Advertisement

Suddenly, we are bidding farewell to some celebrities whom it seemed had been around forever and would go on forever.

Olivia DeHavilland, one of the last surviving veterans of Hollywood’s Golden Age, died Sunday at her home in Paris at 104. Last year, she was photographed riding her bicycle at 103. She noted the irony that she was the last living cast member of “Gone With The Wind” when her character of Melanie was so fragile that she was the only one who died in the film.

In addition to “Gone With The Wind,” her five-decade movie career included “The Adventures of Robin Hood” with Errol Flynn (the first big-budget feature in three-strip Technicolor, a year before “The Wizard of Oz”) and “The Heiress,” for which she won the Best Actress Oscar three years after winning it for “To Each His Own,” scoring two wins out of five career nominations. (One was for “The Snake Pit,”also the premise of one of my favorite obscure jokes, when after escaping being thrown into a pit of snakes, Bullwinkle the moose leans over the edge and says, “Goodbye, Olivia!”)

She also made history in a couple of other ways. In 1943, fed up with being forced to take mediocre roles, she sued Warner Brothers and won. The case resulted in a ban on long-term studio contracts that automatically renewed without the actors’ consent, which became known as “the DeHavilland Law.” And in the days when communists were trying to stealthily take power in Hollywood and called anyone who opposed them “fascists” (sound familiar?), she bravely threw out a pro-commie speech written for her by Dalton Trumbo and gave her own speech, denouncing communism. Read the full story here, it will make you respect her even more:

Also, on Saturday, Regis Philbin died at home of natural causes a month before his 89th birthday. He first came to national attention as the announcer/sidekick on Joey Bishop’s late night show that challenged (barely) Johnny Carson. From there, it was on to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” “Regis & Kathie Lee,” “Regis & Kelly” and countless other shows and talk show appearances.

Coincidentally, Regis died just a few weeks after the passing of longtime TV host Hugh Downs at 99.

Both Regis and Hugh made record albums: “An Evening With Hugh Downs” (1959) and four LPs by Regis, from “It’s Time For Regis” (1968) to 2009’s “Just You. Just Me” with his wife Joy. “The Regis Philbin Christmas Album” (2005) features Donald Trump on “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and an animated Trump appears in the Claymation video: https://youtu.be/U03Q83nl8-4

Regis also broke Downs’ Guinness World Record for the most hours spent on network TV (15,188). Regis was on national TV for about 17,000 hours. That would take being on TV for two hours a day five days a week, 52 weeks a year, for over 30 years. Blogger Mark Evanier recalls meeting Regis once at a Hollywood benefit about 10 years ago, where he happily talked, shook hands and posed for photos with everyone who asked. When Evanier told him that David Letterman must really love him to have him on so often, he replied:

"That's because I'm always available! Someone cancels, it's 'Call Regis!' and I'm there like a trained cocker spaniel! But you know what they say…showing up is 90% of everything! I may not be the funniest guy on TV but I'm really good at showing up."

Regis kept showing up for over 50 years, and we were always glad to see him. TV won’t be the same without him.

Actor John Saxon has also died at 83. Some of his most famous roles included the movies “Enter The Dragon” with Bruce Lee (Saxon was a martial artist himself), “Joe Kidd” and “Raid on Entebbe,” as well as TV roles on “Dynasty” and “Falcon Crest.”

Finally, British singer/guitarist Peter Green died Saturday in his sleep at 73. If you remember when Fleetwood Mac was a blues-rock band, that was under Green. He co-founded Fleetwood Mac but left in 1971, before it morphed into a pop-rock mega-group. Green was considered one of the best British blues guitarists ever. Even B.B. King said he had “the sweetest tone I ever heard. He was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.”

Once again on Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the Court’s liberals against First Amendment religious freedom protections. In a stunning 5-4 ruling against Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley in Nevada that echoed a similar ruling in May against a California church, the SCOTUS refused to hear an appeal arguing that churches, synagogues and mosques shouldn’t have to comply with the Democratic Governor’s 50-person limit on worship services to combat COVID-19.

This is blatantly discriminatory against people of faith because it applies only to them. In a blistering dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that the restriction doesn’t apply to casinos or movie theaters, which could easily be packing in hundreds of people with far fewer health precautions than places of worship are imposing. Not to mention all the anti-police protests for which restrictions never apply, since they’re an exercise of First Amendment rights that liberal officials agree with.

Sen. Ted Cruz sarcastically tweeted that churches should install craps tables; then maybe they’d be allowed to open. My reaction was blunter: I called on Roberts to repent and resign:

Here’s another great commentary by Andrea Widburg on this outrageous ruling that calls it “a constitutional no-brainer.” She writes that “There’s something very wrong at the Supreme Court, and Justice Roberts seems to sit at the heart of the problem.” She adds that the only way to insure a real conservative majority on the Court is to reelect Trump so that he can make more appointments, and if Biden is elected, the “Constitution will be abandoned for the foreseeable future.”

(Ms. Widburg also makes the excellent point that Nevada’s COVID-19 death rate is only 0.02%, with almost all the cases concentrated near Las Vegas, more than 400 miles away from the church. Yet the casinos can open and the church cant’?)

Roberts seems to believe that his job is not to declare unconstitutional laws unconstitutional (it's actually his #1 job), but to find some legal excuse to justify whatever the government does, on the theory that if elected officials did it, then the people must want it. The Bill of Rights does not exist to insure that the government or even the majority always get what they want but to protect the people from their own government. It’s also not a list of rights granted by government until they have a good reason to take them away. It’s a list of God-given rights granted to every American by their Creator that the government has no power to take away.

If Chief Justice Roberts can’t figure out the difference by this stage of his career, then it’s time to find a new career.

Believe it or not, we’re down to the last hundred days before the election. (Wow, time sure flies when you’re not having fun.) Event-wise, this has been the worst lead-in to a presidential election since 1969, and in some ways it’s arguably far worse. Who would ever have imagined that we’d have an election year heading down to the wire with essentially no in-person campaigning, no big national conventions and probably even no debates. (Come on, does anyone really think Joe Biden WON’T get out of debating President Trump?) All this, when the stakes for this country are higher than they have been since, oh, maybe the Civil War.

Elections mean things, and this year, they mean everything. That’s why it’s critical to continue uncovering what was done to try to hijack the last one. Sadly, one of the major ways to influence elections, though it’s not supposed to happen (ha), is through the use –- the misuse –- of the tax-exempt 501(c)3. (To cite the most obvious example, does anyone believe that Media Matters doesn’t concern itself with election outcomes?) Recall that the Obama IRS was clearly weaponized to disqualify Tea Party organizations that had been formed around conservative principles while letting most “progressive” groups sail through to tax-exempt status.

California Rep. Devin Nunes broke some stunning news in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on her FOX BUSINESS NEWS show “Mornings with Maria” about THE most prominent liberal think-tank, the Brookings Institute, a 501(c)3, being involved with...(drum roll, please)...Christopher Steele and the “dossier.”

According to Rep. Nunes, there are direct links between the 2016 president of the Brookings Institute, longtime Clinton loyalist Strobe Talbott, and the creation and distribution of the phony Steele “dossier.”

"I think they have real...questions that need to be answered here,” he told Maria, “about what on earth the president of Brookings was doing texting back and forth to Steele. Why was he accepting the “dossier”?

