Clipped from Racket News: More Nuclear Poker: Russians Fire Experimental Missile at Ukraine after Britain, U.S. “Double Down”
America's post-electoral military escalation might amount to nothing, or it could be the last act of an empire gone mad. On ATACMS, ICBMs, and more nuclear poker
Matt Taibbi || Nov. 21, 2024
One more time, maybe the last, Joe Biden stared through sunglasses and angrily delivered a speech written to be uplifting. “The Amazon is the lungs of the world!” he barked at the G-20 summit in Brazil, before loping off with an unsmiling half-wave, like a man leaving a restaurant with lousy service. The President of the United States disappeared into trees.
Aides said the jungle exeunt was planned, but who knew? In an all-time awkward moment Monday, G-20 leaders waited and finally took a group photo without Biden, absent for “logistical reasons.” It was like taking a holiday portrait at the mall without Santa. When Biden reappeared the next day, a reporter shouted, “Mr. President, why did you change your mind on Ukraine shooting long-range missiles?” Biden said nothing, so other heads of state to speak for him. “I had an excellent conversation with President Biden, he’s a friend and ally,” said Canada’s Justin Trudeau, through a nervous smile. “We talked about a lot of different things.”
Who’s calling the shots for NATO? On the heels of Tuesday’s news that U.S.-built ATACMS missiles were fired into Russia, up to 12British-made “Storm Shadow” missiles were shot into the town of Marino yesterday in Russia’s Kursk region. Reportedly, French SCALP missiles may be the next Western long-range weapons deployed. But that’s just the beginning:
Our just-commenced sixty days of nuclear chicken appear also to include this week’s cutting of an undersea Internet cable linking Finland and Germany, an act German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius called “sabotage.” Another Baltic Sea cable linking Lithuania and Sweden was cut the day before. CNN’s Jim Sciutto said American officials are “extremely concerned” about both incidents, though the Pentagon insisted, “We are not at war with Russia.” Finally there was today, Thursday, when the Ukrainian Air Force released word that Russia fired the first ICBM in the history of war, from the Astrakhan region of Russia to the Ukrainian city of Dnipro:
An unnamed American official told ABC this was no ICBM but an “experimental medium-range ballistic missile.” Others said it was an “intermediate-range ballistic massile,” or IRBM. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said otherwise in a post on Telegram: “All characteristics — speed, height — point to an ICBM,” he said, while Ukrainian army officials said they were “95% certain” it was an ICBM. Russians offered no comment, but Moskovsky Komsomolets reported the missile may have been an R-35M, which was once believed to give Russia first-strike capability and nicknamed “Satan” by NATO. The Russian daily added:
If the information about the launch of an ICBM is confirmed, this will become a clear signal to Kyiv: a nuclear warhead may arrive next.
No historical analog to this situation developing in Ukraine and Russia could possibly exist. Humanity approached World War before, but never like this, without a clear idea of who the decision-makers are. This is the logical conclusion of an argument we first heard after Biden’s shaky debate performance on June 27th: yes, the White House matters, but the actual president is an afterthought. Former Biden video producer Chris Strider tweeted then, “Reminder: you’re electing a team” (causing partner-in-crime Walter Kirn to note, “The buck stops nowhere”). Democratic fundraiser Joe Cotchett told the San Francisco Chronicle the party’s “bed wetters” needed to get over themselves and elect a “‘team,’ not just one guy.” Added The View’s Joy Behar: “We are voting for an administration, not a president.”
When polls plummeted Democrats abandoned the line, and Biden backers knifed him for the good of the congregation. A big blow was George Clooney (“I consider him a friend… But…”), then Adam Schiff (time for Biden to “pass the torch”), then 13 congressional Democrats (give the party’s “deep and talented bench” a shot), then Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries. Who made the final call on removing Biden remains a mystery, maybe by design. The original cri de coeur of the administration was the “adults are back in charge.” Unlike a Trump administration, we were told, people like Tony Blinken and Avril Haines and Jake Sullivan could mind the store even if the chief began jousting with bicycles or shaking handswiththe nonexistent. The “adults” need to know who’s making decisions, but we don’t, just like we don’t need to know who’s dealing the next hand of nuclear poker.
“Who’s running the country?” was asked by the RNC in August, after a photo of Biden sleeping on a beach was released. What little information we’ve gotten since about our still-President has been scattershot. After the election, Biden offered a few remarks to “bring down the temperature,” before assuming a “noticeably quiet” posture. Former Obama advisor David Axelrod channeled poet Robert Herrick, suggesting the lamp of heaven was setting over our President. “His race is over,” Axelrod told ABC. “His day is done.” That was fine, but then came Sunday’s announcement in the New York Times: “Biden Allows Ukraine to Strike Russia With Long-Range U.S. Missiles.”
Biden! News that our sunbather-in-chief “authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia” was delivered by unnamed “U.S. officials” to the Times, which was content to pretend in print that zombie Joe Biden actually made this decision. The story came out just as he arrived in Brazil to freeze before the shaking of ceremonial instruments:
Whichever NATO geniuses cooked up the missile scheme, their endgame appears to involve landing the Ukraine war in a sweet spot between survivable chaos and Armageddon before the White House must be handed to the Trumpian gorgon. Who made the call? Not Kamala Harris, who arrived for vacation in Hawaii as the first ATACMS exploded. One can imagine Blinken or Jake Sullivan or Lloyd Austin thinking it amusing to welcome Trump back by leaving this colossal geopolitical dump on the floor, but what’s Europe’s motive? British author Anatol Lieven wrote:
The raises the question of why, after worrying obsessively about the risk of a Trump administration “abandoning Europe,” the British and French governments want to stick their countries’ necks out in this way just before Trump actually takes power. After all, Trump’s supporters see Biden’s move as a wholly illegitimate pre-emptive strike… to wreck the President-elect’s future Ukraine policy and bequeath him a deeper crisis with Russia, and they see the British and French as Biden’s accomplices in this.
In the last 30-40 years the major political controversies in America have mostly been marked by the same unease over a leadership class that’s seemed more interested in expanding imperial influence than governing a country. From NAFTA to the Battle in Seattle to Iraq to Trump’s election (a mirror of the Brexit/Leave movement) to Covid and this new pair of dangerous and unpopular wars, the schism kept widening. The battle lines have been between those who want elected officials focused at home, and those more interested in making sure America remains a world leader at the helm of international institutions like NATO, the UN, the IMF, the WTO and WHO, etc.
Who makes up that latter group? TED talkers, Davos visitors, CEOs, politicians, Hollywood stars. The rich, basically. Wealth is a nation unto itself now, and the major problem of the last 25-30 years in America is how easy it’s become for people with money to live in archipelagoes where national problems don’t reach. It took a bizarre stunt for the immigration crisis to briefly interrupt a Martha’s Vineyard afternoon. The Hamptons barely noticed inflation because residents were too busy enjoying record volumes of takeover deals during the pandemic. For the “able to work remotely” set, lockdowns meant more time with the kids and many of those people never returned to work at all, allowing the high-earners who did go back to enjoy shorter commute times, and so on.
The last election was an obvious referendum on Wealthistan residents. At some point America’s rich decided noblesse oblige was a net minus and seceded both from the cities Trump called “shitholes” (exodus of the affluent exploded after the pandemic) and the rural areas where “white rage” was said to live. They settled in dots of exclusive suburbs that use creative zoning to keep multi-family housing out and single-family prices high. They then planted “Hate Has No Home Here” signs on lawns and sent their kids to preposterously expensive resort-like colleges, with giant natatoriums and jargon-packed goofball curricula designed to further alienate offspring from the rabble. As a Victorian gentleman had more in common with a Tsarist prince than a Yorkshire miner, Americans from this bubble feel more at home in Geneva than Tulsa or Deland.
It was easy to predict that voters would eventually revolt as national governance withered, but the curveball was how much this governing class let itself go. By the time Trump came along, they were too dumb to do anythingwell. When being rich meant being fabulous and oversexed the poor and middle classes tended to look up in awe, but upscale America wolfs down censorship and idpol fads and its idea of fun is throwing soup at a Van Gogh over the climate. They refuse to produce likable politicians or non-shitty movies because that would require mixing, even for mercenary reasons, with deplorable (read: geographically American) culture. Their self-isolation from conventional life is so total, even tits coded as right-wing in 2024. They won’t do journalism, long an employment program for the incompetent rich, because it requires sharing common truth with undesirables.
This exclusive culture is failing everywhere — the spinoff by Comcast of MSNBC and CNBC is the latest sign of apocalyptic social change — but anyone paying attention in the last weeks noticed a lack of alarm. With the election over, Wealthistan culture is finally free of any obligation to pretend to care about mass appeal. Now it can be the exclusivity religion it always was. Members believed in moving power from nations to corporations and international bureaucracies like the Fed/ECB, the G20, the WTO, the Five Eyes, the EU, while mostly paying lip service to national governance. Now they can stop bothering with the lip service. Biden’s blank stare in this sense is a powerful symbol. They kept this helpless mannequin in office as a message, as an expression of contempt for our desire to be kept in the loop. You want to know what’s going on? Go ahead, ask Joe. Or check the sky for missiles. Also, fuck you! And Happy Indigenous Conquest Day.
What craziness. Let’s hope it all cools down in the next days. Can we Make America Boring Again?
Worth reading in full at source, Racket News, here.
Clipped from Racket News: It's Time to Redefine "Fringe"
Critics of the rumored nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health need to check the election returns
Matt Taibi | November 18, 2024
The Washington Post couldn’t get through an article about Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya without using the F-word. The sub-headline from Saturday read, “The Stanford physician was excoriated by NIH’s director in 2020 for his “fringe” ideas on Covid. Four years later, he’s poised for power in Trump’s Washington.”
It couldn’t leave out the C-word, either:
[Bhattacharya’s] stances — and alliances — have also alienated him from many public health professionals, including on Bhattacharya’s own college campus…”We need to have an honest conversation about how a handful of prominent contrarian academics backed by corporate interests continue to tank evidence-backed policy, including COVID-19 protections,” Mallory Harris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland who received her PhD in biology from Stanford this year, wrote last month…
If Donald Trump creates the position, I volunteer to be Secretary of Feeding People to Komodo Dragons. The first round of tossings into the lizard-pit will involve “experts” who still use grossly snobbish terms like “fringe” and “contrarian” to describe beliefs held by most of the population:
Racket readers are familiar with Stanford’s Bhattacharya, who played a role in the Twitter Files and went on to become a plaintiff in the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case. There’s probably no more visible symbol of the digital censorship era than Jay and co-plaintiffs Drs. Martin Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriaty. Given that speech issues were reportedly right behind inflation among the top concerns of voters, it’s hard to see how anyone could keep throwing the “fringe” tag with a straight face.
Jay’s crime was conducting an early field study called “COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California” that uncovered two surprises about what was then still a new pandemic story. The first was that far more people were already infected with Covid-19 in Santa Clara in early April, 2020 than was expected, as many as 50 to 85 times more. He also found the infection mortality rate of Covid-19 was far lower than authorities were suggesting, closer to 0.2% than the nightmare 3.4% number the WHO put out, and still lower for the healthy and non-elderly.
This led Jay to conclude that a) lockdowns and other interventions would not be likely to stop people from getting such a contagious disease, and b) the lower mortality rates for people outside of a few high-risk groups meant the costs of lockdowns probably outweighed benefits.
The country by now mostly agrees. In March, Harvard conducted a study of attitudes about Covid-19 policies. Fourteen percent believed Covid was only a threat “to the small share of people who were very old or frail.” The biggest group was the one Jay likely falls in: the 45% of people who believed Covid-19 a threat to “a lot of people, including people who were very old or frail AND those who had underlying medical conditions.” A smaller group of 37% characterized the disease as “a serious health threat to everyone.” Who are the “contrarians” in that distribution?
On lockdowns: after the initial panic, whenever the public was asked to make yes or no decisions about school closures, most said no. There was the 79% of parents of K-12 students who supported a return to in-person learning a year into the pandemic, and the 51% of Americans in 2022 who believed school closures were unnecessary. Even CNN, when referencing the 2022 poll, ran a headline story about how the coronavirus debate about school closures “has hurt Democrats.” Even if you believed polls overcounted opposition to school closures by ten or even twenty percent, the remainder would still be a large percentage of Americans: hardly “fringe.”
Through the Trump era, “contrarian” was and is the most irritating of propaganda terms, implying acceptance of official views is the human animal’s natural orientation. The era saw broadsides against “contrarian doctors” like Jay, while the New York Times derided their former reporter Alex Berenson in a “Covid Contrarians Go Viral” piece. One of America’s current crew of bêtes noires, Joe Rogan, is regularly derided for a willingness to “absorb contrarian perspectives,” as if that were not the obvious mission of any talk show host, and the Stanford Daily in 2020 admonished its own professor in Jay for writing a “contrarian Covid declaration.” The Post this weekend made sure to include that Rogan was among Bhattacharya’s “media cheerleaders,” to remind you that Bhattacharya codes as verboten even if nothing about his actual person seems objectionable.
Anyone who’s met Jay will report that he’s one of the world’s most affable people, a listener by nature and moderate not just in policy, but behavior and temperament. His elevation to this post represents a successful demonstration of the democratic instinct. He published research that coincided with the experiences of working parents, who saw that their kids seemed to be suffering more from not being at school than they appeared to from Covid-19, then voted accordingly.
To watch him now being trashed as a fringe kook and a tool of “dark money” who just wanted to force Covid on the world to widen the labor pool would be shocking, except that no propaganda response can be a surprise. A paper with the Washington Post’s circulation issues would normallybe careful before calling anyone else “fringe,” but these still aren’t normal times, are they?
Worth reading at the original source, Racket News, HERE.
Clipped from The Free Press: Niall Ferguson: The Resurrection of Donald J. Trump
Trump’s victory is a blow to political lawfare, critical race theory, woke campuses, legacy media, and Hollywood. It’s a win for a new generation of builders like Elon Musk.
Niall Ferguson | November 6, 2024
It’s tempting for me to say this isn’t a surprise.
Back in May last year, I predicted “Trump’s second act,” telling Spectator readers: “He can still win, in spite of everything.” My point was that the Democrats’ strategy of lawfare against Donald Trump was highly likely to backfire. “If Lula [da Silva] can come back from one-and-a-half-years in jail to win” the Brazilian presidency, I wrote, “Trump may have little to worry about, as there isn’t the slightest chance of his being locked up between now and Election Day next year. Indeed, the perception that Democratic operatives are using the legal system for political ends will likely help him win votes.”
“Joe Biden,” I concluded, “is in serious danger of following Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush into the bin marked ‘one-term presidents.’ ”
Last week, too, I was ready to predict that Kamala Harris was destined for the bin marked “incumbent vice presidents who lost.”
Nevertheless, I am surprised by the scale of Trump’s win.
They used to call Bill Clinton “the Comeback Kid.” He cut a forlorn figure these past few days, trying feebly to drum up enthusiasm for the Democrats’ worst candidate since George McGovern. Well, move over, Bill. There’s a new Comeback Kid in town. Except that Trump is the Comeback King.
This is a bigger comeback than Grover Cleveland’s in 1892, when he became the first—and, until last night, only—American president to win a second nonconsecutive term. This is a bigger comeback than Richard Nixon’s, when he was elected president in 1968, eight years after he lost by a dubious whisker to John F. Kennedy. It’s bigger than Winston Churchill’s multiple comebacks, the biggest of which were in 1940 and 1951. It’s bigger than Charles de Gaulle’s in 1958. It’s bigger than Napoleon’s Hundred Days in 1815. In fact, I am tempted to say that the only comeback it’s not bigger than is the Resurrection.
Why? Because all of Trump’s political opponents made a vain effort to destroy him. In the words of Elon Musk—who has been a key variable in Trump’s epic comeback—Trump is the man “who they tried to kill twice, bankrupt, and imprison for eternity.” Trump faced two assassination attempts, one of which came within an inch of killing him. He was indicted in four criminal cases and convicted in one of them. He was impeached twice as president, in December 2019 (over his infamous call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky) and again in January 2021 (over the mob’s invasion of the Capitol on January 6).
In a civil case in May 2023, a Manhattan jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the journalist E. Jean Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages. Last May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts relating to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. My colleague Eli Lake puts the grand total at 116 indictments. This wasn’t just lawfare; it was total lawfare.
And still he won. He totally won.
What all this goes to show is that Trump is authentically antifragile. That term originated with my brilliant friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Let me quote his definition from the book Antifragile: “Antifragility. . . is beyond robustness: It is about loving randomness and disorder and benefiting from shocks. And love of randomness is love of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to do things without understanding them—and do them well, mostly much better than by understanding them.”
Friedrich Nietzsche put it more elegantly: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” That famous aphorism, from Twilight of the Idols (1889), will provide the perfect epigraph for the first serious biography of Trump, when a younger version of me gets around to writing it.
The extent of Trump’s victory is truly stunning. Apart from J.D. Vance’s childless cat ladies, Trump gained ground with almost every demographic. As of this writing, he appears to have won all seven of the swing states. And, of course, he crushed it in Iowa. (Sorry about that poll, J. Ann Selzer. You were 17 points off. Good luck with the next chapter in your career.)
Trump has destroyed the Obama coalition, which depended on the mobilization of minorities by the Democrats. According to exit polls, he won 54 percent of Latino men. After all the agonizing about comedian Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico “garbage” at a Trump rally, there was a massive shift in the Florida Puerto Rican vote—to Trump. True, Harris won the demographic 52 percent to 43 percent, but Biden won the same group 69 percent to 31 percent four years ago. That’s a 17-point swing.
Trump also seems to have won over a significant number of black men. According to the NBC News exit poll, Trump won 20 percent of the black vote in Wisconsin, compared with 8 percent in 2020. To give just one example from another swing state, Trump even won Anson County, North Carolina, which is 40 percent black, making him just the second Republican to win this county since the 1870s—in other words, since Reconstruction.
Finally, Trump has won over a significant chunk of younger Americans, most probably young men, who have swung right on a scale woefully underestimated by Democratic strategists.
What are the implications of this historic realignment? The obvious point is that the GOP sweep of the White House, the Senate, and likely the House gives the Republicans a rare opportunity. Will they make better use of it than they did in 2017–18? My bet is yes. Eight years ago, Trump did not expect to win. His administration was cobbled together with elements of the Republican Party and military establishments that were fundamentally opposed to the Make America Great Again agenda.
This time really will be different. This election was a crushing defeat for political lawfare, critical race theory, woke campuses, biological males in women’s sports, genital mutilation of teenagers, the Ivy League, the legacy media, and Hollywood. But it was also a defeat for the neoconservative Never Trumpers, including Liz Cheney as well as all the former Trump officials who turned their coats and backed Harris. And it was a victory for SpaceX, for Starlink, for Polymarket, for Bitcoin, for Anduril, for Palantir, for Marc Andreessen, for Joe Lonsdale, for Joe Rogan, for The Free Press—in short, for the new generation of builders whose autistic-virile qualities Musk exemplifies.
The possibility, therefore, now exists for an administration to approach our dysfunctional federal government in the same way Javier Milei approached Argentina’s since his election as president a year ago—with a chainsaw.
“At the suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement,” Trump told the Economic Club of New York on September 4, “I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms.” By the end of October, Musk was talking about a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE, for short—a crypto in-joke about his favorite meme coin—that would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget).
All I can say is: Bring it on. Start by reactivating the “Schedule F” executive order, originally issued in late 2020 and later reversed by the Biden administration, which will allow Trump to hire and fire at will roughly 50,000 civil service positions. Let the firing begin within 48 hours of Inauguration Day.
The conventional wisdom on Trump’s fiscal policy will, as usual, be wrong. Yes, he will extend the soon-to-expire tax cuts of his first administration. (He may also seek to repeal Inflation Reduction Act provisions, though these have been so beneficial to red states that it’s hard to see good political reasons for doing so.) But the idea that his fiscal policy would blow out the deficit more than Harris’s would have rested on bad economics, underestimating the ways in which growth will benefit from Trump’s election. The main drivers of the deficit are mandatory outlays on programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Only radical reform of the sort envisioned by Musk can address those problems.
The conventional wisdom in Trump’s foreign policy will also turn out to be wrong, I predict. The error is to think of the Trump-Vance administration as isolationist and therefore indifferent to the fate of Ukraine and other embattled democracies.
Harris would mostly have continued Biden’s foreign policy, except that she would have been even more dovish on Iran. That would have been bad for Israel and disastrous for Ukraine—which was destined for defeat if the West’s present policy of too-little-too-late had continued.
By contrast, Trump will be much tougher on Iran, will support Israel in its efforts to end Iran’s nuclear program, and will increase the economic pressure on China with a new round of tariffs. Yes, Trump has repeatedly said he wants to end the Russia-Ukraine war. But what we don’t yet know is whether he’ll do this by throwing the Ukrainians to the Russian wolves, as Tucker Carlson recommends, or by exerting greater military pressure on Russia, as Tom Cotton, Robert O’Brien, and Mike Pompeo recommend. My bet is on the latter.
Why? Because Trump and Vance, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson, now understand that the United States faces a real axis of authoritarian powers—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. They understand that a win for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine would also be a win for Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei, and Kim Jong Un. And they understand that, in the new Cold War we find ourselves fighting, only by reestablishing deterrence can the risk of World War III be averted.
Back in April 2021, in the glad confident morning of the Biden-Harris administration, I offered a critical take on their first Hundred Days for Persuasion:
The combination of several trillion dollars of Covid relief plus infrastructure spending and a central bank that just changed its own inflation targeting regime worries more economists than just Larry Summers. And I can think of other things to be concerned about besides economic overheating: a surge of illegal immigration, a crime wave in the wake of last summer’s anti-police protests, and the “woke” culture to which this administration constantly panders. Watch out, too, for the geopolitical crisis as Cold War II threatens to turn hot over Taiwan. The big risk for Biden’s presidency is that it ends up as a rerun of Jimmy Carter’s.
It’s not coincidental that Trump’s campaign has made regular use of two Ronald Reagan slogans: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” and “Peace through strength.” In that sense, this election more closely resembles Reagan’s victory over Carter in 1980 than any other in recent times.
Trump Derangement Syndrome blinds many otherwise intelligent people to the line of continuity from Reagan to Trump. They forget that Reagan, too, was a master of the comeback. He did not win the Republican nomination in 1976, so his victory in 1980 was at the second attempt. More importantly, Reagan’s election marked the beginning of the great American Comeback that culminated in victory in Cold War I.
The comeback that will lead to victory in Cold War II starts here. Hail to the chief. Hail to the Antifragile President.
Worth reading here at the original source, The Free Press HERE.
Clipped from Public: Toxic Femininity And Wokeism Are Driving Men, Jews, Billionaires, and Muslims Away From Harris To Trump
We are looking at an epochal realignment of American politics
Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger | Oct 26, 2024
In under 24 hours, over 20 million people have watched Joe Rogan talk with President Donald Trump, many of whom likely watched all three hours. The two men discussed the affection shown by Whoopi Goldberg and the women of “The View” for Trump before he ran for president, the killing of whales by industrial wind energy, the JFK assassination records, which Trump promised to release if elected, and much more. It was a feast of taboo topics.
It was also the latest sign that the American political tide is rapidly turning toward Trump and away from Kamala Harris. A Wall Street Journal poll last week showed Trump narrowly ahead of Harris nationwide, and a CNN poll yesterday showed them tied. Harris’ decision to make her closing argument to the American people that Trump is a fascist and Hitler sympathizer was widely viewed as a sign of desperation. And her line of attack, tired to begin with, further fizzled out in the media after she failed to clearly answer questions in a CNN Town Hall meeting with Anderson Cooper.
Harris may still win the election. There is still more than a week left. There are significant doubts about the accuracy of polling. Pollster Nate Silver has said on X that people should not rely on early vote counts from states where it is possible to make estimates based on party. Many pollsters say the race is too tight to call.
But even if she wins, Harris will not have a mandate to pursue a progressive agenda. Despite protests from Democrats and the media, voters increasingly support Trump’s immigration plans. Harris has been forced to move to the center on multiple issues. Black, Latino, and young men tell pollsters they will vote in larger numbers for Trump this year than they did in 2024. Several Arab and Muslim leaders today endorsed Trump. And, although Harris leads Donald Trump among Jewish voters, her lead is narrower than Biden’s.
And Trump is rapidly being renormalized after years of efforts to abnormalize him. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, called Trump last week to tell him that his McDonald’s shift was, Trump told Rogan, “the biggest thing” Google has seen “in years.” Earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook called Trump to complain about European Union regulators.
For the better part of the last eight years, corporate executives, reporters, academics, government officials, and political donors have been aligned in their opposition to populism in general and Trump in particular. Through this coalition, federal agencies and tech companies enacted mass online censorship. Institutions punished political dissent, and progressives threatened any deviation from their political orthodoxy with character assassination and social death.
Now, the elite class is rejecting Harris. High-tech VC Shaun Maguire and others in Silicon Valley, outraged by the lawfare against Trump, endorsed him and pledged funding in the spring. Elon Musk, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and other billionaires, many of whom were Democrats or had voted for Biden, like Ackman and Musk, announced support for Trump after the first assassination attempt.
The growing rejections of Harris come at a time of a populist backlash against the mainstream news media, which is trusted by just 31% of the public, and rising concerns over censorship. One poll shows free speech to be the second greatest concern for Americans after immigration.
Last week, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times and then, two days later, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos decided that their newspapers would not be endorsing a presidential candidate.
Many in the chattering classes have reacted to The Post’s decision with outrage. But their outrage is toothless. While exaggerated displays of fear and anger may have once been threatening, they now reek of desperation.
Bezos had already shaken up the newsroom. His newly appointed CEO told Washington Post staff in June, “We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it: it needs turning around,” Lewis said. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience is halved. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
And while some Post employees and subscribers protested the decision not to endorse, just one editor, Robert Kagan, has resigned so far. There is no sign that either Bezos or the owner of the LA Times will be publicly shamed into changing their minds.
That’s a stark change from 2020 when Bezos took a strong stance in support of Black Lives Matter (BLM), endorsing the movement on Amazon’s website and on his Instagram, saying he was “happy to lose” customers who disagreed.
In fact, Democrats increasingly view Harris as a liability. The mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, the city with the highest number of Arab and Muslim Americans in the US, announced yesterday that he is not endorsing any presidential candidate even though he is a Democrat.
As such, we are in a radically different place than we were just six months ago, when Democrats and their allies in the criminal justice system appeared close to getting Trump incarcerated or prevented from running for office. And we are in an even more radically different place than four years ago.
In fact, the 2024 election may go down in history as a significant realignment of the electorate whereby the Republicans gain and maintain a majority by capturing greater support from black, Latino, and young men. “If effective,” said Democratic pollster John Della Volpe, “his effort could peel enough away from the Democratic Party to transform the country’s electoral math for years to come.”
What changed?
Wokeism Ruins Everything
One obvious reason Bezos and other billionaires are backing away from Harris may be because Trump is gaining in the polls, and the conventional wisdom has decisively shifted toward forecasting a Trump victory. Last week, Silver said “his gut” tells him Trump will win. A “snapshot of new polls, public and private,” said Mark Halperin yesterday, “shows movement for Trump. It's real movement, and it's real movement at the end, which suggests that voters are deciding. It's meaningful.”
Even CNN pollster Harry Enten said yesterday, “There is a real shot Trump may get his great white whale: winning the popular vote. Polls show the race nationally is basically even as Trump runs far ahead of where he polled in 2016 or 2020.”
If Trump wins the popular vote, he would be the first Republican to win it in 20 years and the second in 36 years. In this context, it makes sense for a paper like the Post to position itself as neutral rather than side with what could be a losing team through a Harris endorsement.
But some of billionaires’ support for Trump appears authentic and, in any event, the Trump brand has become safer for elites to admire. When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that he would not endorse a candidate for president, he called Trump’s response to the assassination attempt in July “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Voters agree with Trump and Republicans more on the issues than with Harris and Democrats. Ruy Teixeira, the coauthor of the influential 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, recently pointed out that voters hate open borders, social chaos, and identity politics. Increasingly, he notes, more astute progressives like Noah Smith, Andrew Proktop, and Dave Weigel acknowledge that Americans are moving to the right and are rejecting progressive hopes for transformational leftward change.
The heated conflict within the Democratic Party over the Israel-Hamas war has made it unsteady and insecure. October 7 exposed and aggravated divisions between anti-Trump allies. While establishment Democrats and Never Trumpers support Israel and aim to uphold US interests in the Middle East, young progressives argue that doing so is tantamount to support for genocide. This is not a minor disagreement but a foundational difference in how these factions, which often break down along generational lines, view the world and the country.
Ongoing domestic debates about October 7, which often hinge on the question of where Jewish people fit in the “victim-oppressor” dichotomy, are highly disruptive to the progressive-neoconservative alliance. Israelis and Jews, academics and college students suggest, have low status as privileged white colonizers. Many Jewish people, including influential Democratic donors and journalists, view their newfound designation as oppressors to be personally insulting and intolerable.
In this way, the breakdown of the “#Resistance” coalition was inevitable. Over the past decade, Democrats and progressives have been in constant search for new victims to elevate and exalt, but this effort has also involved expanding corollary groups of oppressors. White women, for example, claimed status as martyrs through the “#MeToo” movement in 2017. But in 2020, they were permanently dethroned from the victim hierarchy and designated as oppressive “Karens.” Asians, Latinos, “cisgender” people, the able-bodied, Jews, and many other groups have one-by-one been knocked down the totem pole and thus rejected from the progressive in-group.
In addition to denigrating their own allies and supporters as low-status oppressors, many woke progressives have become openly venomous. While it is perfectly legitimate for the Left to express pro-Palestine views, the destructive and vindictive impulse of woke ideology was made clear when, for example, Teen Vogue writer Najma Sharif posted on October 7, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers.”
At the same time, Democrats are losing support from Muslim communities, who reject the Party’s stance on the use of pro-LGBTQ materials in schools, and who view Biden and Harris as incapable of ending the war in Gaza. Earlier this year, community leaders in Michigan’s Arab and Muslim community refused to meet with Democratic campaign officials. The socially conservative Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan endorsed Trump, citing the Biden administration’s support for Israel and Trump’s pledge “to end the chaos in the Middle East.”
The daughter of the owner of the LA Times said the decision not to endorse Kamala Harris was due to her position on the war in Gaza. “Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process. As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.”
And today, Arab and Muslim leaders joined Trump on stage at a rally in Michigan. “We as Muslims stand with President Trump because he promises peace,” one leader said. “We support Donald J. Trump for his commitment to promoting family values and protected our children well-being, especially when it comes to curriculums and schools.”
On top of all this, favored progressive policies have simply wrought too much pain and destruction to be sustainable. In an interview with Jordan Peterson in July, Musk stated that his estrangement from his trans-identified child is what sparked his battle against what he calls the “woke mind virus.”
“I was tricked into doing this," Musk said. "I lost my son, essentially. They call it 'deadnaming' for a reason. The reason they call it ‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead.”
Whether through gender-affirming care, Covid school closures, or enabling addiction and crime, Democrats have alienated countless parents who, like Musk, witnessed their own children being injured, maimed, or killed in the name of “care.” It was the medical abuse of Musk’s son that ultimately motivated him to buy Twitter and thus land a major blow to the Censorship Industrial Complex and to the Democratic Party-State’s control over the flow of information.
For years, progressives have framed all opponents of measures like “gender-affirming care,” “harm reduction,” and open borders as connected to Trump and, therefore, to a shameful legacy of homophobia, racism, and xenophobia. But as Democrats advanced increasingly drastic policies that, under the guise of overcoming oppression, perpetuated dysfunction, they have wounded and mistreated many of their own constituents.
Emerging MAGA Majority
Della Volpe suggests that to win young men back, Harris should “address their fears head-on and present a bold vision that speaks to their desire for purpose and strength.”
But Harris and her campaign appear to be incapable of engaging male voters without using shame, guilt, and humiliation. Recent campaign ads targeting men in general, and black men in particular, have appeared to insult them, sparking backlash. Former President Barack Obama, as well, claimed that black men weren’t as supportive of Harris as Biden because of their sexism.
“If progressives have a politics that says all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil, it’s kinda hard to keep them on your side,” CNN’s Van Jones told Bill Maher last night. “If you're chasing people out of the party, you can't be mad when they leave.”
And even progressives are leaving. Young Turks progressive commentator Ana Kasparian has battled over the last year with people on the Left around both crime and gender issues. And journalist Noah Smith recently wrote that “my desire for a more economically egalitarian and socially tolerant society has not diminished an iota... But I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years.”
Teixeira explained, “No matter what happens in November, the progressive moment is over.” If Democrats double down, their escalating loss of the male vote will present, in the long-term, an existential threat to the Party.
Much of what people are fleeing can be called “toxic femininity.” Harris, Obama, other party leaders, and the media are stuck in a mode of governance called the “longhouse,” a term explained by author “Lom3z” in First Things magazine last year. “The historical longhouse was a large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian,” he wrote.
In online discourse, the Longhouse “refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering on feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.” In its metaphorical sense, the feminized social norms of the Longhouse can equally be enforced by men as they can be by women. These norms involve not just compassion, but high sensitivity to alleged offense, as well as a desire to “affirm” perceived victims and even encourage their pathologies.
In this election, Democrats have cemented their position as the party of affluent women, while Republicans are becoming the party of men and the working class. This shift is as significant as the break up of Democrats’ New Deal coalition in the 1960s, when the Party lost support of white Southerners. Since that time, Democrats have been steadily restructuring as the party of college-educated professionals and women.
Democrats’ and the media’s attack on Trump and Vance as “weird,” and their celebration of mean-girlism and “brat summer” are emblematic of the Longhouse, in which shaming and belittling take precedence over actual debate. This, in the long-term, has been another losing strategy. Instead of following Della Volpe’s advice, Harris is simply repeating the same behaviors and rhetoric of Obama and Hillary Clinton, who famously referred to Trump supporters as “deplorables,” which had alienated men from the Party in the first place.
While Democrats may continue to cry “Hitler,” the fact that Trump is now getting record levels of support among black and Latino men makes this narrative seem deeply out of touch. Their pronouncements feel rote and soulless, as though written by AI, and as though they have lost conviction in what they are saying. At bottom it is this loss of self-confidence and of belief in their own mythology that spells defeat for the “#Resistance,” and a likely victory for Trump and new media figures like Rogan.
In Wednesday’s Washington Post, author Matt Bai (definitely not a relation) worried about “Our Deepening Cold War.” While there might be an unspecified “Resistance” reaction from Democrats if Kamala Harris fails, extreme means might be necessary to protect the public if Donald Trump “narrowly loses”:
Republicans in Congress seem cowed enough not only to halt the counting of votes, but also to reject electoral college certification altogether. Restoring order might fall not just to the courts, but to the military as well.
Bai describes the dilemma of the rectitude-filled, democracy-defending Post reader, for whom losing this election would mean opting “out of the shared American project altogether” to “wait for redemption.” But can one afford to wait? Trump, called a fascist in “truly astounding” quotes by former generals, is of course a threat, but is he survivable? In other words: “Can the country bend without breaking?”
