demolition was prevented by order of the Supreme Court, which, under today’s system, is the ultimate arbiter of what is “reasonable” and “proportionate” even in areas where they have no professional expertise.

The perils of unbridled authority with no responsibility

Sadly,  Tali Hatuel and her four daughters paid with their lives for the gross judicial intervention into Israel’s security policy, while the judge(s) of course suffered no repercussions for the horrendous consequences of their decisions.

But that is how things are when the judiciary has overriding authority, but zero responsibility.

Clearly, a stop must be put to this glaring travesty!

©Dr. Martin Sherman. All rights reserved.

Our National Debt Crisis – Let’s Begin by Throwing Big Bird Off The Cliff thumbnail

Our National Debt Crisis – Let’s Begin by Throwing Big Bird Off The Cliff

/in , , , , /by

By Neland Nobel

The initial sparring and positioning over the debt limit have begun and not surprisingly, the Democrats are pulling out their past winning arguments that have kept any of the huge entitlement programs off limit to any kind of reform. The past arguments can be summarized as “pushing Granny off the cliff”, a theme derived from the famous TV commercial where a Paul Ryan lookalike kills his grandmother. It was one of the most deceptive, yet effective political TV ads ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGnE83A1Z4U&t=2s

Voters will be told that any kind of proposed cut is equivalent to ruining Social Security and Medicare. This effectively ties the attempt to cut spending to cutting off the elderly who have been given government promises, around which they have planned their retirement.

The counterargument would be to tie cuts in spending to egregious programs which only help rich liberals.

At one time, Republicans had a slogan of “defund the Left.” It basically was designed to cut programs where progressives have mobilized tax dollars to use on their side of the political fight. This can range from NPR and PBS, and government agencies funding nonprofits for “voter registration”, to funding UNESCO and other UN left-wing initiatives. How about cutting funding for research so Chinese scientists cannot make new plagues to harm mankind? Is there not a dollar of waste in the defense budget? How about cutting all funds for Critical Race Theory in the Pentagon? I mean, talk about a target-rich environment!

It is also possible to roll back any program not associated with Social Security and Medicare, such as ObamaCare and Medicaid expansion. That could include a modest cut in so-called discretionary spending (spending other than entitlements, defense, and interest payments.)

In truth though, the long-term deficit problem cannot be addressed without eventually getting around to these two demographically flawed programs as they are growing at such speed and consume so much of the budget already that they are becoming the blob that will eat the entire budget.

Looking at the chart above, it really is amazing how little is spent on law enforcement, for example, a primary function of government, and how much is spent on income transfer programs.  Today, the government has largely become a mechanism not to protect safety and liberty but to move money from one taxpayer to another and move money from one generation to another.

But for the time being, baby steps are necessary.

America has not exercised its budget-cutting muscles in a long time. They are so completely atrophied, that success should first be realized with more modest steps. We need to show the political parties, the populace, and the markets; that actual cuts, however modest they may be, can be accomplished. Right now cynicism dominates because previous attempts have led to political disaster for those daring to cut any kind of government spending.

We suspect Republicans will learn from past mistakes and will use the debt ceiling to effectively cut wasteful, politically motivated spending. If we are reading the political tea leaves correctly, it appears that McConnell understands the newly elected House has the power in the negotiations to be had and that in turn, a hard core of conservatives holds excessive power because of the very narrow victory. Let’s hope they use that power wisely and in a politically savvy way.

What could be the argument to maintain NPR and PBS? Not only is its biased coverage lavishly funded by tax-free foundations and the public donations, but its fundamental purpose was also designed in the era of three dominant TV networks. But today, there are so many channels, podcasts, streaming services, and networks that have educational and nature-inspired programming, news programming, and cultural programming, it is redundant and outmoded.

Before we even attempt to reform Social Security, let’s throw Big Bird off the cliff first.

Election Fraud Database Tops 1,400 Cases thumbnail

Election Fraud Database Tops 1,400 Cases

/in , , , , /by

By Hans von Spakovsky

The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database now includes 1,412 proven instances of election fraud, and our legal center is monitoring many other ongoing prosecutions.

The database, which provides a sampling of recent election fraud cases, demonstrates the vulnerabilities within the electoral process and the need for reforms to secure free and fair elections for the American people.

The database doesn’t list potential fraud discovered by election officials and others that is never investigated or prosecuted, and it obviously cannot list fraud that goes undetected when states with poor security don’t have the tools in place to even realize such fraud is occurring.

But states—especially now that many state legislative sessions are beginning—should make stopping fraud and ensuring the integrity of their elections a top priority.

Here are a few examples of cases that were recently added to the database.

We’ve written before on the ballot-trafficking scheme orchestrated by Leslie McCrae Dowless, a political operative who was working on behalf of North Carolina 9th Congressional District candidate Mark Harris, a Republican, in 2018 involving stuffing the ballot box with fraudulent absentee ballots for Harris.

State election officials determined that Harris had no knowledge of what Dowless was doing.

Dowless, who died last April, was known in Braden County for ballot trafficking. He would “assist” certain candidates who hired him as a consultant for their campaigns, and those candidates or causes that Dowless supported seemed to have a sure way to win elections.

Authorities finally caught up with Dowless after his absentee-ballot trafficking scheme caused so much election fraud that, for the first time in 40 years, a congressional race was overturned, and the North Carolina State Board of Elections had to order a new election.

Dowless instructed his hired fraudsters to mark blank absentee ballots for Harris, complete unfinished absentee ballots, forge signatures on absentee ballots for individuals who were unaware ballots were being cast in their name, and then mail the ballots to election officials.

Officials became suspicious when 61% of the vote-by-mail ballots were cast for the Republican candidate, despite the fact that only 16% of the ballot-by-mail voters were registered Republicans.

Ginger Shae Eason, Tonia Gordon, Rebecca Thompson, Kelly Hendrix, James Singleton, Jessica Dowless, and Caitlyn Croom all pleaded guilty to felony charges related to this absentee-ballot fraud scheme. They were all sentenced to probation, ordered to complete community service, and assessed fines and court fees for their involvement in the fraud scheme.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only example of absentee-ballot fraud by an activist among our latest cases added to the database.

Janet Reed, an Evansville, Indiana, Democratic Party activist, sent illegally pre-marked absentee-ballot applications to voters ahead of the 2020 primary election. To make matters worse, Reed pre-selected the Democrat Party where voters were supposed to choose to receive either a Republican or Democratic primary ballot. Reed included instructions with the applications stating the party affiliation “needs no input.”

Despite receiving several warnings from election officials and even from the Democratic Party to knock it off, Reed kept sending out the pre-marked applications that interfered with the ability of voters to decide which party primary they wanted to vote in.

Reed pleaded guilty to a felony charge of unauthorized use of absentee ballots, was sentenced to 18 months of probation, and was ordered to pay restitution of $2,740 and court costs of $925. She was also barred from working on any elections while on probation.

Our latest update also features several instances of convicted felons voting.

In Florida, Marc Crump and Dedrick De’ron Baldwin were felons who were recently convicted of illegally voting in the 2020 general election.

Crump, who voted in the August 2020 primary and November 2020 general election, pleaded guilty to one count of false swearing and one count of illegal voting. He was sentenced to 10 months in jail and assessed $668 in costs and fees.

Baldwin was charged with two felonies after he voted in the 2020 Democratic primary and 2020 general election. He pleaded no contest to both charges and was sentenced to 364 days in prison on each count. Baldwin was already serving a 12-year sentence for manslaughter and aggravated battery.

The fraudulent conduct of those two ineligible voters was discovered following an investigation by Florida Department of Law Enforcement of Alachua County election supervisor Kim Barton, a Democrat, who organized voter-registration drives that improperly registered felons to vote.

In Arizona, Victor Aguirre, a convicted felon, registered to vote and then voted in the 2020 general election. Aguirre pleaded guilty to a felony charge of attempted illegal voting and was sentenced to a minimum term of six months in prison, to be followed by a period of supervised release, and was assessed fees and fines.

In Texas, Francisco Tamez Jr., another convicted felon, voted in the 2017 city of Edinburg municipal election. Tamez pleaded guilty to the felony charge and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

In Minnesota, Linda Maria Stately, of Little Falls, a convicted felon, registered and voted in the 2020 general election. Stately pleaded guilty to a felony charge of ineligible voting and was sentenced to five years of probation and assessed fines and fees. Her charges will be reduced to a misdemeanor if she successfully completes the terms of her probation.

A new case from Florida demonstrates the importance of implementing safeguards in the voter-registration system to detect election fraud, particularly in states that use online voter registration.

Anthony Guevara was charged with two felonies after he changed the voter-registration address of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the state’s voter-registration database online.

After the fraudulent address change was registered in the system, it was flagged, and law enforcement officers were able to trace the IP address to Guevara’s home. He pleaded no contest to the charges and was sentenced to two years of probation, 100 hours of community service, fined $5,421.39, and assessed $515 in court and prosecution costs.

Another example from Florida demonstrates how system safeguards of the type recommended in The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard can prevent fraudulent votes from being counted in the first place. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Larry Wiggins, a registered Democrat from Sarasota, requested a mail-in ballot on behalf of his late wife during the 2020 general election. Election staff discovered the fraud during a routine check of the voter rolls, which revealed that his wife had died two years earlier.

Wiggins forged his deceased wife’s signature on the ballot-request form and admitted that he intended to mail it back once he received it, but he was stopped by law enforcement. He pleaded no contest to one count of vote-by-mail fraud, and was sentenced to 24 months’ probation, 100 hours of community service, and assessed $738 in court costs, fees, and fines.

If Florida hadn’t had such safeguards and preventative checks in place, that ballot very well could have been cast and counted in the election.

It should come as no surprise that Florida—tied with Louisiana for the No. 6 ranking on our Election Integrity Scorecard—has demonstrated a commitment to improving its laws, regulations, and procedures to ensure secure elections.

We also recently added a couple of instances of ineligible aliens voting to the database.

In Ohio, Irnatine Boayue, an ineligible alien, registered and voted in the 2016 general election. Boayue pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of attempted false voter registration and was sentenced to one day in the Franklin County Correction Center. The court waived fines and court costs on account of the defendant’s indigency.

In Minnesota, Abdihakim Essa, also an alien, forged his father’s signature as a witness when submitting absentee ballots in Hennepin County. Essa pleaded guilty to four felony charges and was sentenced to 180 days in an adult correctional facility, 90 days of which were stayed pending successful completion of two years of supervised probation. He was also assessed $78 in court costs.

Zameahia Ismail, another alien, registered and voted in person in two different precincts in a Hennepin County, Minnesota, election in 2017. She voted in St. Louis Park, where she actually lived, and a second time in Minneapolis after being encouraged by an acquaintance to vote for Abi Warsame, a Democratic candidate for Minneapolis City Council.

She was not required to provide any identification in Minneapolis because her acquaintance vouched for her identity. Ismail, who pleaded guilty to the charge of registering in more than one precinct, was sentenced to a year in prison, with all but 20 days stayed pending successful completion of two years of supervised probation. She was also assessed fines and fees totaling $78.

As the latest updates to our Election Fraud Database illustrate, threats to fair and free elections continue to exist. As the more than 1,400 cases in the database should make abundantly clear, states should get to work implementing election reforms designed to improve the integrity of the election process.

