By • Newsweek
Former vice president Mike Pence announced Thursday the formation of Advancing American Freedom to promote “the pro-freedom policies of the last four years that created unprecedented prosperity at home and restored respect for America abroad.”
To lead the group, he’s chosen Dr. Paul Teller, a highly regarded former congressional staffer and member of his vice-presidential staff. Teller’s policy chops and conservative contacts are hard to match. Pence has also attracted other conservative heavyweights—like former Heritage Foundation presidents Dr. Ed Feulner and Kay Coles James, Arizona governor Doug Ducey, Ambassador Calista and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, former senior Trump advisers Larry Kudlow and Kellyanne Conway and important organizational leaders like Lisa Nelson, Penny Nance and Marjorie Dannenfelser—to serve on AAF’s advisory board.
If you think this looks like a presidential campaign in all but name, you’re not wrong. Pence says he wants AAF to blend “traditional conservative values with the Make America Great Again policy agenda that propelled the nation to new economic heights, and unprecedented strength and prosperity.” That’s a fancy way of saying “take the best of Trump, jettison the baggage and create an agenda the American people—especially the formerly reliable Republican suburban voters who helped put Joe Biden in office—can embrace.”
It’s a smart formula that relies on addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division. As GOP political consultant Roger Stone used to advise, anything a campaign does that isn’t focused on growing its share of the vote is a waste of time.
The question is whether Pence can pull it off. As a House member, he was a GOP star, perhaps in line to be speaker someday. As Indiana’s governor he was a solid, if not exactly inspiring, chief executive who on the ideas front could never quite outshine his immediate predecessor, Republican Mitch Daniels—who is now president of Purdue University.
Pence has a chance to shine now, to step into the spotlight and show America what he’d do and how he’d inspire voters to embrace conservatism redefined. He could bring back the sunny optimism and hope that defined Reaganism—strong and not defensive but also not obnoxious.
On paper that sounds easy. In real life, it will be hard. The media elite already have their guns out for Biden’s potential 2024 challengers. Look at the hatchet job CBS‘s 60 Minutes just tried to do on Florida GOP governor Ron DeSantis, another possible presidential candidate, by alleging that in exchange for campaign contributions he let the Publix supermarket chain dispense the COVID-19 vaccine. The story landed with a thud—but it’s likely just the first of many drive-bys the media will try.
Let’s face it; the elite media helped put Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in office and have a vested interest in seeing them stay there. That means the knives are out for Pence, DeSantis, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and any other Republican who wants the nomination. This will make it especially tough for the former vice president as The New York Times, CNN and others try to tie him to the former president.
The challenges Pence faces on his way to the White House are threefold. First, he must separate himself from Trump enough to allow the Never-Trumpers to consider voting for him while not alienating the MAGA movement. Second, he has to come up with a bold agenda for growth and reform that will get the country moving again to counter what the Democrats offer during Biden’s term. Third, Trump has to decide not to run.
Since the third point is out of his control, Pence would do best to concentrate on the other two. The team he’s assembled so far represents a top-tier mix of MAGA conservatives and Reaganites, meaning that when he runs, Pence will be a force to be reckoned with.
A favorite Republican catchphrase deserves higher scrutiny
By • The Washington Free Beacon
“We are now the party supported by most working-class voters,” congressman Jim Banks of Indiana wrote to House minority leader Kevin McCarthy in a six-page memo this week. Banks, head of the Republican Study Committee, said the lesson is clear: It’s time to act like a working-class party. “Our electoral success in the 2022 midterm election,” he concluded, “will be determined by our willingness to embrace our new coalition.”
The Banks memo, first reported by Axios, is part of a trend. Influential Republicans have embraced the notion that Donald Trump transformed the GOP into the vehicle of the proletariat. “We are a working-class party now,” Josh Hawley tweeted on election night. “The future of the party is based on a multiethnic, multiracial, working class coalition,” Marco Rubio said a week later. “The future of the Republican Party is as a party that defends the social, economic, and cultural interests and values of working American families of every race, color, and creed,” Trump toldCPAC in February. Last month, Rubio announced his support for Amazon employees in Alabama who want to form a union.
Banks doesn’t go that far. The word union appears nowhere in his memo. He mentions “labor” only once, in a derisive reference to a Democratic special interest group. The lacuna is a reminder: Despite the emerging consensus that the GOP is a working-class party, there is little agreement on what such a party should stand for. Industrial policy? Trust busting? Family subsidies and financial transaction taxes? Banks sidesteps these trendy measures on the intellectual right. He suggests instead that Republican candidates adopt Trump’s posture of opposition to illegal immigration, offshoring of manufacturing jobs, COVID-19 lockdowns, Big Tech censorship, and political correctness.
It might take a second—or longer—to see how the issues Banks highlights relate to the material interests of Republican voters. What they have in common is an adversarial attitude toward the votaries of managerial liberalism. Indeed, Banks’s dichotomy isn’t between working class and capital, but between populism and elitism. Republicans, Banks writes, must “highlight the cultural and economic elitism that animates the Democrat Party.” It’s “Democrat elitism” that has driven working-class voters to the GOP. And “nothing better encapsulates Democrats’ elitism and classism than their turn towards ‘wokeness.'” Taxes, spending, welfare, and entitlements do not come up.
For all of the “working class” rhetoric in conservative discourse, few Republican politicians have adopted the economic measures put forth by Oren Cass at American Compass, Samuel Hammond at the Niskanen Center, and Julius Krein at American Affairs. Rubio and Hawley are political entrepreneurs willing to push the boundary of conventional GOP policymaking. But they are outliers. A figure like Banks, who has to win reelection every two years, is more cautious. He perceives that Republican voters are more interested in aggressive prosecution of the culture war than in technocratic manipulation of the economy.
The “class war” mentioned so often in conservative discourse is in fact the continuation of the half-century-long war over which values and social roles should be authoritative in American culture. Imposing a class framework on this struggle leads to confusion. After all, according to the 2020 exit poll, President Biden won voters making less than $100,000, while then-president Trump won voters who earn more than $100,000 by 12 points. And Biden won union members by 16 points. The AP Votecast results were more closely divided, but just as muddled: Trump lost voters who earned less than $50,000, barely won voters who made $50,000-$99,999, and narrowly lost voters who earned more than $100,000.
If you read class through the lens of educational attainment, you see that the GOP leans ever more heavily on white voters without college degrees. But that trend long predates Trump. And the white voters without bachelor’s diplomas are a large and diverse group. They encompass a variety of ages, life experiences, occupations, and net worth. The successful contractor who attended college for a few years before starting his own business has a different set of economic concerns than the restaurant server or grocery store clerk. Does muscular labor define membership in the working class? Perhaps. But not every voter without a college degree works with his hands. And agriculture and industry constitute a narrow base for a political party in an economy where 79 percent of jobs are in the service sector. Conservatives like to position themselves as the representatives of the rural heartland against the cosmopolitan metropolis. True enough. But what about the majority of Americans that lives in the suburbs?
Ideology, partisan affiliation, and religiosity mark one’s place in the culture war far better than income or education. Liberals went for Biden 89-10 in the exit poll, and conservatives backed Trump 85-14. Both candidates won 95 percent of their respective parties. And the gaps between voters without a religious affiliation and all others, and between white evangelical voters and all others, were huge.
Ideology also explains the Republicans’ surprisingly good performance among minority voters. There’s evidence, for example, that black Protestants are moving toward the GOP. “What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates,” election analyst David Shor recently explained to New York magazine. “They started voting more like white conservatives.” Why? Revulsion at the far-left messaging of radical elites on immigration and policing.
When the pollsters at Echelon Insights asked Republicans what they want from a candidate, the answer was someone who would “fight” for the conservative cause, support the Trump agenda, and speak out against cancel culture. The most important issues for Republicans are illegal immigration, law and order, taxes, and liberal media bias. The Echelon data have been replicated elsewhere. My AEI colleague Ryan Streeter writes, “Large national surveys conducted by the American Enterprise Institute suggest Trump’s supporters are actually quite content with American economic life but highly reactive to elite dominance of American culture life.”
Calling Republicans “working-class” is a self-flattering way to put the party on the side of the “forgotten American.” But it risks reducing voters to factors of production. And it flirts with an economic program actual Republicans don’t seem to want. The new class consciousness is another example of the Europeanization of American politics: For decades, the two parties competed for the loyalties not of the working class but of the middle class, and public policy experts devoted themselves to improving the condition of the urban poor or “underclass.” Now, Republican communicators are beginning to sound like the leaders of European parties whose anti-bourgeois romanticism often manifests itself in ugly ways.
Maybe less has changed than people think. Remember that Barry Goldwater first identified himself with the “forgotten American” back in 1961. The GOP remains a populist conservative party whose voters are incensed at the values, directives, and rhetoric of the men and women who occupy the commanding heights of American culture. It’s the party of married parents, of the small business owner, of the journeyman who aspires for a better life for his family. It’s the party of peace through strength, low taxes, safe streets, legal immigration, national pride, and traditional pieties. And what it needs most in 2022 are strong candidates who inspire the grassroots without terrifying independents.
America is a diplomatic fox, while Beijing is a hedgehog fixated on the big idea of reunification.
By • Bloomberg
In a famous essay, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin borrowed a distinction from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
“There exists,” wrote Berlin, “a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to … a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance” — the hedgehogs — “and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” — the foxes.
Berlin was talking about writers. But the same distinction can be drawn in the realm of great-power politics. Today, there are two superpowers in the world, the U.S. and China. The former is a fox. American foreign policy is, to borrow Berlin’s terms, “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels.” China, by contrast, is a hedgehog: it relates everything to “one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”
Fifty years ago this July, the arch-fox of American diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, flew to Beijing on a secret mission that would fundamentally alter the global balance of power. The strategic backdrop was the administration of Richard Nixon’s struggle to extricate the U.S. from the Vietnam War with its honor and credibility so far as possible intact.More fromArchegos Appeared, Then VanishedHedge Fund or Billionaire? For Tribune, It’s a No-BrainerIllinois Owes Georgia Voters a Debt of GratitudeOne Cheer for the Return of Earmarks
The domestic context was dissension more profound and violent than anything we have seen in the past year. In March 1971, Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty of 22 murders in the My Lai massacre. In April, half a million people marched through Washington to protest against the war in Vietnam. In June, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers.
Kissinger’s meetings with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, were perhaps the most momentous of his career. As a fox, the U.S. national security adviser had multiple objectives. The principal goal was to secure a public Chinese invitation for his boss, Nixon, to visit Beijing the following year.