Nunes returned Sunday to talk with her on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES, just as more news broke about the “dossier.” Steele’s main source has been unmasked and is identified as Igor Denchenko (whom I would add is also a close associate of Adam Schiff’s star impeachment witness Fiona Hill). Nunes first offered a little background, saying that a few months ago, he and Sen. Lindsay Graham were saying they saw “three Russians” as possible sources, but that now it turns out that the one finally identified wasn’t really a Russian national, that he lived right here in the U.S. Both the FBI and the media had led Congress –- and the American public –- to believe Steele had some super-secret Russian source, but no.

We've learned something else very interesting about him: Steele’s “Russian” source used to work at the Brookings Institute.

Nunes says the House Intelligence Committee, which he chaired while Republicans led the House, had already known through testimony that back in 2016, Strobe Talbott gave a few copies of the “dossier” to a few people. They also know that there were other so-called “dossiers” that mirrored the main one and that these were being passed around at the State Department; Nunes believes there are connections between those other “dossiers” and the president of Brookings as well.

Understand that all this material was completely unverified oppo research bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Reporters actually got Pulitzer Prizes for playing their roles in disseminating that rot. In Nunes’ words, “The whole thing was just some sick fantasy made up by the Clinton campaign. (Once again we can say that when it comes to corruption, all roads lead back to Hillary.)

Nunes says the investigation (I assume he means the Senate investigation) has now been expanded to include the Brookings Institute, specifically as it involves the IRS and a 501(c)3’s legal obligation to stay out of politics if it’s going to remain tax-exempt. He says they “clearly have not done that” and for the last four years have obstructed the investigation “with propaganda,” publicly attacking them “through this kind of phony legal group of ‘fact-checkers’ that they set up.”

The other trouble spot at Brookings is its acceptance of foreign money; this may include even money from foreign governments. So the question is, what foreign countries are we talking about? Were donors acting on behalf of a foreign power to damage Trump and help Hillary?

After Trump and his campaign were looked at upside down and sideways, it became clear that they had not “colluded” with Russia to win in 2016. But now we see that the Brookings Institute was playing politics on the Democrat side, and THEY had foreign donors. Nunes asks, “...are they doing all of this not just to help the Democratic Party, but also any foreign government?”

A report by Julie Kelly in AMERICAN GREATNESS tells more, recalling the Brookings Institution’s 4,300-word defense of the "dossier" on the website LAWFARE (where we looked to see that it's "published by the Lawfare Institute in cooperation with Brookings") that came out in December of 2018. It said the “dossier” was “a collection of raw intelligence” similar to other forms used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Kelly's piece --- not the LAWFARE piece, unless you want your head to explode --- is a must-read.

Laughably, Chuck Rosenberg and Sarah Grant wrote for LAWFARE, “The dossier holds up well over time, and none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven. The Mueller investigation has clearly public records that confirm pieces of the dossier. And even where the details are not exact, the general thrust of Steele’s reporting seems credible in light of what we now know about extensive contacts between numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.”

Gosh, even Peter Srtzrok, in an internal FBI report, said there was no evidence that members of the Trump campaign had had contact with Russian officials.

"It’s safe to say that LAWFARE acted as the Adam Schiff of the blogosphere,” writes Kelly. That says it all. She also tells how LAWFARE targets Attorney General Bill Barr and Rep. Nunes. (Take a look at the headlines on their website; you'll get the idea.) They slammed Nunes' memo on FISA abuse though we now know it was accurate and Schiff’s was not. The very person who trashed Nunes’ memo for LAWFARE, David Kris, ended up being the person appointed by the presiding FISA judge to offer guidance on cleaning up the FISA process!

Why is it so important now to look at all this? Because there’s a bigger question: If the Democrat Party could go THIS FAR to tip the scales in 2016, what lengths might they go to in 2020 to win? Is there a limit? (That would be a “no.”) What on God’s earth are they doing behind the scenes NOW, under cover of the coronavirus? And how do we prevail? That, in the last hundred days before the election, is what we need to know and act on.

..................................

Incidentally, Sen. Lindsay Graham announced on Sunday that this week, evidence will be released that shows not only did the FBI lie to the FISA court about the reliability of the Steele “dossier,” but they also lied about it in their 2018 testimony to Congress. “And that is a separate crime,” Graham said.

There’s been a huge development related to the story we brought you a few days ago about Peter Strzok’s plan to use President Trump’s first official intelligence briefing to spy on him in January of 2017. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Thursday declassified a memo that details the specifics of an earlier briefing, with then-candidate Trump, in August of 2016. That briefing must have made Strzok very happy, because one can see from this new memo that they were already using such meetings to spy on Trump when he was still a candidate.

In fact, they filed the memo in several very interesting places mostly unrelated to the stated purpose of the briefing: under “Crossfire Hurricane,” code name for the “Trump/Russia” investigation; under “Crossfire Razor,” code name for the investigation of Michael Flynn; under “FARA,” the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and also under the vaguely titled “Russia Sensitive Investigative Matter.”

As reported by John Solomon, the memo shows that agent Joe Pientka attempted to gather evidence against both Trump and Flynn, not just briefing the candidate but also writing down the questions Trump asked during the meeting and scrutinizing the demeanor of attendee Flynn as well.

Recall that Strzok wrote later in an email to his boss Bill Priestap that he was “angry” (his word) he’d been left out of the loop ahead of the January 2017 briefing, as he planned to use it to further his investigation and wanted to offer input beforehand. In other words, this was far more than just an intelligence briefing; it was a set-up to play "gotcha" with the newly-inaugurated President, and his colleagues knew it. Unbelievable.

But true. As for the earlier briefing of then-candidate Trump, a source told FOX NEWS that “...the briefing was used as ‘a cover to listen for any remarks’ by Trump or others about the Russian federation.” See the report by Brooke Singman and Gregg Re here.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/source-says-fbi-agent-used-2016-briefing-on-election-interference-as-cover-to-question-trump-team

This intelligence briefing, held August 17, 2016, was supposedly to brief candidate Trump on foreign election interference. But according to the typewritten notes of FBI agent Joe Pientka, the agent “actively listened” for what was said on certain topics, particularly the Russian federation, using his 13-minute briefing for “cover” to monitor both Donald Trump and Michael Flynn.

The briefing was held at the FBI’s New York Field Office. Also in attendance was Trump campaign adviser and former candidate New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. (As far as we know, all this is news to him.)

It was Pientka’s duty as the one giving the briefing to “warn and tell the candidates what they needed to watch out for.” Yet even with their supposed evidence about the Russians targeting the Trump campaign, Pientka did not tell Trump and/or Flynn that this was happening.

Interestingly, the document written by Pientka and supplied to FOX NEWS shows that it was approved by both Peter Strzok and Kevin Clinesmith. Clinesmith, you’ll recall, is the subject of a criminal referral –- so far the only one we know of –- for altering a document to say that Carter Page had not worked as our own asset for the CIA when he actually had done just that. (Page’s work with the CIA would have been exculpatory evidence for him, but somehow they ‘forgot’ to mention it in the FISA application to spy on him, altered evidence of it, and accused Page of being a Russian agent instead.)