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

COVID Policy: Outrage Upon Travesty Upon Falsehood—Part 1 thumbnail

COVID Policy: Outrage Upon Travesty Upon Falsehood—Part 1

/in , , , , /by

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

The Biden Pentagon is forcing soldiers discharged for refusing the COVID vaccine to pay back their signing bonuses despite the termination of the military’s vaccine mandate by law.  That doesn’t seem fair to me, but the government’s other COVID policies are just as misguided, starting with the lockdowns.

The public health experts could not have been more wrong about the lockdowns.  The experts failed to account for learning losses incurred by shutting schools.  Learning loss has been openly discussed for a while now, but the knock-on effects have not.  The workforce of the future will be lower-skilled due to the lockdowns, leaving students with the prospect of 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income as a result.  But the economic fallout doesn’t stop there.  This translates into future GDP loss of 0.6 to 2.9 percent every year for the rest of the 21st century.  Betcha the public health experts didn’t think about any of that.  They failed to think systemically when they were locking us up and shutting down schools.

Britain is facing years of excess deaths from the lockdown.  Thousands of routine medical treatments and appointments were delayed in the lockdown, which resulted in a lot of heart disease and developing cancers not being caught early.  The bill is coming due.

Fresh evidence has come in proving the experts were also wrong about masks.  A new peer-reviewed, randomized controlled trial showed no significant difference between N95 masks and surgical masks for the prevention of contracting COVID.  N95 masks were thought to be the gold standard offering the highest protection, and surgical masks medium protection. This study followed a previous study showing no difference between wearing a surgical mask and no mask at all.  Remember, in a deposition, Anthony Fauci could not name a single study showing masks to be effective.

We also have more evidence the experts were wrong about natural immunity.  They pushed COVID vaccines as affording better immunity, contrary to common sense.  But a new study shows children developing natural immunity after exposure to COVID had better immunity than children who were vaccinated.  It took a long time, but the experts and pontificators are finally starting to admit they were wrong about natural immunity.  Two new studies show mRNA vaccines produce less effective antibodies than traditional vaccines do.  A Pfizer scientist and a member of Anthony Fauci’s staff were on one of the studies.  And for you Democrats out there who won’t believe anything until you read it in the Washington Post, listen up:

abundant research shows natural immunity conveys excellent protection against covid. One Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that vaccinated people who never had covid were at least three times as likely to be infected as unvaccinated people with prior infection. And a Lancet study found that those who were vaccinated but never had covid were four times as likely to have severe illness resulting in hospitalization or death compared to the unvaccinated who recovered from it. Protection from natural immunity also wanes at a slower rate than from vaccination.

There’s also more data now showing the vaccines were not all they were cracked up to be and cause problems themselves, starting with negative efficacy.  A Cleveland Clinic study showed people who got vaccinated were at greater risk of contracting COVID than those who did not.  Stunningly, people who received more than three vaccines were at the highest risk of all.  Finally, just as I told you 16 months ago, COVID vaccines cause new COVID variants to appear. [Daily Skirmish – 9/17/21]  This is backed up by new studies suggesting COVID vaccines are contributing to viral evolution.

There’s more.  Come back tomorrow and I’ll show you more reasons why the government’s phony COVID narratives and resulting misguided policies did great harm.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

RELATED ARTICLE: What Happens to Soldiers Who Refuse the COVID Vaccine?

Why Russia’s war in Ukraine today is so different from a year ago thumbnail

Why Russia’s war in Ukraine today is so different from a year ago

/in , , /by

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine is approaching its first anniversary. The war being fought by Russian forces today is, however, very different from that being fought when Russia first invaded Ukraine.

In February 2022, the Russian attack on Kyiv — seemingly aimed at bringing about regime change in Ukraine — soon faltered. It quickly became apparent that the current Ukrainian regime would not simply collapse.

Putin appeared to have ignored or not been told about improvements in the Ukrainian armed forces that separatist and Russian forces fighting in the Donbas region since 2014 experienced first-hand. Nonetheless, during the first weeks of the war, Russian forces secured significant territory in eastern Ukraine.

Russia’s war of movement, however, soon degenerated into the sort of fighting that it’s engaged in today. Ukrainian forces also recaptured territory relatively quickly in the fall of 2022, but their war of movement has also come to an end for the time being.

Neither side has been able to gain a decisive advantage on the battlefield. Russia’s army in Ukraine has not collapsed — despite the predictions of many western observers — and shows no signs of doing so. Here’s why.

Redeploying forces

Russia’s attack north of Kyiv was undoubtedly a debacle and it was halted, resulting in a redeployment of Russian forces to the east. That move both greatly simplified Russian supply lines and meant more troops in the east. The Russian pullout from territory near Kherson, in southern Ukraine, had the same effect.

Russia invaded Ukraine with an army far too small to wage a major war there.

Although Putin for many months wouldn’t acknowledge that his so-called special military operation in Ukraine was in fact a full-fledged war, he has certainly now done so — both in words and actions.

His change of tack has been accompanied by a considerable strengthening of Russia’s army in Ukraine. The partial mobilization of reservists has given the Russian army far greater human resources than it started with.

The Russian reservists are concentrated in the east of Ukraine, and they are on the defensive across most of the front lines. This defensive posture means fewer lives lost and more resources than the offensive operations across a wider front nearly a year ago.

Russian offensive operations are now largely focused on trying to secure the remaining territory of Donetsk and Luhansk. Securing that territory was a core justification for the invasion.

‘Grinding advance’

Russia’s current operations in the region of Bakhmut in Donbas are not making rapid progress, but constitute the sort of grinding advance that in many ways better suits the Russian army.

The types of problems with the “command and control” of Russian troops at the beginning of the war have been reduced for operations of more limited scope. Typically less experienced and lacking extensive training, Russian reservists are better suited to the more limited and methodical operations of today.

Russian forces also have considerable experience fighting the sort of artillery-heavy war now being fought.

Russian forces attempted to rush the Chechen capital of Grozny back in late 1994 in a manner not dissimilar to the attack on Kyiv in 2022. In the light of that failure, they adopted the sort of tried-and-tested, artillery-centred approach honed during the Second World War to reduce the city before capturing it. That approach was applied to Mariupol.

As an historian of the Russian and Soviet military, I am well aware of what might be regarded as a Russian cultural disposition towards rash initial offensive operations that make way to a more methodical and measured follow-up. In addition to the case of the seizure of Grozny during the Chechen wars, the Soviet Union’s great Patriotic War is littered with examples of this phenomenon.

This has often been accompanied by a psychological doubling-down and a deeper commitment to the task in hand. There are plenty of signs that this has been the situation for the Russian army since the fall.

Distrust of the West and NATO

Despite Russian losses and setbacks, public opinion polls suggest Russia’s population still supports the war effort in Ukraine. That support is crucial for the army fighting in Ukraine.

Western support of Ukrainian efforts to recapture all territory lost since 2014 is the sort of no-compromise stance that feeds acceptance of the Russian government’s argument that the West has been out to get Russia for some time, and that NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders is part of a process that justifies Russia drawing a line in the sand.

Many Russians consider Crimea a core part of Russia, and western support for Ukraine’s attempts to recapture it is a particular affront.

Both sides will suffer shortages in manpower and material as the war drags on. Russia has large reserves, along with a handful of overt allies like Iran and North Korea — whereas Ukraine is backed by the weight of the NATO alliance.

Long war is likely

Both sides therefore have the capacity to keep fighting for the foreseeable future. More western equipment, including some of the latest western tanks and other armoured vehicles, will undoubtedly strengthen the Ukrainian military in the short term. But more vehicle types complicate training, maintenance and supply issues.

If Germany eventually supplies Ukraine with tanks, it will represent a considerable propaganda victory for Putin. Parallels are already being drawn in the Russian media between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the prospect of German tanks on the battlefield in Ukraine today.

If the war continues along its current trajectory, neither side is likely to gain a decisive advantage. One side or the other may gain temporary advantage as they escalate and counter-escalate, but any advantage for either Russia or Ukraine is unlikely to be sustained.

Sadly, in the absence of any negotiations — and certainly meaningful talks in which both sides will have to give as well as take — the bloodshed is likely to continue for some time yet.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AUTHOR

Professor Alexander Hill has taught history at the University of Calgary since 2004. He has PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge and specializes in Soviet military and… More by Alexander Hill

RELATED ARTICLE: The blood-drenched, suffering lands of Eastern Europe

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Shadows on the Wall [A Start to Defeat Woke Tyranny] thumbnail

Shadows on the Wall [A Start to Defeat Woke Tyranny]

/in , , , , /by

By Auguste Meyrat

With each new batch of the “Twitter Files,” it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Twitter censors were not only duplicitous scoundrels aiming to advance an agenda but also incompetents who failed to see the consequences of their actions. Whether it was suppressing the Hunter Biden story, shadow banning and de-amplifying popular conservative figures and certain medical professionals, and removing a sitting president of the United States from the platform, they convinced themselves that they were making the world a better place.

At no point did they seriously question themselves beyond violating their own rules. It never dawned on them that their constant gaslighting jeopardizes the freedom, health, and safety of all Americans. It seemed to matter little that they oversaw a platform that promised open public discourse but degenerated into a leftist propaganda outlet infested with bots and child pornography.

Not only did these censors do real damage at the bidding of a corrupt FBI but they ruined a potentially successful business. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, there were few real conversations happening on the platform, and Twitter was relatively small compared to other social media platforms. For the great majority of users, scrolling through one’s Twitter feed was never an enlightening, connective, or even fun experience but more a mindless habit to pass the time.

Seeing that this is the case, it’s fair to ask what really drove the moderators to do what they did. They could have easily let the First Amendment be their standard for content moderation and sipped their lattes while attending useless meetings. Why did they feel the need to risk their cushy careers by setting into motion a hostile takeover by Elon Musk and an incoming onslaught of lawsuits from users?

From any angle, this seems utterly foolish—that is, except from the woke angle. While rational actors would have understood the sheer destructiveness of censoring users without cause, facilitating the rigging of elections, and endangering the public by denying them important information on a pandemic, woke actors lack this capacity. They operate on feelings and self-regard, not evidence and logic.

Elon Musk famously called wokeness a “mind virus.” It infects people’s mental faculties and drives them to act and express themselves irrationally. Gad Saad expounds upon this in his book The Parasitic Mind. He bemoans the decline of academic scholarship and intellectual debate at today’s universities all in the name of establishing social justice. Of course, rather than create a more equitable and just world, the woke swarm only achieves the opposite—a world of unforgiving hierarchy and hypocrisy. But instead of learning from their failure, they double down and become ever more unreasonable.

For Saad, this is less an ideology and more an “idea pathogen.” In his scientific opinion, victims of wokeness specifically suffer from “Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome (OPS),” substituting for reality a fiction in which “science, reason, rules of causality, evidentiary thresholds, a near-infinite amount of data, data analytic procedures, inferential statistics, the epistemological rules inherent to the scientific method, rules of logic, historical patterns, daily patterns, and common sense are all rejected.”