But Kissinger was also seeking Chinese help in getting America out of Vietnam, as well as hoping to exploit the Sino-Soviet split in a way that would put pressure on the Soviet Union, America’s principal Cold War adversary, to slow down the nuclear arms race. In his opening remarks, Kissinger listed no fewer than six issues for discussion, including the raging conflict in South Asia that would culminate in the independence of Bangladesh.
Zhou’s response was that of a hedgehog. He had just one issue: Taiwan. “If this crucial question is not solved,” he told Kissinger at the outset, “then the whole question [of U.S.-China relations] will be difficult to resolve.”
To an extent that is striking to the modern-day reader of the transcripts of this and the subsequent meetings, Zhou’s principal goal was to persuade Kissinger to agree to “recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government in China” and “Taiwan Province” as “an inalienable part of Chinese territory which must be restored to the motherland,” from which the U.S. must “withdraw all its armed forces and dismantle all its military installations.” (Since the Communists’ triumph in the Chinese civil war in 1949, the island of Taiwan had been the last outpost of the nationalist Kuomintang. And since the Korean War, the U.S. had defended its autonomy.)
With his eyes on so many prizes, Kissinger was prepared to make the key concessions the Chinese sought. “We are not advocating a ‘two China’ solution or a ‘one China, one Taiwan’ solution,” he told Zhou. “As a student of history,” he went on, “one’s prediction would have to be that the political evolution is likely to be in the direction which [the] Prime Minister … indicated to me.” Moreover, “We can settle the major part of the military question within this term of the president if the war in Southeast Asia [i.e. Vietnam] is ended.”
Asked by Zhou for his view of the Taiwanese independence movement, Kissinger dismissed it out of hand. No matter what other issues Kissinger raised — Vietnam, Korea, the Soviets — Zhou steered the conversation back to Taiwan, “the only question between us two.” Would the U.S. recognize the People’s Republic as the sole government of China and normalize diplomatic relations? Yes, after the 1972 election. Would Taiwan be expelled from the United Nations and its seat on the Security Council given to Beijing? Again, yes.
Fast forward half a century, and the same issue — Taiwan — remains Beijing’s No. 1 priority. History did not evolve in quite the way Kissinger had foreseen. True, Nixon went to China as planned, Taiwan was booted out of the U.N. and, under President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. abrogated its 1954 mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. But the pro-Taiwan lobby in Congress was able to throw Taipei a lifeline in 1979, the Taiwan Relations Act.
The act states that the U.S. will consider “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” It also commits the U.S. government to “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and … services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capacity,” as well as to “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”
For the Chinese hedgehog, this ambiguity — whereby the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as an independent state but at the same time underwrites its security and de facto autonomy — remains an intolerable state of affairs.
Yet the balance of power has been transformed since 1971 — and much more profoundly than Kissinger could have foreseen. China 50 years ago was dirt poor: despite its huge population, its economy was a tiny fraction of U.S. gross domestic product. This year, the International Monetary Fund projects that, in current dollar terms, Chinese GDP will be three quarters of U.S. GDP. On a purchasing power parity basis, China overtook the U.S. in 2017.
In the same time frame, Taiwan, too, has prospered. Not only has it emerged as one of Asia’s most advanced economies, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. the world’s top chip manufacturer. Taiwan has also become living proof that an ethnically Chinese people can thrive under democracy. The authoritarian regime that ran Taipei in the 1970s is a distant memory. Today, it is a shining example of how a free society can use technology to empower its citizens — which explains why its response to the Covid-19 pandemic was by any measure the most successful in the world (total deaths: 10).
As Harvard University’s Graham Allison argued in his hugely influential book, “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?”, China’s economic rise — which was at first welcomed by American policymakers — was bound eventually to look like a threat to the U.S. Conflicts between incumbent powers and rising powers have been a feature of world politics since 431 BC, when it was the “growth in power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta” that led to war. The only surprising thing was that it took President Donald Trump, of all people, to waken Americans up to the threat posed by the growth in the power of the People’s Republic.
Trump campaigned against China as a threat mainly to U.S. manufacturing jobs. Once in the White House, he took his time before acting, but in 2018 began imposing tariffs on Chinese imports. Yet he could not prevent his preferred trade war from escalating rapidly into something more like Cold War II — a contest that was at once technological, ideological and geopolitical. The foreign policy “blob” picked up the anti-China ball and ran with it. The public cheered them on, with anti-China sentiment surging among both Republicans and Democrats.
Trump himself may have been a hedgehog with a one-track mind: tariffs. But under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. policy soon reverted to its foxy norm. Pompeo threw every imaginable issue at Beijing, from the reliance of Huawei Technologies Co. on imported semiconductors, to the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, to the murky origins of Covid-19 in Wuhan.
Inevitably, Taiwan was added to the list, but the increased arms sales and diplomatic contacts were not given top billing. When Richard Haass, the grand panjandrum of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued last year for ending “strategic ambiguity” and wholeheartedly committing the U.S. to upholding Taiwan’s autonomy, no one in the Trump administration said, “Great idea!”
Yet when Pompeo met the director of the Communist Party office of foreign affairs, Yang Jiechi, in Hawaii last June, guess where the Chinese side began? “There is only one China in the world and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. The one-China principle is the political foundation of China-U.S. relations.”
So successful was Trump in leading elite and popular opinion to a more anti-China stance that President Joe Biden had no alternative but to fall in line last year. The somewhat surprising outcome is that he is now leading an administration that is in many ways more hawkish than its predecessor.
Trump was no cold warrior. According to former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s memoir, the president liked to point to the tip of one of his Sharpies and say, “This is Taiwan,” then point to the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and say, “This is China.” “Taiwan is like two feet from China,” Trump told one Republican senator. “We are 8,000 miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a f***ing thing we can do about it.”
Unlike others in his national security team, Trump cared little about human rights issues. On Hong Kong, he said: “I don’t want to get involved,” and, “We have human-rights problems too.” When President Xi Jinping informed him about the labor camps for the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang in western China, Trump essentially told him “No problemo.” On the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Trump asked: “Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal.”
The Biden administration, by contrast, means what it says on such issues. In every statement since taking over as secretary of state, Antony Blinken has referred to China not only as a strategic rival but also as violator of human rights. In January, he called China’s treatment of the Uighurs “an effort to commit genocide” and pledged to continue Pompeo’s policy of increasing U.S. engagement with Taiwan. In February, he gave Yang an earful on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and even Myanmar, where China backs the recent military coup. Earlier this month, the administration imposed sanctions on Chinese officials it holds responsible for sweeping away Hong Kong’s autonomy.
In his last Foreign Affairs magazine article before joining the administration as its Asia “tsar,” Kurt Campbell argued for “a conscious effort to deter Chinese adventurism … This means investing in long-range conventional cruise and ballistic missiles, unmanned carrier-based strike aircraft and underwater vehicles, guided-missile submarines, and high-speed strike weapons.” He added that Washington needs to work with other states to disperse U.S. forces across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean and “to reshore sensitive industries and pursue a ‘managed decoupling’ from China.”
In many respects, the continuity with the Trump China strategy is startling. The trade war has not been ended, nor the tech war. Aside from actually meaning the human rights stuff, the only other big difference between Biden and Trump is the former’s far stronger emphasis on the importance of allies in this process of deterring China — in particular, the so-called Quad the U.S. has formed with Australia, India and Japan. As Blinken said in a keynote speech on March 3, for the U.S. “to engage China from a position of strength … requires working with allies and partners … because our combined weight is much harder for China to ignore.”
This argument took concrete form last week, when Campbell told the Sydney Morning Herald that the U.S. was “not going to leave Australia alone on the field” if Beijing continued its current economic squeeze on Canberra (retaliation for the Australian government’s call for an independent inquiry into the origins of the pandemic). National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has been singing from much the same hymn-sheet. Biden himself hosted a virtual summit for the Quad’s heads of state on March 12.
The Chinese approach remains that of the hedgehog. Several years ago, I was told by one of Xi’s economic advisers that bringing Taiwan back under the mainland’s control was his president’s most cherished objective — and the reason he had secured an end to the informal rule that had confined previous Chinese presidents to two terms. It is for this reason, above all others, that Xi has presided over a huge expansion of China’s land, sea and air forces, including the land-based DF‑21D missiles that could sink American aircraft carriers.
While America’s multitasking foxes have been adding to their laundry list of grievances, the Chinese hedgehog has steadily been building its capacity to take over Taiwan. In the words of Tanner Greer, a journalist who writes knowledgably on Taiwanese security, the People’s Liberation Army “has parity on just about every system the Taiwanese can field (or buy from us in the future), and for some systems they simply outclass the Taiwanese altogether.” More importantly, China has created what’s known as an “Anti Access/Area Denial bubble” to keep U.S. forces away from Taiwan. As Lonnie Henley of George Washington University pointed out in congressional testimony last month, “if we can disable [China’s integrated air defense system], we can win militarily. If not, we probably cannot.”
As a student of history, to quote Kissinger, I see a very dangerous situation. The U.S. commitment to Taiwan has grown verbally stronger even as it has become militarily weaker. When a commitment is said to be “rock-solid” but in reality has the consistency of fine sand, there is a danger that both sides miscalculate.
I am not alone in worrying. Admiral Phil Davidson, the head of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, warned in his February testimony before Congress that China could invade Taiwan by 2027. Earlier this month, my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Max Hastings noted that “Taiwan evokes the sort of sentiment among [the Chinese] people that Cuba did among Americans 60 years ago.”
Admiral James Stavridis, also a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, has just published “2034: A Novel of the Next World War,” in which a surprise Chinese naval encirclement of Taiwan is one of the opening ploys of World War III. (The U.S. sustains such heavy naval losses that it is driven to nuke Zhanjiang, which leads in turn to the obliteration of San Diego and Galveston.) Perhaps the most questionable part of this scenario is its date, 13 years hence. My Hoover Institution colleague Misha Auslin has imagined a U.S.-China naval war as soon as 2025.
In an important new study of the Taiwan question for the Council on Foreign Relations, Robert Blackwill and Philip Zelikow — veteran students and practitioners of U.S. foreign policy — lay out the four options they see for U.S. policy, of which their preferred is the last:
The United States should … rehearse — at least with Japan and Taiwan — a parallel plan to challenge any Chinese denial of international access to Taiwan and prepare, including with pre-positioned U.S. supplies, including war reserve stocks, shipments of vitally needed supplies to help Taiwan defend itself. … The United States and its allies would credibly and visibly plan to react to the attack on their forces by breaking all financial relations with China, freezing or seizing Chinese assets.