According to the FOX NEWS source, Pientka was at that time also handling the FBI’s investigation into Flynn. (Recall that Pientka and Strzok were the two agents who went to the White House to interview Flynn just a few days into his new job as Trump’s new national security adviser.) The same source told FOX NEWS that the briefing was used as “a cover to listen for any remarks” by candidate Trump or others about the Russian federation.

Note that these officials were really out to get Flynn at that time; this particular incident of spying may have been just as much about snagging HIM as it was about stopping candidate Trump. With all Flynn knew about the inner workings of the intelligence community, they did NOT want him working with Trump. This concern would no doubt become a desperate one after Trump was elected.

Another senior administration official did not hold back in commenting to FOX NEWS, saying that this document “shows the same cast of virulent characters that spearheaded the Russia hoax and set Trump up from ‘jump.’” They were trying to make good on their promise to keep Trump from winning. It was “a scam briefing from a scam crew of miscreants at the FBI.”

Then-FBI Director James Comey later testified that he had assured President Trump he was not personally under investigation. (Recall that Trump at the time was understandably upset that Comey wouldn’t come out and state it publicly.) But Comey was lying to Trump. The FBI had Trump under an electron microscope, both before and after he was in office.

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, on Sean Hannity’s TV show Thursday night, clarified how they conducted that early briefing. “The FBI went to then-candidate Trump...They told him Russia might try to spy on you; what they didn’t tell him is, ‘WE’RE spying on you.” And they did it just 17 days into this investigation. It opens on July 31; August 17, they do this. Thirteen minutes for the ‘defensive briefing,’ the part...you’re supposed to get; and then an hour and 42 minutes where they’re trying to get information and set the [candidate] up.”

Jordan went on to say that this came very shortly after Strzok’s August 8 text to Lisa Page in which he said, “We’ll stop it [Trump’s election],” and his August 15 text to Page about the “insurance policy” discussed in “Andy’s office” (Andrew McCabe). Just two days later, they start implementing that insurance policy.

Gregg Jarrett, also on Hannity’s show, brought up the fact that Pientka has been scrubbed from the FBI website and is now cloistered in the San Fransisco Field Office, where the FBI refuses to make him available after repeated demands by Congress. And who is responsible for that, as well as for the excruciating delays in releasing these memos? Why, that would be current FBI Director Christopher Wray, of course! Every time we have a story that involves slow-walked evidence, we always seem to end up back at Wray’s office door, which is always closed.

Remember when we said that if Biden were elected, he’d essentially be bringing back the old Obama machine to the White House? (Of course, my writer Laura Ainsworth has been saying for two years that Michelle Obama will end up either being the nominee or running on the ticket with Biden –- if he manages to make it to the election –- with the goal that she end up in the Oval Office with the original Obama team.)

Well, we'd like to thank Ray Arroyo on Laura Ingraham’s “Seen and Unseen” segment Wednesday for pointing something out. Former President Obama and presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden got together to record a video conversation, and the Biden campaign has released a trailer. The campaign made quite a production out of it, with cameras following the two men as they exit their cars with entourages in tow and even time their entrances from the elevators. Arroyo describes it as playing “like a streaming event.”

He also points out one moment in this trailer in which “Obama reveals more than perhaps he intended.” Can you guess what it is?

It's when Obama says this: “You are going to be able to reassemble [pause and big hand gesture] the kind of government that cares about people and brings people together.”

Okay...REASSEMBLE? Arroyo recalls for his audience the “old group” of Susan Rice, Eric Holder and John Kerry; of course, there are many more. (Quite a few of them are probably still at the FBI.) Whether or not Michelle Obama is Biden's running mate, it’s easy to see that the same old Democrat machine will be back if he wins. Deja vu all over again.

And does anyone think Biden would be willing and able to stop the lawlessness in “blue” cities around the country? No, the only way he'd be able to quell the protests would be to give those thugs everything they demand. They have a long list of "reforms" that would end America as we know it, and Biden would just do it all. I like what Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia said on BREITBART NEWS TONIGHT about Biden, that he is the “leader of lawlessness.”

Collins, who is now running for the U.S. Senate, praised President Trump for working to restore law and order when that is exactly what our country desperately needs.

Elections have consequences, said host Matthew Boyle, and he had a message for those who care about law and order: “I’m calling out to all the listeners of Breitbart Radio tonight: do not think for one second the conservative voice in America needs to be complacent in this country. If you don’t like [it] in these cities, if you don’t like lawlessness, if you don’t like the liberal takeover of your rights and your freedoms, your guns, or anything else, then you have to do more than simply just talk about it.”

We have to fight for what matters, he said. That includes having “a bigger conversation” about “the fact that Joe Biden in his basement in Delaware has been subscribing to these ultra-leftist positions of defunding the police and disrespecting the police.” He has “caved to leftist groups.”

Nothing less than a “conservative movement” will stop this.

But these are the people to whom Joe Biden would bow.

Here are just a few of the ideas these “woke” prosecutors in the Seattle area –- King County –- would like to see considered:

First, to not necessarily file third-degree assault charges against someone who attacks a police officer. “These (charges) often arise from aggressive responses by law enforcement officers toward persons of color, or from an arrestee’s mental health or substance abuse episode,” so such cases should be filed “reluctantly.”

Also, to not file third-degree assault charges against someone who attacks a police officer if the officer didn’t have his bodycam turned on or didn’t have proper training in de-escalation and “implicit bias.”

In addition, to give crime investigators “less input” into bail recommendations. But this group does have recommendations of their own; for example, they think “Burglary 2” suspects with no violent history shouldn’t be held in jail during a pandemic “simply because [Seattle] PD is annoyed by how often they’re responding to break-ins.” (!)

They also recommend that prosecutors not file charges on referrals for: escape, eluding, drug possession, drug possession with intent to deliver, delivery of controlled substance, second-degree burglary, and auto theft, “as long as the suspect “has remained crime free from when the case was referred to present.”

I wish I could say I was making this up, but it’s real. All of these crimes would essentially go unpunished. As in, go and sin no more!

The prosecutor who brought this letter to the attention of FOX Q13 (and did not wish to be identified) was disheartened. “I don’t even know why we’re prosecutors anymore,” this person said. Indeed. “It seems almost as if the prosecutor’s office becomes less and less relevant and necessary to a safe society when we’re willing to let burglars or robbers go free or have a license to assault police officers.”

This letter isn’t the only “starting point” for long-term “reform” of law enforcement in Seattle. Tuesday, an internal memo from the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention outlined their plan to end juvenile detention by 2025 and to close the King County Jail in downtown Seattle once the pandemic is under control.

And this November, King County residents will vote on whether the sheriff will continue to be elected or instead be appointed, responsible just to county officials. Some, obviously, in county government are pushing to have more direct control over the sheriff. Voters will also decide whether or not the charter can be changed to transfer some policing functions to “other offices.” (Uh-oh.) As councilmember Girmay Zahilay said, “Millions of people around the nation have said we need to redirect most policing functions to unarmed, public health, and community-based alternatives. The King County Charter as currently written does not allow us to do this.”

Maybe the people who wrote the King County Charter “as currently written” were not insane. Does anyone think that a (shudder) President Joe Biden --- or whoever his chosen successor might be --- would do anything to preserve law and order in an environment such as this? Biden has already said he definitely would “redirect” funds away from the police. There is no question that he would support redirecting their duties as well.