Unfortunately it’s still an open question of how to “defeat wokeness,” as Elon Musk recently declared. Anyone who has experienced an encounter with the woke infected knows that exposing their falsehoods and contradictions (“sunlight is the best disinfectant,” or, in the new favored expression, “democracy dies in darkness”) only makes them sicker and more dangerous. This is why the “Twitter Files” have mostly elicited silence from the corporate media. Maybe a few of them are pleading the Fifth and hoping the story goes away, but it’s more likely that most don’t understand what these revelations mean, nor do they really care.

So does that mean that releasing and discussing the “Twitter Files” is worthless? Not at all. Even if it doesn’t cure the woke censors or their woke supporters, it fortifies the intellectual immune system of everyone else. Americans now know that they are not crazy; in truth, they are living through a new kind of totalitarianism where Big Tech platforms control speech, impose a social credit system, and fabricate overarching narratives out of thin air.

While this is not exactly a consoling thought, it’s at least the beginning of a solution. The problem has now been identified, and there are now enough informed members of society to have a constructive conversation about the issue. This in turn could lead to finding a cure to the woke pandemic. If these problems continue going ignored and unchecked, the civilized world will surely crumble into ruin, adopting the same chaos, stupidity, and hypocrisy inherent in today’s woke culture.

*****
This article was published by FEE, Foundation for Economic Education and is reproduced with permission.

WEF Is Partnered with 47 CCP-Controlled Entities (Rogue Review) thumbnail

WEF Is Partnered with 47 CCP-Controlled Entities (Rogue Review)

/in , , , /by

By Catherine Salgado

The World Economic Forum, which plans a world where you “own nothing, have no privacy” and enjoy it, is officially partnered with at least 47 Chinese entities, with five of those officially owned by the CCP and at least three others directly tied to the CCP. Since all companies in China are directly answerable to the genocidal, authoritarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, that means that WEF is partnered with the CCP even as it runs its tyrannical, murderous regime. I guess that’s why Chinese state propaganda was so excited to make more “friends” at WEF’s Davos 2023 conference (Jan. 16-20) and uphold the “dazzling” “Davos Spirit.”

The CCP is the greatest mass murderer in history. It also runs a terrible censorship regime, keeps its people in poverty, runs internment and forced labor camps, committed a Tiananmen 2.0 massacre against the recent anti-regime protestors, and is still committing ethnic-based genocide.

In China, all companies are directly answerable to the Chinese government and the major ones have government employees planted in their buildings. Furthermore, as I reported for Media Research Center, “China practices ‘civil-military fusion,’ where everything in the economic and tech spheres is accessible to the Chinese military.” That means any company in China, whether it is officially state-owned or not, is required to give any information to the CCP—and the CCP military—at any time.

The main point is that when WEF partners with Chinese companies, particularly with state-owned companies, it is knowingly partnering with branches or satellites of the worst genocidal, tyrannical regime in world history.

WEF’s Chinese partners include China Huaneng Group (which is explicitly listed as “state-owned”), Bank of China (“wholly state-owned”), China Merchants Group (CMG—also state-owned), Guangzhou Automobile Group (“state-owned”), State Grid Corporation of China (“a pilot state holding company”), Tencent Holdings (has many and deep ties to the CCP), TikTok (owned by ByteDance, in which the CCP has a board seat and financial stake), and Hong Kong Airport Authority (under the authority of the Hong Kong Government, which is totally controlled by the CCP).

What benefit is WEF getting from the mass murdering CCP that makes it so committed to its 47 CCP-controlled partners?

*****
This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

Planned Global Socialist Destruction of Western Civilization—The Great Reset thumbnail

Planned Global Socialist Destruction of Western Civilization—The Great Reset

/in , , , /by

By Simona Pipko

Yes, we are dealing with a Planned Global Socialist Destruction of America by the American government today. I have been warning you about Planned Global Socialist Destruction for forty years. America doesn’t know Russia and its Intel, as a result, we have an incredible chaos nationwide and threat for the future. It is painful to watch Fox News, they are fearlessly arguing, but none of them knows the political history of Russia. They haven’t read my books and columns and don’t know that soon after WWII ended, WWIII began.

The UFO saga started in 1947. Maybe it was connected to the Planned Socialist Destruction of America and WWIII? Maybe? The timing is very suspicious to me. Why does America ignore a chunk of such an important time in the 20th century world history? It was the birth of Stalinism, the ideology of Soviet Socialism, I called Soviet fascism. My latest column reminded you about Soviet Socialism and the way it has been implemented in half of the word by using Socialist modus operandi: lies, deception, fabrication, and fraud. Read it here.

I am not alone talking about Stalinism and the time after WWII. Decent journalists in Russia are also returning to that time. Please, read their assessment of the time and compare in to the information mentioned in my column:

СССР К 1984 ГОДУ. ЗАРОЖДЕНИЕ ПРАВОЗАЩИТНОГО ДВИЖЕНИЯ

22 ИЮНЯ 2022, ВЛАДИМИР ШЕСТАКОВ

USSR BY 1984. THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

JUNE 22, 2022, VLADIMIR SHESTAKOV

“Soviet power relied on an effective system of state security, which regularly served the political leadership of the country. All Bolshevik leaders, beginning with Lenin, considered political repression to be a legitimate and effective element of politics. The state security organs reached their greatest power under Stalin. The “Leader of the Peoples” and his inner circle made extensive use of the state security apparatus for political purposes. Stalin himself initiated the mass repressions of the 1930s, delved into all their details.” Everyday Journal. January 19. 2023, Actual Archive.

The author writes it in the country, where the cult of Stalin’s personality is alive, well and promoted by his devoted disciple Vladimir Putin. The author is in fear of the same KGB’s Mafia/Army, I was reporting and describing for you during the last forty years. Nothing has changed in Russia. The author as a decent individual has no choice as history determined presence, and future. Only by reading my columns, you will see how careful he is in his observation of Stalinism. He had to do so to prevent a political storm against him. I gave you this piece of history for a reason: my column of January 18, 2023 was written for two Special Counsels appointed to investigate two American Presidents. We are dealing with a Planned Socialist Destruction of America by the American government today and knowledge of inextricable connection with Russia and its Intel is a Must.      The timing is helping to see the real design and Stalin’s strategy to pursue of control and power. On October 24, 1945 the United Nation has been officially established in San-Francisco, CA. From that exact day it has become the main target of Russian Intel. There have been nine Secretary-Generals of the UN, one was a KGB’s member and another was assassinated in the plane crash by the KGB—he refused the offer. Read my books. The recent Secretary-General is Antonio Gutierrez, I don’t trust him: he pursues control and power. He impudently and arrogantly propagandized old KGB’s ploy of “climate change” like Gore and Kerry. Read my book and a story about the Olympics in Moscow and listen to Gutierrez in the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2023:

The Elite gathered in Davos to push a global agenda designed by Stalin and promoted by his devoted disciples, a tandem of current Socialist/Communist Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping:  “There are no perfect solutions in a perfect storm,” said Antonio Gutierrez.  He has served as secretary-general of the United Nations since 2017. He stressed on January 18, 2023. “But we can work to control the damage and seize opportunities.” “Now more than ever, it’s time to forge the pathways to cooperation in our fragmented world.” He is echoing the Biden team in full compliance with Socialist modus operandi: lies, deceit, fabricated, and fraud to help Biden’s team to fool and brainwash you. He knows about an upcoming GOP’s investigation and the critical story of Biden’s mishandling top-secret documents and violation of American national security—the crux of the matter with the awful smell of Treason. Remember Socialist modus operandi: lies, deception, fabrication and fraud.

The FBI, CIA and The KGB’s Mafia/Army

The Elite gathered in Davos to push a global agenda designed by Stalin was encourage and sponsored for years by his devoted disciple Russian President Vladimir Putin. Please, remember that Vladimir Putin was a respected member of the G20 in 2021. That was happening, because the FBI and CIA were not proper functioning or infiltrated by the foreign power. I was showing that foreign power during the decades introducing unknown to Americans the KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov 1967-1982 and his KGB’s Mafia/Army. It was Andropov who designed and implemented the simultaneous infiltration in American security apparatus and media by the Russian Intel. If I didn’t believed it being in Russia, I saw it in America 60 years later. I was also introducing the “criminal cabal” in America that colluded with a new term—the KGB’s Mafia/Army—the Andropov’s Doer.

The current Biden’s Docs scandal can be understood only by people who are familiar with the KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov. For them the entire picture of the Dem’s treason is clear. If you read my columns or books you will learn about Soviet Fascism long-term procedure moving slowly from Russia to America. It started under Clinton and continued under Obama and Biden. Putin is a devoted disciple of Stalin and Andropov, his collusion with Biden is obvious by the events in the Southern border if you know that Mexican Cartels are in fact the Russian Cartels of the KGB’s Mafia/Army operated since 1950-1960 in Mexica. Knowing Andropov, you will also learn the main point of collusion and his definition of information: “information is the precious commodity in politics.” It is Russian needs the information, read Unmasking the Underground Enemy: Russia,December 12, 2022.

FBI searches Biden’s Wilmington home and finds more classified materials. The FBI makes believe that the agency acts similar to the Trump case. It is not. On the contrary, the FBI has exposed the differences in many respects, a crumbling misleading defense of Biden. After collaborating with Biden’s team and associating in fraud making Biden the President, I don’t trust the FBI. The agency under Mr. Wray: for unknown to me reason he didn’t want to know Russia, its Intel and lost the ability to vet the enemy that demolishing us from within. You will listen about Russian ties a lot very soon. Moreover, The FBI committed a crime by preventing Americans from reading my books and columns about Russia in 2002, making me a Foreign Agent and banning my writings. This is a result of the recent chaos in America and the World…

The FBI and CIA have failed us, we have not been protected for a long time. In fear and disgust I am watching Dems-Socialists covering-up for Biden. I have already given you their names, but the FBI prevented you from knowing them and forced me to do it again. I called them Socialist Charlatans, lying thugs, and traitors for forty years, they are from different generations constantly destroying the American Republic: Georg Soros, Berny Sanders, James Clyburn, Debbie Dingle, Tim Kaine, Nancy Pelosi, and seventy others in the American Congress. This is only a tip of the iceberg. Read my columns to learn many others names. Supreme Mystery is not mystery for me: I know the KGB’s Mafia/Army and I suspect that two Supreme Court Justices have ties with them. .

You were witnessing total chaos within Biden’s team during the last two weeks—Docs Drama. We are now dealing with criminal investigation, legal process, where subject matter is criminal handling of top-secret Docs for decades. The “criminal cabal” of the Democrat Party will not investigate itself, as they did in Hillary’s case, not touching Bill’s Global Foundation, which I called—the eyes and ears of the KGB. It was a terrible mistake. We now have nationwide chaos because of the prior Dem policy, in my opinion Treason. We ought to learn a lesson and don’t allow the Democrats committing crime again. We also should learn Putin’s mentality and behavior watching Ukraine. He deliberately and inhumanely by fascist methods annihilated the Ukrainian people and their dwelling in the cold winter of 2022/2023.

There is instability around the world and now you feel that we are at WWIII. The agenda of two Special Counsels is very timely. I am writing this column for them to learn who is behind all American troubles. We are dealing with a legal process, where the subject matter is criminal handling of top-secret documents. The evidence is the crux of the matter in both cases. If the two Special Counsels are decent individuals, they will use the information, I have recorded for forty years, to establish the Truth. The fate of the American Republic and the Constitution left to us by our Founding Fathers depends of their professional investigations.