Blackwill and Zelikow are right that the status quo is unsustainable. But there are three core problems with all arguments to make deterrence more persuasive. The first is that any steps to strengthen Taiwan’s defenses will inevitably elicit an angry response from China, increasing the likelihood that the Cold War turns hot — especially if Japan is explicitly involved. The second problem is that such steps create a closing window of opportunity for China to act before the U.S. upgrade of deterrence is complete. The third is the reluctance of the Taiwanese themselves to treat their national security with the same seriousness that Israelis take the survival of their state.
Thursday’s meeting in Alaska between Blinken, Sullivan, Yang and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi — following hard on the heels of Blinken’s visits to Japan and South Korea — was never likely to restart the process of Sino-American strategic dialogue that characterized the era of “Chimerica” under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The days of “win-win” diplomacy are long gone.
During the opening exchanges before the media, Yang illustrated that hedgehogs not only have one big idea – they are also very prickly. The U.S. was being “condescending,” he declared, in remarks that overshot the prescribed two minutes by a factor of eight; it would do better to address its own “deep-seated” human rights problems, such as racism (a “long history of killing blacks”), rather than to lecture China.
The question that remains is how quickly the Biden administration could find itself confronted with a Taiwan Crisis, whether a light “quarantine,” a full-scale blockade or a surprise amphibious invasion? If Hastings is right, this would be the Cuban Missile Crisis of Cold War II, but with the roles reversed, as the contested island is even further from the U.S. than Cuba is from Russia. If Stavridis is right, Taiwan would be more like Belgium in 1914 or Poland in 1939.
Biden should spend less time with historians and more with moderates
By • The Washington Free Beacon
A liberal president enters the White House in a time of national crisis. He campaigned as a moderate but soon reveals his intent to govern from the left of the center-left. His bold agenda has plenty of fans among journalists and academics who celebrate the expansion of the welfare state. They write stories and deliver soundbites likening the new chief executive to FDR. The end of Reaganism, they say, is at hand.
I’m referring, of course, to President Barack Obama. Shortly after his election in 2008, Time magazine portrayed him as Dr. New Deal, complete with fedora and cigarette holder. “It would seem that Obama has been studying the 1932 Great Depression campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” wrote E.J. Dionne in his syndicated column. “Conservatism is Dead,” announced the New Republic. “It has been that kind of presidency,” gushed Jon Meacham in 2009. “Barack Obama, moving as he wishes to move, and the world bending itself to him.”
Take a moment to recover from that last bit of purple prose. Then recall that two years after Obama’s victory, Republicans won the House. In 2014, Republicans kept the House and won the Senate. And two years after that, Republicans won complete control of the federal government. Conservatism didn’t die—the New Republic did. (It’s been reborn as a monthly.)
Now the same wonks and historians who compared Obama to the architect of managerial liberalism downplay his tenure in office as overly cautious, modest, and risk-averse. They’ve settled on a new, new FDR: Joe Biden. And Biden is ready to play the part. Even if it means risking Democratic control of Congress.
Biden met recently at the White House with a group of historians who, according to Axios, share his view that “It is time to go even bigger and faster than anyone expected. If that means chucking the filibuster and bipartisanship, so be it.” Biden’s “closest analogues,” Michael Beschloss told the news outlet, are FDR and LBJ. E.J. Dionne says Biden represents “a new disposition through which pragmatic forms of government activism add up to a quiet political revolution.” And Biden “loves the growing narrative that he’s bolder and bigger-thinking than President Obama,” writes Mike Allen. No doubt he does.
You would think that, in the midst of all the pandering and praise, the scholars who talked to Biden might have provided him some actual historical perspective. Every president Biden is said to recall, including Reagan, had to endure numerous setbacks, crises, unforced errors, and unanticipated consequences of their own policies. By 1938, the New Deal was exhausted, the economy hadn’t recovered from the Depression, and FDR won his final two terms largely on the basis of his international stature. LBJ’s landslide in 1964 was followed by a shellacking in 1966 and the collapse of the Democratic coalition in 1968. The GOP lost 26 seats in the House in 1982, forfeited control of the Senate in 1986, and when he left office Reagan handed his vice president a giant deficit, the Savings and Loan debacle, and a zealous special prosecutor.
The historians urging Biden to go big on policy aren’t analysts. They are partisan cheerleaders. If they stepped back, they would see that Biden is weaker than the presidents he admires and that vulnerable Democrats are warning the majority against overreach.
The Biden team gave Axios four reasons the president is ready to ditch the filibuster and push through a $3 trillion infrastructure and green energy bill, changes to election law in the “For the People Act,” and possibly an immigration amnesty. Biden has (1) “full party control of Congress, and a short window to go big,” (2) “party activists” are “egging him on,” (3) “he has strong gathering economic winds at his back,” and (4) “he’s popular in polls.”
But the same evidence could also be read as an argument for caution and restraint. Biden has less support in Congress than any of the presidents he emulates. (Reagan never controlled the House, but often had a majority of conservative Democrats plus Republicans.) At the moment, Biden’s party has 219 seats in the House and 50 in the Senate—meaning he can lose just two votes in the lower chamber and none in the upper one. It’s one thing to enact significant legislation on a partisan majority. It’s something else to enact such legislation on a partisan majority of one during a time when a positive COVID test upsets the whip count.
Nor is following “party activists” a certain route to political success. Economic winds change direction. And while Biden is popular, his disapproval rating in the January Gallup poll was second only to Donald Trump’s. Negative partisanship drives Biden to steamroll the Republicans. It also exposes him to political rebuke.
Some Democrats are beginning to express qualms with various aspects of Biden’s approach. Maine Democrat Jared Golden was the only member of his party to vote against Biden’s American Rescue Plan. Henry Cuellar of Texas was among the first congressmen to draw attention to the crisis on the southern border. Filemon Vela, also of Texas, announced his retirement the other day, a few months after his vote share dropped to 55 percent from 60 percent in 2018. Several House Democrats have said they disagree with Nancy Pelosi’s outrageous plot to expel Iowa Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks and replace her with Rita Hart, who lost by six votes last year. And West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has yet to cosponsor the election bill at the center of the Democrats’ campaign to end the filibuster.
In these early days, Biden’s presidency has been less a transformation than a continuation of the partisan stalemate that has existed since the end of the Cold War. Parties win elections, misread electoral victories as ideological endorsements, overreach, and pay for it at the polls. The Democrats for whom the bill will come due first are well aware of this dynamic. They may not be as good on television as Jon Meacham or Michael Beschloss, but they have plenty of insight into the aspirations and concerns of swing voters. Biden may want to have them over to the East Room. Before they are out of work.
By • American Action News
The Democrats don’t plan to run on their record in the 2022 midterm elections. They plan to go to the voters and argue that Republicans are too crazy and too outside the mainstream to be allowed to return to power in Congress.
Whether that will be enough will depend in part on the health of the U.S. economy. If the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending binge and planned tax increases don’t hamper the post-COVID recovery, that might be enough. However, if the economy tanks and the Republicans pull together a realistic program for bringing growth and jobs back and getting spending under control, a GOP-led majority in both chambers is not only possible but likely.
Before you snicker, remember the Republicans came within a hair of winning back control of the House in November 2020 even as Donald Trump was losing. GOP congressional candidates ran ahead of Trump in about 180 of more than 210 winning races, and Republican House candidates won more contested races than Democrats did. A change in control isn’t out of the question by any means, which is why the progressive campaign machine has to do all it can to discredit its opposition in the minds of the electorate.
Enter QAnon, the internet-based wellspring of conspiracies ranging from the sublime to the outrageous—and all of them ridiculous. Unfortunately for the GOP, a few folks who’ve lately been their voters (not to mention a newly elected member of Congress or two) have been caught on social media spreading the conspiracists’ tales.
Up until it filled a narrative need, QAnon was a little more than a curiosity among the relatively few people who were aware of it. The intrigues it promulgated did produce a few notable and even tragic events but, in the main, it drew the attention of the fringe. That is, until its usefulness in painting a picture of the GOP as controlled by radical insurrectionists became clear. After that, the legacy media became the biggest outlet for its tall tales under the guise of reporting.
Up to a point, the strategy of elevating QAnon been a success in that it left GOP leaders in the difficult position of defending their own while repudiating the insanity. It’s a tight rope to walk. What the Democrats must do now is determine whether they can sustain these attacks over two years, and whether they’re insulated enough to avoid serious blowback.
You see, it’s not just the GOP that has a problem with conspiracy kooks. The Democratic Party is full of them too—and they’ve got the reins of power now. Consider that Rep. Maxine Waters, who now chairs an important congressional committee, was first heard of across America when she accused the CIA of being behind the crack epidemic in the nation’s inner cities.
She’s a problem, not that people bring that up much anymore. Maybe the GOP should. Republican leaders might also want to talk a bit about the Democrats who said George Herbert Walker Bush flew to Paris in 1980 to negotiate a secret agreement with the Iranians to keep the hostages until after the election. (Spoiler alert: He didn’t, but it took a congressional investigation to knock that rumor out).
Remember all the things the Democrats said about the Trump campaign colluding with the Russians and the allegations contained in the Steele dossier. They didn’t remain inside the confines of cyberspace; no, they became front-page news and were treated seriously for months until poof, nothing.
In the last few weeks, prompted by another tirade by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a guy who could have given the late Joe McCarthy some lessons on tactics, social media was abuzz about the supposed “real” circumstances leading to Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision to step down from the U.S. Supreme Court with a cast of characters including his son, officials of Deutsche Bank, and others appended to numerous tweets.
It’s undeniable, as historian Richard Hofstadter famously wrote back in 1964, that there is a “paranoid style in American politics.” What he and others miss is that it’s not confined to the Right. It’s at least as prevalent on the Left, if not stronger. The difference is that while the GOP’s crazy sometimes becomes unpleasant, the Left’s progressive crazy sometimes becomes law, which is much harder for all of us to deal with. If you doubt me, read the text of H.R. 1 closely.
By • American Action News
Congressional Democrats are pitching their H.R. 1 “For the People Act” as a necessary salve for a broken electoral system. If enacted, they claim, the bill’s provisions will fix a broken campaign finance system, protect voting rights, and make the average American feel once again like they can trust the system we use to select our leaders.