It’s always interesting when the same phrases pop up at the same time in similar editorials. The “bend” question appeared a day later in a New York Times editorial, “There Are Four Anti-Trump Pathways We Failed to Take. There Is a Fifth.” Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt answered Bai’s question in the negative. Trump, they say, has promised to prosecute political rivals, “deploy the army to suppress protest,” and deport as many as 20 million people. Through such comments, “Mr. Trump is forthrightly telling Americans that if he wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.”
But we can’t afford to take that risk, suggest Levitsky and Ziblatt, whose screed is furious, pessimistic, and paranoid. It walks readers through four failed options for stopping a “clear threat to American democracy” in Trump, then proposes a more extreme fifth.
What about just letting voters choose? No go, explain the Harvard men:
Electoral competition is, of course, essential to democracy. But…
Voting turns out to be the first of the professors’ four failed ways in which “democracies protect themselves”:
The traditional American response to extremism… We rely on the self-correcting power of electoral competition… But a laissez-faire approach has two important limitations. First, in the United States, competition is distorted by an 18th-century institution, the Electoral College… [and] history shows us that electoral competition alone is insufficient to fend off extremist threats… Candidates seeking to subvert democracy don’t always lose.
Trump could still win elections, so they’re out. Having dismissed the bend, the academics plan to stop the break, cycling through hardcore options. Trump-stopping method two is lawfare, which they call “militant or defensive democracy,” wherein authorities “wield the rule of law against antidemocratic forces.”
But courts refused to strike Trump from the ballot, so that’s a sad-trombone dead end. The third defense, “Partisan gatekeeping,” is tossed because useless Republicans refused to bar Trump from use of party infrastructure. Method four, building a “mutliparty coalition” (what the French call a cordon sanitaire) is bust because Republicans like Nikki Haley still support Trump, and the ones who don’t, like Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, and George W. Bush, lack the decency to support Harris. “As long as Republican leaders who privately view Mr. Trump as a grave danger refuse to go public,” they write, “most Republican voters will remain unmoved.”
It never occurs to Levitsky and Ziblatt that Republican voters have minds of their own, that “partisan gatekeeping” is among the main things they’re voting against, or that there are species of flatworms and mold with more voter pull than Pence or Romney.
No matter. They move to Choice Five (a future dystopian novel title?). This is “societal mobilization,” really a color revolution minus the term. They describe an uprising of business, religious, and civic groups serving as the firewall that can “forcefully repudiate” the threat. Their lead example is the German rejection of the rightist AfD, in which Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and “top unions” joined “millions of citizens from across the political spectrum” who “gathered week after week in large cities and small towns in defense of democracy.” It’s a happy story, but the essay ends in a cascade of frustration at U.S. business leaders who insist they can “survive and thrive” under either party, as Chase’s Jamie Dimon did.
“The U.S. establishment is sleepwalking toward a crisis,” the professors complain. “What are they waiting for?”
Elections, you think? But no, the premise of these pieces is that the people Levitsky and Zilbatt call “prodemocratic forces” can’t risk waiting for Trump to do the bad thing that necessitates an overthrow. Democracy, they say, is a “paradox.” It’s premised on a system of open competition, but “what if a major candidate seeks to dismantle that very system?” Shaking that Magic 8 ball a few times, they arrive at their PREEMPTIVE ACTION NECESSARY thesis.
These ideas have been in the ether, but are ramping up in conjunction with an avalanche of warnings about a coming insectoid rebellion in the face of expectedelectoraldelays. Chuck Schumer and five other Senate Democrats went so far as to issue a report chiding constituents that “vote totals on election night might not give us a complete picture of who will win,” but we’re not to worry, because “voter fraud is nearly nonexistent.” CNN has been running a loop of increasinglybizarrestories about officials building drone-patrolled, cement-reinforced “fortresses” to fight off the hordes of misinformation-addled populists expected to “rush” ballot centers when results don’t come in.
These warnings fall under the category of “pre-bunking,” a practice in which authorities try to inoculate against badthink by seeding the public with possible bad news in advance of an election, a storm response, a new vaccine policy, etc. Pre-bunking is the messaging equivalent of a doctor warning of a “little pinch” before shoving a forearm up the clacker. Homeland Security officials have a near-religious belief in “building resilience” through such tactics. Still, you could appoint a chimpanzee to run DHS and it should know that if you warn people not to worry about something ten billion times, they will start to do just that, especially when the not-worrisome thing is a nuclear superpower’s sudden inability to count. So what gives? For what bad news are we really being prepared?
The DHS says pre-bunking is most effective when officials establish “working relationships with media” ahead of events like elections. Unfortunately, these Fed-media partnerships often result in “People of Earth!”-style dictates, delivered via softball interviews of enforcement creeps that, again, almost certainly increasefears of corruption. Take a CBS story from October 4th on an intel bulletin “obtained” (lol, no one was hiding this document) from the FBI and DHS. It reveals that “extremists” wigging out about “perceived election fraud” might soon attack “election-related targets.” This comes out in an interview with “national security contributor” Samantha Vinograd, who looks like a Westworld escapee and is somehow never identified as a longtime senior DHS official as she extols a DHS report’s themes. “This violence could persist at least through January 20th, 2025,” she says. Does this cyborgian segment make you worry more or less about manipulation?
Reports of official “anxiety” about potential “chaos and unrest” have been coming in huge quantities. If you now add mention of “social mobilization” or restoring order with “the military” to that mountain of agita, it suggests a certain scenario has been coming up too often in someone’s tabletop dice rolls. Post-election delays followed either by a jarring result or more uncertainty triggers “clashes” or “violence,” which then impels “prodemocratic forces” to take emergency action. To say officials are on high alert for signs of such “unrest” would be a massive understatement. A Wednesday Times story about potential trouble spots sourced to “democracy watchdogs” suggests anything not dressed in J. Crew or carrying a laptop could be a threat. On Esmerelda County, Nevada:
This southwestern Nevada county, with its mining history, ghost towns and fealty to the former president, has become illustrative of the hostility toward election officials.
If places with a “mining history” are suspect, counties with trailers, rodeo, and pig lagoons can’t be far behind. It might be a good idea to put mesh hats away for a few weeks. Good God.
Trump had obviously helped raise tensions. He promised to jail anyone guilty of “cheating and skullduggery,” warned of “bedlam,” and among many other things, said “our elections are bad” because “a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.” If he loses, there will of course be anger toward what the DHS calls “perceived political adversaries,” and claims of fraud are likely.
But he’s out of power, and any trouble he could cause is a for-later problem compared to the ”paradox” his opponents have talked themselves into. The Democrats’ entire argument now is a vote for Trump is a vote for historical infamy, and he must not only be beaten, but eliminated as an option. “We gotta lock him up… politically,” is how Joe Biden put it. The Harris campaign by week’s end degenerated into surrogates shouting “Hitler!” into the void, with everyone from Kamala herself to Walz to Hillary Clinton pounding the “fascist to the core” theme. An openly frustrated former CIA chief John Brennan denounced as “appalling” the fact “so many Americans” are tuning them out when they drop the H-word:
They don’t sound like people sure about the wisdom of conceding. What if that’s the bad news all this pre-bunking is preparing us for?
Worth reading in full, with video, at Matt Taibbi’s The Racket News here.
Clipped from The Free Press: Martin Gurri: I Refused to Vote in the Last Two Elections. Now, I’m Voting for Trump.
There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. Reluctantly, I choose the latter.
Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5.
For many years, I belonged to the “a plague on both your houses” party. In the last two presidential elections, I abstained: I found both candidates unequal to the task and refused to endorse either with my vote.
But I feel I can’t refrain this time around—and I want to explain why.
There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. The antagonists are roughly equal in number but vastly disproportionate in strength. True to its nature, one side controls virtually all the institutions that hedge the life of the voters. Also true to its nature, the other side spends most of the time fighting with itself.
The forces of control own the White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporations, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture. Homegrown control freaks can also rely on assistance from Control International, the cabal of like-minded elites that runs the United Nations, the European Union, and any number of nation-states from Britain to Brazil.
Why the itch to control? Nietzsche would explain it as pure will to power, and that’s a perfectly adequate account.
The Democratic Party is the party of control. Joe Biden has been a dotty old figurehead stage-managed by Democratic establishment fixers: The chief controller is himself controlled. Harris is a less withered version of the same thing. Intellectually, she’s Biden’s equal—that is to say, a slave to the teleprompter. She has never had a thought, held a real job, or succeeded at anything on her own. She was nominated for the presidency after receiving approximately zero votes in the primaries.
No matter. The fixers are on the case, and they can work wonders. Harris has been kept in a bubble of adoration, to the deafening applause of the media and the rest of the institutional horde that controls the national narrative.
Threats to the controllers will be smashed without mercy. Trump represents the greatest danger—that makes him a criminal, to be raided by the FBI and prosecuted in Democratic-influenced courthouses. Tulsi Gabbard demolished Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary debates. That makes her a terrorist, to be placed on the travel watch list usually reserved for hardcore jihadis. Others who run for national office against the wish of the controllers are guilty of lèse-majesté and should be arbitrarily removed from the ballot—not just a Republican like Trump but disobedient liberals like Robert Kennedy Jr. and Jill Stein. It’s about domination, not ideology.
The internet allows too many heretical opinions to reach the public. That means a censorship apparatus must be erected on the Chinese model, to smother those pesky anti-control voices. “Disinformation” has become any message the controllers find offensive. “Malinformation” is acknowledged truths the controllers wish to bury. All are protected speech under the First Amendment but Our Democracy demands the silence of the lambs. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s pseudo-confession of guilt for his own participation, government censorship of the digital sphere continues to this day, including on Facebook.
Mistakes by the regime must be shielded from view—blunders such as Anthony Fauci’s involvement in gain-of-function research at Wuhan and Hunter Biden’s lost laptop from hell. That means the scientific establishment and intelligence service executives must be dragooned to lie to the public on behalf of their institutional masters, followed by a torrent of ridicule in the media for those who irrationally insist on the truth.
Every principle espoused by the controlling caste leads inexorably to a tightening of the noose. Climate change? To save the earth they must control away our vehicles, our travel, our gas stoves, our diets, even our plastic straws. Anti-racism? To ensure perfect numerical “equity” they must control every outcome of every transaction, from the test scores of our children to the people we hire for our companies. Gender identity? To allow for the proper fluidity they must control the relationship between parents and children, access to women’s bathrooms and women’s sports, and finally the English language, down to the last pronoun.
An overarching political theory can be deduced from all this. The American public is axiomatically violent and bigoted. From the best of motives, therefore, the guardians of Our Democracy must radically limit the number of democratic choices available to the public.
So here is the most compelling reason I will be voting against Harris and the Democrats in November. I was born in Cuba. I recognize the stench of hypocrisy emanating from those who conceal lust for power behind a buzz of salvationist jargon.
If the control accumulated by the administration had been used for good—if the world were calm and at peace, say, or the American public brought to unity as was promised—we might have been convinced it has some merit. But there’s a reason Biden is no longer on the ballot. There’s a reason Harris is running away from her administration’s policies. At home and abroad, the last four years have been a rolling disaster—and the voters know it. This crowd understands institutional control and nothing else. Out in the world, failure has been habitual, horrendous, epic in its dimensions.
Where to begin? For motives I am hard put to explain, the Biden-Harris people encouraged millions of illegal aliens to swarm into our urban centers. They mismanaged the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, relying (naturally) on harmful school closures, lockdowns, and mandates, all based on contrived falsehoods, and they utterly botched the persuasion campaign for the vaccines. They inflated, indebted, and overregulated the economy. They spent trillions but were unable to build or achieve much beyond a handful of charging stations: We can guess where the money went. They promoted grotesque stereotypes based on race and sexual preference, a policy that sowed division and reaped distrust.
Internationally, the nightmare began in Afghanistan, where the administration gratuitously turned the country over to the terrorist-friendly Taliban. Thirteen American servicemen died in the rout and many more were abandoned—and shamefully forgotten by the media.
Every despot in the world took note: The U.S. was in retreat mode. Putin sent his Russian legions into Ukraine. Hamas invaded Israel, which was also attacked from the north by Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen, a third-rate outfit, managed to shut down commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Iran is about to build a nuclear bomb, the logical conclusion of the frustrated Obama-Biden-Harris love affair with the ayatollahs. China is aggressively expanding its military, particularly its navy, even as our own military has atrophied because of antique equipment and low enlistment rates. We can’t even deploy all our warships because we lack the personnel to do so.
There are too many leaks in the dike and not enough fingers—not to mention an absolute dearth of strategic thinking to identify where our priorities lie in a dangerous world.
This, then, is my secondary reason for voting against Harris. I’m not sure we can survive four more years of such toxic levels of incompetence.
Against this Everest of power madness and recurrent failure, a single argument is put forward in support of Harris’s candidacy: Donald Trump. Trump, we are told, isn’t just mistaken or bad. He’s a moral abomination—beyond the pale. All decent Americans thus have no choice but to vote the other way.
But the same thing would be said of anyone who opposed Harris. That’s how the forces of control function: “It’s either us or the death of Our Democracy.” Trump isn’t a moral abomination—or at least, no more so than Harris or Biden. He’s an ex-president, a politician with a known track record. If you strip away the moralizing narrative—the endlessly repeated inanities about dictatorship and insurgency—we are left with a flawed but semi-capable person. The world was at peace during his tenure. The economy boomed. I would happily accept the U.S. and the world of 2018 over that of 2024.
A more realistic charge lodged against Trump is that he’s an inveterate liar. This is certainly the case: The man spouts industrial amounts of nonsense. But in politics, everything is relative. The entire public character of the Biden administration rested on a colossal lie, in which Harris was complicit: that the president was a wise, energetic senior, fully engaged in the nation’s business. That massive deception, promulgated for years by an irresponsible media in defiance of the evidence of our own eyes, amounted to state propaganda, many orders of magnitude more destructive of trust than the worst of Trump’s outrages.
Trump is an agent of chaos, much as the Republicans are the party of chaos. At worst, he can do limited damage, since he lacks any purchase on the institutions. At best, he will slash to the ground the malignant harvest of the Biden-Harris years: the digital surveillance and censorship, the human flood at the border, the racial and sexual obsessions, the growing prostration of our military. If, from sheer animal intimidation, he can restore seriousness and discipline to the federal agencies in Washington, that would be a magnificent bonus.
I will vote for him because he’s taken a stand against the forces of control, and has been persecuted and vilified by them—and also because, at the moment, there’s no such thing as an agent or a party of freedom. That, I pray, will come in time.
Whatever happens, our system will endure. The American public, believe it or not, is still fundamentally sound and sensible. I freely acknowledge that we are in the grip of a psychotic episode, a sort of national midlife crisis, but I have faith that we will outgrow and transcend the moment. The hysterical refrain that Our Democracy is dying, recited ad nauseam by the forces of control, is a disgusting and self-serving trope—a gross demonization of fellow Americans who happen to disagree with their views. Those of us who take the side of freedom and the open society should disdain the use of such repulsive rhetoric.
If my candidate wins in November, I will be content but not overjoyed. If our current masters retain control, I will be depressed but not suicidal. I am old enough to have acquired a sense of proportion. The United States and its amazingly sturdy Constitution, and the way of life that has flourished therein, will remain long after I have passed from the scene.
The other day, while driving my son to school, I switched SiriusXM from my usual morning listening—the simulcast of Morning Joe, naturally—to Fox News, just to see what Team Trump was saying. I didn’t really expect that the first voice I’d hear would be that of Donald Trump himself. But there it was. Was he chitchatting with the gang at Fox & Friends? He was not. Rather, he had taped an ad, taking precious time out from his campaign to pitch his special edition, gold-plated “Trump sneakers.” For only $499. Get ’em now before they’re gone, he said, sounding like the guy who used to sell Veg-O-Matics on cable at 3 a.m..
Grifters gonna grift.
Let me say it loud and proud: I have Trump Derangement Syndrome. And it’s not because there is something wrong with me, as the Trump cult would have you believe. It’s because there’s something wrong with him. This man simply has no business being president of the United States. The fact that he’s been a grifter his entire life barely scratches the surface.
But let’s start there, shall we? Trump University was a complete scam, which ultimately cost him $25 million to settle lawsuits from students who said they’d been defrauded. Trump donors have been scammed out of tens of millions of dollars that went to pay the former president’s massive legal bills rather than his reelection campaign. In September 2023, a New York judge found that he had scammed the banks that loaned him money by inflating the value of his properties.
Nor did the scams end once he became president. One example: Foreign dignitaries knew the importance of booking rooms and events at Trump’s overpriced Washington, D.C. hotel if they wanted to stay on his good side. The Saudis spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at the hotel during his presidency, and the Romanian president patronized the hotel the day before meeting him at the White House. This may have violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits presidents from profiting from foreign governments.
But never mind. The ultimate scam is Trump’s lifelong claim to be some kind of business genius. I shake my head in amazement whenever I hear Trump supporters say their guy will do a better job with the economy because he’s a businessman. Don’t they understand that The Apprentice was about as real as pro wrestling?
I didn’t really mean to go on so long about Trump’s scams. But that’s one of the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome: Once you start in on one of his many character flaws, it’s just so hard to stop. (Just ask Joe Scarborough.) I could easily do the same with his many other personality defects, but for your sake, dear reader, I won’t. I’ll just summarize them. Please do keep in mind as you read the next few paragraphs that this man has been our president once and could well be our president again.
He’s an acknowledged sexual abuser. (Remember “Grab ’em by the pussy”?) He’s a racist who claims that immigrants are “genetically predisposed to commit crimes,” as Politico put it. (“It’s in their genes,” he said a few days ago.) He’s a narcissist who cares only about himself. Despite his claim to be on the side of the working man, he’s been sued dozens of times by the workers who built his golf courses, served his customers, and worked for his family. His vulgarity and insults are appalling; he stooped so low as to call his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris “retarded” at a fundraiser not long ago. According to his former chief of staff John Kelly, Trump has described American soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.”
More? He has zero interest in the rule of law. During his term as president he constantly badgered his attorney general to go after his political enemies. In his campaign speeches this time around, he is vowing revenge on his political enemies, even saying he’ll use the military to go after “the enemy from within,” starting with Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who is running for Senate and who Trump calls a “lowlife” and a “sleazeball.”
He makes ridiculous decisions, like concluding that Janet Yellen could not be renominated to chair the Federal Reserve because she is “too short.” He paid off a porn star to keep quiet about the sex they had while Melania was pregnant with Barron Trump—for which he was tried and found guilty. He hid highly classified documents in his bathroom in Mar-a-Lago. He views NATO as a protection racket rather than a group of like-minded nations allied for their defense. He has a thing for dictators, especially the man who poses the greatest danger to the U.S. right now, Vladimir Putin. And for all the talk about Joe Biden’s mental fitness, Trump’s speeches, full of non sequiturs, weird digressions, lies, and mispronounced words, have to make you wonder about his mental acuity.
I ask again—why in the world would we ever want this man to be our president? He was awful the last time around, and this time it will be even worse because he will be surrounded by lackeys instead of the cabinet members and top staffers from his first term who pushed back hard against his worst instincts.
This is the point at which Trump supporters usually say: “Sure, he’s a little rough around the edges, but so what?We’re supporting him not because of his personality but because of his policies.” Those of us with Trump Derangement Syndrome have a simple reply: You gotta be kidding.
Taking his marching orders from the Federalist Society, he nominated three Supreme Court justices so conservative they overturned Roe v. Wade. He bragged about this until he realized it was a political liability. Now he says a second Trump term would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” He spent most of his first term trying to get rid of Obamacare but failed (thankfully); incredibly, his running mate J.D. Vance now claims he saved it. One of Trump’s main tactics for decreasing illegal immigration was to separate children from their parents, a deeply immoral strategy that shames our country. According to The Washington Post, 1,400 children have never been reunited with their families. This time around he says he’s going to deport 11 million illegal migrants, which of course is not remotely possible without turning the entire country upside down. He did manage to get tax cuts for the rich, but he never really did anything to uplift the working poor. Or anybody else who wasn’t a millionaire.
Finally, he has destabilized our democracy. He did so by encouraging the mob on January 6, 2021, to attack the Capitol, by trying to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to allow a second slate of electors, by twisting the arms of election officials in Arizona, Georgia, and elsewhere to “find” the votes he needed to win, and by refusing to acknowledge, to this day, that he lost the 2020 election. Do I believe he should go to prison for some of the things he did to overturn the election? I do.
Trump supporters point to Hillary Clinton’s complaints after she lost in 2016 that the election “was not on the level” and “we still don’t know what really happened.” But unlike Trump, she didn’t try to get the election overturned, and accepted the outcome despite her misgivings—just as losing presidential candidates have always done, including Richard Nixon in 1960 and Al Gore in 2000. Unlike Trump, they understood that the peaceful transfer of power was at the heart of our democracy.
Is it possible that if Trump wins, elections will become shams, as they are in autocratic countries like Russia and Venezuela? Despite my TDS, I’m not ready to go that far. But what seems clear to me is that, thanks to Trump’s nonstop lies about 2020, there are now tens of millions of Americans who believe that elections are rigged. If he loses they will be ready to give up on democracy, if they haven’t already. A polarized country will fragment further, and who knows where that will lead? Not anyplace good.
In short? You’re damn right I have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I wish all Americans had it. We would be far better off.
Worth reading here at the original source, The Free Press.
Clipped from Racket News: The Hurricane Speech Panic is Here
In a sequel to the pandemic panic, politicians and elite media are calling for a European-style speech clampdown, this time using the weather as an excuse.
In Covid-19, health officials issuing confusing or incorrect or shifting dictates caused significant loss of trust, which was then used as an excuse to call for clampdowns on the information landscape. Now a sequel misinformation panic is upon us, with incompetent disaster management stepping in the role of the health bureaucracy. Once again, we’re told it’s Donald Trump and other online miscreants the world cannot survive:
As the theme built momentum through the week, it was only a matter of time before we saw the inevitable next-step headline, provided by Axiosyesterday:
Democratic members Kathy Castor (D-FL), Deborah Ross (D-NC), Nikema Williams (D-GA) and Wiley Nickel (D-NC) sent a letter Friday to Meta, X, TikTok, Discord, YouTube, Snap and Instagram saying, “In the aftermath of Helene, we have witnessed a troubling surge in misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and scams” that are “hindering recovery efforts and exploiting vulnerable individuals.”
The concrete example cited involved “posts on Facebook and X” that “claimed that FEMA was offering a new grant for immediate cash assistance,” resulting in a “flood of applications to non-existent programs.” Scams are already barred, and I doubt that “flood of applications” is so annoying to FEMA that they require cancellation of the First Amendment. But the lawmakers’ aim is broader, as is made clear by the demands they went on to list. Number one is the showstopper:
Increase the monitoring and rapid removal of misinformation and disinformation related to disaster recovery efforts, particularly from verified or large-reaching accounts that have the potential to do significant harm.
Enhance fact-checking partnerships with local agencies and disaster relief organizations, ensuring that accurate information about government programs, emergency shelters, and aid is readily available and prioritized across your platforms.
Strengthen algorithms to flag and prevent the spread of harmful conspiracy theories that target disaster victims.
Implement stronger safeguards against scams that prey on vulnerable individuals during disaster recovery, including ensuring that only verified organizations and entities can promote relief funds or disaster assistance programs.
Members of Congress, seeking “monitoring and rapid removal” of “large-reaching accounts” who say things that have the “potential” to do “significant harm.” Who does that make you think of?
Take something Trump said at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last Saturday: “They’re offering them $750 to people whose homes have been washed away. And yet we send tens of billions of dollars to foreign countries that most people have never heard of.”
Trump never said “only” and even a steelman reading of the original White House statements doesn’t make it sound like a flood of other help was coming. The first October 2 announcement said FEMA assistance for hurricane victims “can include a one-time $750 payment,” after which individuals are “eligible to apply” for additional help. Kamala Harris that same day spoke about $750 for those who “need immediate needs being met.” The “immediate, up-front aid” line was language from a cleanup press release posted by FEMA two days after the original White House statements, saying “there’s a rumor out there that FEMA is only providing $750,” which is “not true,” because there are other forms of assisistance you “may qualify for.”
When Trump claims that people like Biden or a Democratic Governor like Roy Cooper are “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” that’s rhetoric that needs to come with proof, or else he absolutely should be criticized harshly for spreading unsupported allegations. His stump claims about DHS or FEMA funds being “stolen” or showered on illegal migrants similarly appear to be bullshit. But other parts of his critique are not, in particular his complaints about money for foreign engagements. Moreover it’s madness to say the state needs to resort to fiat messaging to counter “strongly suggesting” a thing, or Trump saying Biden’s hurricane response got “universally” bad reviews when it’s not literally “universal,” or claiming there are “no helicopters” as opposed to something like “too few,” and so on.
The $750 gambit was a real political unforced error by the Biden administration. The “one-time” payment line came less than a week after Biden announced $8 billion more for Ukraine after a cheery White House confab with Volodymyr Zelensky. Those funds came via the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a program created in 2015 for which $32.7 billion has been appropriated. Worse, the $750 announcement came the same day Mayorkas gave his presser about running out of money. So, Biden had $8 billion to shove in Zelensky’s pockets, but his own DHS chief claimed to be running out of cash at the outset of a major domestic disaster.
FEMA run out once already this year, forcing Congress on September 25th to pass a continuing resolution freeing up $20 billion. But the agency spent about $9 billion of that on October 1st, over $7 billion of which went to earlier “hurricanes, wildfires and tornadoes.” Hurricanes Helene and Milton combined will surely drain the remaining cash: hence the October 2 presser by Mayorkas. Speaking of “misinformation,” multiple outlets shaded the Mayorkas comments to sound less absolute. Vox in its “Donald Trump’s Many, Many Lies About Helene, Debunked” story for instance wrote that “Mayorkas has warned that the DRF could run out of money before the end of hurricane season,” adding that this would be “due to the severity of this year’s storms,” as if that were relevant.
Meanwhile NPR in a story about “falsehoods” complained “the claim that FEMA has no money for hurricane recovery” has become “another popular refrain that has gained traction on the right.” (It came from Biden’s own White House!) Mayorkas since the October 2nd presser has fallen somewhat in line, repeating a weaker version of the current White House position. Instead of claiming “sufficient funding” to handle both storms, he says things like “We can meet the immediate needs,” but keeps repeating there’s an urgent need for Congress to provide funding. Again, the government needing additional appropriations to handle storms when it’s been shoveling hundreds of billions overseas for war is not a Trump-created issue.
In an October 4th letter, Biden wrote that while “FEMA has the resources needed for the immediate emergency response phase” and its “Disaster Relief Fund has the resources it requires right now to meet immediate needs,” the fund “does face a shortfall at the end of the year.” Ask yourself if that squares with Mayorkas comments from Thursday about being on “shaky ground” funding-wise and needing more money from Congress like, right now:
We learned with Covid that health officials issuing wrong or contradictory dictates about everything from masking to social distancing to mortality rates to vaccine efficacy inspired enormous distrust in the population. Officials decided the fastest route to regaining the public’s confidence was to deprive people of alternative sources of information, claiming a health emergency as their censorship casus belli. Now, weeks before an election, they’re trying to use hurricanes to shut down critics of the White House again.
It’s been clear for a while that the goal of the anti-disinformation crew is an American version of the Digital Services Act, which conceptually is just what yesterday’s congressional letter asks for. Keep the quasi-monopolistic platforms private, so they can “legally” violate rights, but make companies de facto subordinates to state guidance. Officials will keep drumming up panics, and keep asking for the same review power. Sooner or later — and it might be sooner, sadly — they’ll get it.
Worth reading here at the original source, Racket News.
Clipped from Racket News:DNC Talking Points Become Instant Post-Debate Headlines
In the Trump-Harris debate, reality proved easy to manufacture. Was it always like this?
Matt Taibbi | Sept 11 2024
“Last night, Vice President Harris commanded the stage,” began the DNC’s “Talkers’ Toplines” mailing list entry this morning.
“Kamala Harris commanded the debate,” analyst John Heileman said on Morning Joe. “Kamala Harris commanded the first debate against Donald J. Trump,” read the opening line of the New York Times top debate story. “Harris commanded the room from the moment she walked on stage,” California governor Gavin Newsom told the Los Angeles Times. The pattern continued:
Americans saw that Harris “will turn the page once and for all on the darkness and division of Donald Trump,” the DNC “Talkers” continued.
As one of the last relics of the “Boys on the Bus” era I don’t recall campaign messaging being this crude, or politicians, press, and audience acting so overtly as a chorus. I do remember reporters catching themes from each another like colds. If you dug you’d sometimes find stories originated with an aide whispering in the ear of someone like Mark Halperin (the “Fred Thompson is lazy” tales come to mind). But the DNC or RNC just backing up to the commentariat, dumping loads of phrases, and seeing them instantly converted to conventional wisdom, that’s new. Isn’t it? I feel reduced to writing these things down in an effort to keep from going crazy.
There was a lot of discussion in last night’s debate about gas, food, and home prices, about access to small capital, tax breaks, and lower prices. People need these, but they also need reality. We just lived through a remarkable succession of memory-holed events, from lockdowns to Nord Stream to the stunning developments surrounding the end of the Biden campaign, in which reality was briefly allowed to surface before quickly being wallpapered over with a new face. Earlier manipulations already taxed the brain, but memory-holing a presidency? That’s a lot to ask of a population, mentally. Trump was flummoxed when Harris said, “You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me,” as if that settled that. How do you answer a general agreement that a cipher with a two-day-old policy paper is the real new face of government?
Trump kept lashing out like a person clinging to an outdated conception of sanity, like he hadn’t gotten the reality-by-fiat memo. “Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president,” he asked about Biden. “They threw him out of a campaign like a dog. We don’t even know, is he our president?” He looked around as if to say, What the fuck? Later, about Putin, he brought up the old saw, World War III. “He’s got nuclear weapons. Nobody ever thinks about that!” He brought up Nord Stream, the pandemic, the weird voteless nomination of Harris, and was met with bemused stares each time. ABC’s David Muir got flak for hostile questioning, but his subtler act was policing the topics. The world of that debate contained no speech panic, no arrest of Pavel Durov, no assassination attempt, no cover-up of Biden’s health, no oddity in the sudden embrace of Dick Cheney, no mention of a half-dozen bizarre things that only just happened.
They surrounded Trump with rigid consensus framing and watched him flail against it, which did make him look frustrated, old, and at times like a candidate for the political glue factory. But crazy? Not sure about that. If conventional wisdom says you’re crazy, that doesn’t make it true. What if it’s the other way around?
Worth reading at the original source, Racket News, HERE.
Clipped from The Spectator: The problem with branding everyone ‘far right’
The effect, of course, is a blunting one, because the term already seems to have lost all meaning
June 19, 2024 | Douglas Murray
There is a favorite Fleet Street story about the legendary Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie. While editing the paper, he discovered that his horoscope writer was recycling copy. He decided to dispense with her services in a letter that opened: “As you will no doubt have foreseen…”
You do not have to hold claims to being a mystic to predict certain things. The results of this month’s European Union elections were easily predictable, as was the response from much of the British media. As I uncannily prophesied in last week’s column, the BBC’s Europe editor, Katya Adler, went with: “The far right is on the march.” Elsewhere, she offered the claim that people across the continent often say: “This feels like the Europe of the 1930s.”
I don’t know if the BBC’s Europe editor often visits Europe. But having swung through five European countries in the week before the EU elections, I did not hear the sound of jackboots anywhere.
In the week before the European elections, I did not hear the sound of jackboots anywhere
If they existed, you would hear them especially loudly on the streets of Paris, since the city has been made pretty much impossible to get around except on foot. Emmanuel Macron wanted the Olympics to take place in the center of the city and he seems to be learning the hard way why most host cities stick the games away on the periphery. Apart from making Paris almost impassable, he has set up a terrific security risk. An “Islamist inspired” attack on the games has already been foiled. Paris, even more than most European cities, is in a state of permanent high alert.
In any case, the success of the National Rally in the EU elections was not put down to any failings of President Macron, but rather to the infamous march of “the far right.” As a term I find this less and less satisfactory. The destruction of the mainstream parties of right and left in France is a fascinating example of what is happening across the continent and indeed the wider West. Everywhere, mainstream centrist parties of government have spent recent years promising to lower immigration only to oversee a massive explosion of both legal and illegal migration. That the migrants will integrate was the promise of political leaders for a couple of generations. But the evidence people see with their own eyes suggests to many that their governments have not been truthful with them. So they seek alternative parties who they think may actually listen to their concerns.
My interpretation of why the French just voted the way they did is that the French do not like being blown up. The fact that the French security services seem to be having to constantly work overtime is not consoling to the French public. There was always going to be a political response to that. We are lucky that it has so far only come in the form of Jordan Bardella.
Still, in recent days the media have described all the following parties as being “far right”: Giorgia Meloni’s party in Italy, both Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête and the National Rally in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Vox in Spain, the governing party in Hungary, Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord in Italy and (until an apology was offered by the BBC) the Reform Party in Britain.
There is also an increasing use of the weaselly term “hard right.” This now seems to be the preferred term used by journalists who are getting cold feet about describing every-body to the right of Extinction Rebellion as “far right.” “Hard right” also seems to be what a party that used to be called “far right” is called once it is in government.
The effect, of course, is a blunting one, because the term already seems to have lost all meaning. This — as I have said for years — may some day become a problem, because the various parties described as “far right” across the continent include parties that are no such thing as well as parties that I would like to keep an eye on. One of the frustrations with the “far right on the march” theme is that there are parties that there are serious questions about. There are people in the AfD who are definitely up to no good, and who have the capacity to destroy their whole party. The Freedom Party of Austria also has a certain whiff around some of its members.
Will this always be the case? Perhaps. Look in depth into any political movements on the continent and you will invariably find some link to the worst movements of the 1940s. Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the old National Front in France not only had dodgy pasts but a question hovering over them about whether they are in some ways harking back to the days of collaboration.
But what is the continent to do about this? And what is our view supposed to be? One of the many problems with throwing everybody into the “far right” bracket is that it raises a question which I don’t know if anyone is brave enough to ask or answer. Essentially it is this: is Europe so toxic that it requires decades or even centuries before anything healthy can grow there? I suspect some people think the answer is “yes.” Others haven’t realized that this is the ultimate question. But it is.
My answer would be that the ground is still poisonous in parts. Deciding which parts are to be designated such and which are worth cultivating requires unbelievable care. But too many people are not up to that job, including people whose job it is meant to be.
Incidentally, last Monday night thousands of leftists protested and rioted in Paris in response to the European Parliament election results. Members of the French left, including Manon Aubry of La France Insoumise, attended. Late in the evening the police had to disperse the protesters with stinger grenades. This was in fact the far left “on the march.” But you don’t have to be a mystic to predict that this is not a headline that made it into any of the newspapers.
Read the original story (plus watch more coverage) HERE.
Clipped from Public: Smugness And Nice Guyism Behind Tim Walz’s BLM Riot, Covid “Snitch Line,” And Gender Mistreatment Scandals
Minnesota’s governor either has extreme views or was too weak to stand up to activists opposed to the National Guard, in favor of citizen spying, and demanding the medicalization of gender confusion
Michael Shellenberger | August 6, 2024
Gov. Tim Walz (center) watched Minneapolis burn for three days before calling for the National Guard
According to the media, Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris made an excellent choice in selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate. Walz bridges the gap between the Democratic Party’s progressive base and the moderates that Harris and Walz need to win over to maintain control over the White House, they say. And Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, the other front-runner, was too divisive on Israel, they add, and risked overshadowing Harris.