Putin/Biden Collusion in Destruction of America

Please, consider the fact that Biden’s cognitive state is under the question. But his collusion with Putin started in 2013-2914 on the issue of old corrupt Ukraine, when Biden was well. Now he has the same staff and the same advisers. I suspect that the same KGB’s Mafia/Army is now running the White House. You can read my book Socialist Revolution in America. XLIBRIS, 2021. Biden’s chief of staff is suddenly leaving the job…? There are several issues discussed in my books and columns that proved the Putin/Biden collusion for years. However, the national security catastrophe on the Southern border is the most harmful and damaging for the American future.

So, the first is a national security catastrophe on the Southern border. Today, America experiences Putin/Biden conspiracy in all directions, especially on the Southern border, where there is a global invasion orchestrated by Putin’s KGB the way he had been with the Muslim invasion in Europe 2015, and now with Biden’s open border policy to destroy America. An organized invasion, with thousands of migrants lining up and expanding every day. Don’t forget: Russia is a terrorist State and there are no Mexican Cartels—all those Cartels are the Russian Cartels of the KGB’s Mafia/Army. The crime, chaos and catastrophe on the Southern border will not be solved until the Putin/Bide conspiracy is investigated and exposed…

Republicans are struggling with the issue of abortion, because they don’t know that the Dems were using Socialist modus operandi, a subversion for decades to propagandize the issue. They had been working on this for decades and overturned Truman’s Party to Socialist one. I am writing about the events of this process for years to warn you. Read the latest column: Abortion & Other Socialist Plans to Destroy America —One Down, Two to Go. June 24, 2022. A So-called Democrat Party is responsible for all violence connected to the issue and for defrauding you for decades by using Socialist modus operandi: lies, deception, fabrication, and fraud…

Indoctrination of our children is obvious, I recognized it. Read about my childhood in the Soviet Union and it is a clear repetition of it in America. Adam Gillette, Accuracy in Media is right writing about indoctrination of the American children. There are many other socialist destructions in America, but I can’t describe all of them in one column. The Covid-19 is the combined invention of Socialist/Communist tandem Russia and China waging a war against American capitalism for decades. There are some Republicans who don’t know about WWIII, they are making mistakes, like Mike McCaul. To know Ukraine, you have to know Russia, its Intel, and Vladimir Putin, a devoted disciple of Stalin/Andropov, who is now sending Antifa to Atlanta.

To be continued www.drrichswier.com/author/spipko/ and at www.simonapipko.com

©Simona Pipko. All rights reserved.

DeSantis Goes to War thumbnail

DeSantis Goes to War

/in , , , , , /by

By Thomas D. Klingenstein

On election night, I was half-watching Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s victory remarks when something quite extraordinary and encouraging caught my attention. DeSantis evoked Churchill’s “fighting on the beaches” speech, in which Churchill stirred the resolve and patriotism of the British people in anticipation of the invasion of their homeland by the Nazis. DeSantis, of course, was not warning against Nazism: he was warning against wokeism, which he was implicitly equating with Nazism. I had never heard a national political figure treat wokeism with such (deserved) gravity.

Before rephrasing Churchill, DeSantis said:

States and cities governed by leftist politicians have seen crime skyrocket. They’ve seen their taxpayers abused, they’ve seen medical authoritarianism imposed, and they’ve seen American principles discarded. The woke agenda has caused millions of Americans to leave these jurisdictions for greener pastures.

People do not uproot themselves and leave the rhythms of home “for light and transient causes.” These people are not coming to Florida just for the weather. They are fleeing the woke regime of blue America—an abusive, lawless, totalitarian regime which is waging war against American principles and the American way of life.

DeSantis continued:

Now, this great exodus of Americans, for those folks, Florida, for so many of them, has served as the promised land. We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.

In evoking Churchill’s speech, DeSantis lets us know that the woke regime is bearing down on America. In the urgent cadences of war, DeSantis tells us that America will not survive unless she defeats the woke regime. He believes this regime is so evil and powerful that he can, without bathos, compare it to the Nazi regime.

Some Unsolicited Advice

DeSantis has made a good start. He has told us that we are at war with a deadly regime, the woke regime. You cannot win a war unless you know you are in one.

But at some point soon, he must go further. He must show a voting majority of Americans that wokeism is the challenge of our generation, as Nazism was the challenge of the WWII generation and Communism for two generations thereafter.

And he must back up his claim. He has given us at least one piece of substantial evidence: in large numbers, people are fleeing their homes. Still, we need more. We shall not address the problem with the right strategies and people or the necessary resolve until we believe the country’s life truly is at stake. DeSantis needs to put America on a war footing.

In today’s environment, where there is a keen and deepening generalized awareness of danger, I think there is a hunger for a reasoned account of that danger. DeSantis’s most important role—the role of any statesman who is to rise to the historic challenge of this crisis—is to give such an account, one that calls a morally indifferent nation back to the principles of the founding.

So far as I can tell, there is no national Republican elected official who fully understands the threat except for Trump and DeSantis. The national figure not in politics who best gets it probably is Tucker Carlson. Night after night, in artful, insightful monologues, Carlson flays some aspect of the woke regime. He is the best we have, but he is not going to lead a major political movement. For that we need a statesman. That could well be DeSantis. And so I presume to offer him advice he hasn’t asked for:

He should make defeating wokeism his central purpose, with the goal of making it the central purpose of the Republican Party (which currently has no central purpose). Presumably DeSantis will run for the presidency. But even if he doesn’t, his first goal should be the mobilization of America. He should make anti-wokeism (and its opposite, pro-Americanism) the theme of the next Republican administration, whether it is his administration or not.

To develop an anti-woke (pro-American) agenda, DeSantis must first help us understand the woke regime, the woke way of life. He must explain that this way of life cannot possibly coexist with the American way of life. The two regimes have utterly irreconcilable understandings of a just society.

For the American regime, a just society is one in which free men and women pursue happiness according to their abilities and according to nature. Such a society is one where merit rules. For the woke regime, on the other hand, a just society is one where the regime imposes identity group quotas based on victimhood rankings. Such a regime makes war on merit.

It’s one regime or the other. You can’t offer admission to college (or anything else) according to group quotas and, at the same time, offer admission according to merit. I suggest DeSantis frame the debate accordingly: the merit regime vs. the group quota regime (or simply, merit vs. group quotas).

DeSantis should be very clear: woke revolutionaries attempt not to improve our culture, or remake aspects of it, but to destroy it or lead us to destroy it ourselves—not partially but completely. Like (crazed) revolutionaries everywhere, they believe the world must be purified, no matter the cost.

But DeSantis should not overestimate the threat either. The woke regime is a totalitarian regime in the making. Our side is outgunned almost everywhere, but there is still room to maneuver. America is not yet a one-party state; we still have some open communication channels; our intelligence agencies can (conceivably) be reformed; wokeness in the military can probably be reversed by a strong president, and businesses (one must hope!) will come around if they see America gaining the upper hand on woke tyranny. Even in education, where the woke revolutionaries have us tied to a chair, our hands are still free.

In addition to a framing, we need a simple theory or model of the woke regime: its composition, its goals, and the means for achieving those goals. Without a model we cannot anticipate where the woke revolutionaries are going next, and so we are always playing whack-a-mole, each new woke initiative catching us by surprise.

DeSantis might use the 2020 riots as an example of the woke regime in action. Radicals, intellectuals, media, businesses, Democratic politicians, and the criminal justice system conspired to create mayhem. They ignited, justified, hid, funded, fanned the flames of, and freed the rioters. There is no overarching organization. There is some informal coordination among players, but mostly the regime is a revolutionary cabal of the anti-American elite, who want us to believe they are liberating innocent victims.

The objective of the woke regime—group quotas—requires the woke revolutionaries to make Americans deeply ashamed of their past, thereby making them inclined to trade in the merit regime for the group quota regime. This requires a big lie. Every totalitarian regime has one. The woke regime’s big lie is that America is systemically racist and about to be overrun by racists, a.k.a. Trump voters. (That Trump voters are racist is, regrettably, a view also held by many neoconservatives.)

DeSantis should call this the “Big Lie” and, like Trump, dismiss it without apology or qualification. DeSantis should explain that the phony white guilt of the elite is killing the rest of us, black and white, that racism is low on the list of problems confronting black citizens, and, as Frederick Douglass counseled, the way to help blacks is to encourage them to help themselves.

DeSantis must tell Republicans they should forget about defending themselves against charges of “racism” (it cannot be done). Instead Republicans need to explain that the central problem facing the nation is not racism, but the trumped-up charges of racism that hound us from morning to night. The goal of conservatives should be, as David Azerrad has pointed out, “not to solve the race problem but to prevent the race problem from crushing the country.”

DeSantis needs to explain that the doctrinaire egalitarianism of wokesism denies the natural differences in abilities among people and so is evil. DeSantis should say just that: “evil.” Although the elite will cringe, as it did when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “evil,” most Americans will find it both bracing and reassuring.

In addition to telling lies, the woke revolutionaries must, as most everyone knows by now, censor anyone who challenges the lies. In a totalitarian regime there can be no space for dissent. This requires, among many other things, erasing from memory totalitarian regimes and their evil. DeSantis gets it. To his great credit, he signed a bill last year that requires the teaching of “communism and totalitarianism.”

Republicans recognize the Big Lie, censorship, and the corruption of education, but like many pieces of the woke regime, these are not usually seen as part of the larger woke strategy. We see the pieces but not always the picture. That’s DeSantis’s role: to put the pieces together.

DeSantis should make us understand all the woke regime’s actions through this totalitarian lens. Take, for example, Biden’s decision to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. The woke revolutionaries tell us this has to do with climate change, but it is difficult to see how destroying American energy independence can be other than part of an attempt to destroy America. Whether done with conscious intent or simply allowed to happen, the result is the same.

Or take open borders. We usher in millions of illegal immigrants, distribute them around the country, encourage them not to assimilate, and sometimes even allow them to vote. This too is an attempt to destroy our country with the additional benefit for the woke revolutionaries of swelling Democratic voting rolls. Another example is the breaking of the country into identity groups (tribes), each competing for the highest ranking in the victimhood sweepstakes. This will almost certainly lead to tribal warfare. When has it not?

Yes, Republican politicians usually object to such policies. But they don’t generally identify and denounce them as parts of the woke strategy for destroying our country. Unless they do, we will lose our country without even a fight.

A Time for Statesmanship

DeSantis should help us follow the logic of wokeism. For example, if we know group quotas for innocent victims is the goal of the woke regime, then we know that the woke revolutionaries need to bring the black prison population (currently about 33 percent of the total prison population) more in line with blacks’ percentage of the overall population (13 percent). That is the purpose of defunding the police and failing to prosecute certain crimes and other criminal justice “reforms.” For the most part, people with common sense—in particular black Americans who must endure the consequences in their own neighborhoods—see these things simply as very stupid ideas. But DeSantis should keep reminding us that wokeism is not a jumble of stupid ideas but a coherent set of stupid ideas in the service of the group quota regime, one that is completely at odds with the merit regime.