Truthfully, it doesn’t do any of those things but they’re hoping no one catches on. Or because they fear being called “racist” or worse for failing to fight “voter suppression,” won’t fight. That’s unfortunate, at least for the GOP – whose strategy to stop the bill depends on the filibuster – because it’s a bad bill that would keep the Democrats in power almost in perpetuity.
Among its many outrageous provisions is one that would essentially vitiate state laws requiring voters to produce some form of government-issued photo ID before being allowed to vote. To most Americans, that’s a commonsense kind of thing, backed by 75 percent of likely voters in one recent poll.
Look at the facts. We’re asked to show ID every day, whether we’re trying to get on an airplane, make a bank deposit, or enter a federal government building. Democrats say, without offering a convincing explanation as to why it’s so, that asking the same of voters at a polling place would be racist and constitute voter suppression rather than protect the constitutional guarantee of “one person, one vote.”
The American public isn’t buying the criticism, something Red State Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, and Montana’s Jon Tester should be thinking about when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York tries to twist their arms and get them to vote for the bill. There is room for a principled objection to the bill because voters still back the idea that a valid photo ID must be shown before a ballot can be cast by overwhelming margins.
A recent Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey found 75 percent of likely voters agreed voters should have to show a valid driver’s license or some other form of government-issued identification before they could cast a ballot. Less than a quarter of all those surveyed – just 21 percent – said they were opposed.
When an issue has nearly 80 percent support, a smart politician just stands next to it. As it now stands, on top of the near-universal support it has nationally, 36 states have some form of voter ID law that would be nullified to one degree or another if H.R. 1 – which passed the House with only Democrat support — becomes law.
In its analysis, Rasmussen reports said, “Support for voter ID laws has actually increased since 2018, when 67 percent (of likely voters surveyed) said voters should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to vote.”
Voter ID laws are strongly backed by Republicans, with 89 percent saying they support making people prove who they are before they can cast a ballot alongside 77 percent of non-affiliated voters and, remarkably, 60 percent of Democrats sharing that view. The party in Congress, it seems, is out of touch with its rank and file.
As to the claim that voter ID laws are discriminatory, Rasmussen Reports says, voters, reject it by a margin of nearly 2-to1 as “60 percent say laws requiring photo identification at the polls don’t discriminate.” Just under a third, 31 percent, said they do while 10 percent were not sure either way. Unsurprisingly, a bare majority of Democrats – 51 percent – say such laws do discriminate 79 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of independents said they did not. Somewhat shockingly, the pollster said, “Voters under 40 support voter ID laws more than do older voters” as do most whites (74 percent), blacks (69 percent), and other minorities (82 percent).
The abolition of voter identification requirements is but one of several odious provisions contained within H.R. 1 that would, many analysts have claimed, make it harder to prevent election fraud in the future.
Other provisions contained within the legislation would mandate same-day registration in all 50 states, expand early voting that in some states runs into months rather than weeks or days, and establish rules for handling ballots that would essentially codify the practice of ballot harvesting some states have already made illegal.
By • American Action News
Veteran Emmy-winning broadcaster Rita Cosby, it was announced Monday, is joining the primetime lineup on WABC 770 AM, the New York City-based station that at one time served as the flagship for the late Rush Limbaugh, whose three-hour daily program changed American radio forever.
In an interview conducted before the launch, Cosby promised her show would be “a cancel free zone” and invited listeners and fans of all kinds to call in with questions and comments.
“Rita Cosby is the best in the business, with a tremendous following and incredible background,” John Catsimatidis, CEO of the Red Apple Group and 77 WABC Radio, said. Her new show, which will air weeknights from 10 pm to 12 midnight “will bring a new and exciting dynamic to our important evening programming.”
“Rita’s top-notch interviewing skills, impeccable record in journalism, and deep ability to connect with our listeners,” he added, portends big things for both the show and the station, Catsimatidis continued. The program begins at a time when the future of terrestrial talk radio, at one time an incredibly economically robust industry platform, is undergoing major changes thanks to the proliferation of podcasts, satellite radio, and internet streaming service.
None of that should pose any problems for Cosby, one of America’s most recognized broadcasters whose successes across various media platforms can be matched by few other journalists. Her work in journalism has taken her around the globe and includes live reporting from the war zone in Afghanistan, from Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia during the NATO bombing, and along the U.S. border with Mexico. Known for her engaging style and headline-making interviews, she has obtained exclusives with more than twenty world leaders, including seven U.S. Presidents and Pope Francis, as well as with entertainment icons Michael Jackson, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, and infamous inmates Dr. Jack Kevorkian and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, a serial murdered who terrorized New York’s five boroughs beginning in the summer of 1976 through his arrest in August of 1977.
“We are thrilled to have Rita Cosby taking over this important timeslot. Beginning Monday, our evening listeners will get a great dose of the latest news along with powerful and compelling interviews, from one of the country’s most well-regarded broadcasters,” said Chad Lopez, the president of Red Apple Media/77 WABC Radio.
Cosby was named Radio Ink’s 2018 Most Influential Woman Legend of the Year and has won six Gracie Awards in radio, including for Outstanding Host and Outstanding Talk Show. She previously worked at 77 WABC radio, serving as the station’s political editor and as the anchor of weekend and midday talk shows, from 2014 to 2018.
“The Rita Cosby Show” begins at 10 pm on March 15, 2021, and be heard on 770 AM throughout the New York City greater metropolitan area and live on the internet at https://wabcradio.com/.
In a blistering dissent, Judge Laurence Silberman said The New York Times and Washington Post are 'Democratic Party broadsheets.'
By • The Federalist
The control of major media by one political party is a dangerous threat to the country, a federal judge warned in a blistering dissent that called for courts to revisit libel laws that generally protect the press from being held liable for their reporting.
“It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news,” wrote Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit for the Court of Appeals. “It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy.”
Silberman argued that it’s time for courts to revisit New York Times v. Sullivan, which has shaped press law in favor of media outlets for more than five decades. The New York Times and the Washington Post “are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction,” Judge Silberman wrote in his March 19 dissent.
He said that orientation also controls the Associated Press and most large papers in the country, including the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe. “Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet,” Judge Silberman added.
Silicon Valley also has “enormous influence” over the distribution of news and it “similarly filters news delivery in ways favorable to the Democratic Party,” wrote Judge Silberman, highlighting the shocking suppression of stories about Joe Biden and his family when he was running for president.
In that case, Twitter and Facebook censored media outlets that reported accurately about the Biden family’s dealing with foreign entities. Twitter suspended users, including sitting White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, for merely sharing accurate information, and prevented people from sharing the information privately on its platform. Facebook said it would censor coverage of the Biden family corruption pending a “fact-check,” an unprecedented privilege given to Biden in the closing days of one of the closest presidential elections in history.
Only a few major media outlets are not controlled by the left, Silberman noted, citing Fox News, where this reporter is a contributor, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal. “It should be sobering for those concerned about news bias that these institutions are controlled by a single man and his son. Will a lone holdout remain in what is otherwise a frighteningly orthodox media culture? After all, there are serious efforts to muzzle Fox News,” he wrote. CNN hosts and other leftist activsts are currently on a campaign to deplatform their rival.
“Admittedly, a number of Fox’s commentators lean as far to the right as the commentators and reporters of the mainstream outlets lean to the left,” Silberman wrote in a footnote, in a dig at reporters inserting their extreme partisan views into news stories.
A New York Supreme Court judge last week ruled against The New York Times’ effort to get a defamation suit against it dismissed. The Times had said that its reporters were inserting opinion into news stories, and that opinions are not actionable for defamation. The argument didn’t hold sway with the judge, who critiqued the blending of news and opinion in purported news stories.
Another footnote critiqued the tepid response of some to “big tech’s behavior” censoring conservative speech. Silberman called repression of political speech in large institutions with market power “fundamentally un-American.”
“Some emphasize these companies are private and therefore not subject to the First Amendment. Yet—even if correct— it is not an adequate excuse for big tech’s bias. The First Amendment is more than just a legal provision: It embodies the most important value of American Democracy. Repression of political speech by large institutions with market power therefore is—I say this advisedly—fundamentally un-American,” Silberman wrote.
He then cited Tim Groseclose’s book, “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind,” which empirically argued that media bias even a decade ago gave Democrat candidates an 8-10 point advantage. “And now, a decade after this book’s publication, the press and media do not even pretend to be neutral news services.” Silberman noted.
“The First Amendment guarantees a free press to foster a vibrant trade in ideas. But a biased press can distort the marketplace. And when the media has proven its willingness—if not eagerness—to so distort, it is a profound mistake to stand by unjustified legal rules that serve only to enhance the press’ power,” Silberman concluded.
By • The Washington Free Beacon
Democrats won the White House and a (tenuous) Senate majority thanks to runoff victories in Georgia. In both cases, it would probably be more accurate to say Donald Trump singlehandedly lost the White House and the GOP majority in the Senate. Beyond that, the Democratic Party’s performance in 2020 was almost shockingly poor.
Another shockingly poor aspect of the Democratic Party’s performance of late is leadership at the state level. The Democratic governors of the biggest, most reliably blue states are an especially sordid cast of characters. Nevertheless, they are an appropriate reflection of the party’s character.
The following five white dudes have received more votes than almost any other Democratic politician over the past four years. They represent almost 90 million Americans and are significantly more consequential than their grandstanding colleagues in Congress. They are the Democratic Party in 2021, and they’re doing a heckuva job.
California: Gavin Newsom
The governor is likely to face a recall after Newsom’s opponents appeared to gather the more than 1.4 million signatures required to place the measure on the ballot. Proponents of the recall point to the governor’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved some of the most onerous lockdown restrictions in the country, and widespread dysfunction in the early stages of the vaccine rollout.
Earlier this week, Newsom attempted to identify with California parents enduring the “brutal” difficulties of virtual learning as many of the state’s schools remain closed. Newsom told CNN’s Jake Tapper he has been “living through Zoom school,” even though his own children returned to in-person learning at their Sacramento private school nearly five months ago.
Newsom has repeatedly come under fire for flouting his own COVID-related guidelines. In November, the governor attended a maskless birthday bash for a longtime lobbyist friend at a posh Napa Valley restaurant. Around the same time, he blamed the state’s rising caseload on residents “letting their guard down” by “taking their masks off” and gathering “outside of their household cohorts.”
Last month, Newsom did not wear a mask while taking part in an indoor bill-singing ceremony at a Sacramento restaurant still banned from serving patrons indoors. He is, perhaps most notably, the ex-husband of Kimberly Guilfoyle, paramour of Donald Trump Jr.