This would be a hopeless situation for law enforcement. So what we need to do this November is “redirect” the power away from leftists and back towards law enforcement, and the one we can count on to oversee that is President Trump.

Last week, I linked to an excerpt from the new book by John Solomon and Seamus Bruner entitled ‘FALLOUT: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties.’ That chapter told of the dangerous work of an American undercover agent, William Douglas Campbell, as he risked his life in a Moscow hotel room to document an exchange of cash bribes. Today, another excerpt tells the story from that same informant of how the Russians privately mocked President Obama for so easily giving them American uranium in the Uranium One deal, as well as nuclear fuel contracts and technology.

In Russia, PRAVDA reported it as a coup that Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy conglomerate, had taken control of Uranium One Incorporated, and that was not an exaggeration. Though Rosatom was a Canadian company, Putin’s takeover involved the transfer of ownership of 20 percent of America’s uranium. Today’s excerpt from the book is a must-read for anyone curious about what Putin’s goals were and how his win came about, thanks to the gracious assistance of President Obama.

As reported by Solomon and Bruner: “Putin had set his sights on global nuclear domination before President Barack Obama took office and then, just two days after Obama’s second inauguration, Putin had achieved a near virtual monopoly, producing more uranium than all American miners combined. In a single purchase [Rosatom], he had gained full control of one of the world’s largest uranium mining companies and a nuclear foothold in the land of his greatest adversary.”

Kind of makes you think that all those cries of “Russia, Russia, Russia!!” were misdirected.

Rosatom, launched by Putin in 2007, was structured as a private-public enterprise, in that “its expenditures were subsidized, its profits were privatized and its losses were socialized,” essentially giving the Kremlin “a blank checkbook” that ensured Western companies could not compete. (NOTE: This is what they don’t teach college kids about the true nature of government-controlled economies, and why top government leaders in “socialist” countries are typically billionaires while "the masses" scrape by.)

Importantly, Putin needed –- and got –- Obama’s blessing to help Iran develop the Bushehr nuclear reactor, “a project that previous American administrations had deemed unacceptable.” Despite hard evidence that Iran was secretly moving forward on an illegal nuclear weapons program, Obama did nothing to get in the way of this.

Putin also created some lovely new customers and partnerships for Rosatom, including ruthless anti-American dictators such as Hassan Rouhani of Iran, Hu Jintao of China, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and even Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

As you know, the FBI was aware of what Putin was doing because it had its own undercover agent, now identified as Mr. Campbell, inside Rosatom. A few days after he delivered the suitcase with $50,000 cash to Russian officials while secretly recording the transaction with a camera hidden in his pen, he was invited to dinner by the Russians –- including one connected to the KGB and another who was found to have been a spy on American soil –- to Morton’s steakhouse in the tony Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland. (He also picked up the tab for the $700 steak-and-vodka dinner; “your tax dollars at work.”)

The Russians were out for a fun evening because they knew the Uranium One deal was about to be approved and they were planning a party to celebrate the opening of the new office of their American subsidiary, Tenam.

It was at this dinner, with the vodka flowing, that the Russians mocked President Obama, whom they denigrated with the racial epithet of “Bongo-Bongo,” for essentially giving away the farm, which, of course, he HAD DONE. They laughed about how weak his administration was and how they had put one over on him. Of course, they were unaware of Campbell’s true identity and thought they were among friends, so they felt free to make fun of the President all they wanted.

They must have repeated what Obama himself is so fond of saying: "Thanks, Obama!"

Campbell later told Congress, “I was frustrated watching the U.S. government make numerous decisions benefiting Rosatom and Tenex while those entities were engaged in serious criminal conduct on U.S. soil.”

This particular excerpt doesn’t even get into Hillary Clinton’s role in the Uranium One deal and how the Clintons profited from hugely inflated speaking fees for Bill and contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative while she was Secretary of State and also on the board that had to approve that sale. For those details and a great deal more, I recommend you read the book!

When one dares to look honestly into the Obama administration’s dealings with Russia over the years 2008-2016, it makes the more recent years of Russia-related finger-pointing at President Trump seem like the ridiculous fraud they are. Imagine if Trump’s administration were dealing with Russia the way the Obama administration did. Once again, we have an example of the Democrats accusing Republicans of the very thing they've been doing themselves.

As most expected, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, the city’s hyper-partisan top prosecutor, set aside the city’s huge backlog of homicides and charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felony unlawful use of a weapon for brandishing a rifle and a pistol to warn protesters away from their home. The case made national headlines. Mark McCloskey, who is an attorney himself, said the protesters (sorry: “peaceful protesters”) broke through a gate, entered his private property, and were advancing toward his home, threatening him, his family, and their dog.

Worth noting: When Gardner ran in the Democratic primary in 2016, she was backed by a far-left PAC partially funded by George Soros. This is part of a heavily-financed campaign (the type that got AOC into the House) which targets low-turnout races in one-party districts and cities, winning the nomination, and hence the election, for Democrat DA’s who then institute “criminal justice reform” by legalizing crime and refusing to prosecute criminals. Of course, if you dare try to protect yourself from the criminals they release, then they’ll prosecute you. From her public statement:

“It is illegal to wave weapons in a threatening manner at those participating in nonviolent protest, and while we are fortunate this situation did not escalate into deadly force, this type of conduct is unacceptable in St. Louis. We must protect the right to peacefully protest, and any attempt to chill it through intimidation will not be tolerated.”

Fortunately, it appears that almost as soon as Gardner released that statement, her case against the McCloskeys began unraveling. For one thing, the “peaceful protesters” were on private property and behaving in a threatening manner as verified on video, and Missouri has a strong Castle Doctrine law that protects the right to use a weapon to defend your life and property. There are also reports that the McCloskeys were only bluffing: the rifle wasn’t loaded and the pistol was a prop, which means neither would meet the law’s definition of a weapon “readily capable of lethal use.”

On top of that, within hours of the charges being filed, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a brief seeking to dismiss the charges, calling it “a politically-motivated prosecution by a prosecutor who is not interested in prosecuting violent crimes.” He said he would “not stand by while Missouri law is being ignored,” and he’s doing this not just for the McCloskeys but “for every Missourian whose rights are threatened by a rogue prosecutor who seeks to punish people for exercising their fundamental right to self-defense."

And if somehow, this case does come to trial, Missouri Gov. Mike Parsons says he’s already considering pardoning them.

Like all these leftist DA’s, Ms Gardner has her job definition backwards. She’s supposed to jail criminals and protect law-abiding citizens, not the other way around. On August 4th, she’s facing one challenger in the Democratic primary, Mary Pat Carl. St. Louis voters will have a very stark choice. Critics of Carl claim she will represent the law enforcement “status quo” and will end the “progressive” direction that Gardner has set the city on.

Look around you, St. Louis residents. Look at all the damage and the graffiti, the crime and bullying and assaults on police. That's the "change" Ms. Gardner has helped usher in. Does it look like “progress” to you?

Judicial Watch has done it again. We now have even more texts and emails between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page, who were having an affair during the time they were targeting Donald Trump, first as a hated candidate and later as President-elect. These two were texting and emailing each other so much that it’s hard to imagine they ever got any work done, but somehow they managed. At this point, I’ve lost track of the number of communications we’ve seen that relate to abuse of FBI power.