And DeSantis should help us anticipate the woke revolutionaries’ next steps. In the case of prison population, the next step might be disparate sentencing, where blacks get lighter sentences than whites for the same offense, or perhaps the elimination of prison altogether. As loopy as these ideas sound, they are logical extensions of woke theory. Moreover, each has been talked about by leading woke revolutionary intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi. Sometimes all we have to do is listen.

Very importantly, DeSantis must keep reminding us that war requires different strategies than peace time. War is not a time for trying to persuade the independents, reach across the aisle, or even reach out to the Republican accommodationists. DeSantis knows the best way to get these groups on board is not to woo them but to win the war. He knows as well that any concessions made to the woke revolutionaries will be pocketed, not reciprocated—something even Trump may have failed to fully appreciate.

War also requires different personnel. Trump, an almost unthinkable option at any other time in American history, was the right man for these times, and may still be the right man. Trump was a great war time president. DeSantis must help us understand that Trump’s flaws were not—perhaps are still not—disqualifying.

The easy way out for Republicans, and the temptation for DeSantis, will be to say Trump’s policies were good, but not the rest of him. I think this assessment of Trump is wrong. As I have written elsewhere, Trump advanced many important policies, but the “rest of him” is where one finds the virtues that have inspired a movement. His willingness to fight, his abundant courage, strength, independence, optimism, confidence in America, and absence of white guilt are examples of virtues that made him both effective and dear to patriotic Americans. DeSantis should resist his advisors who tell him he should not speak well of Trump. Now is the time for statesmanship.

And when the Republican establishment dismisses the Trump movement as “populist,” DeSantis should demur and explain to that establishment that when the elite undermines the American way of life, and the voices of ordinary people cannot be heard, populism is not only healthy but vital. Trump’s populist base has just what the Republican Party lacks: purpose, the passion that can match the ideological zeal of the woke revolutionaries, optimism, and confidence in itself and the country. And the base doesn’t have what the party has altogether too much of: white guilt. Trump’s base is a fighting force we cannot afford to lose.

In his election night victory speech DeSantis imagined that he, like Churchill, was a great leader fighting the forces of evil. If DeSantis is to actually follow Churchill (and Lincoln), he must be magnanimous, as they were. Voters will rally to magnanimity coupled with courage and resolution.

DeSantis’s immediate goal is to make America vs. the woke regime (merit vs. group quotas) the central theme of American political discourse. Perhaps that begins with a speech. Like Churchill and Lincoln, DeSantis should appeal to our patriotism in order to stir our resolve. We are still a patriotic people. Where patriotism has waned, I suspect its embers would burst into flames. DeSantis must remind us we are part of a noble and honorable tradition. He must call attention to the great successes of our past. In doing so he reminds us that we are still capable of greatness. As in times before, the future of freedom everywhere rests on our shoulders, a fateful burden we carry as the “almost” chosen people. DeSantis must give us hope but not let us forget the possibility of darkness. As a peroration, he cannot improve on Lincoln who faced a crisis not so dissimilar to the one we face today:

LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

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

What the January 6 Videos Will Show thumbnail

What the January 6 Videos Will Show

/in , , , , /by

By Julie Kelly

The jury trial of Richard Barnett, the man famously photographed with his feet on a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office on January 6, 2021, is underway in Washington, D.C. Nearly two years to the date of his arrest, Barnett finally had a chance to defend himself in court on multiple charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding.

But it was not the fiery, outspoken Barnett who provided the most jaw-dropping testimony in the trial so far. To the contrary, one of the government’s own witnesses confirmed under defense cross-examination that “agents provocateur” were heavily involved in instigating the events of January 6.

Captain Carneysha Mendoza, a tactical commander for U.S. Capitol Police at the time, testified Wednesday how a group of agitators destroyed security barriers and lured people to Capitol grounds that afternoon:

Defense Counsel Brad Geyer: Isn’t it true that you had a lot of people, a large quantity of people walking down two streets that dead-ended at the Capitol?

Mendoza: Yes, sir.

Geyer: And would it be fair to say that at least at some of the leading edges of that crowd, they contained bad people or provocateurs; is that fair?

Mendoza: It’s fair.

Geyer: Dangerous people?

Mendoza: Yes.

Geyer: Violent people?

Mendoza: Yes.

Geyer: Highly trained violent people?

Mendoza: Yes.

Geyer: Highly trained violent people who work and coordinate together?

Mendoza: Yes

It was a stunning admission, representing the first time a top law enforcement official stated under oath (to my knowledge) that a coordinated, experienced group of agitators engaged in much of the mischief early that day. Under further questioning, Mendoza acknowledged those same individuals “pushed through barriers, removed barriers, threw barriers over the side, removed fencing, and eased the flow of people into places where they shouldn’t be.” This happened around 1:00 p.m., the same time the joint session of Congress convened to debate the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Hiding the pivotal role of still unidentified—and uncharged—agitators on January 6 is just one reason why the government has successfully sought to conceal thousands of hours of footage captured by the Capitol police’s security system before, during, and after the protest.

As I explained in May 2021, Capitol police immediately designated roughly 14,000 hours of surveillance video as “security information” that should not be released to the public.

Thomas DiBiase, general counsel for Capitol police, the technical owner of the video trove, signed an affidavit in March 2021 objecting to the widespread dissemination of footage “related to the attempted insurrection.” DiBiase claimed the agency wanted to prevent “those who might wish to attack the Capitol again” from accessing interior views of the building.

The Department of Justice subsequently labeled the footage as “highly sensitive government material” subject to strict protective orders in court proceedings. Defendants must comply with onerous rules before viewing any surveillance video associated with their case.

There are, of course, exceptions for any party helping to enforce the “insurrection” narrative. For example, the House committee handling Donald Trump’s post-January 6 impeachment was allowed to use portions of the super-secret reel. So, too, was HBO in producing its January 6 documentary. The January 6 select committee aired extensive if highly selective surveillance footage during their televised performances.

And that brief clip of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) running in a hallway on January 6? It was clearly an image intended to mock his alleged cowardice that day. And, of course, it was Capitol surveillance video.

If it’s safe to place the video in the hands of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the biggest deceiver in Congress, and random HBO film producers, then it’s safe to place all the footage in the hands of the American people. Which is why calls by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to fully release the surveillance video are a welcome, and necessary, step in providing a complete account about the events of January 6 to the public.

(The Committee on House Administration, now under Republican control, is one of two congressional committees with access to the full library of video.)

The recordings, Gaetz said in an interview this week, “would give more full context to that day rather than the cherry-picked moments that the January 6 committee tried to use to inflame and further divide our country.”

That demand undoubtedly will be met with fierce resistance by the same lawmakers, government agencies, and media organizations incessantly bleating about the need to “tell the truth” about what happened before and on January 6.

So, what exactly will the tapes reveal?

The footage, which captured the inside and outside of the building, will show how many agitators and/or federal assets were staged at various locations early in the day. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) might finally get an answer to the question that FBI Director Christopher Wray refused to answer during a congressional hearing last year—whether FBI informants disguised as Trump supporters were planted inside the building prior to the initial breach.

To that end, the video could show who instructed two men how to open the two-ton Columbus Doors on the east side of the Capitol Building, creating an access point for hordes of protesters. Ditto for entry points at other locations.

Will the video identify the individuals who erected the “gallows” featuring an orange noose allegedly built to “hang” Vice President Mike Pence? Just like the identity of the suspect who allegedly planted the pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC, no one has been identified or charged with constructing that stage on government property—another unanswered question the footage will answer.

The public undoubtedly will be shocked to see police officers from Capitol police and D.C. Metropolitan Police Departments viciously attacking crowds of people assembled outside the Capitol. Mendoza’s testimony also confirmed that Capitol police officers used nonlethal “munitions” on hundreds of individuals beginning shortly after 1:00 p.m. Weaponry included pepper balls—projectiles containing a chemical irritant shot from a launcher similar to a paintball gun—gas, rubber bullets, and flashbangs, a less-than-lethal grenade that likely caused the fatal heart attacks of two Trump supporters that afternoon.

Not only will the public see what happened to those two men, Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Phillips, but they will also see evidence of the numerous, serious injuries inflicted on dozens of people, including children and elderly women, at the hands of police. Are Americans prepared to see how law enforcement handled the dead bodies of Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland?

It will be tough to watch.

More importantly, the footage will indicate which cameras were disabled before the protest. The government’s claim that security cameras are not installed outside the Columbus Doors is questionable at best. A full comparison between the Capitol’s closed-circuit television system and the cameras operable on January 6 is a must.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Thursday endorsed Gaetz’s calls to release the footage. “I think the American public should actually see all what happened,” McCarthy told reporters. “Yes, I’m engaged to do that.”

If McCarthy follows through on his promise, the world will see the biggest inside job—an actual coup—in U.S. history unfold before their eyes. Not only is it necessary to expose the truth of January 6 but to exonerate innocent Americans whose lives have been destroyed in the aftermath.

Roll the tapes.

*****
This article was published by American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

Ex-Top FBI Agent Charged With Illegally Working For Russian Oligarch thumbnail

Ex-Top FBI Agent Charged With Illegally Working For Russian Oligarch

/in , , /by

By The Daily Caller

Authorities charged a former Special Agent In Change of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in New York and a court interpreter with breaking sanctions to work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Monday.

Charles McGonigal, 54, who investigated Deripaska during his FBI career ending in 2018, and U.S. citizen Sergey Shestakov, 69, were allegedly paid to investigate a rival Russian oligarch for him in 2021 and worked with his agent to conceal his involvement using shell companies and a forged signature, the office’s press release said. The U.S. government had sanctioned Deripaska in 2018 in connection with Russian government action towards Ukraine following the 2014 presidential declaration of a state of emergency there.

Former Special Agent in Charge of the New York FBI Counterintelligence Division charged with violating U.S. sanctions on Russiahttps://t.co/krkeabMnLa

— US Attorney SDNY (@SDNYnews) January 23, 2023

McGonigal is charged with conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions, violating International Emergency Economic Powers Act, money laundering and conspiring to commit money laundering, while Shestakov faces those charges and one count of making false statements, according to the release. Each of their shared charges could land them 20 years in prison, while making false statements is punishable by up to five years.

“Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska perform global malign influence on behalf of the Kremlin and are associated with acts of bribery, extortion, and violence. As alleged, Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov, both U.S. citizens, acted on behalf of Deripaska and fraudulently used a U.S. entity to obscure their activity in violation of U.S. sanctions,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Michael Driscoll said. “There are no exceptions for anyone, including a former FBI official like Mr. McGonigal. ”

The FBI did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for further comment.

AUTHOR

TREVOR SCHAKOHL

Legal Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Russia Reportedly Offers Citizenship To Foreigners Who Join War Against Ukraine

House Oversight Chair Says ‘Americans Would Be Shocked’ By Biden Family Ties To China

Biden Admin Appoints Doctor Who Claims Obesity Is Mostly Genetic To Dietary Guidelines Committee

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Ways to Defeat Islamic Jihadism thumbnail

Ways to Defeat Islamic Jihadism

/in , , , , , /by

By Amil Imani

This is an urgent call to all free people to rise and defeat the Islamic Jihadists who are marching under the banner of the Qur’an to subdue all non-Muslims.