New York: Andrew Cuomo
Where to start? Democrats love political dynasties. The Cuomo family has governed New York for 22 of the last 38 years. Andrew Cuomo would like to do what his father couldn’t by winning a fourth term as governor, but first he’ll have to stay in office long enough to stand for reelection in 2022.
Cuomo is under fire on multiple fronts. State officials are investigating his administration’s deliberate undercounting of COVID-related nursing home deaths in the state, as well as its controversial policy directing nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients into their care.
Cuomo, aka the “Luv Guv,” is also being investigated for sexual harassment after multiple women accused him of inappropriate behavior. He hired Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer to lead his legal defense. He has a longstanding reputation for fostering a toxic workplace environment and for bullying just about everyone who crosses his path. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) are among those calling on Cuomo to resign.
All of this is taking place just months after mainstream journalists (and other Democrats) elevated Cuomo to celebrity status based on his PowerPoint presentations in the early days of the pandemic. He published a book on leadership, won an Emmy Award, and at one point was considered the frontrunner to secure the Democratic nomination for president in the event of a Biden brain malfunction.
Nevertheless, nearly two-thirds of New York Democrats continue to support him, according to a recent poll.
Illinois: J.B. Pritzker
Who better to lead the nation’s third-largest reliably blue state than a multibillionaire scion of a Big Hotel? Before becoming governor in 2019, Pritzker (net worth: $3.5 billion) served as national co-chairman of Hillary Clinton’s first failed presidential campaign in 2008 and led a special innovation council at the behest of Rahm Emanuel, the controversial former mayor of Chicago.
During his campaign for governor, Pritzker was excoriated for removing all the toilets from his second Chicago mansion to avoid hefty property taxes by having the residence declared “uninhabitable.” Federal investigators are currently looking into whether his actions constituted tax fraud. He is at risk of becoming the seventh Illinois governor to be charged with a crime during or after his time in office.
Pritzker’s Democratic colleague, Mike Madigan, recently ended his 36-year tenure as Illinois speaker of the house amid allegations he accepted bribes and favors from ComEd, the state’s largest utility.
New Jersey: Phil Murphy
Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive who previously served as finance chair of the Democratic National Committee, has presided over the worst COVID-related death rate in the country. (Cuomo is a close second.) His controversial immigration policies—establishing New Jersey as a “sanctuary” state, providing college tuition and legal support to undocumented immigrants—sparked a recall effort that ultimately failed in 2020.
Murphy led the Goldman Sachs Asia office in the late 1990s, when the firm was raking in profits from a shoe manufacturer notorious for inhumane labor practices. He compared his role at the “elite” firm to that of a Marine serving in combat. Most damningly of all, Murphy has served on the board of the U.S. Soccer Foundation.
Virginia: Ralph Northam
It’s been more than a year since Northam apologized for appearing in a medical school yearbook photo wearing either a blackface costume or a Ku Klux Klan robe—he did not specify which. During the first press conference after the photo surfaced, Northam also acknowledged darkening his face as part of a Michael Jackson costume at a dance competition. His poor wife had to stop him from showcasing his “moonwalk” in response to a reporter’s question.
Nevertheless, he’s still the governor. That is mostly due to the fact that the person who would have succeeded him, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D., Va.), has been credibly accused of sexual assault. Fairfax didn’t lose his job, either. In fact, he’s running for governor. It’s no wonder Cuomo thinks he can simply run out the clock and avoid facing consequences for his actions.
The Democrats!
By • Frontiers of Freedom
Like the French royals of the late 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries, Joe Biden, former Senator, Vice President, and presently the President of the United States of America, seems to have learned nothing during his long, yet unremarkable political career. Seventy eight years young when he ascended the highest elected office of the country, Joe Biden has been all over the political landscape, always following the fashionable ideological winds of his party. Without a clear vision of his own, pathetic and narrow-minded Joe has always put his frequently changing faith in plagiarizing other people’s ideas and in his convoluted religious-moral convictions.
A slim as well as a well-dressed widower in his late 20s and being a great charmer, the freshly minted Senator from Delaware believed that his folksy demeanor could be an effective replacement for his intellectual poverty. In this manner, throughout his long political career, he has surrounded himself with a cotery of yes men, whose intellectual qualities have always remained below his own. Yet, for all his pretentiousness, Joe Biden has remained a weak character with an unremarkable intelligence.
Clearly, Joe Biden has never been a quintessential American. Throughout their history, the American people have been the people of great and novel ideas. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Reagan, the many Nobel Prize worthy inventions, are just some examples. However, with the election of Joe Biden America really underperformed itself.
Selected by former President Obama, a community organizer and a junior Senator from Illinois without any foreign policy experience, Joe Biden was hailed by the former as a highly valued expert in international relations. To add insult to injury, Joe Biden himself has pointed to his repeated chairmanships of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to prove his vast international credentials. Of course, a deeper analysis of his activities showed that his foreign policy decisions have unfailingly landed on the wrong side of history. As Vice President, Joe Biden was the prototype of a Don Quixote type fighter for narrow and greedy tactical ends. The wars he supported have not turned out as expected. The “reset” with Russia became the object of ridicule across the globe. Their “diplomacy first” commitment toward the Islamic Republic of Iran was an unmitigated disaster. Equally, their two states solution in the Middle East was a nonstarter. His and his former boss’s persistent refusal to face reality in Central and South America, Africa and Asia has brought American foreign policy to the brink of total irrelevance.
Domestically, the reign of reason was undone by the emerging Democrat campaign of ubiquitous charge of racism against their political opponents, the ruthless campaigning against the so-called enemies of minorities, the concomitant promotion of multiculturalism, the idiocy of open borders, enthusiastically headed by Barack and Michelle Obama and slavishly followed by the Bidens. No wonder that their administration did not pay any attention to the inherent conflicts rooted in the failed Democrat policies of the last seventy years. As a result, the Obama/Biden administration willfully and criminally failed to rally the nation around a vision which could have established a solid foundation for the United States of America to live up to the political principles of the Republic and to the moral imperatives of itself.
During the presidential campaign, his rhetoric was highly divisive, polarizing – and disgustingly stomach-churning. However, his garbage talk has not stopped. Calling the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, “soulless killer” and inventing a confidential conversation between him as Vice President and the latter as then Prime Minister, which is obviously the invention of his sick mind, are childish and idiotic. Domestically, blaming his predecessor for everything that went wrong between 2017 and 2021, while not addressing the relentless hate campaign laced with a constant flow of blatant misinformation and lies, are proof of the worst attributes politicians have to offer the citizens of the United Nations of America. Thus, while sanctimoniously preaching against divisions and calling for unity, Joe Biden accomplishes the exact opposite. He deepens the divisions in society. Yet, pathetic and narrow-minded Joe Biden thrives on division. He always did. It is what gave him and his party power. In this context, the word “politician” is becoming a curse rather than an honor. His and his family’s shadowy dealings across the globe have illustrated a complete lack of shame by him and the entire Democrat Party.
The elementary question at this point of inflection in American history is whether the two parties and the politicians on the federal and state levels are holding up their ends of a national consensus? Are they doing what they have promised? Are they working for the goals that they have espoused? Do they really care about their primary responsibilities of trying to at least mitigate the divisions in society? Are they striving to restore unity? These questions are still open to future developments. Yet, what pains most Americans is that presently the political discourse has nothing to do with ideas, vision, or policy. They are all about power and money. The American people will have another chance in 2022 to change the current misery of the country. By voting intelligently, they could decide the direction this exceptionally talented country can take in the future to come.
By winning control of the House, Senate, and White House in 2020, Democrats created an opportunity to make it easier for them to win in the future and harder for anyone to criticize them. Their first order of business, which House Democrats call the “For the People Act,” is largely an exercise in taking the worst election laws in some of the worst-governed states and imposing them on the entire country.
The bill has passed the House, and plenty of worked-up activists (including much of the media and the still-Never Trump establishment) think Democrats should abolish the filibuster to pass it through the Senate.
H.R. 1 would override state election laws and impose all sorts of mandates, including automatically registering adults to vote, even if they don’t want to register. Democrats passed the For the People Act in 2019, too, but the newest version has some new ideas that they apparently gleaned from the 2020 election.
The bill would bar states from even requiring that identification be provided as a condition of obtaining an absentee ballot.
With these and other provisions, H.R. 1 would nationalize the administration of elections. And it goes even further in nationalizing other bad ideas.
The Democrats’ bill aims to normalize ballot harvesting by striking down any state safeguards against the practice. Yes, some states’ anti-ballot-harvesting laws might accidentally criminalize innocent activity, such as letting Joey run your mail-in ballot up to the mailbox. But if we really believe the vote is sacred, basic safeguards against coercion, fraud, and bullying are necessary.
Taking up Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s “dark money” obsession, the bill requires corporations, unions, trade associations, and other advocacy groups to disclose campaign-related expenditures over $10,000, as well as the donors who fund them. That would function as a clear deterrent to constitutionally protected political speech and association.
California has a law like this, and it’s a bad law, aimed at curbing criticism of politicians. Groups as ideologically divergent as Citizens United (yes, that Citizens United) and the American Civil Liberties Union are lobbying the Supreme Court to strike down California’s mandate.
Why would you want to impose this disclosure burden on groups that might criticize a politician or simply express a political opinion? We don’t really have to guess. Democrats are known to use the power of elected office to punish political dissenters. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has practically made a career of this, and he is about to be promoted into the Biden administration for it.
As usual, Democrats want to intimidate and silence people whose views they don’t like. They also want to deputize Big Business to do it for them — as when they demanded that Amazon deplatform Parler and Twitter deplatform former President Donald Trump. Now, Democrats are pressuring AT&T to drop Fox News.
Democrats know that with forced disclosure, they can scare any businesses or individuals out of funding groups that oppose the Democrats’ aims or criticize them.
The bill also nationalizes another bad state-level policy: the politics tax. H.R. 1 would establish the taxpayer funding of political campaigns — and you can be forgiven for reading that as welfare for the political consultant swamp-class. The House bill tries to cover up the fact that the money ultimately comes from taxpayers by claiming that it comes from criminal and civil penalties on corporations and rich people. But money is fungible. And whenever politicians lack the courage to admit they are funding their proposals through tax dollars, you know they’re ashamed of it.
Coercing voters by normalizing ballot harvesting, coercing donors through forced disclosure, and forcibly funding politicians and their consultants — one wonders why Democrats believe more in coercion than in freedom and debate.