But three major controversies threaten Walz’s image as a moderate. Walz waited three days before asking for the deployment of the National Guard after Black Lives Matter protests turned into fiery riots that destroyed hundreds of businesses. Walz created a “snitch line” through which thousands of Minnesotans reported their neighbors, co-workers, and police officers to the government for things like not wearing masks while outdoors. And Walz doubled down last year on letting doctors and surgeons give drugs to and operate on children and adolescents confused about their gender at a time when Britain and much of Europe are banning them.
Harris’ political advisors might note that Walz ultimately brought rioting under control and that deploying the National Guard was a difficult decision aimed at balancing the need for security with the rights of peaceful protesters. While the “snitch line” for COVID-19 violations was controversial, Harris’ team could frame it as a necessary measure during an unprecedented public health crisis and stress that those actions were part of a broader strategy to keep Minnesotans safe. And they might note that Walz’s gender policies ensure medical decisions are made with thorough support and parental involvement and align with established medical guidelines.
But the more anyone looks at these three decisive cases, the worse it looks for Walz. Walz’s delayed deployment of the National Guard against BLM riots led to destruction and chaos, showing his failure to act decisively when it mattered most, undermining his commitment to protect both public safety and civil liberties. The “snitch line” for COVID-19 violations was a massive overreach of government power inconsistent with the American way and more similar to the kind of tip lines common under Communist regimes. And Walz not only supports irreversible medical treatments for minors without long-term studies on their effects, at a time when other countries are moving to restrict such practices, he last year advertised Minnesota as a state that would expand gender procedures to people from out of state.
In truth, Walz's failure to stop the BLM riots, the Covid Snitch line, and the growing gender medical mistreatment scandal could significantly hurt Harris with swing moderate voters in key battleground states, where Donald Trump’s campaign is already depicting her as part of the radical Left. Most Americans want the National Guard called out to prevent violence and looting. While Democrats generally supported stringent COVID-19 measures, many independent swing voters viewed them as invasive and excessive. And significantly more voters oppose allowing doctors and medical professionals to give drugs and perform surgeries on minors.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro would have been a significantly stronger vice-presidential pick for Harris. He has proven able to win over moderate and independent voters in a critical swing state, which could be pivotal in this election. And, unlike Tim Walz, Shapiro does not carry nearly as much controversial baggage associated with delayed National Guard deployment during the BLM protests, the implementation of a COVID-19 snitch line, or such extreme gender medicine policies.
Given that Walz’s controversies could hurt Harris with moderates, why did she pick him as her running mate? And why, if Walz is so progressive, has he done things that have undermined progressive, liberal, and Democratic value of caring for the vulnerable?
The Nice Guy In The Longhouse
Media reports suggest that Harris chose Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro for multiple reasons. Harris’ selection of Walz could help turn out younger and more progressive voters, similar to how Barack Obama won in 2008. Harris and Walz could lean into progressive policies on reproductive rights and climate change that appeal to younger voters while not triggering Gen Z’s anger at Democrats like Shapiro, who progressives view as too pro-Israel.
There are reports that Harris saw Shapiro’s strong political presence and popularity as a threat to her spotlight, fearing he might overshadow her within the administration. “Two sources confirm on background the deciding factor in the VP’s choice was what Sen Fetterman said publicly: concerns Shapiro’s his own personal ambitions would cause him to upstage/override Harris,” reported Fox news’ Jacqui Heinrich. As such, Harris’s choice of Walz over Shapiro may reflect Harris’ own narcissism and insecurity that she would be overshadowed.
Walz’s role in all three controversies appears to stem from the widespread feeling among Democrats and progressives that they are comparatively more kind and compassionate than Republicans. Walz didn’t call out the National Guard because he, like other Democratic policymakers, was under pressure from BLM and progressives not to, because the George Floyd killing had, rightly in their view, enraged a population that wanted revenge.
At one point after the riots, Walz sounded like he was endorsing a threat from protesters. “Communities have been demanding change,” said Walz. “They've demanded that it wasn't enough. And they very clearly stated if the systemic changes that need to be made, aren't made, that things would repeat themselves.”
Walz appears to have allowed the Covid snitch line because overly aggressive public health officials insisted to him that it was needed to protect people, and he went along with it.
And Walz allowed gender medical mistreatment because trans activists convinced him that some people are born into the wrong bodies, that drugs and surgery can change a person’s sex, and that the people demanding such treatments are genuinely concerned with the best interests of children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults.
Walz reflects a particular kind of progressive view of masculinity and manliness that is, in large measure, a reaction to the generation before them, which had celebrated rugged individualism, like John Wayne, but who Baby Boomers felt suffered from “toxic masculinity” in the form of too little compassion, tolerance, and understanding. The “nice guy” generation of Baby Boomers, of whom Walz at the age of 60 is one, is epitomized by Alan Alda and Richard Dreyfuss.
Some amount of progressive nice guyism is a great thing. Walz should be applauded for his program of universal free school meals, worker protections for poultry processing facilities, removing limits on breaks for breastfeeding workers, free public college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 a year, and creating a standards board for nursing homes to improve conditions.
Where nice guyism falls down is in not critically questioning the claims made by people categorized as victims. “We know that these [trans-identified people] are communities that are always under risk,” Walz told PBS. “We know they have some of the highest suicide rates, attacks of hate crimes, against them.”
If Walz had done an independent investigation, he would have found that there is no evidence that societal discrimination is responsible for the problems trans-identified people face. Researchers do not know if higher rates of violence against trans people are real or an artifact of higher rates of reporting. Nor do they know if higher reported violence stems from being trans or for some other reason. And had Walz independently investigated the suicide claim, rather than rely on trans activists, he might have found that many researchers believe higher rates of suicide from trans are from an underlying psychiatric disorder, not societal discrimination.
During the ceremony in which Walz signed the gender bill into law, it was striking to see Walz’s lieutenant governor wearing a “Protect Trans Kids” t-shirt, which is famous for having a menacing-looking knife on it.
For Democratic and progressive men of the Baby Boom and subsequent generations, men should default to greater compassion and leniency for people defined as victims, whether black people or trans-identified people. Since Covid restrictions were framed as protecting the entire public’s health, the demands of progressives and Democrats became tyrannical, resulting in censorship, lockdowns, and snitch lines.
There is a narcissism in the “nice guy” progressive Democrats like Walz. It’s not enough for progressives like them to do the right, kind, and compassionate thing; they want to be recognized for their virtue. This attitude pervades both ordinary progressive Democratic voters as well as their elected officials. The result is that Democrats like Walz often don’t just accept radical left demands like holding back the National Guard, creating snitch lines, and medicalizing gender confusion; they demand such things. Walz, for example, claimed his state should be a “national model” on so-called gender medicine.
Nice guyism is part of what some have called the progressive feminist “Longhouse,” which First Things described as a “large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian…. The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother.”
This is not a criticism of women or even feminism, some versions of which do not advocate that men uncritically adopt more feminine styles and approaches. “More than anything,” writes the author known as L0m3z for First Things, “the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.” The author notes that this shift of norms among the professional-managerial class that runs government agencies, corporations, universities, schools, NGOs, and other societal institutions.
Why has Walz done things that have undermined the progressive, liberal, and Democratic values of caring for the vulnerable? There is smugness: Walz, like other progressives, is firmly convinced of the moral rightness of his side’s position, and thus frequently expresses contempt for people who disagree with his controversial policies. But there is also nice guyism, the self-perception among many progressive men that their first priority is to be kind and deferential to the “den mothers” in the professional-managerial longhouse rather than questioning of them and protective of the community.
For Stronger Leaders
Nice guyism is today hegemonic among Democratic and other Left leaders, including UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who emphasize empathy, inclusivity, and consensus-building which in practical terms has meant giving into radical Left demands on race, censorship, and gender. Due to its emphasis on empathy and avoiding confrontation, progressive nice guyism of the kind embodied by Walz, Starmer, Newsom, and Trudeau leads to more crime, more restrictions on personal freedom, and mistreatment at the hands of predatory medical professionals.
It all creates an opening for Trump and Vance. Republicans can argue that Walz’s hesitation to deploy the National Guard in response to the BLM riots demonstrated weak leadership. They can criticize the COVID-19 snitch line as government overreach. And they can denounce his gender policies as reckless and out of step with the changing scientific consensus in Europe. The sum of these criticisms would be to define Walz as either too extreme and or too weak to stand up to the radical Left.
Consider Walz’s statements after the riot when he supported reducing consequences for committing crimes, ostensibly as a way to be nice to communities of color. “Communities need to be heard,” Walz said. “They're demanding that these changes be made. They told us last year. Change cash bail. Change how you do traffic stops. It didn't happen and look what we got.”
And it’s not just moderates. Democrats, liberals, and progressives who have as core values protecting vulnerable populations, ensuring public safety, and maintaining personal privacy and autonomy may also be upset when they learn about Walz’s record. After all, the National Guard was needed to stop riots to protect the communities most affected by the violence and destruction, which are often marginalized and economically vulnerable neighborhoods. Avoiding COVID-19 snitch lines respects individual privacy and promotes community trust without fostering a culture of surveillance. And disallowing “gender-affirming care” for minors aligns with the precautionary principle, ensuring decisions about irreversible treatments are made with full maturity and informed consent.
In the end, Kamala Harris did not make an excellent choice in selecting Walz as her running mate. Walz doesn’t bridge the gap between the Democratic Party’s progressive base and moderates; he expands it. What’s more, he exposes the problems with nice guy progressivism and the compassion-first approach to governing.
Read/watch Shellenberger’s full 13-min. video at the source HERE.
Clipped from The Free Press: America the Weird
John Adams was an abolitionist when slavery was the norm and a self-taught Hindu scholar. In other words, like the greatest Americans, he was a total weirdo.
Vivek Ramaswamy | August 4, 2024
When I grew up in southwest Ohio in the 1990s, my immigrant parents always reminded me: if you’re going to stand out, you might as well be outstanding. They said it with a thick Indian accent, but I view their advice as quintessentially American.
It’s what distinguished America’s Founding Fathers. The Old World was one that aspired to a certain form of normalcy—one where people stayed in their respective lanes. An inventor was an inventor, a lord was a lord, a philosopher was a philosopher. Much of this was determined at birth.
But our Founders were different. They didn’t believe in those boundaries.
Benjamin Franklin was not only a co-author of the Declaration of Independence but also founded hospitals and universities; dabbled in medicine; created a musical instrument that went on to be used by Mozart and Beethoven; designed the lightning rod, bifocal spectacles, and the Franklin stove. Robert Livingston helped design the steamship as a side project while serving as an ambassador to France. Roger Sherman was a self-taught attorney who never had any formal education. Thomas Jefferson was fluent in four languages, wrote nineteen thousand letters by hand, and invented prototypes of the polygraph and the swivel chair. Oh, and he designed the architecture of the Virginia State Capitol building.
They were weird. Often the ones who said the weirdest things adopted some of the weirdest viewpoints by the standards of their day. John Adams was an abolitionist during an age when slavery was the norm the world over. He was also a self-taught scholar of Hindu scripture and wrote letters to Thomas Jefferson about the Bhagavad Gita.
People like Adams made our nation a magnet for minds that were as courageous and bizarre as their own. One of the most important chemists of the eighteenth century was Joseph Priestley, a British guy who had unusual religious beliefs that defied mainstream Anglican thought. It soon became unsafe for him to remain in England, so he moved to Pennsylvania, where he was welcomed by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. It may have been the first notable example of a brilliant scientist moving to America precisely because we’re a free society, a tradition that so many others, including my own mother and father, followed centuries later. Priestley didn’t come to America because we had great universities or funding for his research. He came here because we had freedom. The freedom to be weird.
People like Adams and Franklin made our nation a magnet for minds that were as courageous and bizarre as their own, writes Vivek Ramaswamy. (Photo illustration by The Free Press, image by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Against that backdrop, the recent Democrat strategy of labeling their political opponents as “weird” is notable. Over the past week, prominent Democrats appeared on cable television to use the word “weird” hundreds of times to describe President Donald Trump and, especially, the GOP vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance. This wasn’t some kind of grassroots wave but appeared more like a well-coordinated political strategy to define Republicans, executed by the party’s top brass including Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Pete Buttigieg, and countless Democrat governors vying to be Harris’s pick as veep.
But alleging “weirdness” is a troubling form of political argument. It’s anti-American, on at least two levels.
First, it denies the possibility of exceptionalism. Consider the irony of someone like Pete Buttigieg leveling that charge at Republicans. I first met Pete in college and don’t remember him as someone who denigrated people he disagrees with as “weird.” That’s because—sadly—Pete himself was “weird” by the standards of the time: he grew up in small-town Indiana in the 1990s as a gay, ambitious, unusually well-spoken valedictorian at a Catholic school who went on to study at Harvard. Substitute Ohio for Indiana, and Indian-American for gay, and my own journey to Harvard wasn’t that different from Pete’s. He was a senior at Harvard when I was a freshman, and Pete’s “weirdness” is part of why I respected him.
Most people who go on to accomplish extraordinary things in America—or anywhere in the world—said and believed some “weird” things when judged by the standards of their day. Think of Abraham. Or Galileo.
And people who think differently also tend to be a little strange themselves. Albert Einstein refused to wear socks. Nikola Tesla had a strange compulsion about the number three. Leonardo da Vinci wrote most of his notes in mirror-image cursive. German philosopher Friedrich Schelling famously noted that “the utter lack of madness leads to another extreme, to imbecility, which is an absolute lack of all madness.”
If rejecting a “weird” idea is dubious, then rejecting a person, or an entire group of people, as “weird” is antithetical to ingenuity. It becomes a soft form of cultural repression that discourages the exploration of ideas.
Recent events offer a cautionary tale. J.D. Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, harbors a concern about our country that doesn’t top the list of concerns of our nation’s intelligentsia right now: America’s declining fertility rate. Here are the facts: Our nation’s birth rate is now down to 1.62 births per woman—the lowest in history and well below replacement rate. This will result in demographic changes of seismic proportions. Our ratio of workers to retirees will reach the crisis point of 2.5 to 1 by 2060, which will lead to an overloaded and underfunded healthcare system. Every 10 percent increase in the proportion of Americans over age 60 is projected to reduce GDP per capita by nearly 6 percent. That’s the economic equivalent of a ticking time bomb. And it’s not just an American problem. Countries like Singapore and Hungary, which have adopted aggressive pro-natal programs, have only achieved modest results—suggesting that new ideas will be required.
There’s no doubt that Vance’s proposed solutions—such as differentially taxing parents versus non-parents, or expanding the vote of parents by giving them the chance to cast a ballot for their kids—challenge contemporary norms. It’s also true that the way he’s expressed these ideas in the past was sarcastic in tone, as he’s said several times since.
I consider J.D. Vance a friend. I disagree with him on using the tax code to engineer social policy. I believe some of his pro-family ideas are good solutions, while others are not. But the last week has proven that we are unable to have that debate on the merits when we create a political culture that ostracizes the few who dare to broach conversations that others are unwilling to have. This spirit is the opposite of American exceptionalism: if you don’t care to be outstanding, then why bother standing out?
The second reason this is an anti-American charge is that it denies the possibility of national unity. Calling the other side “weird” is a 2024 version of “basket of deplorables.” Like it or not, each party in the upcoming election is almost certain to win over 70 million votes. If the central argument of each side becomes “the other side is weird,” that’s a good way to make sure that whichever side loses no longer sees itself as part of the same culture or country as the one that wins.
And it’s not hard for Republicans to level the charge of “weirdness” in return—over the left’s advocacy for biological men to compete with women in sports, for the elimination of ordinary gas stoves, or for countless other policies. The right counterargument to the left’s policies should be why they leave Americans worse off, but if Democrats stick to their newfound campaign strategy of alleging “weirdness,” Republicans are left with no choice but to respond in kind. Indeed we already are.
Republicans aren’t blameless in creating this dynamic. Not by a long shot. The core message of my Republican primary opponent Ron DeSantis was a promise to “restore normalcy” in America. Whose “normal,” exactly? That sounds a lot like a pro-mediocrity view, much as the Democrats’ charge of “weirdness” does today.
Not long ago, America was nothing more than a backwater cluster of small towns scattered along an eastern seaboard. Economically, militarily, and geopolitically, it seemed that we were destined to be nothing more than a footnote in global history. Yet the people who wrote those footnotes were deeply curious about the world they inhabited, about the history to which they contributed, confident in their ability to change every part of it for the better, and unafraid of being downright weird.
They were weird. They made America weird. That’s a legacy that made this country great—and that can make it great once more.
Worth reading at the source on The Free Press HERE.
Clipped from Racket: American Stasi: Tulsi Gabbard Confirms "Quiet Skies" Nightmare
Placed on a terror watch list, the former Hawaii congresswoman and her husband were tailed by Air Marshals and bomb dogs. "Unconstitutional on every level," she says. "And I'm not the only one."
Tuesday night, while self-styled Democratic nominee Kamala Harris pledged to defend “freedom, compassion, and the rule of law” to cheers in Philadelphia, Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard described being tracked by teams of government agents in a surveillance regime more reminiscent of East Germany than a free country. Whistleblowing Air Marshals told Uncover DC Gabbard was singled out as a terror threat under the so-called “Quiet Skies” program, and the former presidential candidate says she noticed.
“The whistleblowers’ account matches my experience,” says Gabbard. “Everything lines up to the day.”
This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes.
“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter.
“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.
That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military,’” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’
Examples of “Quad-S” boarding passes. Tulsi Gabbard’s air tickets, as well as those of her husband Abraham, were similarly marked
Gabbard goes on: “Then I said, ‘The only thing I can think of is, I work in politics.’ And he said, oh.”
The agent told her he’d encountered supporters of a certain former president who’d had no issues traveling before, but were now “marked quad-S every time they traveled.” Gabbard shrugged and slogged through, still encountering extra security. At one flight, she says, there were “at least six TSA agents doing additional screening,” along with canine support. “There were dogs in Dallas when we got there, dogs at a couple of the gates.”
She called a colleague, who told her: these things happen, don’t worry. “So I thought, ‘Maybe I’m just being paranoid,’” Gabbard says. Then she saw this past Sunday’s report in Uncover DC, a site edited by the well-known Twitter writer Tracy Beanz. Uncover interviewed Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), an advocacy association for Federal Air Marshals. Disclosing Gabbard had been placed on a domestic terror watch list, the former Marshal LaBosco told a disturbing story:
According to LaBosco… Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards.
Uncover DC said Gabbard was initially placed on the list on July 23rd, and that trios of Air Marshals first began following her on flights on July 25th. As Racket would learn, surveillance was conducted on at least eight flights, with different three-Marshal teams for each flight, part of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) “Quiet Skies” regimen that can literally surround people with human watchers. There are “potentially 15 or more TSA uniformed and plain clothes” at a gate for such assignments, LaBosco told Racket. The story about Gabbard was surfaced by two TSA whistleblowers, including one detailed to follow her. When Gabbard read this, she felt a shock of recognition.
“When I saw that, I thought, ‘Wow, okay. So everything I was experiencing was exactly what I feared was going on,’” she says.
Though clearly outraged, Gabbard stresses the important part of her story isn’t any inconvenience or insult she’s gone through.
“This is not a woe-is-me situation,” she explains. Instead, “it’s bringing to the forefront… how brazen the political retaliation and abuse of power continues to be under the Biden-Harris administration.”
The former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii’s 2nd district is far from the first American to be placed under physical surveillance as a “domestic terrorist” threat in post-9/11 America. Especially since January 6th, 2021, when the Quiet Skies program expanded to accommodate a broad effort to track people who were at the Capitol, Americans following Americans on airplanes is no longer uncommon, though the public largely has no idea of the scale of this activity.
However, Gabbard is by far the highest-profile figure to be caught up in this surveillance web. As a war veteran with no connection to J6 or any other known offense, her appearance on a terror watch list is striking, and symbolic of the way politicians and intelligence officials have turned the machinery of the War on Terror inward in the last decade. This aspect of the story galls Gabbard the most.
“I enlisted because of the terrorist attack on 9/11,” Gabbard says. “I was like a lot of Americans. We enlisted to ensure the safety, security, and freedom of the American people and go after the terrorists who attacked us. And so now to have confirmation — I guarantee there are other men and women in uniform or veterans now being targeted.
“I can’t think of a word that adequately captures how I feel. The closest I can think of is the deepest sense of betrayal.” She pauses. “It cuts to the core.”
Gabbard pointed to this summer’s release of documents from the ill-fated “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group,” an advisory panel led by former CIA chief John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Litigation filed on behalf of former Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell led to the disbanding of the group, and the production of documents identifying Trump supporters, people “in the military,” or “religious” as “indicators for extremism or terrorism.” Gabbard says this is an indication that the intelligence community is targeting people of “many stripes,” but “especially so those who still wear the uniform or who have worn the uniform.”
“IN THE MILITARY”: The Homeland Intelligence Experts Group identified soldiers as a heightened risk for domestic terrorism
Neither Gabbard nor, apparently, the whistleblowing Marshals know why the former congresswoman would be on a terror watch list. Gabbard has been a persistent, pointed critic of politicians in the current administration. The day before her reported placement on the TSA list, Gabbard appeared on the Ingraham Angleand criticized the “proxy war” in Ukraine, saying the administration was selling the public “crap” excuses for expanding its military commitment, with intent to turn Ukraine into “another Afghanistan.” A debate clash in the 2020 primary was also a factor in ending Harris’ run that year, featuring the viral line: “She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked.”
Gabbard’s account squares with LaBosco’s description of how Quiet Skies works. Surveillance, LaBosco says, is “every flight, every leg. If she has three legs that day, it’ll be nine Air Marshals. So if she does three flights in a day, she’ll have a set of Air Marshals on every one of her flights.” As for canine teams, “They maneuver over to the gate area. You will have plainclothes TSA officers, you will have uniformed TSA officers and the canine teams will be running in the gate area. They’ll have them floating around to try to pick up a scent of something.” LaBosco says these dogs are only trained for explosives, not narcotics.
What now? Gabbard, who has spoken to at least one of the whistleblowers, is reviewing possible courses of action, contacting former congressional colleagues about a possible Hill investigation. In a seemingly related matter, Empower Oversight — the firm that represented FBI whistleblowers Steve Friend and Marcus Allen as well as IRS special agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler in the Hunter Biden case — sent a letter Monday night to Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari demanding an immediate investigation in the Gabbard case. The firm represented an Air Marshal in another ugly Quiet Skies case two years earlier (see below), and though Cuffari’s IG office promised in January 2023 to investigate, there’s no evidence it ever did, making the Gabbard story more troubling.
Worse, Empower today says it’s learned that the TSA has already initiated an investigation to identify the two TSA whistleblowers who leaked “sensitive security information” in Gabbard’s case. The firm sent another letter to the IG this morning asking for help in stopping retaliation before it begins. “A retaliatory investigation that hunts for whistleblowers in order to intimidate them into silence is exactly the wrong step for the agency to take,” the firm wrote, adding that the TSA “should be investigating the abuses on which [Marshals] are blowing the whistle.” The TSA has not commented for this article.
“Quiet Skies” is a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) program for tracking “travelers who may present an elevated risk,” as well as “unknown or partially known terrorists.” It’s a signature initiative for a new vision of the federal enforcement state that, as covered in this space before, moved after 9/11 from an emphasis on making cases and building prosecutions to endless intelligence-gathering as well as “disruption” and “prevention.” In a key moment, the FBI in 2008 put out a new “baseline collection plan,” which urged agents to come with plans to “disrupt” potential “acts of violence” or other “criminal behavior.” Agents began getting credit for an internal metric called “disruptions,” which allowed them to rise without records of prosecutions or even arrests.
Because most investigations under this new system will never lead to court, agents do not have to worry about meeting probable cause standards or justifying surveillance. The behaviors may be technically permitted, even if some would consider them unconstitutional.
“It all comes under the heading of the Department of Pre-Crime,” adds Empower attorney Jason Foster, longtime Chief Investigative Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “So it’s ‘We don’t have to prove anything. We’re not going to court. We’re just following people.’”
In the wake of 9/11 programs like the TSA’s “No Fly List” and the multi-agency Terrorist Screening Center regularly made the news as the focus of controversies, with criticism often coming from Democrats. In an incident that sounds similar but in fact underscores the expansion of the scope of such programs, the late Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy was prevented from boarding planes on five occasions in 2004, apparently because a suspected terrorist was using “Anthony Kennedy” as an alias. These programs symbolized the Bush-era reflex for wide-scale screening of mostly Muslim suspects, and came to be frowned upon as racist and anachronistic. When a judge in 2019 finally declared the Terrorist Screening Database unconstitutional, voices across the spectrum cheered, “It’s about time.”
Despite the perception that terrorist watchlists are a thing of the past, they’ve actually expanded, with Clear Skies representing an aggressive new generation of watchlisting, which no longer just targets Muslims but ranges of alleged domestic offenders. Though it’s theoretically possible Gabbard’s case will prove a mistaken-identity caper à la Kennedy’s incident (“I can’t imagine what, but they might have an excuse,” a Republican House aide counseled), LaBosco insists whistleblowers waited to make sure it wasn’t an “anomaly” before coming forward. “We thought, ‘Maybe this was a mistake,’” she says. “But then, second flight, third flight… no, this is no mistake.”
Quiet Skies eats up an astonishing amount of resources: an Inspector General’s report about the program in 2019 “identified $394 million in funds that could be put to better use,” meaning nearly half the Air Marshals’ budget was being wasted. LaBosco says this is no surprise. “Think about the overtime, the vouchers, the overnight travel, the per diems. Think of all the wasted resources that we so desperately need right now… We’re not going to find a terrorist following Tulsi Gabbard. We’re not even looking for the bad guys anymore.”
Air Marshals have complained more than once about being asked to spy on Americans. The existence of the program was first exposed on July 28, 2018, when Boston Globe writer Jana Winter published an exposé: “Welcome to the Quiet Skies.” The Globe report said 30 or more people were followed every day by Air Marshals, some of whom told the paper they worried the program “may be unconstitutional.”
When Markey asked if it were true that “innocent” Americans not suspected of crimes were followed under Quiet Skies, Pekoske deflected, then said finally, “I wouldn’t use the term ‘innocent.’” The hearing also disclosed that “thousands” of Americans were in the program. Pekoske later conceded Quiet Skies hadn’t led to a single arrest, nor had it foiled any plots, a fact that is apparently still true:
Three years later in July 2021, in a story out of a Philip K. Dick novel, a Senior Federal Air Marshal with 27 years of experience discovered that his wife had been labeled a “domestic terrorist.” She was reportedly targeted for “Special Mission Coverage” for having attended the January 6th speech by Donald Trump at the Capitol, which she did not enter. When the Marshal told his supervisor, he was advised to “let it play out” as “it was not our investigation.”
Eventually, the Marshal turned to aforementioned whistleblower firm Empower Oversight, which helped him file a protected disclosure with the Office of Special Counsel. The OSC on July 8, 2021 wrote back, declining to refer the matter for investigation to the Inspector General’s office. Empower then wrote directly to the Inspector General’s office, which to date has “provided no public accounting of what it has done.” The Marshal did manage to work with the FBI to have his wife’s name removed from the terror watchlist, though this did not slow the program.
Quite the contrary, according to LaBosco, who says the program has grown “off the charts,” especially since January 6th. “They’re watching 8-year-old children. They’re following 17-year-old cheerleaders that were traveling for cheer competitions, people who lost their legs in combat… TSA is out of control against the American people.”
Gabbard’s recent political career has already been marked by bizarre attacks and harassment. A feature describing her as a favorite of the Putin government was timed to the launch of her 2020 presidential campaign, and Hillary Clinton made waves by denouncing her as a Russian “asset.” After this episode, she intends to fight back. “I’m going to be encouraging former colleagues of mine in Congress who I know are concerned about this to exercise their oversight authorities,” she says.
“These actions are those of a tyrannical dictator. There’s no other way to describe what they’re doing.”
Clipped from The Spectator: Has Donald Trump caused a vibe shift?
Suddenly, supporting Trump seems to be much more socially acceptable than before
Yascha Mounk | July 30, 2024
For the past decade, the basic lines of conflict in American public life seemed clear. Donald Trump was pitted against the establishment, the “basket of deplorables” who supported him against the elites. The reality was more complicated. Yes, plenty of rich and powerful Americans supported Trump and plenty of poorer Americans on the fringes of society were against him. But in a certain section of society the disdain for Trump was unequivocal. Among the country’s elite — at Harvard and Stanford, at Google and Goldman, near the beaches of the Hamptons and the mountains around Aspen — anyone who defied the anti-Trump consensus could expect swift consequences for their social standing.
There have been constant melodramas over this form of social ostracism. Two years ago, Alan Dershowitz — a formerly pro-Democrat lawyer who went from representing Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson to arguing a key case for Trump — complained bitterly that the Chilmark Library on Martha’s Vineyard had failed to invite him to deliver a talk to well-heeled local vacationers, something he’d done annually for decades. “I’ve been canceled, basically, by the Chilmark Library,” he lamented to the New Yorker.
Supporting Trump could also have consequences far more serious than upsetting local librarians. As the tech publication the Information recently acknowledged, it could cost careers too: “It wasn’t so long ago that being a supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in Democrat-leaning Silicon Valley — or even having a loose affiliation with him — was the kind of thing that earned you dirty looks, a pink slip from an employer and stern advice to rethink your life choices.”
Yet this seems to be changing. If a number of American commentators are to be believed, the country is undergoing an unexpected “vibe shift.” Coined in 2022 by Sean Monahan, a self-described trend forecaster, the idea of a vibe shift originated in the fashion world. It was meant to denote the confusing and often unexpected transition from one paradigm of cool to another. One day, smoking and wearing plaid shirts may be seen as fashionable but — vibe shift! — a few months later the inverse becomes true.
Of late, commentators argue, a political vibe shift is under way: suddenly, supporting Trump seems to be much more socially acceptable than before — in some elite circles, perhaps even a little cool.
Take Silicon Valley. The biggest tech entrepreneurs and the hordes of programmers and HR professionals at large firms like Google and Meta were once staunchly progressive. Yet this year, a growing number of the tech world’s rich and famous, from Elon Musk to David Sacks, the founder of a large venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, are endorsing Trump. Even longtime Democrats are suddenly on the fence; Mark Zuckerberg said he wouldn’t endorse either candidate in a recent interview, and called Trump’s reaction to the assassination attempt “one of the most badass things I’ve seen in my life.”
The transformation on Wall Street may be just as consequential. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, for example, has been outspoken in his criticisms of Trump in the past; this year, he used the annual global elite gathering at Davos to signal he’d changed his mind and intended to support Trump’s re-election bid. Dimon isn’t alone. There’s also Bill Ackman, a Democratic donor and notable hedge-fund manager. This year, he picked a series of fights with university presidents who, in his estimation, weren’t sufficiently protective of Jewish students on campuses; a few weeks ago, he announced he’s supporting Trump.
Even some celebrities from traditionally left-leaning fields are donning proverbial — or literal — MAGA hats. 50 Cent, the New York rapper, recently said “many black men identify with Trump.” After Trump’s attempted assassination, he tweeted a picture of one of his albums, featuring lyrics about being shot, with Trump’s face replacing his own. Others who’ve publicly embraced Trump include the influencer Amber Rose and singer Azealia Banks.
The vibe shift goes beyond America’s wealthy, extending to many groups once viewed as solidly Democrat. As polls show, non-white voters, especially young black and Latino men, have rapidly moved towards the Republicans. And they’re increasingly vocal in their support. Some of the most fulsome arguments I’ve heard for Trump recently came from a Puerto Rican cleaner and a Mexican-American Uber driver.
Even now, polls show Trump remains deeply unpopular among most Americans; according to a New York Times poll, about 55 percent of registered voters hold a negative view of him. But the same poll suggests the intensity of that unpopularity has diminished in recent years; the number of Americans who have a “very unfavorable” opinion of Trump has declined by five percentage points since the summer of 2022.
This isn’t a huge swing. But I wonder whether even those Americans who continue to have an unfavourable opinion of Trump have come to fear him less than before. In my own social circle, concerns over his presidency were palpable in 2016 and many actively opposed his campaign. This year, the same people think Trump is likely to win, claim they would be extremely worried about him getting a second term but shrug in embarrassed resignation when I ask what they’re doing to stop him. The dislike for Trump might run deep. But the palpable concern about what he might do — and, with it, the social taboo against his supporters speaking their mind — is diminishing.
Political scientists like to say American public opinion is thermostatic — it moves in the opposite direction of policy. It would be tempting to think the assets of the presidency — with its political power, giant bully pulpit and ability to influence a press obsessed with access — would help the incumbent move public opinion towards their own views. But presidential influence has historically done the opposite. If the incumbent is liberal, American political opinion becomes more conservative (and vice versa). This helps explain why America moved right when Barack Obama was president; why it tacked to the left after Trump’s 2016 victory; and also, perhaps, why it’s been trending in a conservative direction since Joe Biden won in 2020.
This thermostatic swing has been reinforced by Biden’s declining mental acuity. Biden remained sufficiently salient in public for voters to blame him for their frustration, from inflation to the growing influx of illegal migrants, whether he was responsible or not. But once his team felt forced to hide him away, he couldn’t defend his record. Consequently, public views on topics such as border security have moved right.
What’s more, the cultural progressivism that conquered America’s institutions, including the Democratic Party, inspired a thermostatic response of its own. This includes popular disaffection with a constant emphasis on equity; with attempts to punish anyone perceived of committing some ill-defined form of political wrong-think; and with the smug and pretentious linguistic register which characterizes much of public life today.
Take a recent example of the progressive sensibility overreach. When SpaceX successfully launched a rocket into space a few weeks ago, the New York Times responded with a breaking news alert pushed to millions of phones. Rather than celebrating the historic launch, the article attacked Musk’s company for not sufficiently protecting birds’ nests it might damage. Leaders in Silicon Valley — many of whom have long felt personally aggrieved that they have become the whipping boys of their former allies in the left-leaning establishment — were furious.
If one part of the story behind the vibe shift is about a growing rebellion against the progressive ecosystem most Democrats inhabit, another part of the story is about how Trump’s image has changed — starting with the way in which his temporary absence from mainstream platforms helped divert popular attention away from his failings.
If I had been advising Trump in January 2021, I’d have told him to go to Mar-a-Lago, stay off Twitter, give Biden a chance to screw up and let Americans forget about how much they blamed him for the violent assault on the Capitol. Trump is far too enamored with the limelight to heed such advice. But because Twitter banned him in January 2021, and major TV channels made a concerted effort not to platform him, he was effectively forced to adopt this strategy.
As the memories of Trump’s presidency recede, public revulsion at him has subsided. This process was speeded along by two sets of developments that played into his hands. First, the only judicial case against him that led to a conviction was weak. Other cases would have addressed very serious misconduct, such as his alleged attempts to pressure election officials to do his bidding. The case successfully brought by the elected Manhattan district attorney, however, used an unusual legal theory to punish him for the tawdry — but ultimately inconsequential — decision to pay a porn star he slept with for her silence.