It is imperative that the values and the way of life of civilized people be protected against the assault of Jihadists’ savagery born from the primitive culture of long-ago Arabia. There is nothing to negotiate here. Nothing to compromise, for the Jihadists, are on a non-negotiable campaign against Allah. The goal of this mission from Allah is the eradication of just about everything that falls under the rubric of human rights.

It takes every free human to do his or her share in defeating Jihadism.

Below is a partial list of what can be done.

  • You don’t have to take up arms and go around killing the Jihadists. That’s the Jihadists’ way of dealing with us and anyone they don’t approve of. Decent humans value life, even the life of a Jihadist. By contrast, the Jihadists have no compunctions about amputating limbs, stoning, beheading, and hanging people even en mass. The brutal mullahs ruling the Islamic Republic of Iran welcomed the new year by hanging thirteen people, one of them the mother of two young children. We need to dry up their sources of support and beat them in the battle of ideas. We need to show them the fallacy and danger of their pathological belief.
  • Fight to end the deadly practice of political correctness. Truth, only naked truth, can set us free. And freedom is our greatest gift in life. Life without freedom is death disguised as life. Remember Patrick Henry’s cry: Give me liberty or give me death. We must fight for life, liberty, and freedom.
  • Demand that politicians, Islamic apologists, and paid-for media do not abuse freedom by lying about Islam. When these people portray Islam as a peaceful religion, they lie through their teeth. Just take a quick look at Islam’s history as well as what is happening today in the Islamic lands. Islam is not a religion of peace and it has never been. Islam is violent, oppressive, racist, and irrational at its very core. It is treachery for people to present it as otherwise, either out of ignorance or because of their own personal reasons.
  • Challenge your leftist professors who Islamic front organizations may retain to trumpet Islam’s virtues. Demand transparency from hired lobbyists and the liberal mainstream media. Sadly, a percentage of people in Western Democracies are born alienated. These people seem to a have congenital hatred of their own societies; they ally themselves with any and all people and forces that aim to destroy our cherished way of life, and they live by the motto: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. They eagerly join forces with the Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez of the world.
  • Demand that Islamic literature, including the hate and violence manual called the Qur’an, be purged of all violence and hate spewed toward non-Muslims. Is it too much to ask that non-Muslims not be targeted for hate by the so-called sacred religious text? What kind of religion is this? Religion is supposed to bring people together and not put them at each others’ throats. The Muslims must be made to understand that and they must reciprocate the tolerance that the non-Muslims voluntarily afford them.
  • Do not allow any special privileges whatsoever to be granted to Muslims. Demand that all Muslims have their first and foremost loyalty to the United States and its Constitution and not to the Islamic Ummah, the Qur’an, and the shariah law. Europe is rapidly buckling under the pressure of Islamism. Just a couple of examples: Germany has legalized polygamy to placate Muslim men, and Italy is forced to plan separate beaches for Muslim women.
  • Demand that none of the barbaric provisions of Islamic sharia be practiced. Just because a woman is born into a Muslim family, that shouldn’t force her to lead a subservient life to a man, for example. All family matters and disputes, without exceptions, must be adjudicated according to the civil laws of the country.
  • A Muslim is, first and foremost, an Ummahist, a citizen of international Islam. So, when a Muslim takes the United States Pledge of Allegiance, he is either ignorant of the implications of his pledge or is lying willfully. Sadly enough, taqiyya (lying, or dissimulation) is not only condoned but is also recommended to the Muslims in their scripture. Hence, a Muslim can and would lie without any compunctions, whenever it is expedient.
  • Require that many recent arrival Muslims be carefully vetted for their terrorism and Jihadist backgrounds and beliefs. Many recent arrivals from places such as Somalia, Iraq, and Pakistan come as refugees and bring with them their pathological anti-American system of belief. It is criminal to admit these refugees without demanding that they completely renounce their allegiance to the hate dogma of Islam. Those diehard devotees of Islam should make any of the eighteen or so Islamic countries home, rather than invade the secular societies and aim to subvert them.
  • Demand that Muslims, without the least reservation, adhere to the provisions of human rights. Muslims, by belief and practice, are the most blatant violators of human rights. We hardly need to detail here Muslims’ systemic cruel treatment of the unbelievers, women of all persuasions, and any and all minorities across the board. To Muslims, human rights have a different meaning, and their protective provisions are reserved strictly, primarily for Muslim men.
  • Go and talk to Muslims, particularly the young and the better educated, about the horror and the fallacy of a primitive belief that has been handed down to them through an accident of birth. Show them the magnificence of freedom, in all its forms; the indispensability of tolerance for all; and, the futility of clinging to an obsolete hodge-podge of delusional ideology. The onus is clearly on the Muslims to prove the validity, utility, and sanctity of the belief they intend to impose on all of us.
  • As for democracy, our cherished way of life, Muslims have no use for it at all. Muslims believe that Allah’s rule must govern the world in the form of a Caliphate: a theocracy. Making a mockery of democracy, subverting its working, and ignoring its provisions is a Muslim’s way of falsifying what he already believes to be a sinful and false system of governance invented by the infidels. The reason, if you can, with the Muslims is that their belief is an outright rejection of the greatest gift of life: Freedom.
  • Support financially and in every other legal way those individuals and organizations that are fighting the Jihadists’ relentless encroachment. Many European countries are already on the verge of capitulation to the Islamists. The Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, confidently proclaimed recently that Europe will be Islamic in a dozen years. He has good reason to say that. Muslims are forming states within states in much of European towns and cities. In Britain, for instance, non-Muslims are in serious danger of entering Muslim neighborhoods.

In conclusion

Folks, get off your duff. Stop saying, “let the FBI do it.” Neither FBI the agency nor the “NSA, or DHS” can do it by themselves.

This is a battle for survival that every one of us can help wage.

Let’s get on with it before, if not you, then your children and grandchildren end up under the barbaric rule of the

©Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

Domestic Genocide in Iran thumbnail

Domestic Genocide in Iran

/in , , , , /by

By Amil Imani

The world’s most notorious state exponent of anti-Semitism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is on a path to uproot, not only all that is perceived as civilized but to annihilate the greatest threat to its existence, the Iranian people. The mullahs and their mercenaries are wasting precious human life in order to maintain their power by terrorizing the population.

The Iranian people are simply hopeless and helpless. Even the UN does not come to their rescue. From its past performance, rather than its absence of performance, we know that the UN watchdog is a true disgrace to dogs since all it does is eat, sleep and look the other way. Furthermore, the dog has no teeth. The vet had to pull all its teeth before the dog became acceptable to the crafty cats that constitute the UN itself.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a unique creature—it is best described as a Theocratic Aristocracy. The “divinely ordained” rulers maintain power through an elaborate patronage system. Lucrative positions, contracts, and valued privileges are distributed by patronage. The result is that the ruling Mullahs enjoy a significant number of supporters in all strata of society—the civil service, the military, the powerful Revolutionary Guards, (IRGC), and the hooligans and thugs who are ready to unleash their vicious attacks on anyone or group that dares to challenge the in-charge men of Allah. The illegitimate government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a quisling entity that has betrayed its people, its tradition, and its glorious pre-Islamic achievements, and is incessantly working against Iran’s national interest.

Under the stranglehold and machinations of the Mullahs, Iran has been transformed, in less than three decades, to the lead perpetrator of all that is abhorrent to humanity. The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei, like his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, whose callous disregard for human life was matched only by his consuming paranoia, allegedly has issued a decree to hang Iranian dissidents publicly in all the towns and villages with a population that exceeds 1000 people. For Ayatollah Khamenei, the dissident viewpoints represent an unacceptable threat. Anyone found questioning the Sharia Law — and many hundreds of thousands were — had to be “weeded out.” The Islamic Republic is on a mission to end human life in Iran. Mass public hangings, as well as secret executions in prisons, are routine in the tyrannical Islamic Republic of Iran. Recently Majid Kavousifar, 28, and his nephew, Hossein Kavousifar, 24, were hanged for the alleged murder of a hardline judge, Hassan Moghaddas, who also was a deputy prosecutor and head of the “guidance” court in Tehran and notorious for jailing and condemning to death political dissidents. The victims were hanged from cranes and hoisted high above one of Tehran’s busiest thoroughfares. This “judge” had repeatedly bragged publicly that he often issued a death verdict without even examining the charges against the individual.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has the dubious distinction of executing more children, those under the age of 18, than any other country in the world. Such is the plight of the Iranian people.

Iran’s ruling Mullahs are clustered around major factions such as the conservatives, the moderates, and the so-called reformists. Yet, the differences among these factions are tactical rather than strategic. One and all share the same overarching goal of defeating the “Crusader-Zionists” by any and all methods possible, bringing about the “end of the world” Armageddon, and thereby creating the requisite conditions for the appearance of the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, to assume his rule of the world. What is the likelihood that the ruling Mullahs will actually use the bomb, you may ask? If they remain in power long enough to have it, they are very likely to use it, in one form or another, you are told. At the very least, they will use the bomb for blackmail and intimidation in the region. How can you help to prevent this catastrophe from happening, you may ask?

Support the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom, by at least petitioning, you are told. [As for Majid and Hossein Kavousifar, they left Iran for Abu Dhabi following the assassination of the murderous judge, Hassan Moghaddas, and apparently, they both took refuge in the U.S. Embassy where they had applied for U.S. asylum. We have no information as to why they were handed over to the Islamic Republic authorities when they were aware that they would definitely be facing execution.

We hope that the US State Department can give us more information. In order to achieve total control, the Islamic Republic and its lackeys spawned a series of immense internal purges — beginning in 1988 and known as the “Massacre of Political Prisoners of 1988”– and have intensified their domestic terror in recent months and weeks. A society that is intense in its struggle for change has a flip side to its idealism: intolerance. This totalitarian regime sees enemies everywhere, enemies who want to destroy the Islamic Revolution and diminish the results of its hard work of creating an Islamic utopia in the land of Cyrus the Great. The regime seems to be panicking with hyper-suspiciousness. They have installed watchdogs in schools, universities, factories, and all offices across the country, and are urged to be vigilant against sabotage, against those who crave freedom and democracy. Many innocent Iranians are being victimized, and the saying has gone around that “when you chop wood, the chips fly.” As with Khamenei, it was believed that some who were innocent would have to be victimized if all of the guilty were to be apprehended.

In fact, they stigmatize, victimize and murder people without any due process of law. On the slightest suspicion, they arrest, convict, and execute. Few people would deny any longer that Islam and its variants mean, in practice, bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal actions, forced ‘hijabs”, fatal deportations, extrajudicial executions, show trials, and genocide. It is a widespread plague upon humanity, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the greatest threats to the stability of the civilized world and humanity at large. It continues to impose this horrendous ideology called Islam on the Iranian population.