The emails we’re just now seeing –- still heavily redacted, unfortunately –- were written right around the time of Trump’s inauguration, with some concerning a White House intelligence briefing of the new President. Besides including Strzok and Page, these emails were circulated among then-deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Assistant Director for the Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap, and others as well. The frantic flurry of communications going on just before and after Trump’s inauguration testifies to the mood among top FBI officials at that time.

I’d say the most interesting email of all is that from Strzok about the White House briefing --- one that could “play into” the FBI’s “investigative strategy.” The exchanges leading up to it, written the night before the inauguration, are heavily redacted (NOTE to FBI Director Wray: these redactions obviously are for the FBI’s own “CYA” and are not acceptable), but then, we see that on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump was sworn in, Strzok forwarded to Lisa Page and another person (name redacted) an email he’d sent earlier that day to Priestap, asking them to “not forward/share.” Strzok had written Priestap in reference to the White House briefing: “...I am angry that Jen [counterintelligence official Jennifer Boone] did not at least cc: me. AS MY BRANCH HAS PENDING INVESTIGATIVE MATTERS THERE, THIS BRIEF MAY PLAY INTO OUR INVESTIGATIVE STRATEGY [emphasis mine], and I would like the ability to have visibility and provide thoughts/counsel to you in advance of the briefing. This is one of the reasons why I raised the issue of lanes/responsibilities that I did when you asked her to handle the WH [White House] detailee interaction.”

Translation: I want to use the White House intelligence briefing of the new President to continue investigating him, and I’m mad because Jen left me out of the loop.

Other emails from this period detailed in the press release relate to Strzok’s assessment of media reports on the Steele “dossier.” We’ve looked at one such memo by Strzok already, the one in which he admits the NEW YORK TIMES report on Trump colluding with Russian agents was false. Much more detail is here in the press release; it’s kind of “into the weeds,” but if you have time to go through it, some of this stuff is quite entertaining.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton (who deserves huge thanks for working for so long to obtain all this evidence), had this to say, in part: “These documents suggest that President Trump was targeted by the Comey FBI as soon as he stepped foot in the Oval Office... And, in a continuing outrage, it should be noticed that Wray’s FBI and Barr’s DOJ continue to slow-walk the release of thousands of Page-Strzok emails --- which means the remaining 8,000 pages of records won’t be reviewed and released until 2021-2022!”

This is because the FBI has been processing emails at the rate of only 500 pages per month (!) and has yet to process text messages. Again, this is completely unacceptable, Director Wray. Who knows what is still buried in there? (Answer: maybe Director Wray does.) But right now, we go with what we’ve got, and what we’ve got is tons of incriminating material.

John Solomon at JUST THE NEWS has also written a piece --- highly recommended --- on Strzok’s email about the White House briefing. It goes on to quote some longtime intelligence analysts who can hardly believe this happened. They told Solomon that “...any effort to use official briefings of the President and his White House to spy, investigate or gather information violated the necessary trust for keeping a President apprised of intelligence in a dangerous world.”

Some churches in California are defying Gov. Gavin Newsom’s unconstitutional ban on holding services, even though they’re taking extreme precautions, more so than businesses allowed to stay open (taking temperatures at the door, passing out masks, offering an outdoor worship alternative, social distancing, 25% capacity, etc.)

More power to them. And this may hearten them in their fight: in Virginia, a pastor who was hit with criminal charges and threatened with up to a year in jail for holding services saw those charges dropped for no stated reason.

Maybe the reason is that out-of-control Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam realized how that case would go once it got in front of a judge and jury that had actually heard of the First Amendment. This is a case where the legal system, used for so long by leftists as a weapon against the people, is now protecting the people from power-mad leftists. And the church is still pressing its legal rights with the help of the Liberty Counsel, suing Northam for discrimination for raiding their church for having 16 people in a 250-seat church (six over the “crowd” limit) while he exempted other organizations and even encouraged and participated in mass anti-police/BLM protests.

The Trump DOJ has filed a statement of interest in the case on behalf of the church. I’ll also be very interested to see how this comes out, and if the churches in California decide to call up the Liberty Counsel, too.

I keep telling people that most public political polls are meaningless, and those taken this far from an election are less than meaningless. But the media keep hyping the “Biden’s double-digit lead” angle to make it seem as if the election were over (I find it odd that Americans have had multiple chances over the past four decades to make Joe Biden President, but only now that he’s nearing 80 have they shown the slightest interest in the prospect.)

All this has many Trump supporters worried. Combined with the relentless daily media assault on Trump, the blame heaped on him for a virus unleashed on the world by China that his China-appeasing opponents have done everything in their power to prolong, and the right-on-cue riots and racial division that Democrats desperately need to keep minorities from noticing how much worse they have fared under Democrats for the past half-century-plus, they fear Trump’s chances of reelection are slipping.

The media refuse to report what he says honestly (look at the wild misrepresentation of his Mount Rushmore speech), and he can’t hold his rallies to fire up enthusiasm. I suspect, however, that Trump supporters are a lot more enthusiastic than they’re letting on or than is being reported. A Trump bumper sticker might get your car vandalized, but once inside the voting booth, that might just make people punch that “Trump” button all the harder.

Still, the recent shake-up in Trump’s campaign organization shows that he knows some adjustments are needed. One thing that would help would be for him to get off defense and back on offense. Remind people how he actually kept his campaign promises in 2016 to bring troops home, renegotiate bad trade deals, stand up to China, make our allies keep their commitments, bring our troops home, crush ISIS and enforce immigration laws (when he wasn’t being hamstrung by a million lawsuits and out-of-control federal judges), not to target legal immigrants but to keep illegal immigration from undermining American jobs and wages. He promised to create jobs and boost economic growth, and he did.

Trump promised to cut two regulations for every new one, and as Liz Peek at Fox News notes, he’s actually cut eight. Under Obama/Biden, the Federal Register reached an all-time record 97,110 pages. They added 3,853 new rules, of which 629 were flagged as having notable effects on small businesses. Under Trump, the number of federal regulations is the lowest since the 1970s, resulting in record low unemployment in virtually every demographic group, “and in early 2019, hourly wages rose 3.4 percent over the year before, the highest rate in 10 years.”

Trump built an economy so strong, it took a virtual biological attack by China to cripple it, but even now, it’s already surging back. Trump needs to hammer the point that if you want the economy to expire like a senior citizen in a New York public nursing home, then put Joe Biden and the Democrats, with their quack remedies of huge taxes, more regulations, big government and nonexistent “green jobs” back in power.

Trump also needs to build on his great Mount Rushmore speech that’s been deliberately misconstrued, to remind us again and again that we have been bequeathed a great nation and a Constitution and economic system that are the envy of the world, and Americans of every race, creed and gender can succeed when we follow the path the Founders laid out and work together.

Kurt Schlichter has a must-read column outlining 21 second-term promises that he thinks Trump should make, to outline a positive vision the way he did in 2016. When I say it’s a must-read, that means I hope President Trump reads it, too, since there are some great ideas in here. If voters think about the nation that these ideas could lead to, and compare it to the possible Ghost-of-America’s-Future under Democrats that we can see right now in Portland, Seattle, New York City or Chicago, I can’t imagine how anyone who could pass a cognitive test would want to vote for Biden.