Then there was the attempted assassination and Trump’s courageous response. After he survived, Trump shrewdly claimed he was a changed man, promising in an acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that he would demonstrate his desire to heal political divisions. The first minutes of the speech emphasized the need for national unity in tones that could have been uttered by Ronald Reagan, or even Obama.
For the next hour of the speech, however, Trump went beyond the lines on his tele-prompter, returning to soundbites that work brilliantly at campaign rallies – extreme statements and partisan barbs against opponents. In other words, Trump isn’t a changed man. And yet his position on many policy issues — which partially explain the intensity of the revulsion against him in 2016 — has softened. There have been no hostile calls to ban Muslims entering the US.
There’s a final reason why a vibe shift has been taking place — and why it could end as quickly as it began. Most Americans believed Biden was too old. Kamala Harris, who is set to succeed Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate, is also deeply unpopular. Her vulnerabilities, personal and political, are real. But she seems with it, at least. She should be better able to motivate the Democratic base and will likely spend much of her campaign prosecuting a rhetorical case against Trump. If she succeeds, claims of a political vibe shift may turn out to be premature. But that remains a big “if.”
Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris waves as she boards Air Force Two for departure from Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport (Getty)
The events of the last few days have made incontrovertible something that candid observers have known for some time now: that the word “democracy” in the maw of Democrats bears the same relation to really existing democracy that the Russian word “Pravda” bore to really existing truth in the Soviet era.
If you look it up, you’ll see that “Pravda” means “truth.” At least, that’s what the dictionary says it means. But anyone on the ground, experiencing the full-court press of Soviet disinformation knew that the newspaper Pravda deployed the word “truth” only to undermine it. It was necessary to pay lip service to the charade. Otherwise the Potemkin village that had been so carefully built up and that maintained the prevailing consensus might crumble, and who knows what might happen then?
In the beginning, a large part of the population, fired by ideological zeal, actually believed the fiction that was palmed off as the truth. As time passed and the contradictions between word and deed accumulated, however, fewer and fewer believed it, even if many continued to say they did. Eventually, the acrid stench of hypocrisy overcame all but the most committed ideologues — or the most cynical powerbrokers.
That is where we are now in the twilight of Bidendom. Everyone with eyes to see has known he is and has been a malign and senile puppet. But until his debate with Donald Trump a few weeks ago, we were all told to forget the evidence of our eyes and ears and join the Orwellian chorus that insisted he was “sharp as a tack,” “intensely probing,” etc.
Now that Biden — or someone writing over his name — has declared that he would not be running for reelection, thus clearing the runway for his DEI vice president, person-of-color Kamala Harris, the farce of Biden’s cognitive competence could be retired in favor of lo-cal encomia to his “selflessness” and public-spirited support of “democracy.”
But pay attention. What just happened is essentially an anti-democratic coup. Kamala Harris, who got no delegates — zero — when she ran for president in 2020 and was only chosen as Biden’s running mate because he had promised to pick a black woman, is on the cusp of being handed the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
Fourteen million people voted for Biden in the primaries. What about their votes? Don’t be naive. The voters don’t matter except as a matter of packaging. What matters is what the mostly unnamed Council of Elders wants. They wanted Biden when he was a useful proxy. When he ceased being useful, he was cashiered. Just today it was announced that those transcripts Special Counsel Robert Hur made of his conversation with Biden — the ones that prompted him to say that Biden was an elderly man with a poor memory who was not fit to stand trial — suddenly the DoJ found them and is about to release them. Expect a lot more where that came from.
But the real take away from this melancholy farce is that the Dems do not care a whit about democracy. They believe, as I have often observed, that “democracy” means “rule by Democrats.” In 2020 they managed the balancing act whereby they shouted “our democracy” while actually working to destroy it. They are hoping it will work again this time. The phoenix-like return of Donald Trump, together with the malevolent preposterousness of Kamala Harris, makes that exceedingly unlikely. And that, it may almost go without saying, is as reassuring a thing for genuine democracy as it is devastating for the fraud that goes under the nauseating title of “Our Democracy.”
If it happened in Belarus, Burundi, or Myanmar, Joe Biden’s blitzkrieg withdrawal from the presidential race would have inspired eye rolls. We jettisoned an incumbent president’s re-election campaign with all the pomp of an NFL practice squad transaction, announcing the move via a blip of a social media post. Only in America is anyone tempted to take such head-scratching events at face value.
Can we get a WTF? In no particular order, the five strangest things about Sunday’s shocker roster change:
WHERE IS WALDO? The most consequential decision of Joe Biden’s presidency was executed by tweetSunday, via a screenshot of a letter, posted at 1:46 p.m. There was no press conference, video, or photo commemorating any human being’s participation in the event. The letter wasn’t posted on the White House briefing room site, even as lesser news (including a statement purporting to quote Bidenat lengthon “climate pollution reduction grants”) was posted yesterday. It was furthermore written neither on presidential stationery nor under campaign letterhead and appeared rushed, thanking Vice President Kamala Harris for “being an extraordinary partner,” but not endorsing her.
In a second tweet 27 minutes later, however, @JoeBiden announced, “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.” Papers from The Washington Post to The New York Times reported Biden “wrote in a letter he posted” or “said in a statement” he was dropping out. However, we didn’t hear from any official spokesperson, not even deputy platforms director Andy Volosky (who reportedly runs Biden’s Twitter account), explaining how the announcement came to be. To say a president breaking up with America via digital post-it note is bizarre is a massive understatement.
Biden’s letter contained a lot of important informtion. It said he will “speak to the Nation in more detail later this week about my decision.” However, given defiant protestations by him and his staff about remaining in the race (comments that continued through Saturday night), it will be crucial for someonefrom Biden’s inner circle, preferably a family member, to make a public statement soon. As is, any story that puts Biden at the center of yesterday’s events is about as convincing as the “Michael Jordan cutouts move past the window” scene from Home Alone:
WHO’S IN CHARGE? After Biden’s cryptic letter came out yesterday, a slew of elected Democrats, including rumored potential candidates like Gretchen Whitmer, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, California’s Gavin Newsom, and both Bill and Hillary Clinton, all swiftly endorsed Harris. Harris instantly had her own campaign site, suggesting significant lead time and planning. Even JoeBiden.com immediately became a mirror to the Harris site, while Biden’s Twitter page was refashioned to feature a Harris 2024 banner. For all the world, it looked as if the party had unanimously decided to throw its weight behind Kamala, and well before the weekend, too.
However, Barack Obama did not endorse Harris, nor did Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, or Cory Booker. We’re being told in numerous press accounts by more “people familiar with the matter” that this is all a mere formality, and the party leaders are “firmly” and “without reservation” behind Kamala Harris. But are they? Some sources aren’t sure.
Although the top candidates seem to be publicly coalescing around Harris, I heard late last night this may be a temporary stance, held until the Democrats are sure Joe Biden’s $239 million war chest will transfer to Kamala’s hands without issue. The Republicans are preparing a legal challenge if Democrats attempt to pass on Biden’s cash, arguing the pair needed to be officially nominated before such a handoff could legally take place. “Biden can’t transfer his money to Harris because it was raised under his own name, and there is no legal mechanism,” said GOP lawyer Charlie Spies. Eugene Munin, a former General Counsel for the Chicago Transit Authority who’s worked on election law issues, said the status of the Biden funds represents a bit of a “gray area” legally. “I don’t think it’s definitive at all that she can just declare that she’s now a candidate for president and start spending that money as a candidate for president,” Munin says.
At least one Democratic consultant and several Republicans believe the fate of Harris is tied to two factors: how well the public responds to her in the next week or so, and whether or not the funds issue can be resolved quickly enough to allow her to begin aggressively advertising her candidacy. Despite the quick endorsements there have been signs of unease. Just this past Friday afternoon, Harris held a conference call for top donors to what was then still the Biden-Harris campaign. She showed up a half-hour late and said little except that they were going to win. “Everyone was pissed after the call,” one donor told the Washington Post, recalling the disastrous end of Harris’ 2020 run, also marked by internal frustrations about the future Vice President’s behavior (“I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” one Harris official wrote in a letter published by the New York Times). Rumors that have persisted since Biden’s own Hindenburg debate performance that top-level Democrats are less than thrilled with the prospect of a Harris run. The Times ran a long house editorial yesterday rejecting the idea of anointing Harris, hinting at electability issues and calling for a candidate to emerge from “process of public scrutiny” instead. Senior Democrats will watch to see how Kamala holds up under a few weeks of Internet fragging — millions are about to become introduced to the phrase “what can be, unburdened by what has been” — and then decide. How that decision is made, however, will tell us a lot about the question that matters more than anything right now: who’s America’s president right now? Obama? The Clintons? Politico’s “Why Biden Dropped Out”account claimed congressional leaders (“Chuck, Hakeem, Pelosi”) left the horse head in the president’s bed, while multiple Republican sources also pointed to Pelosi and Obama’s non-endorsements, reflecting a belief on the Trump side that the key to gauging Democratic strategy going forward will involve watching those two politicians.
The only person we know for sure isn’t currently running things is Joe Biden. Are we even sure he’s alive? The video below from July 17th is the last public sighting. Did he make it out of that car? Was there a box of cannolis on the next seat? I wish I were joking.
3. TOO SICK TO RUN, BUT FIT TO SERVE? On Friday, November 19th, 2021, Joe Biden went under anesthesia for a colonoscopy and was so insistent on keeping to protocol that he formally transferred power to Harris for 85 minutes. Pursuant to 25th Amendment procedure, Biden sent letters (on White House stationery) to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Speaker pro tempore Patrick Leahy saying, “I have determined to transfer temporarily the powers and duties of the office of President of the United States to the Vice President”:
Yesterday’s Biden letter was different. It read, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” That message suggests two possibilities, both insulting to the collective intelligence. If Biden is too unwell to campaign or even announce his withdrawal, he’s clearly not fit to serve out his term. The idea that Harris can be a more “vigorous campaigner” because “her day job is not nearly as demanding as Mr. Biden’s,” as the New York Times put it, should make any sane person’s blood boil. If Biden could actually do a “demanding” day job, he’d still be running. We’re to embrace Kamala Harris “vigorously” campaigning while the ship of state floats forward unhelmed, like the ghost ship Demeter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula? The question of who’s minding the Executive Branch while Harris stumps should be the first and last question at her every campaign appearance. All this comes a week after Biden ripped Colorado Democrat Jason Crow for raising the issue of his fitness to be Commander-in-Chief, snapping, “I don’t want to hear that crap.”
4. SUNDAY SURPRISE According to Politico’s Eugene Daniels, Biden told his “senior team” at 1:45 p.m. ET Sunday that he’d changed his mind, meaning we’re expected to believe his senior team was given one minute to consider the move. Politico also reported Biden’s inner circle was saying as late as Saturday night that the president was staying in, “no ifs, ands, or buts.” Also Saturday night, the Biden campaign was making plans for events in Georgia and Texas later this week. Even Sunday morning, i.e. yesterday, sources told Politico Biden would not consider dropping out until a planned meeting this week with Benjamin Netanyahu. There was also this piece of damage control starring senior Biden aide Anita Dunn:
Shortly after the tweet went out, Dunn convened a phone call for communications staffers, according to multiple aides. Dunn reassured staffers who’d been insisting to the press that Biden wasn’t thinking about quitting had been correct based on the information they had up until the president’s thinking changed.
Some marveled that Dunn, who told colleagues that everyone was processing the news at the same time, didn’t know about it until just before the post went out on X.
“Some marveled that Dunn… didn’t know” is journo-speak for something, but what? I’m guessing it’s either, “Sources were impressed Dunn had the balls to claim with a straight face she didn’t know Biden was dropping out,” or, “Sources thought something about Biden’s announcement had to be bent if even Dunn didn’t know until the last minute.” The detail that staffers who’d been insisting Biden had no intention of dropping out were “correct based on the information they had” is transparent ass-covering. It’s not plausible this all happened in a few minutes on Sunday.
5. SOMEONE IS LYING ABOUT POLLS The official line promoted this morning is that Kamala Harris fares slightly better than Donald Trump in national polling. “Ms. Harris trails Mr. Trump by two percentage points nationally on average, 46 percent to 48 percent,” wrote the New York Times, adding: “This is an improvement over Mr. Biden’s standing… he trailed the [sic] Mr. Trump by three percentage points in the polling average, 47 percent to 44 percent.” The paper then showed a graph of the alleged difference between Biden and Trump in key battleground states, and while far from positive, the picture doesn’t appear so catastrophic that a change of candidate would be necessary. Ten days ago, an NPR poll put Biden aheadof Trump, 50-48, and heading into this past weekend, the Guardian described the race as “nail-bitingly close.” Biden himself last week said he would only consider stepping aside if he couldn’t win, and “no poll says that.” All the coverage of how Biden was convinced to step aside, however, suggests the Democratic Party and/or the Biden campaign is in possession of poll results far worse than what is being reported publicly, including “collapsing” numbers in Virginia, which the New York Times still has as a virtual dead heat, 47-46 for Trump. Politico quoted Biden team sources as saying Pelosi’s main card to play in convincing Biden to walk would involve disclosing“Democratic polling clarifying Biden’s dire political straits,” with one source “familiar with the matter” adding:
“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way… She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”
For weeks now, we’ve been fed two different genres of poll stories. One says the world is ending, George Clooney is right, and Biden must exit immediately because he can’t win. Another altogether different type of story said that if Biden couldn’t be convinced to leave, that would be okay, because he either wasn’tfar behind or was actually gaining or winning. It looks like polls meant for public consumption are no longer even a vague match to internal party surveys. Every bit as much as wealth, reality is reserved for a few insiders now.
Clipped from The Spectator: Donald Trump’s Roosevelt moment
‘I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot’
July 14, 2024 | Juan P. Villasmil
Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 (Getty)
Donald Trump loves to repeat this famous line at his rallies: “At the end of the day, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” While his strongest supporters believe it, ever since he descended that escalator, his detractors have depicted him as a self-obsessed, egotistical megalomaniac.
After what transpired in Butler, Pennsylvania, last night, when a bloody-faced Donald Trump stood up after almost losing his life, waving his fist in the air, asking his audience to “fight,” there should be no doubt: Donald Trump has a lot of courage and the strong sense that he is fighting for a cause greater than himself.
At the Milwaukee Auditorium on October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt displayed a level of defiance that is taught in history lessons nationwide. “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” he said to his audience. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.” As the crowd gasped, the former president began unbuttoning his shirt, revealing his blood-filled undershirt. “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose,” he exclaimed.
Roosevelt then pulled out a shot-through fifty-paged speech from his coat’s pocket. “Fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through — and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.” And so he did.
The president had been shot with a Colt revolver from five feet away just after 8 p.m. Yet outside the Gilpatrick Hotel, after greeting supporters from a roofless car, a bleeding Roosevelt implored what had turned into a mob not to hurt the man who tried to end his life. “Don’t hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him,” he urged. “What did you do it for?” he asked. Without an answer, he added: “Oh, what’s the use? Turn him over to the police.”
“He pinked me,” Roosevelt said after coughing to his hand in search of telltale blood — a sign that your lungs have been injured. An accompanying medic asked the driver to take the leader to the hospital, but Roosevelt had different orders. “You get me to that speech.”
The difference here is that Roosevelt didn’t have a group of Secret Service officers jumping onto him, pushing him off the stage. The similarity is that they both stood up. They both showed courage, not mere bravery — staring fear in its face.
Trump met the occasion as if he were the Man in the Arena (with his face literally “marred in blood”). Like Teddy, he’ll live in the national memory, for years to come. A great man of history Trump now is.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is free, having struck a deal with the United States Justice Department that will credit him for time served and allow him to go home. As someone who campaigned against his detention, I’m happy for him, his wife Stella, his brother Gabriel Shipton, and the other members of his inner circle who kept the case in the public eye all these years. They deserve to celebrate today.
Despite the fact that the plea was carefully crafted to say the state never proved its case, the Justice Department’s insistence on admission to the top count of violating the Espionage Act means this will remain a sword over the heads of anyone reporting on national security issues. Governments have no right to keep war crimes secret, but Assange’s 62-month stay in prison is starting to look like a template for Western prosecutions of such leaks. For instance, former Australian army lawyer David McBride was just sentenced to five years for leaking “classified” details of offenses by Australian Special Air Service (SAS) in Afghanistan, including the planting of “throwdown” weapons near the bodies of unarmed Afghans.
No one should be confused about the reason for the Assange indictment. Although coverage today focuses on solicitation of classified documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars whose publication supposedly “endangered lives,” the Justice Department made it clear from the start that its fury centered on efforts to disclose governmental bad behavior. The Assange indictment, for instance, highlights the Wikileaks request for “Detainee abuse photos withheld by the Obama administration”:
The U.S. government is frosty about these topics for a good reason. The case record of detainees in places like Guantanamo Bay and the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan makes it clear the use of torture was far more extensive than the public realizes to this day, with one military coroner comparing the injuries of a dead Afghan prisoner to being “run over by a bus.” That’s another topic for another time, but the point is, the Assange case wasn’t just about the past. It’s significantly about the ongoing efforts to keep a lid on the extent of abuses connected to the War on Terror.
An argument can certainly be made that efforts to disclose things that are kept secret for good reasons must be punished. However, the classified nature of some of the solicited material wasn’t central to Assange’s case. The crime was soliciting “national defense information,” which can essentially be anything the government says it is. The use of the draconian Espionage Act will continue to send a message to anyone sniffing around any documents the state might find damaging, for anyreason.
Many are calling Assange’s release a stunt, designed to help Joe Biden in his campaign against Donald Trump. It’s debatable how much this helps Biden, as there will be no shortage of voices reminding the public he had a chance to make this deal three years ago. His administration’s choices (and those of Trump’s) won’t be memory-holed easily, but I do worry about the public forgetting the role of another actor: the press.
When Assange was thought of as a vehicle for scoops about the iniquity of the George W. Bush administration, reporters loved him. Once he was seen as a critic of Barack Obama or as someone who helped Trump get elected instead of Hillary Clinton, they turned, and turned hard.
A quick review of some of the more incredible things said in print over the years:
The Guardian, November 27, 2018: Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy, sources sayThis story remains the single worst piece of unredacted horseshit I’ve ever seen in a major news outlet, and that includes Judy Miller’s WMD pieces. The attempt to connect Assange to a secret Russiagate plot with the campaign of Donald Trump was based on a single anonymous source, who somehow saw something that evaded everyone else watching one of the most surveilled places on earth, the Ecuadorian embassy where Assange hid before his detention.
“A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016,” wrote Luke Harding and Dan Collyns. “Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.” Wikileaks replied that it was “willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” This story was so obviously bogus that even those outlets that were the most aggressive reporters of Russiagate nonsense wouldn’t touch it, with Politico going so far as to publish a piece by a pseudonymous ex-CIA officer named “Alex Finley” suggesting that Harding was taken in by Russian operatives.
Washington Post, May 28, 2019: “Assange is a spy, not a journalist. He deserves prison.” This gloating article by Marc Thiessen of The Washington Post gushed that, “at long last,” the “head of that enemy intelligence agency” known as Wikileaks was indicted and facing a possible 175 years in prison.
This column appeared in the same newspaper that had only just taken a long victory lap for publishing the Pentagon Papers via the movie, The Post. Here’s a section from Post coverage of the film:
“The Post” takes place in 1971 and chronicles how The Washington Post defied the Nixon administration to publish stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study about the Vietnam War.
The newspaper — along with the New York Times, which published Pentagon Papers stories and excerpts first — faces off against a Justice Department that believes publishing the information is a national security risk, a battle that ends up in the Supreme Court.
Thiessen wrote that Assange “engaged in espionage against the United States. And he has no remorse for the harm he has caused,” and insisted the difference between what Wikileaks did and the actions of a “reputable” paper is that Wikileaks “did not give the U.S. government an opportunity to review the classified information.” Lest anyone think this is just the opinion of one columnist, the Post editorial board was even more harsh than Thiessen, publishing a house op-ed saying, “Julian Assange is not a free-press hero. And he is long overdue for personal accountability.” The editorial illustration appeared to show Assange saluting Donald Trump:
Washington Post, January 5th, 2017: Julian Assange’s claim that there was no Russian involvement in WikiLeaks emailsThis one was mind-blowing. The Washington Post “fact-checked” Assange’s insistence that with regard to the DNC leaks, “our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.” Based on nothing more than the assertions of anonymous intelligence officials, they gave him “Three Pinocchios,” meaning the claim contained a “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.” As press watchdogs FAIR.org noted, it’s perfectly appropriate for journalists to be skeptical of Assange’s claims, and there was no forensic proof either way in this case, yet the Post reported the anonymous intel claims as gospel, noting that according to Brookings Fellow Susan Hennessey, “the U.S. intelligence community tends to be conservative in making public attributions.”
Bloomberg, April 11, 2019: If Assange Burgled Some Computers, He Stopped Being a JournalistTimothy O’Brien’s piece was one of many in which journalists conveniently forgot that they help sources disguise their identities all the time, and moreover that the charge that Assange offered to help Chelsea Manning conceal her identity by cracking a hash was never proven. More to the point, however, this was one of many pieces that departed from the tradition of reporters believing any story that’s true is worth doing.
Bloomberg wrote that Wikileaks and Assange “can’t shelter themselves inside the cloak of journalism and the truth” if they helped “hack” the U.S. government. “If he became a hacker and broke the law,” O’Brien wrote, “he was no longer a journalist and no longer just a messenger. He was a criminal.” Even stipulating that this particular offense did take place, this was a crazy attitude for a reporter to take, tsk-tsking Wikileaks as the criminal organization when the published leak included video of the U.S. army machine-gunning two Reuters staffers.
I had quibbles once about Assange’s “radical transparency” idea, not that I ever voiced them. As a younger reporter I wasn’t sure dumping huge caches of documents was the best way to do things. Over time however, I was convinced that the issue of secrecy and classification was a lot cloudier than officials made it out to be. I also had a disillusioning experience in the early Obama years when meeting with a federal law enforcement source about a totally unrelated finance issue, and hearing the person comment offhand that Assange was essentially a terrorist and the state should probably just blow him up. This was someone I liked. Over time I got the horrifying idea that this was the reflexive position of many in government…
Clipped from The Spectator:The Assange deal is ethically dubious
The balance sheet is probably as even as it could realistically be
June 25, 2024 | Mary Dejevsky
Stella Assange’s elation was palpable, after what she has described as a whirlwind seventy-two hours. She was speaking to the BBC in Australia, where she was waiting to be reunited with her husband, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had just been freed from prison in the UK under a three-way deal between the UK, the US and Australia.
Assange was due to travel to Australia via the Mariana Islands, a US dependency in the Pacific, where a judge was expected to accept his plea of guilty to a single charge under the US Espionage Act, relating to classified material published on his WikiLeaks site back in 2010. He was to be sentenced to “time served” — the five years he spent on remand in the UK’s top-security Belmarsh prison — and released with no further charge on the books or penalty in waiting.
In one sense, this was a deal that had been waiting to happen, ever since the involvement of Assange’s native Australia was first disclosed late last year. The legal tussle between the UK and the US had become so fraught that only a third party could realistically have cut through the tangle of conflicting interests. Australia was a logical, but also an imaginative, choice, given the Commonwealth country’s conspicuous lack of interest in the fate of its beleaguered citizen over the years.
Assuming everything proceeds as planned, Assange and his family — he has two children with Stella, born during his detention — will now start a new life in Australia, where his father and other relatives live. After twelve years in confinement, first as a fugitive in the Ecuador embassy in London, then in Belmarsh prison, he will need time to rebuild his health, and his family will need time to adjust.
None of this will be easy, but it will be a huge improvement on the likely alternatives: continuing court battles in the UK, which would leave him in prison, still without charge, or extradition to the US with the risk that he could face additional charges and many years in prison.
All that said, however, the outcome leaves a lot to be desired, as Stella, a lawyer herself, implied in the guarded nature of her initial comments. Assange’s freedom was essentially the result of a US-style plea bargain, in which the defendant pleads guilty in return for a lesser charge or sentence. The practice of plea-bargaining is ethically dubious anyway, but it is particularly so in this case, where it is highly contestable whether Assange had any charge to answer, least of all in the US.
His crime, as claimed by the US authorities, was to have published material that damaged US national security and endangered lives. This included video footage of a US helicopter crew firing on civilians in Iraq, and details from diplomatic cables that cast the US in a highly negative light.
Assange and his lawyers responded that he had been careful to redact any material that could cost lives. Their main defense, however, related to jurisdiction. Assange was under no oath of allegiance to the United States and had broken no US law. He was acting as publisher and journalist, not leaker or traitor. He was not in the US at the time, he was not a US citizen: how could the US argue that he was subject to their jurisdiction?
The distinction between publisher/journalist and leaker was another point of his defense, and elevated the case into a cause celebre for many journalists, who saw US moves to prosecute him, and the prospect of the UK agreeing to his extradition, as a test of free speech. Notably, his support from the journalistic fraternity was more vocal in continental Europe and South America — parts of the world where free speech has been restricted in living memory — than it was in the US and the UK. Although his supporters in the English-speaking world made up for their fewer numbers with their fervor.
It can also be argued that the defense of Assange was additionally complicated by the transatlantic “special relationship,” and the lop-sided nature (to many British lawyers) of extradition provisions. While the UK insists that its courts are independent of politics, it was hard to see Assange’s continuing detention as unrelated to the UK’s general reluctance to cross the US. Once the US had submitted its extradition request, the successive hearings could not but be seen in this wider context.
There were two occasions, however, when the tide seemed suddenly to turn in Assange’s favor. The first was in January 2021, when a judge accepted that Assange’s mental state placed him at risk of suicide if extradited to a US prison.
The second was earlier this year, when the High Court probed rather more deeply than might have been expected into the rights Assange would be able to exercise in the US. For instance, might prosecutors bring additional charges, once they had their quarry within their jurisdiction, and did the first amendment on free speech — a key part of Assange’s defense — apply to a non-US citizen? US equivocation on this score emerged as a crucial sticking point. Last month, the High Court ruled that Assange could mount a final appeal — which is what may ultimately have prompted the deal on his freedom to be done.
There was also a sense, both in the UK and the US, that it was time for the decks to be cleared. Assange’s continued detention without trial, going into a sixth year, was a source of some embarrassment for the UK in at least some judicial and diplomatic circles, calling into question UK politicians’ frequent preaching to other countries about human rights, independent courts and free speech.
The United States for its part, never likes to be on the losing side, and there was a real possibility, after the High Court issued its challenge on free speech, that the US could lose. However much US officials might cite the separation of executive and judicial powers, this would not be a good look for any administration, in particular for a president seeking re-election.
The agreement that Assange would accept an appearance in a US court (albeit one thousands of miles from the US mainland) and plead guilty to a crime that he and his supporters had hitherto strenuously denied, was the face-saving formula eventually found. It was an ingenious solution, even if it represented a climbdown, in legal principle, for Assange.
It should also be pointed out how rare US judicial concessions are, especially when, as in the Assange case, the US has invested so much patriotic and emotional capital in securing its desired outcome. Indeed, the former Republican vice president, Mike Pence, lost no time condemning the administration for weakness — which only confirmed how much more politically costly a court defeat would have been for the White House.
The deal nonetheless leaves a bitter taste. It is widely granted that Assange is a stubborn and prickly character, whose personal loyalty might leave something to be desired. In other words, he was not an easy individual to support, even as the causes that he came to represent — of free speech and publication of classified information in the public interest — cast him as a political prisoner.
His freedom may also have its limits. He will doubtless be barred from the US and perhaps the UK, which is where he made his life. He will go down as a spy in the US, and the question of whether the revelations he published cost lives will remain open. In the end, the balance sheet is probably as even as it could realistically be, and the diplomats and lawyers who had the imagination to pull it off deserve more recognition than they will probably ever receive.
Clipped from Public: Our Spy And Intelligence Agencies Are Out Of Control
From Berlin to Brasilia to Washington D.C., government security operatives have turned against the people
June 04, 2024 | Michael Shellenberger
Starting in 2016, United States government intelligence agencies, news media, and establishment leaders in both political parties warned of a vast Russian conspiracy to interfere in elections. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the Intelligence Community reported that Vladimir Putin had favored Trump and aided his election through Facebook ads, Twitter bots, and other means. The following year, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General appointed a special counsel to investigate allegations of Russian interference, a connection to the Trump campaign, and obstruction of justice.
Every major allegation proved to be wrong or profoundly misleading. According to every serious political scientist, Russia had no measurable influence in the 2016 elections. There was no flow of money from Moscow to Trump through a secret bank account. Russia favored Hillary Clinton for stability and continuity, not Trump, whom it viewed as chaotic. In 2019, the special counsel said he lacked evidence to charge Trump with either colluding with Russia or obstructing justice.
There’s no doubt that Russia is engaged in information warfare and has been long before its invasion of Ukraine. Nor is there any doubt that Russia would like to expand its influence over the West if not least to restore the flow of oil and gas to Western countries, which was cut off at the beginning of the war.
But there was extremely little evidence of Russia’s influence over either media or politics in the West before its invasion of Ukraine, and there’s even less today. Across the Western world, 80 to 90 percent of the public has an unfavorable view of Russia.
And yet, according to intelligence and security services, the news media, and establishment political leaders across the Western World, Russia is currently interfering in European elections by secretly bribing conservative politicians. Yesterday, the Washington Post repeated the claim, which has been made in European newspapers for months.
But neither the government agencies nor the news media have produced any evidence to support their accusations, and every single individual accused of taking money from the Russians has denied it.
That includes a German Member of Parliament, Petr Bystron, who represents the conservative AfD party and whom I interviewed by phone yesterday. Bystron, who is running for European Parliament, says there is no truth whatsoever to any of the accusations and that government intelligence agencies are accusing him because of his opposition to the war in Ukraine.
I am publishing Bystron’s interview with me below in its entirety. If evidence emerges that contradicts his claims, I will publish it.
However, there is a larger principle at stake here. People are innocent until proven guilty. Government officials who believe political candidates have broken the law must produce that evidence before making accusations.
To date, government officials have not offered any good reason for withholding the evidence. And the fact that they have not done so suggests they don’t have the evidence.
What’s more, this is not the first disinformation campaign we have seen. My colleagues and I have documented how a German publication called Correctiv spread misinformation about a meeting that discussed re-migrating immigrants back to their own countries, which members of AfD attended. Correctiv implied that the meeting and AfD’s position were secrets, which they weren’t. As such, Correctiv’s reporting, which was followed by Color Revolution-style protests organized by NGOs, was deliberately misleading.
In fact, as we reported, Correctiv, which is funded by the German government, George Soros, and Pierre Omidyar, likely served as a front group for German intelligence agencies and has engaged in counterpopulist disinformation campaigns, including against protesting German farmers, falsely claiming that they were far-right and held extremist views.
What we are witnessing appears to be establishment politicians weaponizing government intelligence agencies to interfere in Europe’s elections, with the active participation of mainstream German NGOs and news media companies.
AfD has been criticized for its positions on immigration. But this is not about politics or what you think about immigration. This is about whether we want to continue to be free people living in liberal democratic societies or whether we are willing to live under tyranny where a secret government interferes in elections. While I support the right of nations to control their borders, I do not support mass re-migration of immigrants. I support neither the AfD in Germany nor Trump here in the U.S. My commitment to journalistic independence and neutrality is such that I will not vote this year.
We in the West live in liberal democracies where our constitutions require that we, the people, control the intelligence agencies, not the other way around. As such, the weaponization of government by politicians and intelligence agencies should terrify us all.
Just because you’re not the victim in this particular case, either because you’re not European or conservative, is no reason to think that what’s happening couldn’t affect you and the people you love and care about in the future. One thing we know from past descents into tyranny is that totalitarianism is reckless, sweeping, and often random. And most people are aware of how totalitarian regimes even eat their own.
We must resist these abuses of power. That starts with further investigation. I have requested interviews with all key individuals involved in this apparent scandal, including government ministers, intelligence agencies, and the journalists spreading the accusations. My colleague Alex Gutentag and I will travel to Berlin, Prague, and other cities over the next several weeks to investigate what is happening.
Most of all, we should learn from the Russiagate hoax that started in 2016. The government intelligence agencies, news media, and establishment leaders who promoted that hoax betrayed the public’s trust, and they appear to be betraying it again. We must not let them.
Interview with German Member of Parliament Petr Bystron
Conducted by phone on June 3, 2024
Did you take money from Voice of Europe?
Never! I said this to CNN on the first day. There is nothing there.
They say there are recordings.
I want them to publish the recordings because I think it’s manipulated. One side said they had a recording of me complaining that I got the money, 30,000 euros, in Prague, and I was complaining that I don’t want 200 euro bills because I cannot spend them at a gas station. But for three years, I have been living separated from my wife, who is in Mallorca with my car, and I’m in Berlin taking the train and riding with the limo service provided by the government. I haven’t seen a gas station for three years. And a team investigated the guy allegedly distributing hundreds of thousands of euros to politicians. He was living outside of Prague in a village, not even in Prague. He had a used car he bought in Berlin from a second-hand dealer. His wife had to work in a Prague agency. He was living with his father and his wife. He was lower middle-class, not living like someone giving away hundreds of thousands in cash.
Are their accusations based on any true information?
No. It's completely faked material. Look at the list of the 20 or more people who were accused of getting money. They are all like, “What? It’s insane. Out of range.” They’re not saying, “No, I didn’t get that amount.” They’re saying, “Are you kidding me?”
If you are accused of being a Russian agent in Europe right now your life is not safe.
Who is Voice of Europe?
Voice of Europe appeared to be normal journalists. They even had some Americans working for them. They were, from my point of view, normal journalists. I gave them an interview two times: one time in Germany attending our party convention and the other time at the side of a Prague conference. They were normal: a guy with a camera and a girl with a microphone.
Did anyone from VOE ever offer you money?
No! Listen. It doesn’t make any sense. Offering money for an interview? Total crap. Nobody offers money for an interview. We all want to send the message of our party and we do it for free. The idea that Putin paid us to spread propaganda? Why would Putin pay anyone to spread their own party’s propaganda? I’m spreading AfD’s political program. It makes no sense to give anyone a bribe to do what they’re doing already anyway!
The whole point is that they are afraid. You see the polls from the EU parliament they are losing majority, and if they lose the majority in the EU parliament then there’s a real chance that the financing of this fucking war will stop. So they are accusing anyone against the war as not doing it for patriotic reasons but because we are Putin’s agents
Three days after I was accused, they accused The Freedom Party’s Herbert Kickl in Austria in the exact same way. They are using the same blueprint and the same wording in several countries. They are saying “Oh you shook hands with a Russian and now you are a Russian agent!”
And it’s effective because people are afraid of saying anything for fear of being labeled a Russian agent.
But why Voice of Europe?
It wasn’t an important publication. It was connected to Viktor Medvedchuk, the main Ukrainian opposition leader before the war. He was head of the party that was, in the polls one year before the war, the strongest party in Ukraine. It had more votes than Zelensky’s party. But Zelensky was in power, and he forbade the party. He closed four TV stations and put Medvedchuk under house arrest, illegally, in violation of Ukrainian laws. They were trying to kick him out of the country.
He was using the Voice of Europe to publish information about Zelensky’s corruption in Ukraine. Nobody was really reading it, but they were publishing it just to show him they knew he was stealing and that he had deals with the Bidens.