The world must file legal charges against the leaders of the Islamic Republic’s wanton violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: for their crimes against humanity and genocidal actions against religious and political groups; for support of international terrorism; for demolition of sacred sites and cemeteries; for rape, torture, and summary executions of prisoners of conscience; for forgery of documents; for acts of blackmail and fraud; and for much more. To those misguided advocates of negotiation with the mullahs, beware. The mullahs are on an Allah-mandated mission. They are intoxicated with petrodollars and aim to settle for nothing less than complete domination of the world under the Islamic Ummah. It is precisely for this reason that they consider America and the West as “Ofooli,” setting-dying system, while they believe their Islamism is “Tolooi,” rising-living order. They are in no mood to negotiate for anything less than the total surrender of democracy, the very anathema to Islamism. This is only one reason, but perhaps, one of the greatest reasons, for fostering democracy.

In short, we have an excellent opportunity to topple these parasitic terrorists once and for all. History will judge us all. At Munich, Chamberlain got an international agreement that Hitler should have the Sudetenland in exchange for Germany making no further demands for land in Europe. Chamberlain said it was ‘Peace for our time’. Hitler said he had ‘No more territorial demands to make in Europe. Neville Chamberlain, appeasement (1938) Hitler, our European allies, and the United States, are doing the same with the ayatollahs. [I really like to know how these people become National Security Advisors)?

©Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners

RELATED VIDEO: In Search Of Cyrus The Great – by www.spentaproductions.com.

The Making of and Dealing with Jihadists thumbnail

The Making of and Dealing with Jihadists

/in , , , /by

By Amil Imani

Bewildered by what fanatic Muslims do, some conclude that Muslims are brainwashed. Otherwise, how can their totally illogical belief system and barbaric behavior be explained? But the notion of “brainwashing” that is bandied about is the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood movies such as the Manchurian Candidate.
The human person arrives in this world with his brain already washed in the sense of being what John Lock called tabula rasa, a clean slate—ready for an experience to imprint its script on it. John Lock was only partly correct. The brain also arrives with numerous predispositions already in place. It is a combination of life’s influences and a person’s own decisions that determine which of these dispositions develop and which ones fail. It is through this process that a unique human being is formed.

Many animals come with already in-place programs that automatically run much of their lives. Birds’ migration, mating courtship, and thousands of other complex behaviors are instances of this type of specific programming. A catchword for this type of behavior is “instinct.” As a general rule, the higher the organism the less is its rigid pre-programs and the greater its latitude to exercise choices.

Making choices depends on what there is to choose from and to what extent a given choice appeals to the person. And the human newborn enters the arena of life without the means of being other than a passive recipient of “things” already chosen for him.

It is like the old joke by Henry Ford who reportedly told his customers that they could have the choice of color for their car as long as it is black. Things are almost as bleak for the new arrival. He didn’t have a say in choosing his parents, his socio-economic condition, his environment of birth, and much more. All are already in place and he is to start in life from the context of his birth.

The development of a newborn in any family is influenced by many factors, among them how hands-on the parents are; how religious they are, and how severely they micromanage him in an attempt to make him not only a good person but also a person better-one than they themselves.

Parents tend to live vicariously through their children by programming them, the best they can so that they become or achieve much of what they had failed to become or accomplish. This attitude covers all areas of life such as giving the child the education they didn’t have, helping him with fame and fortune, nurturing him to become a top-notch athlete, and so forth.

It is a fact that early influences play a cardinal role in shaping a person. For this reason, for instance, the overwhelming majority of Muslims have been born into Muslim families, Catholics into Catholic families, Hindus into Hindu families, and so on. It is also a fact that the degree of religiosity ranges from mild to strong, with most people falling somewhere between the two extremes.

Interestingly, two siblings raised by the same set of parents under the same influences may end up at the opposite extremes in their religious views and practices. Here, the human dynamic of freedom of choice comes into play and steers one to one extreme and the other to the other extreme. Occasional extreme deviations notwithstanding, the great majority of siblings of a given family end up with various degrees of that family’s overall religious and other values. The same general principle of subscribing to a set of common values exists in all human groupings, in some cases with broad flexibility and inclusiveness while in others with rigidity and exclusivity.

In order to enjoy the privileges of belonging to a group, the person must also pay his dues of membership.

The very young human faces, beginning with the minute he can make some sense of the world, a bewildering array of mysteries, challenges, and enticements. There are questions at every step, fears, and hopes entangled with the need to survive and possibly thrive.

Who am I? What is this world all about? What’s the purpose? What am I supposed to do and how? Where am I headed? People die. Where do they go? And on and on and on. The information booths available to him in the fairground of life provide him with answers that may help relieve his innate existentialistic anxiety. And it is here that religion plays a critical role and holds a great appeal. Religion provides a surefire answer to those who are willing to take it on faith.

And Islam is a powerful magnet for the masses that are unable to deal with the uncertainties of life and death on their own. It is from this population, many already thoroughly indoctrinated from birth, that the majority of diehard jihadists emerge.

It is the bargain the jihadist makes. He surrenders totally to the religion of surrender in exchange for blanket security. Islam gives him all the answers he really seeks for dealing with this world and promises him a lush and eternal paradise of Allah once he leaves it. And leaving this world in perfect submission as the foot-soldier of the paradise’s creator gives the faithful unimaginably glorious sensual eternal reward in his next life. It’s a bargain that some buy in whole, some in part, and some refuse and seek other means of dealing with their questions and the unrelenting existentialistic anxiety.

The great majority of jihadists emanate from the ranks of those born into the religion of Islam, simply because they are the ones who are most thoroughly indoctrinated and influenced by the Islamic dogma in their most receptive early years. Yet, there are others who embrace Islam in adulthood, on their own and enlist themselves as devoted jihadists for the same rewards that Islam offers them.

Islam has a great advantage of the first call on the new arrival. It is an omnipresent system with masses of believers, mosques, madrasahs, and a host of other social and economic organizations that overpower the person and steer him into the same fold; it is a sea of people who seem to know what they are all about, what life and death are all about, and what one must also do.

Within this sea of surging humanity composed of some 1.5 billion Muslims, each individual believer—a drop—through a combination of choice and forces beyond his control, ends up in one of its many waves. It is the jihadist wave that is highly attractive to the deeply indoctrinated and poorly adjusted in dealing rationally and independently with life. Here, he finds the iron-clad perfect solution to his anxieties and perplexities.

To a jihadist, death is nothing more than casting off a shell of the worthless earthly existence and donning the suit for winging joyously to the life of bliss promised by none other than Allah’s beloved final emissary, Muhammad.

The eradication of jihadism is a daunting task since Islam is a virulent persistent pandemic disease. Massive education efforts, combined with a resolute confrontation of all sources and people that support and promote this deadly philosophy, hold the best promise of dealing effectively with this affliction of humanity.

In addition to the family, places such as mosques and madrasahs, Islamic associations and charitable organizations, prisons, and the like are incubators for jihadists. Massive efforts are required, on the one hand, to drain the breeding swamps of the Islamic virus, while on the other hand helping Muslims adopt an alternative perspective of life that addresses their perplexities and offers a degree of comfort that religions dispense without pitting one segment of humanity against another.

In the monumental task of dealing with jihadism, every individual, group, and government must combine their resources and energies to prevail. The destiny of civilized life hangs in the balance. It is an unpardonable act of shirking responsibility for anyone to adopt the attitude of “let George do it.” George is you. George is I. George is every enlightened human being and organization that values human liberty and dignity.

©Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: UK: Teen converts to Islam, plots jihad massacres in London

The Great Reset and Its Critics: The Technocrats thumbnail

The Great Reset and Its Critics: The Technocrats

/in , , , , , /by

By Michael Watson

In mid-2020, after COVID-19 and lockdown policies to (unsuccessfully) stop it had spread across the world, the World Economic Forum (WEF) leader Klaus Schwab, along with the man now known as King Charles III of the United Kingdom, announced the Forum’s “Great Reset Initiative” to guide a state-managed, environmentalist, and corporate-aligned reconstruction of the world economy. Schwab built on the initiative with a book co-authored with French economist Thierry Malleret titled COVID-19: The Great Reset. In their book, they made predictions about how the pandemic and ruling regime it ushered in would “reset” society to the benefit of environmentalism and management of the economy by a concert of state and “stakeholder.” The sequel, The Great Narrative, proposed an approach to selling the WEF’s reset agenda based on Schwab and Malleret’s discussions with 50 mostly left-wing, mostly academic thinkfluencers; It calls for more global governance. The radicalism of the “reset”—it’s right there in the name—and the influence of Schwab and the WEF, have elicited firm opposition.

Few quotes stick in the conservative or libertarian craw. quite like the infamous musing of incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to President Barack Obama, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” For Emanuel, the Obama administration, and Democrats’ generational-scale majorities in both houses of Congress, that meant enacting the fiscal stimulus, a then-outrageous $787 billion boondoggle of building projects; regulatory legislation like the Dodd-Frank banking act; and Obamacare, the statist restructuring of health care finance.

The Technocrats

But the quote sticks because the impulse is far from Emanuel’s alone. Nothing in the COVID-19 pandemic period so vividly demonstrated the impulse “to do things that you think you could not do before” as the name given to a project launched at a 2020 virtual conference of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the think tank and business league based in Europe best known for hosting the annual Davos meetings at which international politicians and corporate bigwigs lay out their visions for the world.

That name was “The Great Reset.” Demonstrating the WEF’s influence over a European metropolitan left-leaning sort, the project was launched by Klaus Schwab, the German academic who has led the WEF and been a leading opponent of shareholder primacy in corporate governance since 1971, and then-Prince of Wales, now King Charles III of the United Kingdom. The project, in the words of International Monetary Fund managing director Kristalina Georgieva, aspires to frame the emergence from the COVID-19 pandemic in the creation of “a greener, smarter, fairer world.”

Later in 2020, Schwab and French economist Thierry Malleret published COVID-19: The Great Reset­, a book-length examination of the changes in society the authors presumed were likely to happen and perhaps desirable as a result of the pandemic. Increased power of the state and left-wing activism were presumed certain; rapid adoption of environmentalist-aligned, “stakeholder”-influenced corporate practices was presumed to be a necessity.

Schwab has opposed “shareholder primacy,” the view that corporate management owes shareholders the greatest profits that can be obtained in obedience to law and custom, since the 1970s. Like the financial crisis of 2008 did for Emanuel’s American Democrats, the crisis created by the COVID pandemic and the unprecedented-in-modern-times attempts to suppress it offers Schwab and the WEF the opportunity to press home their environmentalist and statist goals.

But can central planners remake a world that they cannot accurately predict? From the perspective at the turn of 2023, many of Schwab and Malleret’s predictions of the world that COVID would bring into being have not come to pass, perhaps none more crucially than one on page 70: “At this current juncture [mid-2020], it is hard to imagine how inflation could pick up anytime soon.”

Schwab and Malleret’s sequel to COVID-19: The Great Reset, titled The Great Narrative, does little to diminish such suspicions. The “narrative” is essentially a repackaging of the same warmed-over environmentalist tropes all have heard before with little connection to the actual production of things, which makes sense given that the book is based on discussions with 50 global thinkfluencers or government officials, not with industrialists or even manufacturing-trades labor unionists. The result is a mix of technocratic gibberish and Greenpeace-in-a-suit environmentalism with the solutions for “a better future” having little to offer the Western middle and working classes beyond handwaving about a “just transition” and promises that weather-dependent energy technologies are much more stable and productive than traditional fuels. (Just ask Europeans trying to heat their homes amid an energy crisis how well that claim has aged.)