By • Frontiers of Freedom
The alarms bells for the Postal Service’s financial position have been brought to the forefront yet again following the recent release of the Government Accountability Office’s new 2021 High Risk List of vulnerabilities for waste, fraud, and abuse within elements of the Federal government. The report cites USPS losses of $87 billion in the past 14 years and it is projected to lose another $9.7 billion in 2021.
While the nation’s usage of the Postal Service continues to fluctuate amidst changing consumer demands and adjustments to account for the COVID-19 pandemic, the GAO maintains that the USPS is still subject to the essential responsibility of operating with financial self-sufficiency by earning enough revenue from its products so that it can adequately cover costs.
Yet evidence of the USPS’ broken business model have persisted and accelerated as the agency’s expenses exceeded revenues by $18 billion in 2019 and 2020.
Surely the challenges must become a central focus as potential new members to the Board of Governors are considered. Newly announced nominees include recently retired Deputy PMG Ron Stroman, in addition to Anton Hajjar, the former general counsel of the American Postal Workers Union, and Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute.
While the qualifications for the USPS board speak generally to the importance of candidates having a background in public service, law or accounting or have demonstrated skill in managing substantially large organizations, there are also designations that are very specific in nature, including requirements that, “the Governors shall not be representatives of specific interests using the Postal Service.”
With respect to the nominees, such stipulations present myriad questions about conflicts of interest and potential disqualification from consideration including, but not limited to candidates’ history in regularly endorsing and encouraging programs that entail USPS mailing services, and also major inquiries in regards to the representation of postal employees’ interests in direct negotiations with the organization in which they would potentially assume a leadership role.
This is especially important given the Government Accountability Office’s instruction that Congress is to take USPS’s financial condition into account in “any binding arbitration in the negotiation process of USPS labor contracts.” The GAO’s demands ultimately underscore the importance of ensuring that USPS is led by independent thinkers who acknowledge how rectifying the agency’s fiscal chaos is a foremost priority.
Frontiers of Freedom has previously cautioned that simply absolving the USPS of its debt without achieving structural reform would be a nightmare scenario. Following the release of the Postal Service’s year-end financials for 2020, we emphasized the importance of taking action: “In order to effectively manage and reduce the agency’s $160 billion debt, the USPS must update its policies and work with the incoming Biden administration to create thoughtful reform that will help preserve and ensure the success of our most important public institutions.”
The challenges facing the U.S. Postal Service are surely far too significant to be entrusted to potential leaders with unknown motivations and who lack the urgency to help USPS achieve more sustainable financial footing.
By • The Federalist
A new Democratic-sponsored Colorado Senate bill is raising eyebrows with the proposed establishment of a state-run ministry of truth to regulate online speech.
The bill, titled “Digital Communications Regulation,” seeks the creation of a digital communications division under the state department of regulatory agencies to regulate online content available in the state. The division will be run by a new commission to serve as government-blessed arbiters of truth.
Under the legislation, proposed by Democratic state Sen. Kerry Donovan, the new commission is tasked with the authority to investigate and hold hearings on claims filed with the division that accuse a particular platform of engaging in what the government declares unlawful conduct. Such conduct under the proposal ranges from promoting “hate speech” to “disinformation,” “fake news,” and “conspiracy theories,” or content the commission determines is meant to “undermine election integrity.” The idea for a similar proposal at the federal level was floated by New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in January.
The bill puts government force behind an already-implemented progressive purge pursued by Silicon Valley tech giants wielding unprecedented power over the digital public square, with many of the same rules already in place. Such rules, however, which have become more stringently enforced to justify censorship of conservatives and reporting unfavorable to progressive interests, have been applied with remarkable inconsistency.
“We all know from experience at other places where such rules are in place, they’re not applied equally,” Joshua Sharf, a senior fellow in fiscal policy at the Denver libertarian think tank Independence Institute, told The Federalist. “They’re actually impossible to apply equally.”
The contrast between the four-year conspiracy alleging President Donald Trump was a Russian agent and the online suppression of blockbuster revelations published by the New York Post last fall, which implicated then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in his son’s potentially criminal overseas business ventures, illustrates how rules governing online content are arbitrarily enforced for political purposes. There is no shortage of examples highlighting Silicon Valley’s double-standards.
“Realistically, we all know what the intent here is,” Sharf, who runs his own online blog, warned. “The intent here is to limit what Sen. Donovan considers conservative speech.”
Donovan did not respond to The Federalist’s request for an interview.
Under the senator’s legislation, communications-oriented online businesses, including social media platforms and media-sharing platforms with services offered to Colorado residents, would be forced to register with the new government ministry of truth. Failure to do so would classify as a class-two misdemeanor with up to a $5,000 fine each day until they comply.
Republican Colorado Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, who sits on the State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee where the bill was introduced, railed against the proposal as unconstitutional and shared no faith that the independent commission appointed by the governor would dictate online content fairly.
“I have no confidence whatsoever that if the commission was formed it would be somewhat politically diverse,” Sonnenberg told The Federalist. “It’s almost like a giant commission just like Facebook to determine what posts are accurate and what are not.”
Republicans in the state’s upper chamber have already pledged their opposition, though Democrats control both houses of the Colorado legislature.
“Nobody wants an unelected commission of wannabe authoritarians deciding what is and is not ‘fake news’ and what we can and cannot read on the internet,” Colorado Senate Republican spokesman Sage Naumann told The Federalist. “We’re hopeful this bill never makes it to the floor.”
Sonnenberg said he saw no momentum for that happening, even as Democrats hold the majority.
“Anybody with a reasonable mind would look at this bill and go, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ This indeed is a violation of our First Amendment, a blatant violation,” Sonnenberg told The Federalist. “If this is a party-line vote and it gets out of committee, we have bigger problems in our country.”
By • Hoover Institution
Earlier this year, the Biden administration issued a “Fact Sheet” on his proposed US Citizenship Act, a comprehensive plan to expand pathways to citizenship and otherwise modernize and liberalize this nation’s immigration system. It is very difficult to draw categorical conclusions about the many facets of immigration law. The passion on both sides of this issue suggests that finding a sensible middle position may be impossible. Even so, a measured and compromising approach is the best way forward on immigration reform, with its complex highways and byways.
One way to think about immigration reform is to compare the case for free and open immigration with the parallel case for free trade. Fierce opposition to free trade in part propelled Donald Trump to his 2016 presidential victory. Free trade did not take a central role in the 2020 election, in large part because candidate Biden offered a similar sentiment to bolster trade union support. This was not merely campaign talk. President Biden recently issued a protective “Buy American” statement, the objective of which is “to support manufacturers, businesses, and workers to ensure that our future is made in all of America by all of America’s workers.” A Biden executive order from January seeks to “use terms and conditions of federal financial assistance awards and federal procurements to maximize the use of goods, products, and materials produced in, and services offered in, the United States.”
But the effort to turn the United States inward on matters of economic activity will force superior foreign products to be substituted with inferior domestic ones, making domestic production less efficient. These inefficiencies will have far-reaching consequences: raising prices and lowering wages across the board, weakening American exports, and inducing other nations to take retaliatory measures, which will further contract world trade. Hopefully, the world economy can avoid a repeat of the implosion of international trade that followed the passage of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff. But the political risk still remains.
Face the Challenges
The issue of free immigration is vastly more complex than the problem of free trade. As a general matter, no one thinks that the United States and other nations lack the power to exclude foreign individuals from entering and residing in their countries. But, as with free trade, there is a fierce debate over how that power to exclude should be exercised, leading to a series of difficult and hotly contended questions. Do we reunite families, when some members are abroad and others are in the United States? Do we allow entry into the United States for political refugees who have suffered under oppressive regimes? Do we reserve spots for individuals who bring special skills and talents to the United States? Do we make special allowances for “dreamers” who came illegally into the United States at a young age and have nowhere else to call home?
In all these cases, it is possible to offer a sympathetic justification for expanding the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States. Indeed, American policy on immigration since the 1960s has become increasingly liberalized on exactly such grounds. Thus the percentage of foreign-born individuals in the United States has nearly tripled from about 4.8 percent in 1970 to 13.7 percent in 2018. The basic policy that lets individuals into the country is complemented by a back-end system of deportation of individuals who have entered under false pretenses, have given material support to terrorist actions in their own country, or who have committed serious crimes after their arrival to the United States.
Beyond the serious administrative difficulties of the current immigration system, it may be harder to support free immigration than free trade. Free trade is largely an economic story, with massive efficiency gains that can be spread broadly to offset much of the displacement it generates. Immigration, on the other hand, brings new persons into the United States, the presence of whom change the face of the nation. Claims of excessive criminal conduct by immigrant populations, especially those intemperately made by Trump during his successful run for the presidency in 2016, are surely mistaken. Nonetheless, immigration poses heavy challenges in the areas of education, health care, and housing. The political composition of cities and states can change with a rise in immigrant power.
Often, these issues are dealt with by sensible policies that help immigrants integrate into the economic system, learn English, and participate more fully in society. Indeed, as the immigration debate rises to a fever pitch, Ilya Somin of the Scalia Law School at George Mason University has written a powerful book, Free to Move. Somin, against the grain, urges the United States to adopt an open-border policy on immigration, noting the enormous gains for immigrants who reach our shores and the major contributions immigrant populations have made toward overall welfare in the United States.
Somin’s arguments help to strengthen the case for maintaining current levels of immigration and point towards some further liberalization of the system, starting with dreamers, who have already integrated themselves into American society. Nonetheless, I am uneasy about the more extreme position, which may be called open or free immigration. Even the mass immigration into the United States from 1890 to 1914 was not entirely free and required the resolution of hard policy problems.
For instance, immigrants had to be free of contagious diseases––and if these could not be eliminated during quarantine, shipping companies were obliged to return immigrants to their country of origin. That system, moreover, worked as well as it did in part because the private costs of immigration were sufficiently high. High costs operated as a sorting mechanism that tended to bring fitter and more self-reliant individuals to our shores. At the same time, the absorption of immigrants into society was made easier by the far smaller state and federal welfare operations of the time. This reduced the public costs of admitting new residents, and left the task of supporting and integrating newly arrived individuals to successful private organizations like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), founded in 1881.
Open immigration under current conditions would bring great uncertainty. Could the United States absorb several million Central American immigrants coming across the border through Mexico, especially if their arrival generated political unrest or brought risks of disease? Could an organized effort by third-party entrepreneurs to ferry thousands of impoverished individuals from Africa or Asia to our shores place burdens on this nation that it could not withstand? Would the same rules for deportation apply to such populations that are imposed today?