I am not even sure if this stupid Czech government is really an active part of this game. In my opinion, this whole thing is CIA or NATO or Ukraine secret service, but it’s all run by US and UK secret services. And the journalist with the Washington Post is very tight with the British secret service.
But it was just given to the Czech govt. This is the least popular Czech govt since WWII. Their own survey by the state on TV and only 2% believe “strongly” what the government is saying. The people hate them. They will never come to power again. The only hope of the politicians is to grab a position in some supranational organization after the elections, like something from the European Commission or the UN or something.
There was a good article by a Czech journalist [Angelika Bazalová] who did an excellent job reconstructing who was saying what and when. She discovered that one online newspaper [Deník N] was receiving government information in advance and that it was a prepared campaign. The newspaper even published an article quoting a tweet from the Czech Secret Service, but the Secret Service didn’t publish it until eight minutes later.
I read the article and I read Czech, and in between the lines, she says that this all is built on the Der Spiegel article, saying, “We have anonymous sources from the government saying they have heard recordings.” Der Spiegel says that their sources were given the name Petr Bystron. But the Czech secret service said, “No, there was nothing from Petr Bystron.”
Der Spiegel was involved from the beginning. They played the story back and forth like ping-pong with the Czech media.
Did you make a secret trip to Belarus?
That is a lie that came from Correctiv.
Here is what happened. I am a foreign policy speaker of my party. I wanted to make an official trip to Belarus. The normal procedure is to ask the Bundestag and they said, “No. You can go to Russia and Belarus, but not on the Bundestag budget, under your party.”
So I did official travel to Latvia on the Bundestag budget, but immediately after Latvia, I paid for Belarus from the party budget. You always have to write a report, and it’s not published, but it’s there. Correctiv went to the Bundestag, and they said, “We have no report of his trip.”
Clipped from Rackett: We Called It: Karine Jean-Pierre Blames AI "Deepfakes" for Joe Biden's Real Infirmity
Last week, Racket showed an intelligence-crafted game blaming AI for suggesting "one of the candidates may have dementia." Yesterday, Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre played that exact card
June 18, 2024 | Matt Taibbi
CHEAP FAKE OR DEEPFAKE? The White House played a clever game of propaganda telephone
On the last America This Week, Walter Kirn and I introduced “HAIWIRE,” a game for training intelligence professionals to respond to AI-created information crises. One of the cards in this Dungeons & Dragons-style game read, “An easy-to-use voice model helps create a viral video suggesting that one of the candidates may have dementia”:
Developed by In-Q-Tel, the venture capital armof the Central Intelligence Agency, HAIWIRE was ostensibly designed to help officials role-play responses to AI-generated hoaxes, but it read more like a catalog of messaging proposals. It was therefore shocking to learn White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre literally played the above MIND GAMES card yesterday, suggesting provably real videos of an infirm and confused president Joe Biden were “cheapfakes” and “deepfakes”:
I’ll come back to HAIWIRE in a moment, but first, a few details about the incredible official public relations response in recent days to real video of Biden’s decline:
The president last week traveled to Europe, among other things to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day. It was a mess. The Biden brain at this point is a cave filled with cannibals, girls in bobby socks, West Point cadets, and cut electrical wires, and when one of these residents gets shocked, a neurological order seems to flash behind his eyes. In the space of a week he wandered in the wrong direction during a G7 parachute exercise, appeared to try an NFL-style celebratory head butt with the Pope, then had a creative thought mid-memorial service while standing with President Emmanuel Macron that led to a scene straight out of the Three Stooges:
On June 11th the Washington Post ran a piece called “How Republicans used misleading videos to attack Biden in a 24-hour period.” As this site has been warning for some time, the new Urgent Reason our intelligence and enforcement betters will say we need information controls for the 2024 election season has been pre-determined to be AI “deepfakes.” But since there was no AI distortion in any of these (or several other viral episodes), the Post deployed the term, “cheap fakes.” This is the AI version of the deceptive Homeland Security moniker “malinformation,” which is true but politically undesirable. A cheap fake is real video that may “misrepresent events simply by manipulating video or audio, or by leaving out context.” It’s been in the anti-disinformation vocabulary for years, but the Post brought it out on the big stage:
“CHEAP FAKES” in the Washington Post
The Post argued that demented-Joe videos coming back from Europe were deceptively edited. In one, Biden appeared to be escorted out of the D-Day event by wife Jill before the end of the ceremony, which one doesn’t see often, but the Post explained: “In reality, Biden, who arrived at the event before Macron, had already greeted the veterans and was leaving the ceremony at its conclusion to attend another scheduled memorial event.” (The passage, oddly, appeared sourced to nothing but “an examination of video feeds.”) In another video that seemed to show Biden sleeping — the type of video I never show because I’d fall asleep at a lot of this stuff — the Post wrote:
A further examination shows that Biden closed his eyes briefly while listening to live translation of the D-Day ceremony — the translation device in his left ear could not be seen in the shortened clip. The president opened his eyes shortly after the edited clip ended, and there was not evidence that he slept through portions of the Normandy events.
In other words, Biden wasn’t asleep, but concentrating on a translation coming in via an earpiece that manipulators failed to tell audiences about. That is the extent of the “fake” in that video, unless you want to count the idea that he eventually opened his eyes.
It’s no secret that people looking to dunk on President Wandernuts will edit clips in an ungenerous way. But listen to how even this dubious Post story was laundered by White House official Jean-Pierre in a question about Biden’s performance:
This is something coming from your part of the world… cheap fakes and misinformation. And I’ll quote the Washington Post where they wrote about this and they said how “Republicans use misleading videos to attack Biden in a 24 hour period…” Ironically, several recent cheap fakes actually attacked the President for thanking troops, for thanking troops. That is what they’re attacking the President for both in Normandy… We’re seeing these deep fakes, these manipulated videos, and it is again, done in bad faith.
“Misinformation” is another term that’s undergone a sneaky makeover. While “disinformation” was an intelligence-themed word meaning deliberately incorrect propaganda (often pushed by a nation-state), “misinformation” has always carried the connotation of false, inaccurate, or wrong information, just of a type that may be transmitted unintentionally. Now, misinformation is often defined as false “or misleading” information, which is how Jean-Pierre is able to call unaltered video “misinformation.”
It got worse, however, when Jean-Pierre dropped in “we’re seeing these deepfakes.” In this way, “manipulated” or ungenerously edited videos became, in the words of the White House spokesperson, deepfakes. Not true-but-unkind, but outright deceptions, intentional digital lies. The staccato use of the meaningless term cheap fake is what made this remarkably dishonest switch possible.
It’s been clear for a while that “deepfakes” would soon be evoked as a national security threat. A drumbeat of scare stories about “deepfakes” and AI dates to early this year. FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress in February that new AI methods would require a “combat-tempo response” by the Bureau and “other US intelligence and security agencies” this year; CNN reported the White House held a deepfake exercise in December; NPR just over a week ago quoted the Director of National Intelligence and an Atlantic Council analyst warning of AI-driven efforts to erode support for Ukraine and overhype immigration fears; the Brookings Institute highlighted efforts of states like Indiana to ban “fabricated” media; and so on.
The game Walter and I discussed on the last America This Week, HAIWIRE, was developed by the CIA’s VC arm just in time for the crisis Chris Wray claims will require a “combat-ready” response. It’s become increasingly clear that officials like Wray plan to use fear of an AI-generated catastrophe — a “HAIWIRE” — to green-light more stringent information control and/or censorship programs. Anyone who grew up in the eighties or nineties will recognize the Dungeons & Dragons-inspired game style, right down to the use of a goofy-looking ten-sided die to decide outcomes. As noted in America This Week, if you roll the In-Q-Tel symbol, your “HAIWIRE” is averted, i.e. if you roll CIA, you win:
This HAIWIRE deck is no scoop. As I’m learning often happens, the game was made public, in this case via a GitHub address, but it was not exactly announced. At least one other journalist spotted the link before I did.
The instructions read: “HAIWIRE is a state of chaos in which your algorithmic decision-making system has caused harm to human beings, and continues to have consequences.” Teams of information professionals draw “incident cards” of varying seriousness — red for grave, yellow for medium-serious, green for survivable — and then draw “inject” cards that add complications to the decision-making of information-management teams. The idea is to come up with a plan to avoid “HAIWIRE” within two minutes.
In-Q-Tel did not respond to queries, so one can’t draw too many conclusions about the game’s purpose, except to say that like the “MIND GAMES” card above — indicating that AI deepfakes could be used to suggest “one of the candidates may have dementia” — are extremely interesting. Another card suggested “AI-driven election forecasts” could be “wrong” and leave voters with the impression that swing states are “safe” for one party this November:
HAIWIRE card topics suggested someone has been reading the news lately:
A great many of the incident cards involve interruptions to vote counting that role-players will have to find ways to explain. Events include an AI-caused “halt in vote counting,” corruption of voter data in “thirty states,” the sudden appearance of AI-created obituaries for “still-living minority voters,” a delay in delivery of absentee ballots, and more. Shown the game, one former military intelligence official who was a source on Twitter Files stories said, “It certainly shows where their heads are at.”
These games are nothing new. NATO last year came up with a game called “Debunk Twister,” which mainly seems to train officials in how to argue for missions in places like Ukraine, while teaching responses to “myths” like, NATO PROMISED RUSSIA IT WOULD NOT EXPAND AFTER THE COLD WAR.
Meanwhile, numerous information security contractors have come up with HAIWIRE-type games over the years, sometimes as promotional exercises. In 2020, Black Hills Information Insecurity put out an openly D&D-inspired game called, no kidding, Backdoors and Breaches. “Backdoors” contains its own sad take on an “inject” card in which “Legal” takes away the firm’s best incident response professional for “very important reasons,” forcing Your Team to step up. This anticipated HAIWIRE’s own enticing windows into the kinds of things that may go wrong at such info-tech firms, including cards about accidental “loss of human life” and injury to “adorable toddlers”:
The infuriating thing about the propaganda-as-gaming movement is that grownup, serious technology already exists in the private sector to quickly identify actual foreign intelligence bots. However, the U.S. has repeatedly shown it will not deploy such simple solutions until it’s forced to. As we saw in the Twitter Files, during the Russia scares of 2016 and 2020, companies like Twitter already had working systems for identifying suspicious accounts and limiting their reach before bodies like the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded they open their doors to military and defense analysts.
Now, once again, we’re already in too much of a contracting boondoggle for anyone to risk actually solving the problem. Additionally, our White House is just one actor that’s already shown it can use having an AI deepfake excuse handy to explain unpleasantly “deep” reality. Beware press flacks warning of deepfakes, as they themselves may be the biggest fakes of all.
Clipped from The Spectator: The left-wing plot to delegitimize SCOTUS
Democrats call it a ‘court in crisis’ after bogus attacks
June 19, 2024 | Amber Duke
Left-wing activists are working overtime to smear the conservative majority on the Supreme Court in a blatant attempt to undermine rulings coming out of the nation’s highest court. They attempted to stop Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination with dubious, vague and uncorroborated sexual assault accusations. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was painted as a Catholic extremist — Senator Dianne Feinstein declared during her confirmation hearing that “the dogma lives loudly in you” — and her husband was targeted with a Rolling Stone article that charged him with the crime of... being a lawyer. Justice Clarence Thomas has fended off a series of ProPublica investigations that imply he has ruled more conservatively on cases because of his friendship with billionaire Harlan Crow. Justice Samuel Alito is the latest to be in the crosshairs; the left first went after him for flying an American flag upside down amid a spat with nasty neighbors, and the latest non-troversy is a series of conversations he had at a public event that were secretly recorded.
Lauren Windsor, a self-identified “independent journalist” who surreptitiously records conservatives while pretending to be one of them, was responsible for the leaked tapes. Windsor has a history of dropping secret recordings of top conservative and Republican figures, which are never the bombshells she paints them as. Take the slate of tapes involving Alito. The justice, openly a conservative Catholic, confirms that he believes America would be better off if more people were religious. This might surprise you, but Supreme Court justices are allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion and are allowed to think that doing so might be good for others. Unfortunately, the Catholic justices on the bench are subject to prejudice related to historical anti-Catholic bias in America, which rested on the idea that Catholics have outside loyalties (namely to the Pope) that prohibit them from properly serving their country.
When asked about the political divide in America, Alito responds simply that things probably won’t get better until one side or the other wins out as there are some things that are impossible to compromise on. In a separate recording from 2023, Windsor pushes him to point to say that the Supreme Court has a role in healing this divide; instead, he affirms that the court’s role is to decide cases, not to play politics. Scandal!
Windsor neglected to characterize any of the recordings honestly, providing helpful bait for anyone who declined to actually listen to her tapes or dishonest left-wing activists who don’t care what Alito actually said. “Justice Alito admits lack of impartiality with the left,” Windsor said on her X account, adding in interviews that it was concerning what he was willing to admit to a stranger. What he was willing to admit? More like Alito behaved agreeably with someone who was probing him at a public event and, even then, didn’t say much of anything.
Nonetheless, Democrats have seized on the latest round of attacks. President Joe Biden warned that he needs a second term in office because if Trump is elected he will “appoint two more” Supreme Court justices “flying flags upside down.” Biden of course has also done everything possible to skirt SCOTUS telling him he does not have authority to forgive student loan debt. Democratic senator Chris Murphy described the court as being in “crisis” and said it is “brazenly corrupt” and “brazenly political.” Many have called for Thomas and Alito to recuse themselves from cases related to January 6 as former president Donald Trump seeks presidential immunity. The Supreme Court introduced new ethics rules in 2023, the first time this was done in the court’s history. Others would like to see the conservative justices removed entirely.
There is obvious hypocrisy at play when the crowd who accuses “extreme” or “ultra MAGA” of undermining democracy and American institutions openly attempts to delegitimize the Supreme Court. But it seems to be a very predictable reaction from the left as they are used to controlling institutions and tend to lash out when they lose. The draft Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was likely leaked from a liberal clerk or justice to put pressure on the conservative justices to change their opinion. In the aftermath there were arguably illegal protests outside of SCOTUS justices’ homes plus a thwarted assassination attempt. In response to a decision striking down an ATF rule that improperly reclassified semi-automatic guns equipped with bump stocks as “machine guns,” liberal activist groups accused SCOTUS of having “blood” on its hands.
The left is also likely gearing up for a second Trump term in which lawfare and legal harassment are two of the biggest tools they have to thwart his agenda. An article in the New York Times revealed that the anti-Trump “resistance” is already preparing for a Trump win in November by drafting potential lawsuits to policies they oppose, particularly on immigration. They can likely tie his administration up in court — but for their grand plan to be successful, they need a Supreme Court without a conservative majority.
What the Pope really thinks about frociaggine in the Vatican
‘Francis clearly understands that the Vatican is structurally gay,’ says Frédéric Martel
June 14, 2024 | 11:52 am | Clipped from The Spectator
Pope Francis this week apologized for decrying the “frociaggine” — or “faggotry” — in the Vatican and in Catholic seminaries for the second time in a matter of weeks. On Tuesday in a private meeting, Francis mentioned the “air of faggotry” in the Vatican, which followed his May 20 comment that “nella chiesa c’è troppa aria di frociaggine” — “in our Church there is too much of an air of faggotry.”
The Spectator reached out to Frédéric Martel, an anchor at Radio France, a professor at the ZHdK University in Zurich and the author of twelve books, including In the Closet of the Vatican, his explosive New York Times bestseller about the widespread hypocritical homosexual behavior rife in the higher echelons of the Church. Martel offers his response on the reasons behind the Pope’s recent remarks.
MM: Pope Francis has caught a lot of media attention with his assertions that “nella chiesa c’è troppa aria di frociaggine” (“in our church there is too much of an air of faggotry”) and “in Vaticano c’è aria di frociaggine” (“in the Vatican there is an air of faggotry”). What do you make of his repeated use of this specific controversial word?
FM: In my opinion, the Pope spoke both in error and in the truth. In error, because he uses the pejorative expression “aria di frociaggine” which denotes, on his part, his age (eighty-seven), which does not help him to understand the importance of the gay question in 2024 and a difficult relationship with gay activism. I don’t think Francis is homophobic — some of his personal assistants in Buenos Aires and Rome were gay — but he has a real unease with those who use the fact of being gay to defend an LGBT agenda or gender studies.
To understand the Vatican, we must always remember that popes, cardinals and bishops, often very old, have a relationship to homosexuality that dates back to their adolescence and when they were young men: that is, homosexuality as it was in the 1930s (for Benedict XVI), in the 1950s (for Francis), in the 1960s at the latest for most cardinals and bishops. In fact, their idea of homosexuality dates from before Stonewall, when homosexuality was illegal in most countries, a taboo and an evil that had to be understood, including for oneself, by choosing chastity. This is the key to homosexuality in the Catholic Church.
At the same time, Francis is right too, because he clearly understands that the Vatican is structurally gay. It’s not a matter of a lobby or a network, but of sociological rule: the Church has long recruited mainly homosexuals and has gradually, through many channels, pushed aside heterosexuals who leave to marry or are marginalized because of a clearly homoerotic environment. I lived regularly for four years in Rome and the Vatican to write my book, and this “aria di frociaggine” was evident.
MM: Do you think his use of “frociaggine” can be mostly attributed to him being from an older generation, or are there other explanations (for example, if it’s a word that would likely only be used by closeted gay men, or another specific sub-community)?
FM: While we can think that Popes Paul VI or Benedict XVI had homosexual tendencies and desires, though probably remaining chaste, nobody can think that Francis is gay. On the contrary, he’s a heterosexual who’s both rather gay-friendly (although here he’s been very changeable in his ideas on the topic) and very reserved about the Vatican’s gay omnipresence. I don’t think Francis has a problem with gays per se, but he’s very reserved about gay activism. He likes discreet gays, let’s say “in the closet.” Not those who militate for or against the gay cause, while being gay. That, to my mind, is the key to his repeated remarks.
FM: Francis was asked about my book. He replied that he had read the book, found it “good” and added “I knew all that.” I also know that he commented on my book with several cardinals and bishops who reported it to me, in particular my chapters on Cardinals Burke, Sodano, Ruini and Muller. His main enemies…
To understand the Pope, and his repeated recent remarks, we must do some counterintuitive work. I do not believe that Francis is only criticizing gay domination in the Vatican — the majority of priests, bishops and cardinals have homosexual tendencies even when they are chaste in Rome — but above all the fact that his opposition is very largely gay. Like Benedict XVI, he knows that Cardinals Casaroli and Sodano — John Paul II’s two secretaries of state and the Pope’s true prime ministers — had very active homosexual practices and that they recruited mainly gays into the hierarchy of the Vatican. Cardinal Sodano covered all the major cases of sexual abuse (Marcial Maciel in Mexico, Karadima in Chile, Hans H. Groër in Austria, McCarrick in the US etc.), with the support of Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, private secretary of John Paul II, for more than twenty years. Francis knows all this.
But more importantly, he understood — and this is the main thesis of my book — that his ultra-conservative opposition which reproaches him for his ideas on the ordination of women, the end of celibacy for priests or his pro-gay statements, was composed mainly of active or unchaste homosexuals. This deeply revolts him. He adopted the sociological rule from my book: “the more homophobic a cardinal is in public, the more likely he is to be homosexual in private.” This is, to me, the key to Francis’s remarks on “an air of faggotry.”
MM: The Pope was specifically speaking about the “air of faggotry” in seminaries and whether gay men should be admitted to the priesthood. Are these two comments part of his longstanding criticism of the morality or hypocrisy of his cardinals in the Vatican — or in the Catholic Church writ large?
FM: I think so. I believe that Francis has been quite consistent from the start: recognition of the right of individuals to live their sexuality as they wish; acceptance of civil unions; refusal of gender studies and gay marriage; denunciation of homophobic cardinals who are almost always the most homosexual in their private lives. That’s his strategy.
I believe that Francis knows, deep down, that there is no solution for the Church if it wants to get out of cases of sexual abuse, if it wants to refill the seminaries and curb the problem of vocations, and stop the homophobia of the college of cardinals, than to authorize the ordination of women, the acceptance of marriage for priests and the recognition of homosexuality within the Church. But he did not go through with this revolution because the college of cardinals did not let him do so. And because he is an old and weakened Pope. His successor might do this and the main wish of Francis is to encourage the arrival of a true reformer.
MM: How would you characterize the factionalism in the Vatican — and the wider Catholic Church — over the issue of gay priests and how they should conduct themselves?
FM: Most heterosexual cardinals — Matteo Zuppi and Juan José Omella: for example – there are very few of them — are rather gay-friendly and they think that the Church must move away from its obsession with sexual matters. Homosexual cardinals are the most anti-gay: they campaign for chastity and refuse the ordination of women. They prefer to stay among themselves in their homoerotic bubble, out of sight. Francis “outed” them.
MM: What changes have you seen, or have sources informed you of, on the issue of gay men in the priesthood in the five years since your book came out?
FM: The problem of homosexuality in the Vatican has been the main problem of the Catholic Church in recent years. And since it’s a structural and sociological question, nothing has really changed. When you are homosexual in a small Italian or Spanish village and you do not accept this particularity, or are a closeted homosexual, you choose the priesthood. A heterosexual no longer makes this choice today because no one can live chastity in happiness in 2024. Heterosexuals who give in to it are either sick — and this leads to sexual abuses — or rare specimens without sexuality. As for gays, they accept heterosexual celibacy and find themselves among men. They can dress in women’s clothes, sing with a high voice and live their sexuality discreetly. Hence an “air of faggotry.” The expression is not beautiful; but it’s the absolute truth.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom must veto legislation that would promote sex science denialism (Getty Images)
Democrats Deny Basic Biology In Push To Change Gender Of Children
Governor Gavin Newsom’s allies have passed legislation to block schools from telling parents when their kids think they’re the opposite sex
Clipped from Public
For the last 30 years, Democrats have attacked Republicans and others as science deniers. They have pointed to skepticism about climate change, evolution, and the history of life on Earth as proof that Republicans are in the grip of a pseudoscientific religion.
But now it’s Democrats who are denying science. In California and across the United States, Democrats are demanding that schools teach children that they can change their sex. They say that boys can become girls, and girls can become boys through the magic of language. You’re a girl if you say you’re a girl, and vice versa, many Democrats believe.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with boys playing with dolls and girls playing with trucks. Very few people are truly “gender-conforming” if we define gender as stereotypes from the 1950s.
But I have a real problem with taxpayers funding schools to teach the pseudoscientific idea that there are more than two sexes and that they can be changed. There is no debate over this question. No amount of magic words, drugs, or cosmetic surgery can turn a boy into a girl or a girl into a boy. This is basic biology.
What’s happening is much more horrible than most people realize. Democratic Senators in California, including the main allies of Governor Gavin Newsom, not only want to teach sex science denialism in schools, they want to prevent schools and teachers from informing parents if their children start to believe that they are actually the opposite sex.
Just imagine for a moment what Democrats are proposing. They’re demanding that schools, on the one hand, teach basic human biology, which starts with the fact that there are two human sexes. Then, just minutes later, the very same schools are supposed to teach children that they can change their sex. Or that they might have been “born into the wrong body.” Whatever that means.
Now you might be thinking: what harm is there in a boy identifying as a girl and vice versa? Well, according to the best available science, there’s a lot of harm in it. Convincing children into thinking they were born into the wrong body and that they can do something to their bodies to change their sex has resulted in one of the worst medical mistreatment scandals in human history.
Children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults are being sterilized and losing their sexual function through drugs and surgeries. And according to a major scientific review by the British government that came out a few weeks ago, the first step down that road is the so-called “social transition” that schools encourage with their sex science denialism.
Every nation in Europe is moving away from so-called gender medicine because it’s not medicine. It’s mistreatment. And many of the victims are gay, anxious, autistic, or simply bothered by the experience of going through puberty.
The right way to deal with all of this is through cognitive behavioral therapy and “watchful waiting,” not promoting the delusion that anyone is “born into the wrong body,” much less blocking puberty, giving children testosterone or estrogen, or God forbid cutting into their bodies.
Nobody is born into the wrong body. We are all just born the way we are born. Yes, some people are attracted to people of the same sex. Fine. That doesn’t make them the opposite sex. It just makes them gay or bisexual.
What’s worse, many teachers and schools are promoting this pseudoscience. And so Democrats are proposing not only that schools miseducate children, they want to hide what they’re doing.
There is plenty of blame to go around for this awful state of affairs.
Lesbian and gay rights groups should have closed up shop after they won same-sex marriage rights instead of pushing trans pseudoscience. They raised billions of dollars, including millions from the pharmaceutical companies that sell puberty blockers and hormones for kids, to promote sex science denialism.
The news media and corporate America have not only promoted trans pseudoscience, they’ve celebrated it. They have demonized those who have stood up for science and for the right of children to go through puberty as somehow mean or “transphobic.”
The only thing we should be phobic of is the Democrats’ attack on science and childhood. Science deniers have taken over the Party.
Governor Gavin Newsom must veto the legislation that the Senate just passed. California Democrats, including gubernatorial hopefuls Rob Bonta, Javier Becerra, and Eleni Kounalakis, must denounce it.
As for scientists and journalists, we stand up for basic biology. After years of denouncing flat earthers and other science deniers, the defenders of science and truth must defend the basic science of sex. It’s a binary. There are only males and females. And no amount of drugs, surgeries, or magic words can change that.
Worth reading and listening in full at Public here.
Clipped from The Free Press: Stop Saying Florida Isn’t Safe for Gay People. It’s Fine.
My local haunt in Pensacola lets you smoke inside. Gay bars in New York will charge you 18 bucks for a gin and tonic. That’s real oppression.
River Page | June 11, 2024
Last weekend I got drunk at my local gay bar in Pensacola, Florida. Inside, some drag queens were hosting a “hot body” contest; the title went to a roided-out white guy, or so I heard. The room was so crowded, I fled outside. There, I heard a lot of gossip about one acquaintance getting strung along by another—plus a variety of opinions on the latest episode of RuPaul’sDrag Race. Over cheap drinks and endless cigarettes, a million gay proclamations were made over a million gay subjects, but never once was the name Ron DeSantis uttered. As the night marched on and the crowd marched out, Grindr notifications chirped alongside the crickets underneath the patio. It was Friday night at a Florida gay bar and the only thing people were afraid of was going home alone.
This is what gay life in Florida is actually like. But the chasm between reality and the media narrative is so wide I suspect we’ll soon hear that Republicans want to throw drag queens down it.
Case in point, earlier this month, Axios released an article titled “Why Florida is America’s least gay-friendly state”—the latest in a litany of reports documenting the supposed horrors faced by gay and trans Floridians, who, activists claim, are living under “genocidal terror.” Last year, TheWashington Post profiled families who feel they have no choice but to “flee” the state, while the Human Rights Campaign, one of the country’s largest LGBT organizations, issued a “Travel Advisory” warning people of the supposed dangers of visiting Florida. The NGO’s president claimed: “LGBTQ+ people in Florida are finding themselves in a state of emergency every single day.”
The trigger for all this rhetoric has been a series of laws passed under DeSantis. The most famous (or infamous) is the 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” bill (officially, the Parental Rights in Education Act, House Bill 1557), which people have interpreted as a ban on teachers talking about issues of gender identity and sexual orientation, from kindergarten to third grade.
When it first passed, there were panicked headlines criticizing it as “cruel and spiteful”—but also a lot of confusion around what the law meant, because it used the words instruction and discussion interchangeably. This led some people to believe that, for example, the law might prevent gay teachers from keeping photos of their spouse on their desks, or force teachers to ignore or silence students who discuss their own sexual orientation or gender identity, or that of family members.
The bill’s sponsors always denied this, and earlier this year, in settling a lawsuit, the state emphasized that the legislation would not stop teachers or students talking about their own or others’ identities, and discussions of homosexuality or transgenderism in the context of fictional characters and historical figures is fine. The settlement also clarified that teachers would not be prohibited from sponsoring LGBT clubs, displaying “safe space” stickers, or intervening in cases of homophobic or transphobic bullying.
Essentially, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill is a “Don’t Teach Lessons on Gender Theory” bill. In other words, the nickname “Don’t Say Gay” comes from a political framing of the issue, although I suppose the bill’s real name, “The Parental Rights in Education Act,” does too.
But it’s likely many people, including gay teachers, still have misconceptions about the bill’s scope because of how it was portrayed in the media. Perhaps this is what Florida Republicans wanted when they chose to write it so vaguely. If so, critics may have accidentally helped them achieve their goal by wildly (if not unreasonably) speculating about the law’s overreach.
There was a similar knee-jerk panic in the media last May, when DeSantis signed a bill banning children from “sexually explicit adult performances,” which many interpreted as drag shows. Multiple headlines declared that Pride events were being “canceled” in parts of the state as a result. But the truth isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds: organizers in St. Cloud, a small town outside Orlando, chose to cancel a Pride event because they thought it would be “unsafe,” citing a number of new laws “that target the LGBTQ+ community,” which they claim had “created climate of fear and hostility.” Organizers of Port St. Lucie Pride also canceled their parade, and said they were “working with the city to assure our safety.” But the vast majority of events went on, including in my city of Pensacola. Besides, you can’t cancel Pride: people will celebrate it whether there are formal events or not.
Still, canceling local events did mean some gay people in Florida missed out. This isn’t the end of the world—in my experience, Pride is mostly just an excuse to day-drink—but it is unfortunate. Any concerns over drag queens being hauled off in handcuffs (or whatever people were imagining might happen) were quickly proven to be overhyped—federal courts promptly blocked the anti–sex performance bill, on the basis it was “unconstitutionally vague.”
At the same time, not many activists amplified the fact that last January, Florida joined states like California in banning the “gay panic” defense, where someone who assaults a gay or trans person can say they did it because their sexual advance was shocking.
The DeSantis administration also tried to ban trans people from using Medicaid to pay for transitions (this ban was overturned in court); and tried to ban trans teachers from using pronouns that align with their gender identity (also overturned, on free speech grounds). Most recently, a change in Florida state policy made it impossible for trans people to change their gender on their driver’s license, though this policy is unlikely to become law. You can still change your gender on your birth certificate.
So yeah, it looks like DeSantis is trying to make life difficult for trans people, which sucks—but he’s not having as much success as activists are trying to make out. And what NGOs like the Human Rights Campaign don’t really want to admit is that the restrictions that have succeeded are not actually universally rejected by the gay community.
For instance, plenty of gay Floridians are uncomfortable with the medical transitioning of children and aren’t losing any sleep over the state’s ban of the practice. In private conversations, I have heard gay men who were very effeminate as boys worry that, had they been born in a different generation, they might have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and set on a path to medical intervention they would later regret. Many people who were “gender nonconforming” as children simply grew up to be gays or lesbians.
And there are plenty of gay—and even a few trans—people who are concerned that trans women might have an unfair competitive advantage in sports. (Famous examples include lesbian tennis legend Martina Navratilova and trans former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner.) There are also plenty of people in the community who think it’s reasonable to require that anyone seeking to transition—to permanently alter their bodies—has to see a doctor in person, instead of getting hormone pills over Zoom.
And without getting too deeply into the LGB vs. T argument, none of these restrictions is a smoking gun that Florida is unfriendly to gay people.
DeSantis is petty, it’s true. This year, he resorted to banning bridges from lighting up in rainbow colors for Pride. Is this “bad”? Sure. Does it scare me? No. I feel the same way about some Florida schools banning books with gay or trans characters, though this doesn’t directly correspond to state law. Where I live, in Escambia County, some local busybodies got a book about gay penguins banned from the school library. This is the deep South. There are always going to be conservative Christians who go to school board meetings and complain about gay penguins—even in a city where, for decades, every Memorial Day weekend, upward of 200,000 gay people attend a Pride Month kickoff at the beach, including this year, without incident.
To me, nothing good will come of telling gay people in Florida they should be scared. Most of my friends here are gay, and none of them have ever expressed any fear over living in the state. When I asked my husband, who grew up in Florida, if he had ever felt unsafe here because he’s gay, he said “No.”
When I asked him what he thought about the “anti-LGBT laws,” he replied: “There’s more than one?”
He was aware of the “Don’t Say Gay,” bill, and thought it was bad. But he also thought it stopped teachers from talking about their gay spouses in school (because that’s what lots of people assumed two years ago), which it doesn’t.
In general, the Florida gays in my life seem to be aware—with varying degrees of specificity—that anti-gay or anti-trans political developments are unfolding in the state, which they find troubling. But how troubling? I’ve known these men for years and this was the first time we’d ever discussed any of these policies.
That said, I’m sure there are gay people in Florida who do feel terrified—probably those who are highly online, susceptible to media narratives, or have very few gay friends who they can see going about their lives unbothered.
Activists might think they’re helping when they throw around words like genocide, and the media may think it’s helpful to warn people that Florida isn’t “gay-friendly.” But what they’re actually doing is amping up the hysteria.
DeSantis and co. are fighting a culture war—but it takes two to tango. LGBT activist groups like the Human Rights Campaign are using the same tactics: DeSantis runs off fear, the media runs off fear, and so do NGOs. All of them benefit from an alternative reality where people like me are living in terror. Pretending that gay and trans people are less resilient than we actually are is both insulting and dangerous—if you tell people to panic, it’s more likely they will.
The truth is, I’m openly gay and have lived in Florida for nine years, and I’ve never once experienced overt homophobia. Okay, fine, I was called a faggot a few years ago in traffic. But in that lady’s defense, I did cut her off.
Other than that, Florida is a gay paradise. The taxes are low, the weather is great, and the people are hot. At my local haunt, the tab is never more than $40 and they let you blast cigarettes inside. Gay bars in New York will charge you 18 bucks for a gin and tonic. That’s what real oppression looks like.
Worth reading the original at The Free Press here.
Clipped from The Spectator: The far right is not what threatens Europe most
It is time that the European left grew up. Prattling on about Mussolini and Marshal Pétain is passé
June 8, 2024 | Gavin Mortimer
In France, Holland, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Hungary and Austria parties described by their foes as “far right” are on course for significant gains at next month’s European elections. To the chagrin of progressive politicians, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders are popular with many voters. But centrist groups in the European Parliament are determined to do everything to stop them.
Europe does indeed feel like it might be returning to ‘the darkest pages of our history’
“We are facing a crucial moment in the history of our European project, where once more the far right is attempting to bring back the darkest pages of our history,” said a communique issued by a coalition of left-wing, green and centrist outfits in the European Parliament on May 8. The timing was no coincidence: that day marked the seventy-ninth anniversary of Victory in Europe day. It warned that “far right” parties represented a threat to democracy, due to the “constantly growing cases of harassment, vandalism, spread of disinformation, defamation and hate speech.”
The statement ended with a declaration that they “will never cooperate nor form a coalition” with a “far right” party. It called on Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, to endorse their message.
The communique was an insult to the intelligence of the European electorate. Voters have eyes and ears, they are aware of what has unfolded in Europe in recent months. It is not far-right students calling for the destruction of Israel; it was not members from Marine Le Pen’s party who were questioned by police on charges of “apology for [Hamas] terrorism;” it was not a right-wing Spanish member who tweeted soon after the October 7 attack: “Today and always with Palestine;” it was not a right -wing mayor in Brussels trying to prevent democratically elected politicians speaking at a conference because he objected to their views; it was not a Swedish right-wing member who recently attended a conference linked with Hamas.
Europe does indeed feel like it might be returning to “the darkest pages of our history;” but it’s not the right which is responsible for many of the most troubling recent events: it is a toxic alliance of elements of the progressive left and their Islamist allies.