Democrat Raccoons

July 20, 2020

My wife Laura and I live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth suburbs and our house used to be surrounded by woods. Recently, many of those wooded areas have been bulldozed to make way for big, ugly cement warehouses (the councilman we didn’t vote for calls this “progress;” we call it destroying our neighborhood.) Anyway, the wild animals have a dwindling habitat, and some have started appearing overnight in our backyard, foraging for food.

Since we keep raccoon hours and are up all night at the computer, we watch through the windows. We’ve seen a fox and a shockingly beautiful skunk that looks like it was brushed and groomed for the Westminster Skunk Show. But mostly, each night brings a constant stream of possums and raccoons coming and going.

I feel bad for them, so I started putting out a pan of dry dog food, which I replenish several times a night, and a bowl of water. The possums are polite: they just eat, drink and move on. The raccoons are more like frat boys on spring break. When they devour all the food and I go out to refill the dish, some of them trot alongside me like tame dogs (maybe it’s all the dog food they eat.)

But after a few months, they’ve started to lose their gratitude and act a bit…entitled. If I don’t refill the dish fast enough, they come up on the back porch, knock over the big plastic container, pull open the lid and spill food all over. So I’ve been trying to stay on top of the refills.

Then last night, I discovered that even though there was still food in the dish, some raccoon had turned over the bin anyway. They still had food, but rather than being grateful for what they’d been given, they felt entitled to simply take more from the person who had to work to pay for it.

That’s when I realized: our raccoons have become Democrats.

To wean them off their folly, I had to move the food bin inside the garage where they can’t get at it. I just hope they don’t burn the house down now. It occurred to me that they feel entitled to break something open and take things that don’t belong to them, and they’re all wearing black masks. They’re not only Democrats, but I think they might have joined Antifa.

Late last week, we brought you some newly declassified documents showing the FBI was ridiculously well aware there was no evidence of the Trump campaign “colluding” with Russians. Yet they went right on accusing Carter Page of being a Russian agent and kept renewing the application to spy on him as a window into the campaign and the activities of Trump's associates. We know without a doubt that this happened, because we have it in their own words, not just in casual texts but even in official reports.

A couple of additional key documents are expected sometime this week. And we’re hearing the word “indictments” more frequently.

Mark Meadows, in his first interview with Maria Bartiromo on FOX NEWS’ SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES since becoming President Trump’s chief of staff, used that word. “I know I expect indictments from the evidence I’ve seen,” he said.

He referenced the “couple of other documents” that will be coming out and said, “It’s all starting to unravel and, I tell you, it’s time for people to go to jail and people [to be] indicted.”

Something else related to swap-draining will be revealed in a few weeks, and I’m not quite sure what to think about it, not having seen it yet. It’s an HBO documentary actually called THE SWAMP, featuring dedicated swamp-drainer Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz along with Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Colorado Rep. Ken Buck. The producers claim to have had “unfettered access” to them as they covered “a pivotal year in politics, demonstrating the breadth and grip of a system that rewards money-raising above all else, playing Congress on both sides of the aisle.”

The film focuses primarily on these three Republicans, but three Democrats are also interviewed: California Rep. Ro Khanna, Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes, and disgraced former California member of Congress Katie Hill.

It has promised to expose “how the prevalence of lobbyists and special interest groups in Washington can influence policy based on financial contributions and how Congressmembers’ ability to get key committee assignments depends on how much money they are able to bring in, reflecting both their rank and their ability to affect legislation.”

Ben Kew in BREITBART compares this effort to those of BREITBART NEWS senior contributer and president of the Government Accountability Institute Peter Schweizer, whose 2020 book ‘PROFILES IN CORRUPTION: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite’ takes a look at how Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and (oh, yes) Joe Biden “cashed in” through corruption and special interests.

Until THE SWAMP debuts on August 4, it’s impossible to know how good a job it does of exposing the corruption within the government. There’s just so much of it, they could turn it into a long-running documentary series without addressing it all. And considering “the swamp” has long been in cahoots with so many in the media, it’s easy to be skeptical about the objectivity of any such production. The directors, Daniel DiMauro and Morgan Pehme, also produced the 2017 Netflix documentary GET ME ROGER STONE.

Pehme appeared with GET ME ROGER STONE director Dylan Bank on MSNBC following Trump’s pardon of Roger Stone. You’ll see from the trailer and from this interview that they aren’t exactly fans of Trump or Stone and certainly painted Stone as a personification of the corruption in Washington. That doesn’t mean their new romp through "the swamp" isn’t accurate –- I don’t want to prejudge that –- but it does give us an idea of what they might and, more importantly, might not be focusing on as they peer into its murky depths. We'll see.

Finally, Sara Carter has a hard-hitting commentary on the news we had last week about the FBI and the need to see justice done.

Carter asks the $64,000 Question: If “senior Obama and law enforcement officials didn’t believe there was evidence to prove a conspiracy, or that one even existed, then WHO IN POWER GAVE THE DIRECTIVE [emphasis mine] to target the Trump campaign and continue investigating beyond the election?”

These people knew it was a lie, yet they harmed America’s national security by feeding their lie to the media: newspapers, social media and cable news outlets around the world. “It was a disinformation campaign unlike anything ever seen in U.S. politics and it was cultivated by former senior intelligence officials with extraordinary power,” Carter rightly says.

I strongly agree with her concern over Barr’s recent statement that U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation might not be completed until after the November election. It’s understandable that Barr doesn’t want to be seen as getting in the way of a political process, but holding information back from the public is ALSO a kind of interference, an arguably worse one. That's because in deciding whom to support, voters need and deserve as much information about the candidates and the political parties as they can possibly get. (That’s why I always urge waiting until Election Day to vote; if something comes out at the last minute to cause you to change your mind, it’s too late and your precious vote is wasted.)

So, if Durham has concluded that indictments are called for, Barr needs to move forward. And that report has got to come out, no matter what it reveals. We’ve had investigation after investigation for years now, and it’s time. Long past time, in fact.

Carter says she hasn’t “seen any real results since first publishing stories more than three years ago on the subject.” She says she’s “starting to feel, like most people involved in exposing what has happened, like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.” Judging from letters I receive from readers, she has a great deal of company.

On the bright side, look at what we do already know. Even if indictments aren’t handed down soon, we know there is PROOF that the FBI, with help with some in the DOJ, State Department, CIA and the media, and even some senators and members of Congress perpetrated a fraud to influence the 2016 election and sabotage Trump’s presidency. We even know that Obama and Biden were present at a meeting about at least one aspect of that sabotage, that of framing Michael Flynn.

But that makes it even more frustrating when Durham says his report might not be out before the election. At this point, months of additional delay would be absurd. Those who directed and led the soft coup against the Trump administration must be exposed and indicted, or our legal system is a joke. Or, as Carter put it, “We will no longer be the nation based on the principles of justice and liberty we believe ourselves to be but something altogether different.”

As we near the election, we see leftists trying to MAKE us into something altogether different. Indictments of those who perpetrated this fraud are the appropriate way to push back and show that’s not going to happen.