The authors’ barely veiled desire to exploit the COVID crisis to pursue left-wing ends has provoked alarm and responses, at least two of book length. ClimateDepot.com publisher and longtime critic of environmentalism Marc Marono released The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown while Michael Walsh released a compilation of essays tiled Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. Both focus less on Schwab’s “reset” itself than the broader agenda of ski-chalet environmentalism and chardonnay socialism popular with the professional-managerial technocratic class that is overrepresented at World Economic Forum gatherings and among the speakers at TED Talks. The right-leaning opponents’ fears are summarized in a line from a pre-COVID-era WEF video on predictions for the world in 2030: “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

The WEF is adamant that it does not advocate this; the line is derived from an op-ed by a Danish Social Democratic politician published by the WEF that is headlined, “I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better.” Many would still respectfully dissent from such a vision.

*****
This article was published by Capital Research Center and is reproduced with permission.

The Opponents of Free Speech Are Gaining Ground. Here’s How We Can Fight Back thumbnail

The Opponents of Free Speech Are Gaining Ground. Here’s How We Can Fight Back

/in , , , /by

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

When we break down the core institution of free speech, we lose a lot of what made America so successful in the first place.

Free speech used to be held up as one of the core American institutions. It was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights for a reason: while other countries have also adopted free speech, it is a fundamentally American tradition.

More than that, free speech is essential on its own terms. It is the single best way for humans to make progress. None of us are perfect, and none of us know the full truth. Therefore we all need to engage in the marketplace of ideas in order to find the truth and develop the best path forward.

But free speech has been under attack for decades.

One of the earliest—and most influential—critics was Herbert Marcuse, a college professor and the father of the New Left. In an essay called Repressive Tolerance published in 1969, Marcuse recommended removing rights (including the right to free speech) from conservatives. Marcuse didn’t see the world in terms of human beings who all have equal worth; he saw the world in terms of power. Those with power should be forcibly silenced (at least, the ones he disagreed with) so that those at the bottom could have more freedom. For Marcuse, if a majority is being repressed, what is needed is “repression and indoctrination” of the powerful so that the weak get the power they deserve.

In recent years, Marcuse-style attacks on free speech have filtered down from academic institutions into the mainstream.

Ilya Shapiro, adjunct law professor at George Washington University and the University of Mississippi, provides a case study on the new rules around who can speak and what they can say. Early in 2022 Georgetown Law School hired him to teach. When President Biden said he would only nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, Shapiro expressed dismay at this form of blatant affirmative action. At the voicing of this heterodox view, the sky fell down on him.

Georgetown swiftly placed Shapiro on administrative leave, where he languished for months without knowing whether or not he’d be fired. An administrative investigation into the offending Tweets lasted 122 days.

Georgetown finally reinstated Shapiro, but only on the technicality that he hadn’t officially started at Georgetown at the time he sent his tweets. The Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action (IDEAA) said that his comments were “objectively offensive” and that saying something similar in future may be enough to get him fired.

Even more disturbingly, the IDEAA adopted a blatantly subjective standard for deciding whether or not speech by faculty would be punishable. “The University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent intend to denigrate,” according to the report. “Instead, the Policy requires consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.”

As Shapiro puts it: “That people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have broken the rules.”

This punishment of heterodox speech isn’t an isolated incident. A 2017 survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that over a third of Democratic responders said that a business executive should be fired if they “believe psychological differences explain why there are more male engineers.” A substantial number of respondents thus advocated stripping someone of their job for the crime of saying what many psychologists know to be true.

The new cultural norms around free speech aren’t just a problem for right-wingers. In an in-depth explainer on cancel culture, Julian explains the scope of the problem:

“Heterodox Academy surveyed 445 academics about the state of free inquiry on campus, asking them, ‘Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?’

One of the hypothetical consequences Heterodox Academy listed was, ‘my career would be hurt.’ How many academics said they would be ‘very concerned’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about this consequence? 53.43%.

To put it another way: over half of academics on campus worried that expressing non-orthodox opinions on controversial topics could be dangerous to their careers.

We see the same self-censoring phenomenon among college students. In 2021, College Pulse surveyed 37,000 students at 159 colleges. They found that 80% of students self-censor to at least some degree. 48% of undergraduates reported feeling, ‘somewhat uncomfortable’ or ‘very uncomfortable’ expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom.

In a panel on free speech and cancel culture, former ACLU president Nadine Strossen said, ‘I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship.’”

It’s not just students and professors. In an article titled “America Has A Free Speech Problem,” the New York Times editorial board noted that 55 percent of Americans have held their tongue in the past year because they were concerned about “retaliation or harsh criticism.”

Extremists on both sides of the aisle increasingly wield their power to shame or shun Americans who speak their minds or have the temerity to voice their opinions in public. This problem is most prominent on social media, but is spilling into offline conversations as well. Citizens of a free country should not live in fear that a woke or far-right mob will come for them because they express an idea that isn’t sufficiently in vogue.

The very concept of free speech is increasingly associated with violence. When former vice president Mike Pence planned to speak at the University of Virginia, the student newspaper Cavalier Daily published a furious editorial saying that Pence shouldn’t be allowed to speak. Why not? “Speech that threatens the lives of those on Grounds is unjustifiable.” It takes a lot of mental contusions to conclude that letting Pence give his opinion could threaten anyone’s life.

It’s not just students. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “When is speech violence?”

According to Barrett, “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”

She continued: “That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.”

The fact that psychologists are lending the veneer of science to the idea that speech is violence should be deeply troubling to every American.

When we break down the core institution of free speech, we lose a lot of what made America so successful in the first place. Robust norms of free speech helped people build the emotional and mental resilience to cope with ideas they disagreed with. It helped us build bonds with people who believed different things, because we were able to listen to and understand their position.

Free speech also enabled multiple parties to argue from competing worldviews and find a solution that was better than what any party had formulated going into the discussion.

The silver lining is this: Americans increasingly recognize that free speech is a value whose preservation is essential. The New York Times editorial board notes that “84 percent of adults said it is a, ‘very serious’ or ‘somewhat serious’ problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.”

As a strong and integrous person, what can you do to limit the impact of the degradation of free speech on your own life?

First, speak up about what you know to be true—even if no-one else is speaking up, even if there are risks to you. Develop the courage to call a spade a spade. If you see insanity—in your workplace, in politics, in your home—call it out openly and honestly. You’ll sleep better at night. You’ll also become stronger through the act of speaking out. Speaking takes courage, but it also creates courage.

Second, seek out people who disagree with you. Listen to them. Go further; try to be persuaded by them. Skewer your sacred cows and let go of your ideology. Neither one is serving you.

Third, banish forever (if you haven’t yet) the infantile notion that words are violence. This notion is profoundly damaging, because it makes you weak. If mere disagreement can hurt you, after all, then so can everything else in life. So will everything else in your life. Instead, embrace the adage of the Stoics: other people are responsible for their actions, you are responsible for your response. Once you embrace the idea that mere words—whether vicious or merely heterodox—cannot hurt you, you are on the path to emotional strength and groundedness.

Fourth, don’t let yourself become a “tribe of one.” It’s easy, in this environment of chilled speech, to always feel scared to speak up. Find a group of friends who encourage you to speak your truth, and who speak their truth in return to you. Find people who aren’t afraid to share heterodox ideas and to challenge your sacred cows, nor to have their own challenged in return.

Find a group you’d trust to have your back in a firefight, and who will love you and expect you to have theirs in turn.

This article was republished with permission from The Undaunted Man.

AUTHORS

Julian Adorney

Julian is a former political op-ed writer and current nonprofit marketer. His work has been featured in FEE, National Review, Playboy, and Lawrence Reed’s economics anthology Excuse Me, Professor.

Mark Johnson

Mark is an executive coach and men’s coach at The Undaunted Man.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the power of free speech

The Freedom Convoy Debate Demonstrates Why a ‘Right to Free Speech’ Makes No Sense

John Wilkes: The Hero of Liberty Who King George III Arrested for ‘Sedition’

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Weaknesses in America’s Defense Posture thumbnail

Weaknesses in America’s Defense Posture

/in , , , /by

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

You undoubtedly have heard of SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  Today, we look at some of the weaknesses in America’s defense posture that have not received a lot of attention.

A 2020 Pentagon study found 77 percent of today’s 17- to 24-year-olds are ineligible for military service without a waiver, up 6 percent from 2017.  Obesity, alcohol and drug abuse, poor health, and mental health issues are the primary reasons.  This makes recruitment a challenge, especially among a generation less interested and less respectful of the military than previous generations were.

China is rapidly building up its nuclear forces, aided by American technology obtained by Chinese spies, but also transferred through U.S. space and nuclear cooperation in the 1990s.  Our naïveté is the weakness I want to highlight here.

Russian software found its way into U.S. Army applications.  The software company presented itself as American, but is actually based in Siberia.  The concern is the Russian government could compel the company to turn over data collected from U.S. Army apps.  The U.S. wing of the company claimed it severed ties with the Russian part, but failed to document its assertion when journalists asked.

Hundreds of Chinese-made drones are flying over restricted airspace in D.C.  Even if China is not flying the drones itself, experts worry the drones could still be sending data to China covertly.  There were more than a hundred drone incursions in a recent 45-day period.

The military’s support facilities are ancient and falling apart.  Maintenance for aircraft hangars, motor pools, supply depots and the like has been deferred for so long our military readiness is being called into question.

Experts also worry our missile defenses have not kept pace with Chinese and Russian advances in hypersonic and cruise missiles.  Here we have another area underfunded for decades and in need of modernization.

We have a huge defense budget, so where is all the money going?  It’s been observed a lot of it is just social spending – housing, schools, healthcare, and other social services for personnel – not direct outlays for force readiness.  Then there’s this: the Navy is top-heavy with flag officers, that is, admirals and generals.  In World War II, there was one flag officer for every 7,500 sailors.  Today, it’s one flag officer for every 1,250 enlisted personnel.  The Navy has been called a “Lamborghini welfare program” for flag officers who are well paid and get hefty pensions.

Finally, the Biden administration must be counted among America’s weaknesses.  The Biden people have shown themselves much more interested in transgender training for the troops than in bolstering America’s war-fighting capabilities.  The Biden administration is just not taking defense seriously.  Here are three recent examples: The administration reversed posthumously the decision to revoke the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, a nuclear scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project which developed the first atom bomb.  The reversal came even though it’s well established Oppenheimer passed nuclear secrets to the Soviets.  The administration is also considering the appointment of a civilian to head up our missile defense, an unprecedented move experts warn will compromise national security.  Biden’s Treasury Department removed safeguards on humanitarian aid, making it easier for taxpayer dollars to reach designated terrorists in conflict zones.

Naïveté, lack of seriousness, and fat disinterested kids.  These are self-inflicted wounds which must be addressed.  We cannot take our security for granted.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

RELATED TWEET:

Fruits of blindly and senselessly funding whatever the Pentagon asks for. Our military can do more with less. https://t.co/01WpKeP4vp

— J Michael Waller (@JMichaelWaller) January 20, 2023

STAY INFORMED

Receive regular news, commentary, and analysis straight to your inbox.

POWERED BY

DrRichSwier.com | ThePricklyPear.org

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.