The man who was shot dead in France last month as he set fire to a synagogue was an Algerian; and the man jailed for life last week for killing a pensioner in Hartlepool, “for the people of Gaza,” was a Moroccan.
It is Islamofascism that frightens many Europeans today: teachers murdered because they showed images of the Prophet; girls beaten unconscious because they don’t wear a headscarf; men stabbed to death because of their sexuality or because they drank alcohol.
What also alarms voters is that so many progressive politicians live in a state of permanent denial; they can’t bring themselves to confront the truth. They wring their hands about “Islamophobia” even as Jews are routinely persecuted in Europe.
Other than the deceit and delusion of their opponents, there are other factors that explain the popularity of politicians like Meloni, Wilder and Le Pen. They recognize the folly of Net Zero, and of open borders, and they know that only the male species has a penis.
The European left has lost its way this century, which accounts for the fact that most of the twenty-seven countries in the EU are run by governments that lean in varying degrees to the right. The left will only reverse this trend if they begin to speak and act with courage and honesty.
A start would be to issue another communique, alerting voters to the real danger in next month’s European elections, a coalition that poses a genuine threat.
The “Free Palestine” coalition is composed of parties from countries including France, Belgium. Sweden and Germany. One of its spokesmen Belgian member of parliament Fouad Ahidar has declared: “There are two major issues we want to discuss: Islamophobia in Europe, which is on the rise, and the Palestinian question.” Ahidar has described Hamas’s slaughter of 1,200 Israelis as “a small response” to seventy-five years of “massacres.”
The Free Palestine manifesto demands a “radical” change in the direction of European diplomacy. This could include legitimatizing Hamas and Islamic Jihad as political organizations, and imposing sanctions on Israel. It could also become illegal for European citizens to enlist in the Israeli army.
The French component of the coalition is the Democratic Union of French Muslims (UDMF), which states that its raison d’etreis anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism. Also operating in France is the Muslim Brotherhood. The academic Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, whose book about the organization last year led to her being given police protection, told Le Figaro: “The Brotherhood networks in France operate in two ways: either they lay their eggs in cuckoo parties on the far left, hoping to infiltrate these organizations, or they openly display their own colors.”
It is time that the European left grew up. Prattling on about Mussolini and Marshal Pétain is passé. There is a new threat spreading across Europe and once again its primary targets are Jews.
Clipped from Public: Supreme Court May Prevent “Irreparable Harm” To Trump, Says Yale Law Prof
June 07, 2024 | Michael Shellenberger
Over the last week, America’s leading legal scholars and journalists have explained that former president Donald Trump is now a convicted felon. A jury found Trump guilty of many crimes, including falsifying business records and interfering in an election.
But according to an influential constitutional law scholar at Yale University, legal scholars and journalists got the story all wrong. Trump is not, in fact, a convicted felon. “You're not convicted unless the judge enters a judgment of guilt against you,” explained Yale’s Jed Rubenfeld, “And the judge still has the power… to throw out that verdict and enter a judgment of acquittal.”
Rubenfeld acknowledges that “it's very likely that Judge [Juan] Merchan will enter that judgment of guilt against Trump on the same day that he issued sentencing, July 11.”
But Trump’s lawyers can still sue New York City District Attorney Alvin “Bragg and other state actors and ask the judge — the federal judge — for an emergency temporary restraining order, halting Judge Merchan from entering that judgment of guilt until the federal courts have had an opportunity to review and rule on the serious constitutional arguments that exist here.”
Rubenfeld made his remarks in a video, and I reached him by phone. He elaborated on how the Supreme Court could rule on the case.
“If Trump’s lawyers file in a federal district court, they would ask for TRO, Temporary Restraining Order, on an emergency basis,” he told Public. “The court would set a briefing schedule and ask for ‘hurry up’ schedule by July 11. If the court said, ‘No, we’re not issuing a TRO,’ you could appeal to the court of appeals. And then, whatever that court did, you could appeal to the Supreme Court.”
Said Rubenfeld, “You could even go over the circuit court to the Supreme Court.”
Rubenfeld is a law professor and does not work for the Trump campaign. He is most famous for his liberal positions on issues like affirmative action and same-sex marriage. And Rubenfeld stressed that he wasn’t giving advice but rather explaining the constitutional issues at stake
Rosenfeld expressed concern over three potential violations of the Constitution by the New York state court. First, a felony conviction could cause “irreparable harm” to Trump and his effort to become president. Second, it could have been a case of “selective prosecution” by Bragg, who campaigned on convicting Trump. Third, the court may have violated Trump’s Sixth Amendment rights, which is that the accused must know what they are being accused of.
Most people are familiar with the selective prosecution argument.
“The whole point of the prosecution, people say, is to undermine Trump's chances of being president,” notes Rubenfeld. “Well, if that's true, does that make the prosecution unconstitutional? Yes, it would. That's called, in legal terms, selective prosecution. The state cannot come after you with a criminal prosecution because of hostility toward or in retaliation against your political activity. That's unconstitutional. And if they're doing that, the whole prosecution is unconstitutional.”
But the problem, Rubenfeld explains, is that it is very hard to prove selective prosecution.
“That gets into the motives inside the head of the prosecutor,” he explained. “Very tough to prove. In fact, some courts have held the only way you can prove it is by coming up with a comparable case, a comparator, a comparable case of somebody else that the district attorney could have prosecuted on very similar facts, but didn't prosecute because the District Attorney liked their politics but didn't like Trump's politics.”
Most in the news media reported that Trump was convicted of falsifying business records, but the only way to make that misdemeanor count as a felony was for it to be in service of some other crime.
“So what was the second crime?” asks Rubenfeld. “Well, that's where things get tricky because the indictment didn't say. The indictment said that he falsified business records to conceal a second crime, but it never said what the second crime was. And to this day, a lot of people are unsure what the jury thought, because what the state did was it did not commit itself to what the second crime might be.”
The District Attorney said the second crime could be a tax violation, campaign finance violation, or election law violation, and by the end of the trial had narrowed it down to the latter.
“But the problem,” explained Rubenfeld, is that “they never said exactly which other statute that was going to be. And to this day, we do not know what the jury was thinking when it convicted him.”
The judge allowed this. Explained Rubenfeld, “the judge told the jury, ‘You know, when it comes to that election law offense, with its second crime, you don't have to be unanimous about that. Two of you could think that Trump was trying to influence an election through a tax violation. Two of you could think that Trump was trying to influence an election by falsifyin other records. And a bunch of other people on the jury could think there was some other violation.’ And the judge said, ‘You don't have to be unanimous about that.’”
Rubenfeld suggests that this was a violation of the Sixth Amendment.
“Under the Sixth Amendment, every criminal defendant has a right to know the charges against him,” he explained. And, crucially, “Where an indictment charges a crime that depends in turn on violation of another statute, the indictment must identify the underlying offense…. Well, that's exactly what this indictment did, charged a crime that depended in turn on the violation of another statute, but it didn't specify or identify the underlying offense. There's a very good argument that that indictment was in violation of federal constitutional law under this Second Circuit case and many other cases that are like it.”
The result is that the trial was similar to a show trial in totalitarian societies.
“The Sixth Amendment requirement that the defendant be informed of the charges against them is not a mere technicality,” explained Rubenfeld. “We're not supposed to have a legal system like Franz Kafka's legal system in The Trial, where the protagonist is put through a trial and found guilty and never told what it is he's been charged with.”
As for the potential of the ruling to cause “irreparable harm” to Trump, the best evidence is the fact that all of this is happening just five months before the presidential elections.
“Ultimately, it might well go to the Supreme Court, where finally we will have a conclusive ruling on whether the conviction was constitutional or not. Of course, that would take years. And that's a problem here. Why is it a problem? It's a problem because the election will have taken place. And if this conviction is unlawful and unconstitutional, it could have an effect on that election.”
Rubenfeld points to the fact that new polling shows that “convicted felon” label has hurt Trump. “An unlawful conviction in this case could interfere with and, in fact, decide the outcome of the next election of the next president of the United States. Even if the conviction were reversed on appeal years later, that effect could not be undone. In legal terms, that's called irreparable harm.”
At the end of the video, Rubenfeld says that if he were Trump’s lawyers, he would move immediately to take the case to the federal courts. “If I were Trump's lawyer, that's probably what I would do. I would run into federal court. File this action under section 1983 and ask for a temporary emergency restraining order. Will Trump's lawyers do that? I have no idea, but that's what I would do.”
Clipped from The Spectator: Biden acts on the border… sort of… maybe
The orders are meant to solve a serious problem at the ballot box
June 4, 2024 | 3:53 pm| Charles Lipson
The contrast between the two parties on illegal immigration couldn’t be sharper. Donald Trump erected a wall. Joe Biden erected a pole. Oops. Sorry. That should be “poll.” And Biden didn’t erect it. He was skewered by it.
Very few people think President Biden is doing a decent job at the southern border. More than twice as many think he has created a full-scale disaster. Those poll numbers aren’t just underwater. They’re headed for the Titanic in a flimsy submersible.
Faced with this disaster, Biden finally did what he has said for three years he had no authority to do. He issued some Executive Orders to close the border… .well, sort of, partially, maybe, under certain circumstances. It’s unclear why he thought he could issue orders demolishing Trump’s effective border policies during the first weeks of his new presidency but couldn’t issue others to restore tougher measures as the crisis unfolded.
And a crisis it is. Since Biden entered office, US Border Patrol has totaled some 8 million “encounters” with illegal immigrants at the southern border, overwhelming the agency’s manpower and the courts’ ability to hear cases. These migrants aren’t just coming from Mexico and Central America. They are coming from around the world, including America’s most dangerous enemies.
Once they touch US soil, these migrants are effectively home free for several years. They can available themselves of an extensive panoply of legal rights, which make deportation slow, cumbersome, and expensive.
Most immigrants have learned to say the magic words, “political asylum,” since that phrase ensures a long wait before deportation hearings. The real engine of migration is poverty, high crime, and political oppression, but those are losers in court. So the migrants ask for political asylum. Since there are no courts to hear their cases, they are simply released into the US “on parole” and asked to return for a hearing in a few years. That’s going as well as you might expect.
This influx of 8 million illegal immigrants would be bad enough. But they aren’t the only ones coming. Several hundred thousand more have entered the US secretly during the Biden presidency but escaped contact with border patrol.
These “gotaways” are not a random sample of all illegal immigrants. They are a particularly dangerous bunch, who have powerful reasons to escape contact with law enforcement. They are bringing in vast quantities of fentanyl and heroin, trafficking young girls for prostitution, setting up spy networks, and assembling terror groups to attack America’s cities and military bases. That’s the conclusion of FBI director Christopher Wray, who has issued that warning repeatedly to Congress. The threats posed by illegal immigrants, he says, are unprecedented in scale and scope, and many seem well-coordinated.
None of this is news to the Biden White House. The crisis has been building since the first week of his presidency, when the president began dismantling America’s borders. Voters shouldn’t be surprised, either. They voted for it. Biden promised these “progressive” changes when he campaigned in 2020.
Why is he issuing new orders now? Because his pollsters and political advisors have seen what voters think. They aren’t just unhappy about illegal immigration; they are furious. They rank illegal immigration alongside the economy as their top concern, and they blame Biden for the mess.
With only five months until the election, the White House has decided it’s time to at least look like they care enough to act. That signal will be particularly important if there is a terrorist attack associated with the open border.
The goal of these Executive Orders is the oldest one in the politician’s playbook: CYA. The orders are meant to solve a serious problem at the ballot box, not a serious one at the border. In fact, they don’t even try to close the border, only diminish the massive surge of daily arrivals. Stronger measures don’t take effect until more than 2,500 illegal immigrants arrive each day. Why not 250? Why not zero? Because the left-wing of the Democratic Party is fuming that the number is as low as 2,500. They would prefer no limits at all.
Biden and his advisors have genuflected to that wing of the party for three years. Now, they are looking at dreadful poll numbers and realizing that Bernie Sanders, AOC and George Soros are not the entirety of the party. They certainly aren’t representative of centrist, swing-state voters, the ones Biden needs to win.
The big political question is whether these Executive Orders will sway those undecided voters. Will they see them a strong action. Or will they see them tepid half-measures they can summarize in just four words, “Too little. Too late.”
Clipped from Racket News: A Sham Case, and Everyone Knows It
Even Donald Trump's detractors know they shouldn't be celebrating this conviction, and some are admitting it
June 2, 2024 | Matt Taibbi
Maureen Dowd in the New York Times in this morning’s op-ed about Donald Trump’s trial:
Even though the case was a stretch and not the strongest one against Trump, there was something refreshing about the jury doing what no one else around Trump has been able to do — not the inexplicably sycophantish Republican lawmakers, not the corrupt Supreme Court, not the slowpoke Merrick Garland.
Whoa. Trump has so altered American consciousness that detractors feel comfortable publicly supporting the idea of slapping 34 felony convictions on the man as punishment for alleged earlier offenses. Dowd’s slip (if it was one) wasn’t rare. Editorial pages, broadcast panels, even political mailers in the past days implored readers to focus on Trump’s overall history, not this particular case:
Maureen Dowd in the New York Times in this morning’s op-ed about Donald Trump’s trial:
Even though the case was a stretch and not the strongest one against Trump, there was something refreshing about the jury doing what no one else around Trump has been able to do — not the inexplicably sycophantish Republican lawmakers, not the corrupt Supreme Court, not the slowpoke Merrick Garland.
Whoa. Trump has so altered American consciousness that detractors feel comfortable publicly supporting the idea of slapping 34 felony convictions on the man as punishment for alleged earlier offenses. Dowd’s slip (if it was one) wasn’t rare. Editorial pages, broadcast panels, even political mailers in the past days implored readers to focus on Trump’s overall history, not this particular case:
New York’s Jonathan Chait, who lives on the outer edge of the spectrum of Trump-detesting pundits but has expressed unease with some recent moves to unseat him, wrote “the case was always marginal” and “the sort of charge you’d concoct if the target is a bad guy and you want to nail him for something.” Like Dowd, he explained the larger justification elsewhere:
In a global sense, Trump’s conviction in a court is not just fair but overdue. He has been flouting the law his entire adult life… Once he ascended to the presidency, Trump’s criminality only grew. He issued illegal orders constantly, flummoxing his staff…
The hush-money trial gets at some of that… Was Trump trying to manipulate the election? Was he trying to hide an affair from his wife? Was it a little bit of column A and column B? We’ll never know precisely. What is clear is that Trump is crooked and more than a little sleazy—two things that have been part of his self-image, to varying degrees, since he first became a public figure more than 40 years ago.
Ana Navarro got The View’s studio audience (read: the closest thing to a show trial gallery we have in America) hooting and cheering at the idea of punishing Trump because he “made the life of our country a living hell for six years, and so he deserves to be [held] accountable”:
[video]
Not one of these people recognized the obvious: that of all the things Donald Trump has been accused of, none are as serious or system-imperiling as abusing the courts to dispose of a political rival. If Trump was caught buggering a corpse while smoking joints rolled in rubles, it wouldn’t approach the offense of “concocting” a charge to put away someone you want to “nail” for “something.”
Here’s The New Yorker’s joking reply to the notion that this was a show trial:
Trump will not be summarily executed, as so many hundreds of thousands were in the Soviet purges. He won’t even have to wear an orange uniform if he does, in fact, end up serving time—inmates in New York are actually banned from doing so.
This craziness been pervasive since Trump entered the political arena, a fact buried by commentators great and small. Joe Biden’s post-verdict address insisted “this is a state case, not a federal case,” omitting the minor detail that original evidence came from an FBI raidconducted after Special Counsel Robert Mueller referred the matter to the Southern District of New York. Mueller’s investigation, remember, grew out of the FBI’s dubious Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was later asked if he’d have signed the FISA warrants if he knew then what was in the applications. “No, I would not,” he said. In other words: the current Trump case was about hiding an alleged escapade with a porn star maybe from a wife, maybe from the public, maybe both, but Hillary hid a role in advancing FBI and intelligence investigations of a political opponent, an infinitely more serious business that may even have helped bring about this verdict.
Editorialists are working to reshape the history of what just happened in a less dubious light. The least ridiculous might be the argument offered by Vox, suggesting Trump’s prosecution isn’t evidence of excess, but rather simple logic:
If a man perpetrates a wide variety of frauds over the course of decades — and routinely advertises his contempt for the rule of law — prosecutors may aggressively scrutinize the legality of his business records and get a bit creative in holding him legally accountable.
That “a bit creative” take blurs lines between training attention on Trump because of his politics and doing so because he “advertises his contempt for the rule of law.” Meanwhile, in another New York Times piece today called “A Felon in the White House Would Test The American System,” Peter Baker argues “the notion that 34 felonies is not automatically disqualifying and a convicted criminal can be a viable candidate…upends two and a half centuries of assumptions about American democracy”…
Clipped from The Spectator:Trump deserves to be grilled at the debates
The networks are colluding with the White House to favor Biden — and Trump agreed to their terms
May 22, 2024 | 3:45 pm | Stephen L. Miller
The Biden campaign, and by proxy, the Biden White House, released an unusual ransom list of debate conditions that the media and Trump campaign must meet for there to be any presidential debates this year.
The list of demands include dissolving the Commission on Presidential Debates, a move that the media just one president ago stated would erode trust in the American media. Other demands include no live studio audience and cutting microphones for other participants. The Biden campaign also demanded the debates only be on four networks: CNN, ABC, Telemundo or CBS.
It was an unprecedented and suspicious move that many critics said was meant to vacuum-seal Biden into a protective environment, prevent his infamous gaffes and limit the moments that will show the country more of just how advanced his age and recent lack mental acuity are.
That the Biden campaign made these demands isn’t surprising, though I would argue if the Trump campaign made these demands, the media, networks and the Commission would all laugh them off. What should be a genuine scandal, however, is that CNN, with help from Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, as well as ABC, accepted these ransom demands whole cloth.
Both networks announced two debates, on two dates, and made their audience and the country believe they somehow just stitched this all together at the last minute. Balderdash. These networks have been negotiating and agreeing to these demands from the White House for weeks, as CNN’s Jeff Zeleny admitted, through anonymous sources. Two supposed independent media networks essentially colluded with the White House to a format and list of demands that the White House clearly thinks favors Biden. We’ve seen these lines blurred before, as we did with current MSNBC analyst Jen Psaki, who accepted a job with the network prior to leaving her post as the White House press secretary.
All of this stinks and should be independently investigated. And as much as the Biden campaign was in the right to dissolve the Commission on Presidential Debates, which had become wildly partisan and abusive within the framework of presidential debates (hello, Candy Crowley), it doesn’t change the fact that the Biden White House is clearly stacking the deck, with the help of network media and their star anchors, against Donald Trump.
The problem for Donald Trump is his campaign was involved in these negotiations — and they accepted every single one of the terms proposed by the Biden campaign. Trump will undoubtedly attempt to use this to his advantage, declaring and blustering to his base that the “Fake News Media” set him up and the debates were unfair. He would, of course, be right, but once again, it won’t matter, because Trump agreed to these terms. Whether or not this all helps Biden remains to be seen.
Biden is clearly not the same candidate he was even three years ago. The rigors and time of the presidency have taken their toll on him, both physically and mentally. Trump will no doubt demand his own conditions, like Biden not wear his giant rubber-soled shoes or that he submit to a pre-debate drug test. But it’s too late, as Trump has submitted to both the networks and to Biden.
More likely than not, there will be a stalemate — and these debates, I predict, are probably not going to happen. Should they happen, however, Trump will deserve every bit of biased treatment he gets from CNN and ABC, because he himself volunteered himself to these conditions, once again proving that Trump can be his own worst enemy.
Clipped from The Spectator: RFK’s Libertarian moment
Juan P. Villasmil
The 2024 Libertarian National Convention in Washington, DC attracted the quirkiest of individuals. I was first greeted by a man wearing a “Fuck Vaccines” shirt (not that odd) who was doing some squats in the lobby (pretty odd).
Not so long after, I overheard a weird flex: “I read Mises before I was twenty,” and then an even weirder one: “I grew up without AC, a very libertarian upbringing”
“Ermmm, konichiwa actually means good afternoon,” a lady told her interlocutor.
Anyhow, you get the picture — weird hats and a variety of mustaches. On a more serious note, The Spectator talked to many insightful folks. Last cycle’s Libertarian vice-presidential candidate, Spike Cohen, told us that in regard to RFK Jr. and Donald Trump’s speeches at the convention, “It is useful to have Donald Trump speak [here], only if our candidate speaks right after him and rebuts him. Same with RFK. We should be leveraging them for attention, not the reverse.”
“They are here only to take votes,” Cohen added.
Chase Oliver, a former Georgia senate candidate seeking the presidential nomination, shared similar thoughts. “The Libertarian Party is ultimately an anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian party. If you are looking for someone to represent that brand, Kennedy is not the person you want to go with. He’s been part of the politc elite his entire life.” In regard to Trump, he was blunt, “This is probably the first time we’ve had a war criminal on our stage.”
Dylan Allman of American Values 2024, a pro-Kennedy Super PAC, told The Spectator that “The critics do have a point. Robert Kennedy is by definition a statist — like literally everybody, unless you believe in zero government, period.”
Responding to some of the critics, he says that he doesn’t think RFK is “trying to use the Libertarian platform in any way.”
“He was invited to this event, not the other way around,” Allman said.
Dave Smith, a comedian who recently joined Tucker Carlson’s show on X, told us that he welcomes both Trump and Kennedy. “A lot of the former candidates and current candidates were like, oh, they're using us, we shouldn't let them use us! As opposed to what? As opposed to just doing what the Libertarian Party has always done — just losing and being irrelevant,” Smith asserted.
Kennedy’s speech, which began a tad late, was a masterclass in appealing to the crowd. “As everyone in this room knows, government doesn’t like to limit itself,” he said early on to the crowd’s laughter. Most of the speech focused on the Bill of Rights and the principles attached to it. He brought up, in chronological order, events in which the government has “gone too far,” starting with the Red Scare and ending with the Covid pandemic. “Maybe a brain worm ate that part of my memory,” he joked after mentioning the series of government-sponsored abuses.
Referencing the likes of Aldous Huxley, George Mason and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, RFK delivered a speech that captivated the nerds and the activists. “There has been no time when we look back at history and say that the people censoring speech were the good guys,” Kennedy said.
Challenging Trump, who has avoided these subjects, Kennedy said, “On my first day of office, I will pardon Edward Snowden and drop all charges on Julian Assange.” The crowd, including Assange’s brother, went crazy. “We should have a monument for [Julian Assange] here in Washington DC. And same with Edward Snowden. He is a hero, not a criminal.” He then talked about unethical experiments done by the US government, including MK Ultra. He dove into the Milgram experiment, which used a series of controversial methodologies to measure the willingness of participants to obey authorities who instructed them to act in opposition to their moral consciences.
Whatever one thinks about Kennedy, what was clearer than ever today is that he is knowledgeable and that knows how to get a crowd pumped up (even when it isn’t his ideal audience). No wonder neither Trump nor Biden want him on the debate stage.
Clipped from The Spectator: Zelensky’s time as president is up, but he’s right to stay put
22 May 2024, 5:53am | Eliot Wilson
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky’s five-year term is up, but he’s staying put. Unsurprisingly, some of Zelensky’s critics – and the Kremlin – have questioned his legitimacy. But Zelensky, who marked five years in office on 20 May, is right not to step down. The idea that, as a result, there has been some unprecedented outrage against democracy simply doesn’t stand up.
The practical problem in holding an election is obvious. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 gave it control of 16,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. The full-scale military invasion in February 2022 saw Russian forces seize another 46,000 square miles, leaving about a quarter of Ukraine under occupation. Ukraine’s counterattacks in the summer and autumn of 2022 liberated nearly 30,000 square miles of territory. Nevertheless, an assessment this week by the Council for Foreign Relations estimates that 18 per cent of Ukraine is currently occupied by Russian military forces.
It is obviously impossible to conduct a free, fair and representative presidential election when a fifth of the country is controlled by the enemy. As late as last autumn, Zelensky was considering whether there could somehow be a poll, making provision for votes to be cast abroad and for those in the armed forces to exercise their franchise, but the practical obstacles were too great. Even if elections were held in the four-fifths of the country not occupied, polling stations would be prime targets for Russian military strikes, and meaningful campaigning would be almost impossible.
In legal terms, the point is moot. President Zelensky declared a state of martial law on 24 February 2022, in response to the Russian invasion, according to the Constitution of Ukraine. One of the strictures of martial law is that elections cannot be held. Equally, Article 108 of the constitution makes it clear that the incumbent president remains in office until a successor is sworn in.
This is not a matter of autocratic disdain by the head of state: in November last year, all parties represented in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, agreed a memorandum agreeing that elections should be postponed until martial law comes to an end. It states that ‘future free and fair national elections (parliamentary, presidential) shall be held after the end of the war and the end of martial law with a period of time sufficient to prepare for elections (at least six months after the end of martial law)’.
This accommodation of brutal military reality should not surprise us. The Parliament Act 1911 set the length of a parliament at five years, but a general election was postponed during the First World War, initially by the Parliament and Registration Act 1916 and then by other pieces of legislation. A poll was finally held in December 1918, only weeks after the armistice but eight years since the preceding general election.
Britain reached the same sensible conclusion during the Second World War. The 1935 Parliament should have been dissolved in 1940, but the Prolongation of Parliament Act 1940 extended its life by a year. Similar acts were passed in the next four years of the conflict, and a general election was eventually held in July 1945, when the parliament was almost a decade old.
American critics argue that presidential elections have never been interrupted, and Franklin Roosevelt was subject to re-election in 1944 when the United States was still at war with Germany and Japan. But the comparison is fatuous: America was never occupied during the Second World War, nor was there any serious suggestion that it might be invaded. So the electoral infrastructure was intact and unthreatened...
If a country is invaded and partially occupied by an aggressor, it changes the situation on the ground. That is practical politics – more fundamentally, it is an acceptance of reality. Zelensky used his constitutional to declare martial law, and he has carried the Verkhovna Rada with him. The legislature has agreed that elections should be held only when the war is over and robust voting arrangements can be put into place: a decision democracies, including our own, have regarded as inevitable in the past…
Clipped from The Spectator: Harrison Butker exposes the media’s blindness
Did any of the commentators even watch the speech?
May 17, 2024 | 12:34 pm | Ben Domenech
The mass freakout over Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker’s commencement speech to Benedictine College is a revelatory incident. For one, it’s another sign of the impatient obliviousness of our media landscape. The speech is a mere twenty minutes long, but it’s readily apparent that most commentators on the remarks didn’t bother to watch it. CNN’s Jonah Goldberg put the speech in the context of a reactionary attitude among men toward women in the workplace, which is just absolutely ludicrous if you watch the speech — most of which is an indictment of the current Catholic priesthood — in a segment where the CNN commentators ordered Butker to “stick to kicking.”
It fell to Whoopi Goldberg to make the obvious point: that if you support the right of Colin Kaepernick to speak out, you have to support Butker’s right, too. You can disagree with what he said, and how he said it, but he’s got as much a right to express these views as anyone else. In fact, Butker’s statement is even more defensible — the solid argument against Kaepernick is that his act of protest was a distraction for teammates because it occurred on the field of play, on game day, not expressed in press conferences or speeches or off the field, as in the case of Butker.
The difficulty for the NFL in this context is clear: Butker is a three-time Super Bowl champion on the best franchise in the league, he’s not some no name on the roster of a backwater franchise. And the Chiefs have shown their disdain for political correctness repeatedly throughout this era of Patrick Mahomes-led dominance. They still beat the drum and sing as they do the tomahawk chop. They aren’t the types to be offended by an expression of traditionalist Catholic views by a guy who literally looks like the real life version of the Yes Chad meme.
They haven’t been quiet about it, either. Tavia Hunt, the former beauty queen and prominent wife of Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, took to Instagram with a post clearly defending Butker’s views and clarifying her own, writing in part:
Studies show that committed, married couples with children are the happiest demographic, and this has been my experience as well. Affirming motherhood and praising your wife, as well as highlighting the sacrifice and dedication it takes to be a mother, is not bigoted. It is empowering to acknowledge that a woman’s hard work in raising children is not in vain. Countless highly educated women devote their lives to nurturing and guiding their children. Someone disagreeing with you doesn’t make them hateful; it simply means they have a different opinion.
And Gracie Hunt, their Maxim cover model daughter, echoed this view on Fox News this morning during (of course) a pickleball promotion.
So the NFL’s corporate offices may have a problem with all of this, but the team ownership doesn’t — and as Ethan Strauss writes in his indispensable sports Substack, neither do Butker’s fellow players:
The aspect of the speech that was most controversial in media was probably least controversial within Butker’s industry. How do I know this? Well, beyond having some friends in and around the NFL, I’ve enough NBA experience to know how many of the athletes’ wives are, yes, homemakers. When your spouse makes millions of dollars and travels frequently, you’ve less incentive to put in eighty-hour weeks at the cubicle. When Butker is extolling the virtues of homemaking, he’s praising the life path chosen by many (probably most?) NFL players’ wives. Would you expect these football couples to hate a speech that praises homemaker as this heroic role? Or would you expect them to appreciate Butker giving the role its due?…
It’s obvious, as The Media and many fans cast Butker as this absolute moral freak, that he’s well within the norms of his profession. The LA Chargers are happy to hop on the bandwagon of lampooning Butker as some reactionary weirdo, but tomorrow they’ll be back to promoting coach Jim Harbaugh as the team’s glorious savior. Like Butker, Harbaugh is a devout Roman Catholic who freely expresses that abortion kills babies. He campaigns at pro life events, with the following repeated theme: “The right choice is to have the courage to let the unborn be born.” Making the abortion decision a matter of courage would theoretically be as controversial as Butker’s homemaker comments, but I don’t make the internet’s rules.
Whether you agree with everything Butker had to say or not, the truth is that his perspective is probably closer to that of the average players, coaches and fans of the NFL than any of the commentators who are going to be weighing in…
Clipped from Public: Big Tech Hubris And Greed Behind Digital Education Failure
It’s time to go back to paper and pencil
May 12, 2024 | Denise Champney
In 2010, the US Department of Education released its ambitious National Educational Technology Plan, setting a goal to transform the future of education through technology. In many ways, this vision has now been realized. Today, students across the country use computers to learn English, Math, Science, and History. Tech companies and curriculum developers claim that this is helping them. Personal devices and digital platforms, they say, increase student engagement and have huge educational benefits.
Yet in my experience as a speech-language pathologist, digital programs are ineffective and distracting for kids.
I recently asked a 5th-grade student to show me how he uses My Path, an individualized math program through Curriculum Associates iReady Math. This student has a diagnosis of ADHD and is a struggling reader. Although he understood the math concept the program presented to him, he had trouble solving problems because of the presentation on a screen. Using a computer for math increased his ADHD tendencies, impacted his reading, and caused him to become so frustrated that he impulsively clicked and swiped. He would have had far less difficulty if he’d been given the same problems on paper.
To be sure, technology has a role in the classroom. Students must develop digital literacy and digital skills. Tech tools can also be used for enrichment and advanced instruction.
But this student is not the only child who struggles to learn from a computer. The optimistic vision of technology in education from 2010 does not match the realities of 2024. If you walk through the halls of a high school or middle school (and sadly some elementary schools), rather than the fantasy of students enthusiastically engaging in self-directed learning, you’ll instead see many students in a zombie-like stance staring at a Chromebook or laptop opened in front of them while only half listening to the teacher.
“It would be great if our education stuff worked. But that we won’t know for probably a decade,” billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said about his edtech initiatives in 2013.
In truth, over a decade later, it’s clear that this “education stuff” has not worked at all. Despite billions spent, test scores have declined since then, and mental health issues among teens have risen.
Some K-12 curriculum developers, such as McGraw Hill, claim their digital programs are supported by research. Yet they often use small sample sizes, do not include control groups, and admit that their results have major limitations. Other studies from RAND are funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested tens of millions of dollars in personalized programs.
The best available evidence shows that excess technology is detrimental to learning and development. An increasing amount of research demonstrates that screens have a negative impact on reading comprehension.
One study published last year suggests that cognitive engagement is higher in children when reading printed books versus digital media. Another such study in 2018 found that there was higher functional connectivity in the brain when reading from print versus a decrease while reading from a screen. And yet another research review highlights, “Paper-based reading yields better comprehension outcomes than digital-based reading.”
Other studies reveal the harms of screen time on brain development. More alarmingly, new research shows changes in brain structure of children with higher screen time use. There may be a physiological and psychological effect as well. One research review found, “Excessive digital media use by children and adolescents appears as a major factor which may hamper the formation of sound psychophysiological resilience.”
A United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report released in 2023 provides an in-depth evaluation of technology in education. The findings are mixed, but one that stands out is that “There is little robust evidence on digital technology’s added value in education.”
In my experience as a professional trained to work with struggling students, most children’s developing brains are not equipped to engage in the self-directed learning imagined years ago, especially online. As a result, students multitask and divert their attention to popular games such as Roblox or streaming videos off YouTube and Netflix while simultaneously completing assignments, degrading their capacity to learn.
Tech developers are skilled at designing their products to keep kids using them while maximizing profits. Tristan Harris, former Google employee and Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology, describes this as the race to the bottom of the brain stem. Since classrooms inundate kids with access to technology throughout the day, their precious attention is constantly being robbed.
The evidence against screen time is strong enough that executives with ties to Big Tech and edtech often send their own kids to private schools that don’t use technology.
So, how did we go from the promise of self-directed learning with unlimited information at our fingertips to what we see now, impacting an entire generation of kids? Many point to virtual learning due to Covid-19 as the time when technology took over and student achievement levels dropped. But those paying attention saw the insidious technology creeping in long before then.
High Tech Profits Trumped Achievement
Profits rather than achievement appear to be driving the push for technology in schools. The Digital Textbook Playbook, released by the FCC and US Department of Education in 2012, was designed to “help K-12 educators and administrators advance the conversation toward building a rich digital learning experience.” Not surprisingly, many contributors to the playbook, such as Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft, had obvious profit-driven motivations to support this project.
In the same year, reading and math scores for 13-year-olds reached their peak based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report card. Since then, scores on the NAEP have declined. At the same time, according to Forbes, edtech companies have seen their profits grow into the billions.
Kids pay a steep price for the supposed benefits of edtech. Many edtech programs are considered to be “High-Quality Curriculum Materials” (HQCM), defined as instructional materials that are aligned to rigorous college—and career-ready standards, also known as the Common Core Standards. A closer look at these materials raises the question: Are they truly high-quality, or are they just another way to profit from the education system?
In 2015, an organization known as EdReports was created with the support of some of the following philanthropic organizations: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation just to name a few. Since then, at least 12 states began using the now nationally recognized EdReports as a guide for choosing the curriculum that school districts in their states can use. To this day, they are lauded as the gold standard for identifying HQCM.
EdReports’ criteria to evaluate whether instructional materials are “meeting expectations” include their alignment with the Common Core standards and their usability. Curiously, it does not use any criteria to evaluate whether or not a program actually supports student achievement. These same Common Core standards received hundreds of millions of funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation when they were first introduced in 2010. It should be no surprise that they are currently the largest donors to EdReports, a company that is described as an independent non-profit organization, providing expert reviews of instructional materials.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can also be connected through generous donations to many other organizations developing and promoting technology in the classroom. The US Department of Education, the American Instructional Resources Survey (AIRS), the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) are just a few of the institutions that receive funding from the Gates Foundation.