The slogan “Black lives matter” is indeed true. Of course black lives matter. Our nation is founded on the premise that “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” No one, regardless of color, ethnicity, or origin, should be denied those God-given rights. So you bet-black lives matter. But recently, the slogan has morphed into a meme that black lives have to matter MORE. The left goes berserk if someone then adds, “All lives matter.” But isn’t that the point? If historically black lives didn’t matter as much, affirming that black lives matter equally should indeed be the uncompromised quest and rightful demand. But if someone gets angry that recognizing that black lives matter because there is equality of lives, then the assumption becomes that black lives matter MORE and thus perpetuate inequality. Such an absurd view is illogical and irrational. It becomes more than a slight to those who are white, who are no more guilty of their whiteness than someone is of his or her blackness. It’s equally an insult to Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans, and Mid-Easterners who aren’t black, but who are equally human and equally endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Why would that be offensive to those who chant “Black lives matter?”

It may be because black lives matter is more than a slogan. It’s the name of a radical left-wing Marxist organization that openly advocates for the dismantling of America’s economic system and the family structure involving a man, a woman, and children related by blood or adoption to that man and woman. Here’s some of the actual language direct from the website of the organization Black Lives Matter:

“We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence. We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer?affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).”

There is more, and some of their goals are shocking. So why do major American corporations like Nike, Apple, GM, Coca-Cola, LL Bean, and others give millions of dollars to the organization whose stated goals are the deconstruction of the traditional family and the free-market economy that has empowered people of all colors to succeed and prosper? Great question! It appears because they are afraid to say no to the bullies who run this and other radical leftist groups and because too many of us who believe in true equality for ALL people whether black, white, red, yellow, brown, are also afraid to stand up and speak out. It’s time we do speak out. I do not believe that a majority of Americans, whatever their color, support rioting, looting, disregard for authority to the point of physically assaulting police officers and demanding that we defund the police. But if we don’t become as vocal in opposition to mob rule as the mobs are so as to cause the biggest corporations in our country and politicians of both parties to cower in the corner and surrender to the mobs, we will get what we deserve, but we will not like it. The elections this year will not be about political parties nor will it be a popularity contest to elect the most pleasant personality. Whether you identify as Democrat or Republican, you better identify as one who believes in the rule of law, civil order, and genuine equality for people that doesn’t favor some over others for ANY reason.

So, yes—black lives matter. And they don’t matter less than any other. But neither do they matter more. To say they do is bigotry and yes, it’s racism as surely as is the sinful notion of white supremacy. No race is supreme. God alone is Supreme. And we must live as servants to Him and to each other as we “do unto others what we would have others do unto us.”

Going into the weekend, we’ve got some great new reading material to pass along that blasts to Kingdom Come any pretext of legitimacy concerning the “Trump/Russia” investigation.

As Sen. Lindsay Graham forecast a couple of days ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, has at last obtained a couple of highly significant documents, newly declassified.

The first is a curious typewritten report by Peter Strzok on the accuracy of a NEW YORK TIMES story on the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia. Written February 14, 2017, his report (as opposed to the story) shows beyond all doubt Strzok’s awareness that there was NO reliable evidence that the Trump campaign had had contact with Russian intelligence, in any form.

How can we be so sure of this? Well, the NYT had reported that “phone records and intercepted calls” showed that Trump campaign officials had contact with members of the Russian intelligence services. But Strozk, in his report, said, “This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written. We have not seen any evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [intelligence officers]."

As Zachary Evans writes in NATIONAL REVIEW, Strzok wrote this not once, not twice, but three times in his report.

Investigative reporter John Solomon, appearing with Devin Nunes and guest host Tammy Bruce on Friday’s HANNITY, said that “nine substantive errors” were found in that single NYT story and that it should be retracted. (Ha, don’t hold your breath. Not that it matters; the damage was done at the time.) According to Solomon, what we’re now finally able to see proves that the FBI knew for months “that everything they gave to the FISA court was wrong --- EVERYTHING --- and yet they never retracted it and renewed the FISA application two more times.”

Nunes stressed the importance of INDICTMENTS. (I put that in capital letters to stress the importance of indictments myself.) “I’m not too interested in the Durham report,” he said. “I would like to know everything, for the four-plus years, that went on, including even the Mueller investigation, but really what we want is...indictments. We’ve made 14 criminal referrals; we have another investigation that’s ongoing...Also, we have suspected for a very long time that Steele had maybe only two Russians, but we believe [that]...he didn’t really know them. How was it that Steele found these supposed 'Russians' and was able to use them? We’ve asked the FBI and the CIA about these Russians; I’ve said for a long time we’re interested in two Russians –- and...they have yet to allow us access to these two Russians who we now believe are living in the United States.”

All right, Director Wray, what is going on with that? It should be all right for senate and congressional investigators to have access to the whole cast of characters by now, as part of their oversight function of the FBI. What is the holdup at this point? If it's just that this is going to make the FBI look bad, well, sorry, that's not a good enough reason.

Moving on...the other document now available is the 57-page transcript of an interview with Steele’s primary source for the “dossier.” The document still contains some redactions, but as THE DAILY CALLER reports, Sen. Graham says it “indicates the reliability of the dossier was completely destroyed” after the interviews, which were conducted over three days in January 2017.

In other words, over January and February of 2017, the “dossier” –- and, by extension, the investigation based on it –- was shown without a doubt to be an outrageous farce with no evidence to back it up. But the FBI just kept pushing. So, of course, did the Democrats. Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in mid-May!

Incidentally, there had been a hold-up in obtaining this document as well, as can be seen in this earlier report from THE DAILY CALLER, dated June 25.

According to THE DAILY CALLER, the FBI had been “refusing” to supply the document, “saying in response to a public records request that the information is classified and risks identifying a confidential FBI source.” Reading their account, you can see how long and hard the tug-of-war has been to get hold of classified documents that tell the tale of this hoax.

But they're out now --- happy reading!

MORNING EDITION

July 18, 2020 

By Mike Huckabee

NEW DOCUMENTS SHOW NO DOUBT "RUSSIA" WAS A HOAX

Going into the weekend, we’ve got some great new reading material to pass along that blasts to Kingdom Come any pretext of legitimacy concerning the “Trump/Russia” investigation.

As Sen. Lindsay Graham forecast a couple of days ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, has at last obtained a couple of highly significant documents, newly declassified.

The first is a curious typewritten report by Peter Strzok on the accuracy of a NEW YORK TIMES story on the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia. Written February 14, 2017, his report (as opposed to the story) shows beyond all doubt Strzok’s awareness that there was NO reliable evidence that the Trump campaign had had contact with Russian intelligence, in any form.

How can we be so sure of this? Well, the NYT had reported that “phone records and intercepted calls” showed that Trump campaign officials had contact with members of the Russian intelligence services. But Strozk, in his report, said, “This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written. We have not seen any evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [intelligence officers]."

As Zachary Evans writes in NATIONAL REVIEW, Strzok wrote this not once, not twice, but three times in his report.

Investigative reporter John Solomon, appearing with Devin Nunes and guest host Tammy Bruce on Friday’s HANNITY, said that “nine substantive errors” were found in that single NYT story and that it should be retracted. (Ha, don’t hold your breath. Not that it matters; the damage was done at the time.) According to Solomon, what we’re now finally able to see proves that the FBI knew for months “that everything they gave to the FISA court was wrong --- EVERYTHING --- and yet they never retracted it and renewed the FISA application two more times.”