It is hard to deal with such issues by experimentation once an open immigration program is implemented, and easy to predict the massive backlash that would occur if post hoc restrictions were implemented legislatively. It seems better, then, to adopt safer policies that have a better chance of leading to a measured expansion of immigration populations while offering humanitarian aid to regions in or near crisis.
Truthful Distinctions Matter
Candidly confronting illegal immigration is a necessary component of these delicate midcourse corrections. Some sanctions have to be imposed on illegal aliens if a system of legal immigration is to be maintained. In this regard it is instructive to note the recent trend to undermine the distinction between legal and illegal immigration for the sake of generating a more tolerant attitude towards illegal aliens. Take, for instance, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,passed during the Clinton administration, which deployed the term undocumented immigrants in place of illegal aliens. That verbal substitution creates the linguistic possibility that people could be both undocumented and legal, even though a legal illegal alien is an oxymoron.
More recently, both the Biden administration and liberal Supreme Court justices have preferred the term noncitizen, which covers a range of persons, including those who have never had or desired contact with the United States. The term leads to such linguistic oddities as permanent noncitizen. It is now commonly asserted that the term illegal alien is “disparaging,” “derogatory,” or “dehumanizing,” and that a change from “alien” to “noncitizen” offers a way “to recognize the humanity of non-Americans,” as urged by a long-time immigration law expert, Professor Kevin R. Johnson.
Unfortunately, these exaggerated claims undermine the very policies that could help expand legal immigration. Immigration policy requires many difficult judgments on the proper relationship between citizens and legal and illegal aliens. Truthful statements about illegal conduct should not be regarded as wholesale condemnation of any individual. Deliberate obfuscation will not move immigration reform forward for either the proponents or the opponents of expanded immigration. d
By • Frontiers of Freedom
Geza Hofi, the brilliant late Hungarian comedian, in one of his politically charged monologues, delivered in the Madach Kamara Theater in Budapest, described post-Communist Hungary in the late 1990s thus: “The setting on this stage depicts a closed psychiatric ward in a hospital that specializes on mentally ill patients. I am a patient in this institution. I closed it from the inside in order to prevent all those idiots living outside from coming in.” His admonition to his countrymen was twofold. On the one hand, he wanted to call attention to the predictable vagaries of history, namely, to the disconcerting fact that history, if allowed, does tend to repeat itself, and normally not in a positive way. However, even more importantly, he undertook to issue a warning to humanity at large about the destructive behavior of the majority of ordinary citizens in a quasi or full democracy who can be fooled by ideologically demented public figures masquerading as sane and responsible politicians.
Presently, America is at war with itself. The nation is under siege by diverse mobs whose savage designs to replace reality with a regime of fallacious falsehoods threaten the very survival of the Republic. Their infinite and blind violence have already spiralled out of control in the Democrat Party controlled towns and metropolitan areas. In Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and in many other settlements the racially charged savagery of assorted minorities dated back to the hateful rhetoric of Democrat politicians as well as the subservient media have witnessed brigands murdering and pillaging at will. These unsavory groups have operated outside the constitutional framework of political actions with the declared goal of altering by force the very organization of society. This politically fueled artificial chaos coupled with the measures necessarily taken by the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, have led to the most unusual national elections before, during and after November 3, 2020.
Whether there was a wholesale fraud perpetrated by the unholy alliance of the Biden campaign organization, Big Tech, the overwhelming majority of the media, politically motivated judges, and the federal as well as states’ bureaucracies is still open to many unanswered questions. Yet, when the air cleared a little, the Democrats succeeded to maintain a shrinking majority in the House of Representatives, to gain four seats in the Senate, and recapture the White House after four years of a turbulent hiatus.
Joe Biden was 78 years old when he ascended to the Presidency on January 20, 2021. The visibly unwell former Senator and Vice President was carefully shielded from the world throughout the campaign by his handlers as well as the Democrat Party’s praetorian guard. During the intervening period between November 3, 2020 and January 20, 2021, his handlers surrounded him with a coterie that harked back to the unsuccessful ancien regime of former President Barack H. Obama, and as such is characterized by its glaring lack of intellectual quality. Against all the laudatory nonsense by the hugely biased media, he has been, throughout his long political career, a weak character with a woefully empty mind, prone to frequent plagiarisms, without any original ideas or imagination, and the wherewithal to manage himself, let alone enforce his stolen ideas when the inevitable challenges and crises have hit him like a ton of brick. Indeed, animated with superficial emotions and with a below mediocre intelligence, bereft of ideas of his own, subject to the persuasion of the last person he has spoken to, he has been the saddest epitome of an utterly failed amateur in the highest echelons of American politics.
While President Biden now exists mostly in a cocoon of his own, his handlers attempt to be the quintessential hands-on politicians. These Obama-era veterans are navigating from professional incompetence to full-blown socialism, making sure to preserve their bureaucratic powers amidst the relentlessly aggressive attacks of the Democrat Party’s radical elements. Nothing good will come out of such a catastrophic situation. As long as in power, the Democrat establishment will stumble from one grave crisis to another until their self-erected house of cards will collapse into the abyss of their sophomoric illusions.
Clearly, the sinister shadows of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and the newest generation of so-called communist despots across the globe hover over President Biden, Vice President Harris, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Schumer and their comrades’ self-created audacious political swamp. The American Republic is faltering. The past is annihilating the present and the future. The dead destroying the living. The bodies of the two seasoned criminals Michael Brown Jr. and George Floyd have had more political power since 2014 than the many great achievements of the Trump administration. To add insult to injury, President Biden in his inaugural address called for unity and to end the “uncivil war” thus: “A cry for racial justice, some 400 years in the making, moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer. A cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can’t be more desperate or any more clear now. The rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism, that we must confront and we will defeat. To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America, requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy – unity. Unity…My whole soul is in it today, on this January day. My whole soul is in this. Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause. Uniting to fight the foe we face – anger, resentment and hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness, and hopelessness.”
Yet, the flurry of his executive orders, actions and memorandums, which were ready for his signature immediately, belied his high-flying rhetoric. Halting funding for the construction of the border wall, reversal of the travel ban from certain countries, and twenty two other executive actions directly eliminating “bad policies” of the Trump administration were justified by him thus: “And I want to make it clear – there is a lot of talk, with good reason, about the number of executive orders that I have signed – I’m not making new law; I’m eliminating bad policy.” And then: “What I’m doing is taking on the issues that – 99% of them – that the president, the last president of the United States, issued executive orders I felt were very counterproductive to our security, counterproductive to who we are as a country, particularly in the area of immigration.” Again, the high-flying rhetoric of the Obama era without any truthful and rational explanations. Forty one executive actions to satisfy the most radical demands of the Democrat Party. This is not leadership. This is called the Stockholm Syndrome. Plainly, this is the behavior of a fake politician held hostage by his own party and his own monstrous bureaucracy.
President Biden’s divisiveness and immorality have been in full display in the $1.9 trillion COVID package and the H.R. 1 – For the People Act of 2021. Neither piece of legislation is about the relief they pretend to address. The former is a shameless bailout for the Democrat governed failed states of the west and the east coasts, coupled with outrages handouts to the most radical Democrat Party constituents. At the end, the massive coronavirus relief bill was passed by both the House of Representatives as well as the Senate without a single Republican vote. Speaking about the pandemic, President Biden said the following: “A year ago, we were hit with a virus that was met with silence and spread unchecked. Denials for days, weeks, then months, that led to more deaths.”
Blatant lies and not a single word of truth. Already on January 6, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the leadership of then President Trump published a travel notice for Wuhan, China, due to the available information. On January 29, 2020, He formed a coronavirus task force at the White House and two days later declared a public health emergency, accompanied by a restriction on travel to and from China. Then President Trump did all these measures while Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Head of the World Health Organization, declared on January 14, 2020, that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.” Even as late as January 20, 2020, ABC quoted him stating that there was “only limited human-to-human transmission.” For good measure, the Organization declared that “This (meaning the COVID-19) is in line with experience with other respiratory illnesses and in particular with other coronavirus outbreaks.” The World Health Organization finally declared the coronavirus a global emergency only on January 30, 2020. Busying themselves with impeaching the then President Trump, the Democrats ignored the pandemic until after the former’s acquittal. Most glaringly, the COVID package utilizes unemployment numbers instead of the previous population numbers in determining final state payouts, thus rewarding failing blue states with tax dollars of red states whose jobless claims have always been below the unemployment numbers of the Democrat governed states. Textbook retail politics that has nothing to do with President Biden’s high flying clarion calls for national unity.
In the same vein, HR1, fraudulently titled “For the People Act” passed the House of Representatives without a single Republican vote. Defined by every objective analyst as a law allowing wholesale fraud of all elections, HR1 would shift control of elections from cities, counties, states to the federal government in Washington, D.C. Moreover, HR1 would make voting by mail-in ballots permanent, prohibit voter ID, launch automatic voter registration, allow same-day registration and voting, enshrine in law ballot harvesting, and funnel all appeals into one court – the traditionally Democrat-controlled D.C. Circuit Court.
To up the ante, the New York Times published on March 11, 2021, an Opinion by its Editorial Board, titled “For Democracy to Stay, the Filibuster Must Go.” Pursuant to the Board’s opinion, “It is hard to imagine a more fitting job for Congress than for members to join together to pass a broadly popular law that makes democracy safer, stronger and more accessible to all American.” Please, notice the misleading language that has become the hallmark of the radical as well as extremist members of the Democrat establishment. HR1 would weaken democracy. It will open the floodgate for uncontrollable voting by limitless numbers of ineligible individuals. It would also erode democracy, because voting, according to HR1, would not reflect the will of the citizens of the United States of America. Moreover, HR1 is far from being “a broadly popular law.” Even the Opinion states that HR1 could only count on the votes of fifty Democrat Senators and the tie breaking vote of the Vice President. Of course, the solution is to abolish the filibuster, which is opposed by Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, both Democrats too. Some “broad popular” support!
Unquestionably, the fledgling Biden administration is infected with the virus of ideologically tainted incompetence and nascent immorality. Headed by a mentally confused President, supported by a woefully incompetent Vice-President, and surrounded by a coterie of ideologically blinded bureaucrats, collectively they preach the deceptive gospel of ubiquitous unity. In fact, however, the Biden administration is bringing about the greatest tragedy of American history by its ruthless attempt to enforce an utterly false unity, domestically as well as internationally. As Biden is prone to tell his fellow Americans and the rest of the world, his administration will be the torchbearer for the humanistic values of mankind across the globe. President Biden’s schizophrenic belief in the universal goodness of all Americans and the rest of the world, and his simultaneous railing against everybody who does not happen to share his and his fellow travellers’ cult-like enthusiasm for accommodating their political as well as antisocial psychopathic fictions, put all normal people in the Hillary Clinton’s basket of not just “deplorables”, but also into the cage of “enemies” or “domestic terrorists” of an absolutely fake Democrat Utopia.