Curriculum developers are also playing the profit over educational benefit game. They were more than willing to move from traditional print to digital formats and not because it’s what's best for children. Digital is better for their bottom line. McGraw Hill, a leading curriculum developer, states, “we’re working to expand the possibilities of content and technology to support learning in a connected world”. They also boast that in 2019, “The Company's total digital billings (based on the last 12 months) were greater than 50% for the first time.” Their company's timeline history reveals they have been acquiring many edtech platforms, including gaming, since 2009.
Edsurge is another organization funded by philanthropic supporters with ties to big tech. They released a four-part series detailing The State of Edtech 2016. Their report discusses the profit from the edtech boom and the future role of technology in the classroom. What is unanswered in this and similar lengthy reports is whether using digital materials for K-12 learners actually supports their achievement in reading, writing, and math.
Despite a lack of evidence, the number of devices in schools has exploded. In 2010, Google unleashed their Chromebook through a small pilot program in Wisconsin, which then took off to districts across the country a few years later. Fast forward to the spring of 2020, when over 20 million Chromebooks were ordered and disbursed to students throughout the US to support the transition to virtual learning during Covid school closures.
With the introduction of the 1:1 trend in high schools, meaning a device for every student, the profitable rush to provide education technology materials began. The “virtual learning” debacle only sped up the process of putting a device in the hands of even our youngest learners. Promoters and creators of edtech compellingly describe their technology as transformative, supporting “21st-century skills” and personalized learning. Unsuspecting educators have been allured with buzz words such as “engaging,” “data-driven,” “adaptable,” and “self-paced.” In reality, edtech has largely only served the interests of wealthy investors and for-profit companies.
Back to Basics
Have we jumped the gun thinking that technology would solve problems in education?Many teachers, administrators, and parents say “yes.” When I talk to them, there is a palpable defeated feeling that we have gone too far and that there is no way to reel it all back in.
Fortunately, there are other parents, educators and child development experts that disagree…
Clipped from Racket News: Blame Canada? Justin Trudeau Creates Blueprint for Dystopia in Horrific Speech Bill
Life sentences for speech? Pre-crime detention? Ex post facto law? Anonymous accusers? It's all in Justin Trudeau's "Online Harms Bill," a true "threat to democracy"
May 10, 2024 | Matt Taibbi
On February 21st, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a press conference in Edmonton, announcing his government’s decision to introduce the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63. It was described in Canadian media as a “bill to protect kids” that would stop the “exploitation of children,” and Trudeau’s curt speech focused solely on minors. The scarf-clad PM angrily dismissed criticisms the bill might have a broader focus.
“I look forward to putting forward that Online Harms bill, which people will see is very, very specifically focused on protecting kids, and not on censoring the Internet,” he said sharply. “I think everyone, wherever they are in the political spectrum, can agree that protecting kids is something governments should be focused on doing.”
Soon after, on February 26th, Trudeau’s government introduced the bill. Canada’s stable of retreating, credulous on-air personalities announced its rollout like the arrival of penicillin. “Tonight, Web of Harm,” gushed CTV’s Omar Sachedina. “Tackling online dangers and safeguarding children… The long-awaited framework for protecting the vulnerable…”
There was little initial uproar. What could be wrong with increasing child safety, or “protecting the vulnerable”?
Then people read the bill.
“If you look at the purpose of this law, it’s actually quite noble and most lawyers would agree with it,” says Canadian attorney Dan Freiheit. “Online safety, protecting children’s physical and mental health.” But the actual text?
“It’s wild,” Freheit says.
Trudeau was lying when he said C-63 was “very, very specifically focused on correcting kids.” The purview of the Online Harms Act extends far beyond speech, reimagining society as a mandated social engineering project, creating transformational new procedures that would:
enlist Canada’s citizens in an ambitious social monitoring system, with rewards of up to $20,000 for anonymous “informants” of hateful behavior, with the guilty paying penalties up to $50,000, creating a self-funded national spying system;
introduce extraordinary criminal penalties, including life in prison not just for existing crimes like “advocating genocide,” but for any “offence motivated by hatred,” in theory any non-criminal offense, as tiny as littering, committed with hateful intent;
punish Minority Report pre-crime, where if an informant convinces a judge you “willcommit” a hate offense, you can be jailed up to a year, put under house arrest, have firearms seized, or be forced into drug/alcohol testing, all for things you haven’t done;
penalize past statements. The law gets around prohibitions against “retroactive” punishment by calling the offense “continuous communication” of hate, i.e. the crime is your failure to take down bad speech;
force corporate Internet platforms to remove “harmful content” virtually on demand (within 24 hours in some cases), the hammer being fines of “up to 6% of… gross global revenue.”
Things you’re saying, things you’ve already said, things an administrative judge thinks you might say, all barred, with neighbors deputized as enforcers? Good times. Leave it to Trudeau, a frequent trailblazer in new forms of illiberalism in the digital age, to come up with this quantum leap downward on the rights front. C-63 is a Frankenstein’s Monster combining the worst censorship ideas already deployed by supposed ally government-in-laws like Europe’s Digital Services Act, Australia’s updated Australian Communications and Media Authority Act (ACMA), and Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which saw 7,152 complaints in its first week when the law took effect last month.
Trudeau’s creation is a turbo-charged social surveillance law aimed first at forcing big platforms like Facebook and Twitter to “self-police,” but secondarily targeting individuals and doling out civil and criminal penalties for speech and thought on a scale not seen anywhere. What constitutes hateful conduct? While the bill newly defines hate speech as “likely to foment detestation or vilification” of Canada’s growing list of protected groups and individuals, Canadian lawyers interviewed were generally unsure of what the standard might look like in practice.
“It’s impossible to know what exactly it’s going to mean,” says Bruce Pardy, Executive Director of Rights Probe. “So you’re going to have to rely upon the court in a criminal prosecution, or the human rights tribunal in a human rights proceeding, to put their own interpretation on that, and figure out where the line is.”
Despite being split on how serious the immediate impact might be (“We’re not looking at prisons full of people doing life for misgendering” said one), most attorneys seemed to agree C-63 will be a game-changer if passed, aimed beyond speech at the very concept of individual rights, chipping away at ideas like the presumption of innocence and the right to face one’s accuser, and using traditionally dubious tools like ex post facto laws.
On one level, it’s not surprising, given Canada’s historically diffident attitude toward rights — the first section in the country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ironically introduced when Trudeau’s father Pierre was Prime Minister, is essentially a giant loophole — but this Prime Minister appears determined to swap out Canada’s reputation for brotherhood, humor, and generosity for a new one based on rigidity and collective paranoia.
RIGHTS, BUT: Canada guarantees the right to freedom of expression, but “only to such reasonable limits… as can be demonstrably justified.”
There’s a long backstory of important recent laws and Supreme Court cases that helped push Canada down a path toward C-63, but this bill still stands apart as a unique problem, and only a few domestic media outlets have been willing or able to criticize it. One of those is Rebel News, whose founder Ezra Levant says Canadians could really use America’s help in sounding the alarm. “Canadians need to fight for our own freedom, but the Canadian political and media establishment are obsessed by what U.S. journalists and politicians have to say about us,” Levant says. “So any attention Americans can bring to this civil liberties bonfire really makes a difference. Frankly, we need your help.”
How bad is C-63? See for yourself, in a tour through its key sections:
The biggest headline-grabber in C-63 involves new provisions for life imprisonment for speech offenses. There are really two. “Advocating genocide” is already a crime in Canada, but C-63 boosts its maximum penalty from five years to life. “Life sentences for sending out some words. That’s heavy,” Canada’s former Supreme Court Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin, told journalist Edward Greenspon.
Andrea MacLean of the Calgary-based JSS Barristers is among the lawyers who don’t necessarily foresee an avalanche of life sentences for speech offenses, but does worry the draconian life sentence provisions might have serious downstream effects.
“They might encourage people to take plea deals they wouldn’t otherwise take,” MacLean says.
Advocating genocide is already a crime in Canada, but the new maximum punishment is life.
As bad as the “sending out some words” portion is, a more frightening provision prescribes potential life sentences for any “offence motivated by hatred.” This is a difficult concept, but what the law proscribes is any violation of any “Act of Parliament,” no matter how minor, combined with hateful motivation. One example given was crumpling up an anti-gay flier and throwing it out the window in a national park, which would combine a federal littering prohibition with hate speech. Another attorney suggested this could refer to something like denial of restaurant service, and marveled that “this takes civil offenses and makes them into crimes.”
I heard conflicting takes on this section, and it’s worth noting that Justice Minister Arif Virani has repeatedly described this “offence motivated by hatred” section as hateful intent mixed with a “criminal” offense like theft, assault, or murder. But the text reads like a parody of the American “hate crime enhancement” idea:
The “prior restraint” portion of C-63 describes the process by which a person can be punished preemptively if an informant convinces a judge that either a “hate propaganda offence” or the aforementioned “offence motivated by hatred” has a “reasonable” chance of occurring:
This clause might particularly affect a high-profile person like J.K. Rowling who’s already declared an intention to keep saying things deemed offensive to Canadians, who in 2017 passed a law (C-16) forbidding “gender identity” discrimination. Pardy, who described the 2017 measure as a “weaponization of human rights law,” says C-63 is like that act “on steroids.” This pre-crime provision includes a long list of potential punishments, ranging from house arrest, scheduled exit and entry from the home, ankle monitoring, and seizure of firearms. MacLean pointed out that this guts Canada’s Section 11 guarantee of presumption of innocence unless guilt is proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Again, a “reasonable” chance the crime will occur is sufficient to justify detention:
The Online Harms Act gets around the Charter of Freedoms, which forbids punishment of ex post facto or “retroactive offenses,” through a clever piece of wordsmithing. It defines the hate speech crime as “continuous communication” of hateful speech, i.e. making the failure to take down speech on the Internet that could be removed the crime. One lawyer commented to me that this will immediately cause a flurry of activity by conservatives desperate to remove “misgendering” language, since a previous law, C-17, mandated use of appropriate pronouns:
Perhaps scariest of all is the section all of the attorneys pointed to as one most likely to cause significant change in society: the snitching clause. A pair of provisions allows complainants to level accusations at no cost. If an administrative authority substantiates the claim of hateful conduct, the “informant” receives up to $20,000, while the defendant pays up to $50,000. The incentives “are pretty obvious,” as one Toronto-based attorney put it…
Clipped from The Free Press: The American Men Seeking the American Dream—in Russia
Once, they put their hopes in Donald Trump. Now they’re looking to Putin. ‘I often say it feels like our positive vision of 1950s America.’
May 7, 2024 | Peter Savodnik
It was probably January 2023 when Joseph Rose, a 49-year-old YouTuber from Tallahassee, Florida, realized God had sent him to Moscow.
“I do think it was God leading me to where I needed to be right now,” Rose told me over the phone. He was in his apartment, with recessed lighting and a sauna and an odd pirate theme, outside the center of the Russian capital. “I would say that Russia is becoming a bastion of Christianity and that America is becoming the opposite of this.”
He added: “I was put in a spot where I could be used.”
He was alluding to his YouTube channel, which had made him something of a celebrity in Russia. “People recognize me on the street all the time.”
When people ask him what it’s like living in Russia, Rose said, “I often say it feels like our positive vision of 1950s America.”
Rose resides at the nexus of a growing movement of Americans chasing the American dream. In Russia.
I spoke to twenty American expats, all men, who have moved to Russia over the past four years. They told me they moved to Moscow or St. Petersburg or the wild east—Siberia—because they no longer believed the one person they once thought could save America—Donald Trump—could still save it. America, they felt, was beyond saving now.
“Is Trump better than Biden?” Bernd Ratsch, 56, who moved to Moscow from Texas in 2019, said. “Of course. But do I want him? Would I vote for him again? No. It’s just, ‘Boy, shut your mouth for a while.’ ”
Rose and Ratsch and the other Americans flocking to Russia told me they did so to save their children and their children’s children.
“I wouldn’t seriously consider starting a family in the U.S. today,” Peter Frohwein told me. Frohwein is 62, and he is divorced with no kids. He had been a computer engineer in Atlanta, and in July 2023, he moved to Yalta, in the Crimea. “The U.S. is a political mess,” he went on. “Socially, things are a mess. Spiritually, things are a mess.”
Now he is living in an 800-square-foot apartment with a gorgeous view of the Black Sea, a two-minute walk from the beach. There is a farmer’s market nearby—they have the best tomatoes and recently butchered pigs, he said—and he can live comfortably on his Social Security. “And 20 percent of the women could be supermodels,” he said. His children, he expected, will speak English, Russian, and Mandarin.
“People are running around in America wondering why we have so many problems with suicide and depression, and they’ll virtue signal and talk about the phones, and it’s this and that, and the reality is children are not allowed to be children,” Joe, a program manager from Texas who moved to Moscow in 2023 with his wife and six (soon to be seven) children, told me. He didn’t want to share his last name for fear of losing clients back home.
No one was bothered by Putin being a dictator or invading Ukraine. That was, they agreed, understandable, what with NATO having expanded east and the United States having spent the past two and a half decades “meddling” in Russia’s backyard. (That was how most of them described U.S. support for democratic activists in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and other post-Soviet states.)
Peter Frohwein, who, like most recent expats, had never been to the former Soviet Union until recently and had a tenuous grasp of the Russian language, said of the war, “When someone says it’s a Russian invasion, that’s not even true.” He thought the United States, not Russia, had instigated the war by installing a friendly regime in Kiev.
“I think he’s a good man,” Frohwein said of Vladimir Putin. “This lie that he’s somehow a dictator—just because he was in the KGB doesn’t mean he’s ever killed anybody.”
Shortly after Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, in early February, Rose released his own video about the interview. In the video, Rose noted Putin’s “healthy sense of humor” and conspicuously avoided flagging any of Putin’s innumerable lies and half-truths—about World War II, the Soviet collapse, Ukrainian sovereignty, and on and on.
“I had a revelation,” he messaged me a few weeks ago. It was about Ukraine’s relationship to Russia, and it popped into his head while he was making one of his videos. “Although these are technically two different countries, it is one culture. I think it would be like if Texas had left the USA.”
Even though there are not many Americans coming to Russia—Russian immigration attorneys estimate a couple thousand had moved in the past year, including young families, older couples, and people starting businesses—their despair is emblematic of a wider-ranging hopelessness that has gripped much of the American right.
That hopelessness stems from a sense that the fight for America’s soul is over, that a darkness has enveloped the land, and everyone has been swept up by, among other things, “the newfangled gender politics—the doctors chopping off five-year-old boys’ penises,” Joe, the program manager, said. Brandon Slabaugh, 27, a blogger who grew up in West Virginia and moved to St. Petersburg in 2020, said that, among the American expats, there was a fatigue with the new progressive dogma back home. “It’s all transgender this, or Black Lives Matter that. It’s like, ‘Shut the fuck up,’ ” Slabaugh said.
“How can the United States get that feeling back of being normal?” Bernd Ratsch said. “To me, from what I see, it’s just about too late.”
He was hardly alone. A September poll showed Republicans are generally more pessimistic about America’s future than Democrats. A Rasmussen poll last week found that 41 percent of likely U.S. voters believe there’s a chance the U.S. will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years. That sentiment doesn’t surprise Joe, the program manager. “If you take America to its logical end, it’s going to eat itself,” he said. “You can’t continue with this garbage and be a respectable civilization.”
Which is why many believe they have nowhere to go but somewhere else.
Like Russia—which Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and an international relations professor at The New School in New York City, said is entirely predictable.
“Russia always says to America, ‘Whatever you do, we do the opposite,’ ” Khrushcheva told me.
Jason Van Boom, an American professor of semiotics who moved to Irkutsk about ten years ago to be with his Russian wife, said this American-Russian dichotomy came into sharp relief in the early years of the Cold War.
“In America, starting in the 1940s, we started becoming separated from ourselves,” Van Boom said. Americans, he explained, focus “on all the externals—the fake smiles, the consumerism, all that.” But in Russia, “they have that sense of an interiority, and that’s how they can appeal to all these Americans. It’s like, ‘Wow, there’s all this stuff going on inside.’ It’s deeper.”
Joseph Rose, the YouTuber, agrees that there is a hollowness in America. Even so, coming to Russia with his wife, Svetlana, and their five kids had been a long, tortuous path.
He had gone to community college in Tallahassee, studied film at New York University (his favorite movies include Back to the Future and To Kill a Mockingbird), tried to make it in Hollywood as a director or a producer, found God, got married, gave up on the movie biz, and moved home.
“I had always felt like I had a dual loyalty to Hollywood and Christianity,” Rose said, and Christianity won.
Back in Tallahassee he opened a daycare, and he and his wife belonged to a big evangelical church with branches all around the globe. By then they had two kids, a girl and a boy. But then the marriage fell apart in 2010.
Two years later, he was in San Antonio at an international church conference, where he met Svetlana; she went to the same church, but in Moscow. The next year, they got married, and Svetlana and her son moved to be with Rose in Florida. But she was homesick, and he knew she wanted to move back to Russia, though he couldn’t really wrap his mind around it. “In the U.S., you just grow up being told Russia is the bad guy place,” he said.
I asked whether Svetlana ever suggested they move. Rose said: “She would never ask that, because we’re traditional, and as Christians, I’m supposed to lead the family.”
Finally, in February 2022, after lots of trips to Russia, after things had gotten a little crazier in America—”People want traditional family values, and Russia is offering that to them right now, and the West is not,” Rose explained—they moved.
“Eight days later, the special military operation started,” Rose said. (Special military operation is Kremlin-speak for the invasion of Ukraine, and pretty much all the American expats I spoke to use it to refer to the war.)
He didn’t want to weigh in on the war. But he messaged me: “Russians do sincerely believe that they must do something to save their country from a slow, deliberate Western campaign to eventually break apart their country.” (There was, as usual with Kremlin talking points, an element of truth to all this, but a great deal of lying by omission.)
“I started the channel because I realized I was kind of behind enemy lines, and I could tell people what it’s like for regular people here, and I thought if I could do that, maybe I could help end the Cold War,” Rose said. “The new Cold War.”
By early 2023, he had about 9,000 subscribers. Suddenly, it seemed like he was in Russia for a reason—like God had had something to do with it.
For a long time, he said, he had wondered why he had abandoned his Hollywood dreams, whether it was too late for him now.
“After I left the movie business, I would think, ‘Did I make a mistake?’ I thought there would be something more to life. And then I’d think, ‘Maybe there’s not going to be something more—maybe this is it,’ ” Rose said.
But in Russia, he discovered, there was no dual loyalty, no tension between his movie self and his religious self. He was free in a way he had never been in America.
“It turned out that this is not it,” Rose said. “I’m at 54,000 subscribers now…”
Clipped from Racket News: More Republicans Betray Causes They Supported Ten Minutes Ago
The Great Bipartisan Constitution-shredding project of 2024 continues at breakneck speed
May 12, 2024 | Matt Taibbi
Whispers about familiar villains preparing new versions of the election censorship programs that animated the Twitter Files grew louder last week, when Virginia Senator Mark Warner let slip at a conference that the FBI and DHS have renewed “voluntary” communications with Internet platforms.
Republicans who objected to the last programs on First Amendment grounds are now rushing to out-censor the censors. Between renewal of FISA surveillance, the depressingly bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, and now a proposed No Fly List for campus protesters, most all of congress apart from a few libertarian holdouts is signed up for the project of turning War on Terror machinery inward. Not exactly the surprise of the century, but still, sheesh:
This week’s big letdown is the No Fly List. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and Roger “Doc” Marshall of Kansas were both critics of Big Tech censorship and campus speech codes. “Like the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s novel,” Marshall wrote in the wake of the J6 riots, “educational institutions and news outlets have pitched in to stamp out segments of society that dare to disagree with their ideas.” Marshall joined Blackburn, who professed to be horrified by the Twitter Files, in promoting the Campus Free Speech Resolution of 2021. A tick of the clock ago, they explicitly sought to enshrine legal speech and protest on campuses:
Now, under the banner of trying to restrain activities already barred by law a dozen different ways (supporting terrorist groups, inciting violence), they’re pushing a No Fly List for American students that clearly punishes legal speech, and will essentially put University officials in charge of deciding who gets to fly on airplanes:
“SUBJECT TO A DISCIPLINARY ACTION”: Congress adds passport control to the duties of University administrators
“Why do I feel like I got hit by a bus?” I ask my husband first thing upon opening my eyes.
“Because we have a two-year-old — and we’re eighty,” he says.
“I was told kids keep you young,” I say to no one. My husband is already gone, making coffee.
We aren’t eighty, but there are days that it feels like it. In 2022, for the first time ever, the median age of a first-time mother in the United States hit the ripe old age of thirty. I was forty-three when I had my daughter and, let me tell you, there is a reason we are biologically wired to have kids in our youth. Having kids is a young person’s game.
You’re made aware of this the minute you get pregnant if you’re over the age of thirty-five. Those in healthcare used to refer to these pregnancies as “geriatric” but that fell out of fashion for obvious reasons. Geriatric makes it sound like my ovaries are in Florida, riding golf carts in a MAGA parade. Geriatric evokes blue hair and nursing homes where my ovaries take a long drag off a Winston and yell, “BINGO!”
Even if you want to think of yourself as Hera herself, the doctors and nurses will remind you constantly of your “advanced maternal age” — but you know who reminded me the most often? My ancient body. “Geriatric” is offensive yet factually accurate at the same time. There is a higher chance of chromosomal abnormalities as you age and it goes up exponentially every year. Higher chances of stillbirth, miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. More likely to have high blood pressure, preeclampsia and gestational diabetes. If anyone is sexist, it’s Mother Nature.
My age has felt more of an issue as the child has entered into toddlerhood. This age is such a workout, physically and mentally. I spend all day chasing and lifting a twenty-five-pound, two-foot tyrant. Lately she’s been saying, “Mommy walk with me” and will grab my hand and start leading me down the hall.
And I’ll look at my husband and say, “Am I getting fired?”
“I don’t know, but that presentation you did on the planets was pretty mediocre, if I’m being honest,” he says, “and you definitely phoned in last night’s reading of Goodnight Moon.”
I love toddlers because they represent who we are before we are forced to live in society: tiny dictators who will fly into a rage because you did or didn’t do something for them. The child had a meltdown the other night because I wouldn’t let her wear her Easter dress to bed. She flew into a rage when I tried to velcro one shoe she was wearing and put the other one on. She wants to throw rocks and throw herself off the couch onto the dog bed. Civilization is the thin crust of cordiality formed over the mercurial temper of a barely verbal toddler.
One thing that never occurred to me until I had a child, and one of the biggest reasons I advocate having kids younger or sooner than you might want to — if you wait too long the grandparents will be too old to really help if they’re still around, and they have less time with your kids. This is sad for the kids and devastating for the grandparents and sucks for you because kiss any hope of free childcare goodbye…
In recent weeks, Public has documented how ruling European politicians appear to have weaponized government intelligence agencies to discredit and censor their political enemies.
Now, Public has learned that the European Union is close to winning new legislation that would allow it to monitor all private digital conversations, from text messaging to emails. The new law would give EU police the power to read all messages on Gmail, WhatsApp, and other mail and text messaging services.
The politicians, who are Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), say their legislation will be limited to “individuals or groups… linked to child sexual abuse using “reasonable grounds of suspicion.’” And, they said, “To avoid mass surveillance or generalised monitoring of the internet, the draft law would allow judicial authorities to authorise time-limited orders…”
But the technology companies themselves such as Apple say such “automatic data scanning” is technically impossible without compromising privacy and security. The new law would require Facebook, X, YouTube, Telegram, Snapchat, TikTok, and cloud services and online gaming websites to constantly monitor and report any evidence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on their systems and in the private chats of their users. And messaging apps including Signal, Proton Mail and Tutanota would no longer have end-to-end encryption.
As a result, "Millions of private conversations and private photos of law-abiding citizens are about to be searched and leaked using flawed technology without even a remote connection to child sexual abuse,” warned Patrick Breyer, a privacy activist and former member of the European Parliament who opposes the proposed modifications tothe law, known as "Chat Control."
The details of the new law leaked on April 2 and were published in the subscribers' section of the French news site contexte.com. The draft contains the full text of the regulation, which people close to the process say means that it is getting readied for approval.
All of this is very shocking. There is no evidence of any increase in child exploitation that merits this panic. Europeans have historically cared more about privacy than Americans, and have put in place strong privacy protections for their citizens. Why is it now seeking such a massive invasion of privacy? Why is the EU on the verge of enacting mass surveillance?
“Chat Control” As Information Control
The EU’s “Chat Control” is not the first attempt to undermine encryption. WhatsApp and Telegram have been in the censorship industry’s crosshairs since late 2018, when free speech on texting apps was blamed for allowing then-candidate Jair Bolsonaro to become president of Brazil.
In March 2021, Rob Flaherty, the Biden White House's director of digital strategy, demanded that Meta, the owner of messenger app WhatsApp, moderate private conversations on its platform.
Large philanthropies have promoted spying on text messages for several years “There is currently no easy way to discover potentially problematic content on WhatsApp and other end-to-end encrypted platforms at scale,” lamented censorship advocates in a January 2022 Omidyar Foundation report.
“One potential solution is to make use of misinformation ‘tiplines’ to identify potentially misleading or otherwise problematic content,” the report concluded. “On WhatsApp, a tipline would be a phone number to which WhatsApp users can forward potential misinformation they see to have it fact-checked.”
EU institutions have been discussing mandatory control of private messages for almost two years. The EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, and several NGOs, the most prominent of which are Thornand ECPAT, are all behind the current proposed legislation.
The proposed law is excessively "influenced by companies that pretend to be NGOs but behave more like technology companies", Arda Gerkens, former director of Europe's oldest online CSAM reporting hotline, told Balkan Insight last September.
"Groups like Thorn are using everything they can to bring forward this legislation, not only because they feel it is the way forward in the fight against child sexual abuse, but also because they have a commercial interest in it," Arda Gerkens added.
Meredith Whittaker, president of the American non-profit Signal Foundation, the company behind the encrypted chat app Signal, said at the European Digital Rights (EDRi) conference on September 26, 2023, "we're in the midst of a storm of global attacks on the human right to privacy with governments Security Services, AI companies masquerading as NGOs and a lot of money with very little transparency hard at work trying to walk back the few safe havens we've been able to carve out against the ferocious surveillance business model and the states that skim off of it."
In an interview with Balkan Insight, Whittaker said that AI companies that produce scanning systems are effectively establishing themselves as clearing houses and liability buffers for large technology companies and feel the market potential. "The more they frame this as a huge problem in the public discourse and in front of regulators, the more they incentivize big tech companies to trust them to solve problems," Whittaker said.
According to Whittaker, these AI firms are essentially offering tech companies a "free pass from liability" by telling them, "'Pay us [...] and we will [...] maintain the AI system, we will do whatever it takes to magically clean up the problem.’”
According to EDRi, it is possible that providers will rely on “already existing infrastructure, such as the PhotoDNA software“ to comply with “Chat Control.” This technology is linked to efforts to prevent “extremism.”
PhotoDNA creates a unique signature for a digital image, which can be compared with the signatures of other images to find copies of that image. According to EDRi, use of PhotoDNA tool would mean that, “In the event of the file being identified as relevant, this would not only allow to block the message from being forwarded but also an alert to be given to the police as well.”
Farid and PhotoDNA did not respond to Public’s request for comment.
The European Commission's December 2023 report refers to PhotoDNA as “the most widely used tool […] used by over 150 organizations. PhotoDNA has been in use for more than 10 years and has a high level of accuracy.“
Microsoft already uses its PhotoDNA — in combination with artificial intelligence — in a number of its products, including Skype, OneDrive and Xbox. Microsoft donated PhotoDNA to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
As of 2022, PhotoDNA was widely used by online service providers including Google's Gmail, Twitter,Facebook, Adobe Systems, Reddit, Discord to help find, report and eliminate some of the images of child pornography online.
In June 2016, Farid, then working as a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), unveiled a software tool for use by Internet and social media companies to quickly find and eliminate extremist content used to spread and incite violence and attacks. It functions similarly to PhotoDNA.
In December 2016, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft announced plans to use PhotoDNA to tackle extremist content such as terrorist recruitment videos or violent terrorist imagery. However, according to EDRi, “the definition of “extremist content” is everything but clear; CEP’s algorithm does not (and logically cannot) contain this definition either.”
Farid also specializes in the analysis of digital images and the detection of digitally manipulated images such as deepfakes. A deepfake detector designed by Farid and Czech student Matyáš Boháček to identify unique facial expressions and hand gestures can spot manipulated videos.
“We need government oversight,” professor Farid said in an interview about disinformation in November 2023. “Europeans are doing a good job of it. They came out with a dossier recently, the Digital Safety Act. The Brits are coming out with an online safety bill. The Australians have passed one. The Americans? The Americans are lost at sea.”
PhotoDNA can recognize not only images but also videos. It can therefore identify all copies of deepfake videos on the Internet. Or videos that contain child pornography. Or videos that incite extremism. Or videos that contain disinformation or hate speech. It only depends on the assignment.
Clipped from The Spectator: USC’s suppression of the anti-Israel valedictorian is unacceptable
This is a textbook attack on the principle of free expression in the name of security
April 21, 2024 | Juan P. Villasmil
University of Southern California’s 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, will not be allowed to deliver a speech at the university’s commencement ceremony due to, according to the school’s provost, security concerns. The cancellation comes following a wave of criticism over what groups such as US-nonprofit StopAntisemitism labeled “her authoring [of] an antisemitic social media post on her Instagram account.”
This is a textbook attack on the principle of free expression in the name of security. The move is designed to avoid controversy and save face by unjustly silencing those whose beliefs and speech differs from that of other, often more powerful, groups.
You don’t have to agree with Tabassum. You may well see her position on Israel-Palestine as radical and impractical. But how could anyone who stands for pluralism, debate and free expression take USC’s side?
“While this is disappointing, tradition must give way to safety,” Provost Andrew Guzman wrote in an email to the university community. “This decision is not only necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students, but is consistent with the fundamental legal obligation — including the expectations of federal regulators — that universities act to protect students and keep our campus community safe.”
“To be clear: this decision has nothing to do with freedom of speech. There is no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement. The issue here is how best to maintain campus security and safety, period,” Guzman added.
While somewhat rhetorically compelling, the email’s justification shouldn’t convince those who cherish free expression and meritocracy. Even if it is true that no one is “legally” entitled speaking time at the podium, Tabassum hit the highest marks and became valedictorian — she earned it. This, by definition, should be the sole criteria. Yet because of her controversial views — wanting to “abolish” Israel is a pretty common view on college campuses — she has been denied the opportunity.
Guzman’s line of logic can be — and has been — used to justify the silencing of anyone with heterodox, controversial, or simply different views. It is because of this way of thinking that dozens of conservative speakers have been disinvited from colleges throughout the country before.
In usual fashion, according to Tabassum, the so-called safety concerns remain unmentioned by university administrators. She told CBS News correspondent Carter Evans: “I was never given the evidence that any safety concerns and that any security concerns were founded.”
Responding to criticism, Guzman kept things conveniently abstract, resorting to the language of safetyism. He alluded to the “intensity of feelings” that have “grown to include many voices outside of USC,” and about how “similar risks have led to harassment and even violence at other campuses.”
Questions about the university’s self-interest and legality aside, as a matter of principle, how can the answer to this issue be shutting the speech down? Instead of canceling it, couldn’t the university have taken further steps to enhance safety for the graduation ceremony? And if there’s an identified threat, why can’t they neutralize it or explain its nature to the public?
The answer to those questions are simple. In fact, conservatives have been screaming them for years, yet the many of the liberals angry over this today have all too often looked away, if not joined the mob. In response to the 2018 visit of the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro to USC, student leaders introduced an amendment, attempting to give de facto veto power to their student government over which speakers are allowed on campus…
Clipped from The Spectator: On the ground at the People’s University for Palestine (formerly Columbia)
Many of the students are masked.
April 22, 2024 | Ben Appel
I’m on Columbia’s campus today. Sorry, I mean, “The People’s University for Palestine.”
I graduated from the university in May 2020. My alumni ID allows me access. A couple of days ago, student protesters started occupying the South Lawn, in front of Butler Library. The police force was called in. Some arrests were made. The police were able to clear the eastern half of the lawn, but the western half remains occupied. Students have pitched tents. Hand-painted signs hang from clotheslines that stretch around the lawn.
“Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine.” “Free All Palestinian Prisoners. Ceasefire Now.” “While You Read Gaza Bleeds.” “Admitted Students Enroll in Revolution.”
Palestine flags and keffiyehs are everywhere. And trans flags, of course.
“Japan for Palestine.” “Hindus for Intifada.” “Israel Is a Terrorist State.”
I walk the perimeter of the encampment, filming it on my iPhone. So many of the “occupiers” are women, I notice. In the northwest corner, ten or so are spread out on the grass, painting signs and posters. One paints a large tree. It’s a beautiful spring day — bright and sunny and in the mid-sixties.
How desperate these students are to reenact the 1968 protests, I think to myself. To be a part of something. To feel righteous. I was once one of them.
Many of the students are masked. “Admitted students enroll in revolution,” the sign said. And yet they don’t want to show their faces. I’m sure some are afraid of being doxxed — of having their identifying information published online. But why? So that they aren’t “canceled?” So that they can still secure a job at Goldman Sachs after they graduate from the People’s University for Palestine?
I didn’t think revolutionaries were afraid to show their faces.
Continuing around the perimeter, a young, masked woman just inside the encampment asks me to stop filming. I politely decline her request.
Now I’m in the Blue Java Café in Butler Library.
Earlier, I had stopped to chat with four students who lingered outside the encampment. I was no longer filming. I wanted to see how they felt about what was going on. They were clearly with the “resistance”: they were white, blond and accessorized with the appropriate regalia — bracelets and beanies and scarves.
They insisted everything be off the record. One student in particular seemed pretty paranoid. Her parents were probably investing a lot of money in her education. If she jeopardized her future job prospects, there would be hell to pay. I assured them that I wouldn’t identify them.
Last night, in bed, I watched a video that Sahar Tartak, the editor in chief of the Yale Free Press, had posted on X: it was nighttime in front of Butler. The occupiers had spotted “Zionists” in the camp. They linked arms and were slowly advanced in order to push the Jewish counter-protesters off of the lawn. A black student led the call-and-response. He was masked, but, judging by his voice, I would be surprised if he didn’t identify as transgender. The throngs of students — mostly women, it appears — repeated his words.
“WE ARE GOING TO SLOWLY…” WE ARE GOING TO SLOWLY…
“WALK AND TAKE A STEP FORWARD!” WALK AND TAKE A STEP FORWARD!
“SO THAT WE CAN…” SO THAT WE CAN…
“START TO PUSH THEM…” START TO PUSH THEM…
“OUT OF THE CAMP!” OUT OF THE CAMP!
“ONE STEP FORWARD!” ONE STEP FORWARD!
“ANOTHER STEP FORWARD!” ANOTHER STEP FORWARD!