In this context, it is worthwhile to take a short trip along the memory lane of the early 20th century Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks of Russia/Soviet Union decided in December 1923, to introduce the policy of revenge against their opponents. Having borrowed from the vocabulary of the French Revolution, they adopted the Jacobins favorite definition for their numerous opponents, “enemies of the people”, “enemies of the workers”, “enemies of the republic”, and “enemies of the glorious revolution.” Anyone found guilty by the Bolshevik regime’s kangaroo courts was sentenced to a minimum of ten years, mostly in the GULAG. The gruesome story of the retaliations in the Soviet Union can be found exhaustively in Agnes Gereben’s excellent book with the same title.
This collection of the Biden administration’s useless idiots lack both domestic and international strategies. Their only so-called policy is to wipe away everything that was accomplished between 2017 and January 2021, and beyond. By denouncing everybody who allegedly “oppose them everywhere”, their real aim is to permanently disrupt any emerging understanding among the starkly divided groups and organizations of American society. Opening the southern borders to indiscriminate illegal invasion of the United States of America and calling this humanism is lunacy, rejoining the Paris climate accord while lying about its real content, refinancing counterproductive United Nations’ organizations to deepen already existing divisions among nations as well as regions, embracing a dead Palestinian cause in contravention of the Abraham Accord as well as the newest positive developments in the greater Middle East, North Africa, and South-East Asia, trying to appease Iran repeatedly, and calling Black Lives Matter, Antifa, ACLU as well as other violent minority groups peaceful and beneficial for the perfection of American democracy, while denouncing in the strongest possible language those who oppose these lies, open the door to deception over reality, and immorality over decency.
Yet, the ultimate purpose of this charade of unbelievable manipulations is to prove that the Biden administration and the Democrat Party is a modern government unquestionably committed to transformative reforms on behalf of all Americans and the rest of the world. In other words, they are alone in touch with the people of all races. For this reason, anybody who opposes them is guilty of “systematic” and “institutionalized” racism. In this manner, mankind is inherently guilty of the moral crime of racism, and are burdened to prove their innocence. This Orwellian or Kafkaesque trap is injustice ab initio amounting to the grossest abuse of language, and ultimately to a shameless undemocratic perversion of power.
This pseudo-epistolemic misuse of language could win votes in the short run. However, it cannot win hearts and minds in the long run. Rigged elections give a sense of false security, yet deny understanding of the real reflection of political, economic, and social discontent in the country. Ideology-driven foreign policy will surely breed intense criticism as well. Calls for return to genuine normalcy and the restoration of necessary freedoms will quickly undermine Biden’s psychopathy and the Democrat Party’s attempt at totalitarianism in the United States of America. Invented history, such as “Project 1619” and the Obamas’ “you built this country” primitive exhortations, only contribute to the intellectual poverty as well as the contextual thinness of the Democrats’ utopian lunacy. Their collective resistance to acknowledge reality will surely end in catastrophic defeat and tremendous political, economic, social, and moral disarray. Therefore, the United States of America shall prepare itself to rally around a narrative which shall face reality and which shall enable the nation to live up to its views of its past, present, and future greatness.
In 2015 and 2016, then candidate Donald J. Trump campaigned under two simple slogans: “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” Collectively, these two rallying cries called for the rejection of the two endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the open borders policy of then President Barack Obama, the convoluted doctrine of multiculturalism, the identity politics heavily laced with an exaggerated sense of mostly nonexistent victimhood, and similarly unreal elitist idiocies coached in twisted linguistic phenomena reminiscent of the communist propaganda that emanated ceaselessly from the Soviet Union and its vassal quasi-states for over seventy years in the 20th century. When he announced his candidacy for president on June 16, 2015, Trump appeared to be a lonely voice in the political desert. His speech was highly unconventional, because of its provocative content. Basically, he faced the nation alone with the nonchalance of an ordinary citizen speaking his mind without any concerns for the political consequences. This personal campaign strategy gave him the presidency on January 20, 2017. His presidency proved that he was right. He revived the economy, which under the community organizer president’s eight years tanked, lowered unemployment for everybody, including African Americans, to 3.6%, reestablished the strength of the military, accomplished internationally the normalization of relations between Israel and most of its neighbors, and largely stemmed the criminal penetration of the central and south American gangs and cartels into the United States of America.
Then came the Chinese COVID-19 virus in January 2020. Among other shortcomings of the system, the pandemic brought forth the long-term problems of the federal administration that he attempted to change. Former President Trump has created a movement that is alive and well to the present day. Yet, politically he has remained a solitary figure, belonging to nobody and yet to every American. Thus symbolically, he has embodied in his person the past, the present, and the future of America. Clearly, for three years, he was one of the most successful presidents the United States of America have had in the almost two hundred fifty years of its history. This is not to say that those three very successful years were not turbulent. The “Resist” movement by the Democrats, the “Never Trump” Republicans, the Black Lives Matter radicals, the idiotic Antifa criminals, the irrationally biased media and Social Platforms, all allied themselves to thwart him at every step. His answer to this relentless opposition was twofold and fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, he insisted that the rule of law shall be strictly obeyed and followed. On the other hand, however, he was ready to break the laws when he believed that his resistance would help America to be protected and to be stronger.
His achievements in America’s recovery following the post-Reagan era insignificant decades of the Clinton-Bush-Obama triumvirate, are as impressive as that of any great democratic leader of the 19th and 20th centuries. President Trump has always believed that loyalty to the constitution would strengthen the Republic and democracy. Commander, stage manager and star of his movement to make America great again, he bathed in the unconditional adoration of his followers. His defense of American interests was unfailing. As President he took literally the constitutional mandate that the head of the Executive Branch is the President. Therefore, the secretaries of his cabinet were there to execute his policies, which he set with minimal consultation. Those who stood up to him were mostly summarily dismissed. He also believed that America looked for strong leadership that he always strived to provide.
Although former President Trump was indeed a revolutionary chief executive in his own way, even he could not set a lasting mark for a nation so starkly divided between conservatives and those who adamantly refuse to integrate and assimilate into the constitutional order of the United States of America. His handling of the pandemic was in a way self-defeating. While the full nature of the new coronavirus was still unknown and the medical community was hopelessly divided over the measures that might mitigate or even stop the spread of the virus, former President Trump wanted to demonstrate strong leadership. However, the virus turned out to be more complex and, therefore, more unpredictable than the so-called experts predicted. Meanwhile, the economy began to weaken and unemployment rose. Coupled with the political unrest that engulfed the Democrat-led communities, America started to descend into chaos.
Since former President Trump assumed leadership from the get go, the blame largely fell on him. In the second half of 2020, the majority of Americans became prisoners of their visceral mistrust of the federal government. Although most Americans wanted to see their country as exceptional, bequeathed to them by the founding fathers and their successors, they developed their doubts about the existing state of affairs. Historically, if present realities contradicts the prevailing political vision, and the people’s faith in their president’s ability to handle the problems facing them weakens, these combined occurrences would leave them feeling uncertain about the future, opening them up to the siren voices of extremist illusions. In this mental condition, they start to long for unity instead of division, tranquility against political and social unrest. Yet, ironically, when such efforts fail, as they always do, compromise becomes suspect. The results are the reemergence of old divisions – multiplied by new once -, ethnic and religious factionalism, personal and ideological conflicts in the historic tradition of the nation. Quick and mindless recourse to mayhem and distraction then escalates to ubiquitous social chaos.
Once again, Washington, D.C. is out of step with the nation. The American national identity, which is firmly anchored in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, contain the principled ideas of the Republic. Yes, the history of this Republic has not been perfect. However, set against some flaws are the many achievements both domestically and internationally, which are more than sufficient reasons for justifiable national pride. Nor has the history of the last decade been all negative by any means. Those who love America can point to the country’s strength, to its inherent goodness, its morality, its guarantees of the rule of law, good healthcare, liveable pensions, long lives, and almost eight decades of peace. However, for fast every plus there has been a minus lately. Minority groups arrogantly as well as aggressively claim victimhood status and with it demand only rights without responsibilities. To wit, they demand impunity from punishment for criminal acts with the cynical explanation of fake discrimination and nonexistent racism. While doing nothing or little constructively, they call for ever more slices of the pie and oversized power for themselves to the detriment of the majority.
To top this insanity, teaching organizations resist reforms and hide behind the Democrat Party and its affiliated organizations. As a result, elementary education has tanked and so has the quality of secondary education. Vocational training has been deteriorating, especially in comparison to Europe and Asia. Logically, tensions between parents and teachers have risen, particularly since the pandemic. Enrolment in private and charter schools has risen steadily, accounting for almost 30% nationally. Colleges and graduate schools have turned increasingly into places of indoctrination instead of teaching. Indoctrination, in turn, has given rise to intolerance, censorship, intimidation, and outright authoritarianism in higher education.
There is a palpable and deepening disaffection among the younger generations. The majority of these people have the unsettling feeling that the United States of America is not living up to its ideals and its potentials. Thus, the spreading sense of victimhood. Demands for social justice, reparations, reexamination of the past, cancel culture, the growth of false identities and identity crises, are eroding the political, economic, social, and moral fabric of the country. Revolution is called for, while the nation remains mostly conservative in its mentality. For the majority, that fact that the United States of America is in a turmoil is reason for sadness that goes beyond the notion of manifest destiny. The turbulences of the last decade, especially the four years of the Trump presidency, affected all parts of the nation. Yet, the elections of 2020 were an evasion of reality. While the results might appear to be politically convenient, prolonging a clear decision could prove to be a disaster. Increasingly it appears that the fault lies with the American people. As President Reagan said: “Our whole system of government is based on “We the People,” but if we the people don’t pay attention to what’s going on, we have no right to bellyache or squawk when things go wrong.” Accordingly, the opposition to the present idiocy must find and work out a realistic alternative acceptable to the majority of the American people. For that to be accomplished, politicians ready and able to rally this majority behind a positive vision must be found and supported. The “We the People” cannot allow a rudderless administration to keep them hostage of a fraudulent history and its untrue narratives.