“WE ASK…” WE ASK…
“THAT YOU PLEASE RESPECT…” THAT YOU PLEASE RESPECT…
“OUR PRIVACY…” OUR PRIVACY…
“AND OUR COMMUNITY GUIDELINES…” AND OUR COMMUNITY GUIDELINES…
“WHICH YOU HAVE SO FAR DISRESPECTED…” WHICH YOU HAVE SO FAR DISRESPECTED…
“AND LEAVE OUR CAMP!” AND LEAVE OUR CAMP!
“ONE STEP FORWARD…” ONE STEP FORWARD…
The leader is now centered in the frame of the video. He looks at the camera.
“Have you got enough video? ’Cause I look very pretty,” he says.
The women around him laugh. Some snap their fingers.
“You guys don’t have to do this, you know?” says a counter-protester, perhaps the one who is filming. “You’re all here because we’re here. Why are you…”
“We were here before you came here,” snaps the leader. He cackles, then continues his call-and-response as the counter-protester tries to speak.
“REPEAT AFTER ME!” REPEAT AFTER ME!
“I’M BORED!” I’M BORED!
“WE WOULD LIKE YOU TO LEAVE!” WE WOULD LIKE YOU TO LEAVE!
“REPEAT AFTER ME!” REPEAT AFTER ME!
“I’M BORED!” I’M BORED!
A young man in a keffiyeh steps in front of the camera to block the leader from being recorded. A young woman standing next to him politely tells the counter-protester, “We’re just actually trying to have a community meeting in a sec.” The young man adds, “We’re asking you nicely if you will please leave.”
“Why can’t we be on the lawn?” says a female counter-protester.
“Because you’re not respecting the safety…”
“You know I pay to go here?” she says. “And I pay for this lawn to be manicured, I pay for the lights to be on, and if you’re a student, you’re also paying for that.”
The video ends.
I returned outside to take some more photos. From atop the Sundial, a man speaks into a loudspeaker. A large crowd has gathered. He talks about the referendums for the university to divest from Israel. Columbia students voted to divest, he said. The crowd cheered. But, he added, Students for Justice in Palestine was silenced, and the university ignored the referendum. “Shame!” screamed the crowd.
“And now students at the encampment are suspended!” he added.
“SHAME!”
In 1968, the university placed on probation six anti-war student protesters inside Low Library. This outraged the student body and helped activate the larger revolt that soon followed.
“Divestment has been debated,” the man with the loudspeaker continued. “The discourse has happened at the university. And the student body at Barnard and Columbia College have decided to divest!” The crowd cheered. “Divestment is not a question anymore. It’s overdue,” he said.
“There are some things we should just not debate,” he said. “Just like we refused to debate the validity of white supremacy, we refuse to debate the humanity of Palestinians.”
“Gaza Solidarity Encampment: Community Guidelines,” written on a tall posterboard at the entrance to the encampment. I am told I must ask the students for permission to take a picture. I ask the young women holding up the poster for permission. They grant it.
We all commit to remain grounded in why we enter this space — as an act of solidarity with the Palestinian People
No desecration of the land, no littering
We recognize our role as visitors, and for many of us, colonizers, on this land. We camp on colonized Lennapehoking [sic] land and recognize Columbia’s complicity in the displacement of the Black and Brown Harlem Community
No drug/alcohol consumption inside the camp. We want to ensure people feel comfortable in this space — Please keep substance use outside the camp!
Respect personal boundaries — tight quarters are not an excuse to cross physical boundaries without affirmative consent
We commit to never photograph or videotape another community member without their affirmative consent.
We commit to never share the names of details of anyone we meet in this camp. We keep us safe, which includes refusing to comply with any demands if the NYPD or Columbia admin try to force us to disclose the identities of any fellow campers
We commit to assuming best intentions, granting ourselves and others grace when mistakes are made, and approaching conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing. [Unless you are a Zionist Jew.]
Please think of community members when making decisions about autonomous actions. Not everyone has consented to the same level of risk, but everyone will be impacted by decisions community members make
Do not engage with the counter-protestors.
“Please contact a CUAD [Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student groups, including SJP] organizer to suggest guidelines or changes to the list above. Free Palestine!”…
Clipped from Racket News: A Saturday Massacre in Congress
On a Saturday to mark and remember, congress funds two wars and hands the intelligence agencies sweeping new surveillance power, getting nothing in return
Saturday, April 20th, 2024. The NBA opened its playoff season, the city of Pinecrest, Florida was overrun by peacocks, and congressional Republicans cozied up to Democrats in in one of the all-time legislative betrayals, overriding voter sentiment to hand the national security establishment a series of historic unearned victories.
Do members of Congress work for voters, or for the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community? You be the judge:
SURRENDER #1: CONGRESS ALLOWS EXECUTIVE BRANCH TO RE-AUTHORIZE ITS OWN POWER
The first betrayal began with a lie. Heading into the weekend, it was widely reported that unless the Senate reathorized section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which among other things allows the government to collect communications of Americans without a warrant, an April 19th deadline would expire. Our poor government would be forced to make do for whole days, if not longer, without warrantless spying authority.
This was all fake. The law was already extended. On April 5th of this year, Joe Biden’s Department of Justice effectively granted itselfa one-year extension of FISA, meaning the real deadline was April of 2025. Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin and others repeatedly announced the fact, even on the Senate floor, but press didn’t report it.
“The U.S. Department of Justice has already obtained a fresh one-year certification from this Court to continue Section 702 surveillance through April of 2025,” Durbin said Thursday, while arguing the need to require warrants to spy on Americans. “There is no need for the Senate to swallow whole a House bill that expands—rather than reforms—Section 702.”
Similarly, at the end of last year, Section 702 had been set to “expire” on December 31st amid another panic. Congressional leaders inserted an extension through April 19th into the “must-pass” National Defense Authorization Act, seemingly tying the FISA extension to all military appropriations and staving off the horror of even temporary FISA-less existence.
But that too, was fake. As the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and over two dozen other groups wrote to congressional leaders at the end of last year, the government was already conducting surveillance “pursuant to a one-year FISA Court authorization” from the previousyear.
In other words, the Executive Branch has been re-authorizing itself two years running, and Congress has gone along, setting the precedent that spy agencies need not ask permission to do anything at all.
It turns out the only real check on the continuation of the FISA program is the FISA court itself, which approved the Department of Justice’s request in late February of this year for an early extension. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen told the New York Times when the request was made that bypassing Congress was necessary because it is “our responsibility” to “avoid a dangerous gap in collection.”
That one was designed to cut out a seemingly small provision, covered here last week, that massively expands the number of companies and individuals who’ll be forced to cooperate with FISA surveillance requests under the new law. The new provision has been dubbed the “Everybody is a Spy” law, and all it needs now is for someone to help Joe Biden add his signature.
SURRENDER #2: KILL FISA, BUT NOT REALLY?
“KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME!” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on April 10th:
It would take too long to chronicle all the huffing and puffing Republicans have done about FISA in recent years, after it was used illegally as part of an investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016, but also to obtain the communications of “tens of thousands of protesters, racial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, journalists, and members of the U.S. Congress.” Republican as a result now overwhelmingly oppose reauthorization of FISA, and members like Devin Nunes effectively sacrificed their careers to expose its misuse. How could the party cave on this issue?
When Trump posted “KILL FISA,” it coincided by a move among a cadre of House Republicans to block a procedural vote allowing a vote on the overall bill. It was the fourth such instance and deemed a “major embarrassment” for leadership, suggesting that Trump, rather than Johnson, really controlled the House caucus.
Despite all this, two days later, Trump received Johnson at Mar-a-Lago and gave the appearance of backing him against a leadership challenge, among other things over this issue. “He’s doing a great job,” Trump said. Once Johnson cast the key vote to reauthorize warrantless FISA, it set the stage for yesterday’s Senate vote.
To say this is confusing is an understatement. Both Trump and Johnson spent a lot of time talking about the border in their presser, but a major subtext was mutual surrender on other issues like FISA. There is no price imaginable that Trump could extract from Johnson that would seem to make giving in on FISA worth it, politically. Was Republican opposition to FISA ever real?
Start with the obvious. As Democrats increasingly don’t want funding for Israel, Republican voters do not want more spending in Ukraine. This is from a Gallup poll in March, when Republicans were still refusing to budge on Ukraine funding:
Seeing that poll, it was hard to imagine House Republicans folding on Ukraine funding anytime soon. Then, in the first week of April, a source sent a mailer from a high-profile weapons lobby firm, offering an assessment of Johnson’s intentions…
Clipped from The Spectator: President Biden’s latest abortion ad misrepresents Texas law
The ad twists the Zurawski story to promote a pro-abortion agenda at the expense of important medical and legal facts
April 18, 2024 | Christina Francis
President Joe Biden’s latest reelection campaign ad, Willow’s Box, highlights the story of Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman whose traumatic pregnancy loss made national news after her hospital neglected to give her the emergency care she needed, resulting in her needing two stays in the intensive care unit.
Certainly, Ms. Zurawski’s ordeal presents a harsh reminder of our healthcare system’s serious faults. However, Biden’s ad twists this story to promote a pro-abortion agenda at the expense of important medical and legal facts.
In this ad, written commentary appears between video shots of Ms. Zurawski and her husband tearfully displaying the contents of a box of items they bought for their pre-born daughter, Willow.
In 2022, Willow tragically passed away when Ms. Zurawski suffered premature pre-labor rupture of membranes, or PPROM, at eighteen weeks gestation; that is, her water broke in the middle of her second trimester. As an OB hospitalist, I have cared for dozens of women facing this complication. In such cases, it is crucial for a woman’s medical team to closely monitor her, specifically for signs of infection, which can spread rapidly and result in sepsis. This is exactly what happened to Ms. Zurawski — only it appears she was not monitored closely enough.
President Biden blames Texas’s pro-life law for Ms. Zurawski’s experience. The ad states “because Donald Trump killed Roe v. Wade, Amanda was denied standard medical care to prevent infection, an abortion.”
This is simply false. Induced abortion — defined by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists as “an intervention to end a pregnancy so that it does not result in a live birth” — is far from necessary to treat PPROM. What distinguishes induced abortion from other pregnancy interventions is that its aim is to end the life of the embryonic or fetal human being. In my two decades of practice, I have never needed to intentionally end the life of my pre-born patient for the health of my pregnant patient.
As a pro-life physician, I practice according to the same principles that drive Texas’s abortion law. When treating a pregnant woman, I treat both her and her pre-born child as my patients and as equally worthy of excellent healthcare. I, like the Texas law, recognize that killing isn’t healthcare and has no place in the practice of medicine.
Despite what President Biden says, Texas’s abortion law expressly allows physicians to separate a mother and her baby in the case of serious pregnancy complications. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission reports fifty-two instances of such emergency interventions in the state in 2023. Clearly, physicians are still able to offer lifesaving care under the current law.
The Biden ad falsely asserts otherwise. It states that due to the Texas law, “doctors were forced to send [Ms. Zurawski] home” when she presented to the emergency room with ruptured membranes…
Clipped from Racket: New NPR Chief Katherine Maher's Guide to the Holidays
What might America's future national holiday calendar look like? A trip around the calendar with new NPR chief Katherine Maher, current world champ of unintentional comedy, offers a clue
Katherine Maher, the new head of NPR, was a minor character in the Twitter Files. She was CEO of Wikimedia when the company was (like Twitter) being invited to election tabletop exercises at the Pentagon and “Industry meetings” with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She also scored the rare personal triumverate of being member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum young global leader, and a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Labs.
She took a job heading NPR in January, shortly before senior editor Uri Berliner set off a nuclear newsroom stink-bomb by publishing a tell-all article at The Free Pressabout station failures on stories like Russiagate. Berliner’s piece triggered a frenzy of anti-NPR Schadenfreude, which led to a furious examinations of Maher’s sitting-duck tweet history. Maher’s timeline reads so much like the Titania McGrath site spoofing overeducated nonsense-babbling white ladies that it’s difficult to believe she’s real — she even looks like the fictional McGrath, if Titania had more money to spend on personal upkeep.
Maher’s commentary dating back to the early Obama years is a gold mine of unintentional comedy. She’s gotten the most heat for using phrases like “As someone with cis white mobility privilege,” and “Sure, looting is counterproductive, but…” She also made an impressive Usain Bolt-like surge past Hillary Clinton in the Intersectional Gibberish Olympics:
When I spent what I admit is embarrassingly long period reading her social media history, I was struck by the random, unquenchable nature of Maher’s anger. Maher at rest, commenting on literally nothing at all, sounds like this:
When some poor sap tweeted about “Hereticon,” a conference of canceled-type speakers proclaiming “dissent is essential to the progressive march of human civilization,” Maher made an instant leap from a snapshot of ironic fifties conformism to a dead-serious KKK metaphor:
Maher is now in her second consecutive hugely influential role in American culture, yet her idea of happiness seemingly would involve torturing The Muppets until they give up the location of the patriarchy’s secret headquarters (inside a volcano shaped like Elon Musk’s head of course!). Reading, one wonders: does this person have a vision of enjoyment that doesn’t involve self-mortification? Out of curiosity, I took one tour with her through the holiday calendar, starting with Thanksgiving. The comprehensive list:
Don’t think she doesn’t like Thanksgiving. Despite “what it represents,” it was “always my favorite,” and now it’s even better, being an opportunity to interrogate her settler colonialist upbringing…
Worth reading in full HERE.
Clipped from The Spectator: The rise of the celebrity trans kid
The Catholic Church declares gender theory ‘grave threat’
April 10, 2024 | Amber Duke
Seraphina “Fin” Affleck
Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Seraphina Rose, appeared to come out as transgender last weekend. The chosen venue for this announcement? Her grandfather’s funeral. The young lady recently got a buzz cut and wore a black suit to the memorial service, at which she introduced herself to the audience with her new name before reading a Bible verse.
“Hello my name is Fin Affleck,” she told the grieving audience.
The intent is not to beat up on Miss Affleck here — she is a minor and is clearly going through a lot. She is the middle child of parents who went through a very public and messy divorce with allegations of infidelity and alcoholism. Her father has since gotten remarried to an old flame. All of this happened during some of her most formative years, between the ages of nine and thirteen. To an outsider, her behavior might seem like a stereotypical teenage cry for attention.
What is quite peculiar about Seraphina/Fin’s announcement is that Jennifer Lopez, who married Ben Affleck in 2022 and is Seraphina/Fin’s stepmother, has a “nonbinary” child. Lopez revealed a couple of years ago that her daughter, Emme Maribel Muniz, uses they/them pronouns. Seraphina/Fin and Emme are reportedly close friends and are routinely pictured spending time together.
The Affleck/Lopez kids are far from an anomaly in Hollywood. Actress Jamie Lee-Curtis announced in 2021 that her twenty-eight-year-old son identifies as a woman named “Ruby.” NBA star Dwyane Wade and actress Gabrielle Union are raising a transgender daughter, Zaya. Sigourney Weaver, Charlize Theron, Cher, Busy Phillips, Tori Spelling, Cynthia Nixon, Ally Sheedy, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, Sade, Marlon Wayans, David Tennant and Megan Fox have all publicly shared that their children identify as transgender or non-binary.
This evidence may be anecdotal, but it nonetheless seems strange that there are so many celebrities with visible transgender children — and in the case of Affleck/Lopez, that there might be two in the same family. What are the odds of that?
We’ve learned through the tireless research of people such as Abigail Shrier that transgenderism has become a social contagion among young people, particularly young girls. Children learn that they can get attention — whether positive or negative! — from their parents and status among their peers if they announce a new identity. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to suggest that children who grow up in the type of wealthy, liberal enclaves that accept gender theory and who simultaneously struggle with growing up in a parent’s shadow might see “transgender,” “queer” or “nonbinary” as a useful label. Celebrities may also reinforce this behavior because 1) they don’t want to appear un-“woke” to their friends and 2) publicly supporting an LGBTQ child earns them positive media coverage and a new fan base.
Alas, the Seraphina/Fin Affleck story comes at a difficult time for the trans activist movement.
This morning, Dr. Hilary Cass published her final report on the current treatment options for gender dysphoric children through Britain’s National Health Service. Cass’s preliminary findings prompted the NHS to discontinue prescribing puberty blockers and hormones for children with gender dysphoria outside of clinical research settings. The full report is even more devastating to the “gender-affirming model,” which suggests that children have the best outcomes when they are affirmed in their chosen gender identity and are supported in a social, and eventually medical, transition.
Dr. Cass concludes that puberty blockers do not just buy a confused child time to think about what gender they want to be — instead, they essentially lock the child in to a full gender transition. Further, there is no evidence that puberty blockers accomplish their stated goal of reducing gender dysphoria or body image issues. It is a better route, Cass suggests, to treat gender-related distress as analogous to other mental health concerns; essentially, what are the underlying psychological or environmental causes for the dysphoria?
Earlier this week, the Vatican also released the product of its five-year study of sex change operations, gender theory, and surrogacy and how they ought to be viewed in relation to Catholic doctrine. The Church has previously spoken on these issues but sought to provide fuller guidance given new scientific, political, and cultural developments and increased societal prevalence of their practice.
Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel Saturday night represents a dangerous escalation for three reasons. The first is its scale, some 300 drones and missiles. Second, it marks the first time the Islamic Regime has launched a lethal attack on Israeli territory from Iran itself, rather than through proxies. Most important of all is the combination of the first two: a major attack launched against Israel from Iranian territory. Although Israel, the US, the UK and, surprisingly, Jordan managed to shoot down nearly all the incoming drones and missiles, it was the thought that counts. And it was a very dangerous thought. Within hours, the Iranian attack changed the region’s strategic landscape. It brought the Islamic regime into direct, open military conflict with Israel and its Western partners. More bloodshed is sure to come.
Iran says it’s all over. Done. There’s no need for any response from Israel, they say. We were just “retaliating,” a term emphasized in headlines from the New York Times, MSNBC and others on the left. The effect of that framing is to justify Iran’s major escalation. That may play well on the Upper West Side, but not in Tel Aviv, Haifa, or Jerusalem. For Israel’s War Cabinet, the only questions now are how intense the Israeli response will be and whether that will lead to tit-for-tat escalation?
The crucial point is that Iran’s decision to launch a direct attack on Israel marks both a basic change in the strategy of Islamic regime and, consequently, a major change in the region’s politics, diplomacy and security.
What’s new is not that Iran has responded militarily to Israeli actions, like the one that killed a senior Iranian commander in Syria. It has always done that. What’s new is how Iran responded. Until now, it has always responded through proxies. This time was different.
Why such a dramatic change in Iranian strategy? The answer is unclear. Does it represent a shift in who controls the regime’s foreign policy? Or does it represent shifting views and greater risk acceptance by the same old leaders? We simply don’t know, at least not yet. What we do know that this barrage is not the first sign of Iran’s greater aggressiveness. Its direct attack on Pakistan is another sign.
We know, too, that the Biden administration’s efforts to deter Iran failed. The question, as always with policy failures, is whether those responsible will change their stance or dig in their heels.
In this case, the failure comes from the top: President Biden. The president, secretary of defense Lloyd Austin, national security advisor Jake Sullivan and other senior administration officials repeatedly gave Tehran a one-word message: “Don’t.” Uttering a single, ominous word was supposed to convey special authority. It didn’t work. What it told the world, we now know, is that the Biden administration’s threats were too feeble, too incredible to deter Iran.
In the last few days, the administration supplemented its rhetoric by deploying more ships and planes to the region. Neither the US military assets nor the tough talk managed to deter the radical Islamist regime. Either Tehran didn’t believe the words coming from Washington, or, like Japan before Pearl Harbor, it believed them but was willing to accept the risk. Why Iran is more “risk acceptant” now than in the past is unclear.
In any case, Iran’s attack marks the dramatic failure of US deterrence in the region. That’s a very bad sign for America’s other partners around the world, especially Taiwan.
The Iranian attack also marks the failure of the Biden administration’s broader effort to cope with Tehran by “playing nice.” Naturally, the administration will deny that’s what they have been doing. The denial is false. That’s exactly what they have been doing. It has been the foundation of their Middle East strategy.
Now that their strategy has failed, they need to acknowledge it, at least privately, so they can begin to change. Whatever the White House does, the rest of us should recognize the failure and hold the Biden administration accountable. You can be certain that Donald Trump will drive home the point and, of course, say it would never have happened on his watch.
He’s right to say the failure began when President Biden deliberately reversed the Trump administration’s strategy of building a strong anti-Iran coalition and starving the Islamic regime of foreign income. It managed to do that without putting more US troops in harm’s way. Trump’s unpredictability plus his deadly strike on Iranian military leader, Qasem Soleimani (in January 2020), made his threats credible. Biden’s threats clearly were not. Again, you can expect Trump to emphasize the difference on the campaign trail and underscore how Biden’s policies have led to disasters in Afghanistan, Ukraine and now the Middle East.
When Trump left office, Tehran was almost completely drained of foreign currency, thanks to the stringent application of sanctions. Biden’s more lenient policy — retaining the sanctions in name only but refusing to enforce them — allowed the Islamic Republic to rebuild its treasury. The administration’s forlorn hope was that Tehran would become part of a wider, more cooperative region and would be encouraged by Washington’s outstretched hand. In fact, they slapped down that hand time after time. On Saturday, they tried to amputate it. Biden’s Middle East strategy now lies in ruins.
One immediate question facing the administration is whether it will back a new arms package for Israel. A major one passed the US House with strong bipartisan support after Hamas’s terror attacks in October 2023. It died in the Senate when Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and every other Democrat opposed it, with Biden’s backing. They were not against aid to Israel, but they were unwilling to pass it without aid for Ukraine and other provisions.
House Speaker Mike Johnson could easily pass another arms package for Israel (and Israel alone) this week. It would be the right thing to do strategically and clever politically since it would force the Democratic Senate either to act or to pay a high price for refusing.
The problem for Democrats is two-fold. First, they want to pass an aid package for Ukraine, a desire shared by many, but not all, Republicans. Since funding Israel has nearly-universal support but Ukraine does not, the administration had hoped to pass the Ukraine package by tying it to Israel. That will be much harder to do now that Israel needs the aid immediately. The Republican House can hand the Senate an “Israel-only” package and force the Democratic Senate to make very hard choices.
Second, the Biden administration knows the left wing of the Democratic Party plus Muslim voters strongly oppose any military aid or diplomatic support for Israel. The president needs their votes in November. They were already accusing the Biden administration of “genocide” for giving Israel any support in Gaza. Providing more weapons to Israel now would compound Biden’s electoral problems.
Much as Israel needed the weapons six months ago, when the House passed the original package, it needs them even more urgently now. Among other things, it must replenish the anti-ballistic missiles used to thwart the Iranian attack. Without those arms, Israel would be vulnerable if Iran or its proxies renew their missile attacks. Some attacks are almost certain once Israel responds to the latest bombardment.
Clipped from The Spectator: Shakira is right about Barbie
The pop singer says her boys found the film ‘emasculating’
April 4, 2024 / by Amber Duke
Colombian pop singer Shakira caused quite the stir this week when she revealed that her sons “absolutely hated” the Barbie movie.
Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, had a major cultural moment last year. Hot pink came back in fashion, people were hosting Barbie-themed parties and everyone was obsessing over lead Margot Robbie’s vintage Barbie-inspired clothing on the movie’s press tour. It was Barbie-mania, and the film earned $1.4 billion worldwide.
Shakira’s family, though, weren’t fans of the global phenomenon. She said her nine- and eleven-year-old sons didn’t enjoy the movie because they found it to be “emasculating.” And, she added, “I agree, to a certain extent.”
Critics have slammed Shakira in response, as they do when anyone criticizes the uniculture, accusing her of not understanding the movie and missing the point. “Barbie is not made for Shakira and her pre-adolescent sons, insofar as she presents her family in the Allure piece: it’s a story about women coming into power autonomously, independent of the patriarchy and all its trappings,” a Salonwriter responds.
I’d posit that Shakira actually understands the “unabashedly feminist” film more than her critics do. Her commentary on the problems she had with the movie are insightful; she acknowledges the film’s worthy goal of female empowerment while suggesting that it went too far in its negative depictions of men.
“I’m raising two boys. I want ’em to feel powerful too [while] respecting women. I like pop culture when it attempts to empower women without robbing men of their possibility to be men, to also protect and provide. I believe in giving women all the tools and the trust that we can do it all without losing our essence, without losing our femininity,” Shakira said.
She continued, “I think that men have a purpose in society and women have another purpose as well. We complement each other, and that complement should not be lost.”
The Barbie movie operates on the premise that men have to sacrifice some of their masculinity in order for women to succeed…
Attorney General Letitia James could freeze the Republican front-runner’s bank accounts, thus interfering in the presidential election, and rattling financial markets
Former president Donald Trump committed fraud for years by lying about his wealth on financial statements to get favorable loans, say Democrats and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Judge Arthur Engoron ruled last month that Trump must pay over $354 million in damages, which has since increased to $464 million due to interest. Trump now has until Monday to post a bond. If he fails to do so, James can begin seizing his assets, including his bank accounts and properties.
“There’s not only potential asset seizures that could take place,” reported New York Times investigative journalist Susanne Craig on MSNBC yesterday. “He’s got some cash. His bank accounts could be frozen… If someone’s going to start a seizure process, they’re going to grab the most liquid thing, which is the cash.”
But Trump’s alleged fraud was victimless. The New York Times reported that Trump's bankers “testified that they had been delighted to have Mr. Trump as a client.” And, testified a banker in Deutsche Bank’s wealth management group, “It’s not unusual or atypical for any client’s provided financial statements to be adjusted to this level, or this extent.” Indeed, in 2013, the bank adjusted Trump’s net worth from the $4.9 billion he reported to $2.6 billion.
Judge Engoron, who was elected in 2015 and serves until 2029, argued that even if the bankers had no issues with the loans, “The mere fact that the lenders were happy doesn’t mean that the statute wasn’t violated, doesn’t mean that the other statues weren’t violated.” Trump could have committed fraud even if the bank did its own analysis of his finances.
But such alleged asset inflation is not uncommon, and James’ prosecution of Trump appears to be politically motivated. In 2018, James promised to “focus on Donald Trump” and “follow his money” if elected. She called him a “con man” and “carnival barker.” After her election, James said, “We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well.”
Seizing Trump’s cash and properties could have significant repercussions, warn business leaders. “I don’t think this case is about Trump anymore,” said investor Kevin O’Leary on CNN. “I think this case is about New York. It’s about the American brand. It’s about what we promised the world in terms of fairness and justice and investing capital in the country that’s built the largest economy on Earth. Forfeiture? Seizing of assets? Is that in our nomenclature in America? Is that what we tell people who want to bring their money here and protect property rights? Forget about Trump. Nothing to do with Trump. You think this is good for business in New York? You think this is good for business in America?”
And the bond is unprecedented and punitive. “There is no such thing as half a billion bonds,” said O’Leary, who is famous for his role on the TV investment reality show, “Shark Tank.” “Never been done before. Never. This law has never been applied.”
Democrats’ overreach could backfire and help Trump gain more support. After all, it would be easy for Trump to make the case that the courts are interfering in the election by freezing his bank accounts, which contain the cash he said he would spend on his presidential re-election campaign. ”I think we’re going to be writing an obituary of the Trump Organization,” said the Times’ Craig.
“I want you to remember this moment, and don’t forget it,” said anti-Trump pollster and consultant Frank Luntz on CNN. “If the New York Attorney General starts to take his homes away, starts to seize his assets, it’s all gonna be on camera… you’re going to create the greatest victimhood of 2024, and you’re going to elect Donald Trump.”
By violating democratic norms to prevent Trump from re-entering the White House, Democrats are thus at risk of installing him there. Why is that?
I planned to leave the “bloodbath” topic alone, thinking it was over. Donald Trump gives speech, mentions “bloodbath”; Democratic PAC-funded oppo outfit circulates video out of context; lots of media dopes from Joe Scarborough to the Washington Postfall for it; criticscatch up to the scam. Embarrassment ensues. Fin du Media Cycle. Haven’t these people watched The Three Stooges? If you somehow throw a pie in your own face, don’t do it again.
To recap: Trump gave a speech last Sunday in Dayton, Ohio. The “bloodbath” portion concerned a promise to slap a 100% tariff on foreign cars, and the quote was, “If I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath.” Acyn, a media chop shop funded by blue-party PAC Meidas Touch, put out a 17-second tweet, which the Biden-Harris campaign shortened to nine seconds:
This triggered the usual outrage battery. Biden spokesperson James Singer said it was clear Trump “wants another January 6th.” David Corn said Trump “endorsed political violence.” Even Hillary Clinton slid her crypt open to contribute:
“Bloodbath” was clearly economic metaphor, and the worst thing you could say about it is that it underscored a general Trump tendency to preach doom and disaster in a way some consider irresponsible. I don’t. This rhetoric works for Trump for a reason, the same one that makes the media miss on “bloodbath” a double-insult.
This apocalyptic speech resonates in places like Dayton, a region that produced six million vehicles between 1981 and an infamous GM plant closure in 2008. There’s now a Chinese auto-glass factory on the site. Many people in that part of the world watched $30-an-hour factory jobs turned into $1-an-hour gigs for Mexican counterparts after NAFTA, which explains why crowds tend to respond to heated rhetoric about the border. You don’t have to agree with Trump’s stances on these issues, but not understanding why they work is rhetorical malpractice.
The “bloodbath” episode is exposing how even a nationwide digital blackout of Trump can’t and won’t work, ever. It’s not Trump’s own statements or online “misinformation” or Russian bots or Decepticons or Marilyn Manson or the Reverse Flash or any other diabolical villain animating Trump’s campaign. It’s people who hate him the most, in media, who’ve become nearly the whole of his PR operation.
Clipped from The Spectator: Is a Christian revival underway?
As a believer, I see signs that Christ is moving in the minds and hearts of secular intellectuals
March 30, 2024
Byline: Justin Brierley
Tom Holland recently invited me to attend a service of Evensong with him at London’s oldest church, St. Bartholomew the Great.
Holland, who co-hosts the phenomenally popular The Rest is History podcast, has been a regular congregant for a few years. He began attending while researching Dominion, his bestselling book which outlined the way the first century Christian revolution has irrevocably shaped the twenty-first century West’s moral imagination. It also recounts how Holland, a secular liberal westerner who had lost any vestige of faith by his teenage years, came to realize he was still essentially Christian in terms of his beliefs about human rights, equality and freedom.
Christianity is not just a useful lifeboat for stranded intellectuals. If it isn’t literally true, it isn’t valuable
Holland is not alone as an agnostic trying out church again. In contrast to the usual ageing demographic of many Anglican churches, the congregation of St. Bart’s seems to mainly consist of young professionals, both male and female. I noticed a famous politician among the gathered faithful, and was told that a well-known melancholy rock star has also been frequenting the church of late.
Despite the fact that “smells and bells” aren’t part of my own church tradition, I found the blend of sacred choral music, candlelit arches and incense-infused worship to be an intoxicating experience. I imagine that many people in the pews are likewise turning up for a mystical encounter as much as the preaching and prayers.
I also believe Holland’s journey reflects a wider turning of the secular tide in the West, a phenomenon I document in my book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.
The New Atheists of the early 2000s — led by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett — predicted a utopia founded upon science and reason once we had abandoned religion. But their bestselling books proved to be full of empty promises. All that our post-Christian society has delivered so far is confusion, a mental health crisis in the young and the culture wars. It’s not surprising then that a movement of New Theists has sprung up.
Influencers such as Joe Rogan and Douglas Murray are increasingly talking about the value of Christian faith and the dangers of casting it off. The former new atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been praising the virtues of our Judeo-Christian heritage, after becoming convinced that secular humanism cannot save the West. The women’s rights campaigner Louise Perry has been advocating for a return to traditional Christian morality since writing her book The Case Against The Sexual Revolution. The evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein often describes religion as “metaphorically true.” Secular psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt and John Vervaeke have written extensively about the value of faith in the midst of a “meaning crisis” in the West.
Another significant voice speaking about the value of Christianity is the psychologist Jordan Peterson. In November I attended a lecture by him at the O2 Arena. As he often does, he pointed his vast audience of mainly young men back to the Bible as a source of deep wisdom about the human condition.
It was clear, though, that while Peterson thinks of Christianity as useful, he struggles to believe that it is true. He applies his Jungian eye to the Bible and detects “deep patterns of symbolism and meaning.” Yet, as is also the case with Weinstein, Haidt and Vervaeke, such an appraisal of faith still only amounts to regarding religion as a “useful fiction” for making sense of life.
But Christianity is not just a useful lifeboat for stranded intellectuals. If it isn’t literally true, it isn’t valuable. Whether Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead matters. It mattered to St. Paul. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” And it should matter to us.
C.S. Lewis wrote: “If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.” The impact of Christianity on the West is intrinsically linked to the living faith of those who established its institutions and values. If people hadn’t actually believed in the Christian promise of redemption and if they hadn’t been able to hope in the face of death, they wouldn’t have had the courage to change the world in Jesus’s name.
If conservative-leaning intellectuals only “cosplay” at Christianity (Tom Holland’s phrase) without really believing it, then this “New Theist” movement will inevitably fade away. Co-opting Christianity in the cause of an anti-woke agenda or in order to fend off radical Islam turns it into a useful political tool, but drains it of any life-giving power. A Christian nationalism of the right will become as pallid and pointless as the Christianity of the progressive left that parrots the latest politically correct talking points.
However, they say God moves in mysterious ways. As a believing Christian, I see signs that he is moving in the minds and hearts of secular intellectuals. Many of them are recognizing that secular humanism has failed and, against all their expectations, seem to be on the verge of embracing faith instead.
Some have actually become Christians. The author and poet Paul Kingsnorth surprised his readership when he announced his conversion in 2021. Russell Brand is now calling himself a Christian and says he plans to get baptized. Ayaan Hirsi Ali says she has embraced Christianity after realizing she was “spiritually bankrupt.” The tech pioneer Jordan Hall recently went public about his conversion to Christianity. Significantly, both Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Hall have mentioned the influence of Tom Holland’s thesis that Christianity is the foundation on which the ethics of the West sits.
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As a Christian I believe things that are dead can come back to life. That’s the point of the story after all. As G.K. Chesterton wrote: “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
Clipped from The Spectator:After Ronna, Republicans should ignore NBC
The network can’t possibly be viewed as a good-faith participant in ideological debate
March 27, 2024
Byline: Ben Domench
The network can’t possibly be viewed as a good-faith participant in ideological debate
NBC News’s decision to ditch Ronna McDaniel after the hissy fit thrown collectively by Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, Jen Psaki, Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow and more should be more than enough evidence to support a commitment from the Republican National Committee and its new leadership: there is no working with NBC. Not on debates, not on town halls, not even on campaign season interviews. There’s no point in creating content for a network that finds even the most generic Republican figure so vile and scary that they don’t even want her in the building.
Obviously this is an unenforceable commitment, and someone like Chris Christie or Larry Hogan will assuredly ignore it. But the point is that NBC News can’t possibly be viewed as a good-faith participant in ideological debate — they’re just a partisan mouthpiece for the Democratic Party.
There are numerous opportunities to debate the left all across today’s media that are more prominent than anything on offer from MSNBC. And unlike their network, if you’re doing so on a program like Bill Maher’s or any of dozens of high-traffic podcasts, it’s going to be a more legitimate and intelligent battle of ideas than trying to pretend NBC is at all interested in such a discourse.