Nunes stressed the importance of INDICTMENTS. (I put that in capital letters to stress the importance of indictments myself.) “I’m not too interested in the Durham report,” he said. “I would like to know everything, for the four-plus years, that went on, including even the Mueller investigation, but really what we want is...indictments. We’ve made 14 criminal referrals; we have another investigation that’s ongoing...Also, we have suspected for a very long time that Steele had maybe only two Russians, but we believe [that]...he didn’t really know them. How was it that Steele found these supposed 'Russians' and was able to use them? We’ve asked the FBI and the CIA about these Russians; I’ve said for a long time we’re interested in two Russians –- and...they have yet to allow us access to these two Russians who we now believe are living in the United States.”

All right, Director Wray, what is going on with that? It should be all right for senate and congressional investigators to have access to the whole cast of characters by now, as part of their oversight function of the FBI. What is the holdup at this point? If it's just that this is going to make the FBI look bad, well, sorry, that's not a good enough reason.

Moving on...the other document now available is the 57-page transcript of an interview with Steele’s primary source for the “dossier.” The document still contains some redactions, but as THE DAILY CALLER reports, Sen. Graham says it “indicates the reliability of the dossier was completely destroyed” after the interviews, which were conducted over three days in January 2017.

In other words, over January and February of 2017, the “dossier” –- and, by extension, the investigation based on it –- was shown without a doubt to be an outrageous farce with no evidence to back it up. But the FBI just kept pushing. So, of course, did the Democrats. Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel in mid-May!

Incidentally, there had been a hold-up in obtaining this document as well, as can be seen in this earlier report from THE DAILY CALLER, dated June 25.

According to THE DAILY CALLER, the FBI had been “refusing” to supply the document, “saying in response to a public records request that the information is classified and risks identifying a confidential FBI source.” Reading their account, you can see how long and hard the tug-of-war has been to get hold of classified documents that tell the tale of this hoax.

But they're out now --- happy reading!

"HUCKABEE" PREVIEW

Tonight on TBN, we’ll relieve your hot July with another cool new episode of “Huckabee!” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt will tell us what’s being done to protect America’s monuments from history-hating vandals. You’ll meet one of the unsung heroes of the mission to take out Osama Bin Laden, and a Huck’s Hero who overcame his struggles with autism and now helps countless others do the same. I’ll have some serious news commentary, plus plenty of laughs from hilarious stand-up comic Bob Zany. And get ready for a blast from the past as the Zmed Brothers perform their amazing tribute to the Everly Brothers.

It all gets rockin’ tonight at 8 and 11 EST, 7 and 10 CST, and the same times on Sunday, only on TBN. To find where you can watch TBN, from local cable and broadcast channels to streaming, visit https://www.tbn.org/huckabee and click on the “WATCH” menu at the top. You can also stream previous episodes, highlights and Internet-only “Digital Exclusives,” like extended interviews and extra performances by our musical and comedy guests. It’s all at https://www.tbn.org/huckabee

JOHN LEWIS RIP

Longtime Georgia Representative John Lewis died last night of pancreatic cancer at 80. Even those who disagreed with his political views admired him for his bravery in fighting for civil rights, sometimes at risk of his own life. In 1965, he led a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. As the marchers were crossing the Edmond Pettus Bridge, they were met by state troopers, who fractured Lewis’ skull.

Over the course of his life, Lewis went from a segregated school to being the only person who spoke at the Rev. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington who was still alive and in attendance when Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first black President. Our prayers and condolences to his family. The article at the link has some extraordinary photos from his history-making life.

EXCLUSIVE TRUMP INTERVIEW

President Trump recorded an exclusive interview with Chris Wallace that will air on “Fox News Sunday.” Here is a sneak preview.

One of the big controversy points is that Trump said Joe Biden will defund the police, and Wallace replied that he hadn’t endorsed that and the “unity platform” he signed with Bernie Sanders doesn’t specifically call for abolishing or defunding police. However, Biden said in a July 8th interview that some funds should “absolutely” be diverted from police. His campaign insists that diverting funds away from police does not mean defunding police.

To explain how that works, I refer you to the Biden campaign’s language adviser, Humpty Dumpty…

THE FIGHT OVER LAW AND ORDER

You might have heard the claims that “secret federal police” in unmarked vans are assaulting and arresting “peaceful protesters” in Portland. Portland’s Mayor is demanding that all federal officers leave town because, I guess, he’s doing such a bang-up job of keeping order. The DHS has now responded that those are Customs agents, and they are clearly marked as such. They just don’t wear their names on their uniforms because the radicals they’re dealing with have doxed agents by tracking down their addresses and threatening them and their families. And they have a duty to protect federal property and officers who are being assaulted by the uncontrolled mob.

This story has both sides of the dispute. All that needs to be added is the fact that if the Mayor had done his job at any point during the previous 47 days and taken action to stop the violence in the streets, there would be no need for federal officers to come in at all, and then everyone would be happy except the protesters who like to destroy things.

Speaking of liberal officials who have turned their cities into dystopian hellholes, three suspects have been identified in the bloody assaults on police officers with sticks on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. And a liberal judge immediately put one of them right back out on the street under “supervised release.” Yes, there is the recent idiotic no-bail law that’s created a revolving door that releases a lot of criminals, but that didn’t have to apply here. The judge could have made an exception for a “violent felony” crime. He just didn’t do it.

All this could be coming to your town in 2021 if you don’t vote in November to remove Democrats from power. Clearly, like addicts with heroin, they just can’t handle it.

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY (KJV)

 



Today’s reminder that electing Joe Biden will cost you big time: On top of his vow to reverse the Trump income tax cut on day one, here’s a round-up of some of the recent instances of Biden vowing to double (or more) the capital gains tax, which would devastate investors and retirees, and obliterate business expansion and American job creation.

Biden is also vowing to make all cars zero-emission by 2035. At the risk of quoting his former boss, that’s going to take a magic wand. Or more likely, making every American too poor to buy a car.

And I feel I should point this out, since it tends to get lost in all the larger insanely bad economic ideas Joe is haltingly reading off his TelePrompter these days: he wants the government to subsidize Americans trading in their cars on new low-emission vehicles. Sound eerily familiar?

That’s right: among all the other failed ideas of the past that “progressives” want to resuscitate is Obama’s “Cash For Clunkers” program. That cost taxpayers $3 billion, and studies since found that it had a negligible effect on stimulating the economy or car sales (most of the money went to people who were already planning to buy a car), a slight effect on carbon emissions (but not cost-effective), and it harmed charities that resell donated cars and poor people who buy used cars because the government took so many older cars off the market and crushed them.

It’s one of those ideas that are so embarrassingly bad that most people would say, “Let us never speak of it again.” But those are the kind of ideas that tend to be repeated over and over by the left. It’s their most popular form of recycling.

For all the media figures and politicians were rooting against and trying to block the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients just because President Trump said it might work, take a look at the chart from France in this article. It shows what happened to the case fatality rate between the moment when a bogus study trumpeted by biased media outlets got the drug banned and the moment when the study was retracted and doctors were allowed to prescribe it again.

I think we can now officially classify Trump Derangement Syndrome as a fatal disease, except it doesn’t kill the carrier, it kills other people.

A few days ago, I told you about the new book FALLOUT from investigative reporters John Solomon and Seamus Bruner, and late yesterday, John Solomon had an update about the John Durham probe.

He said that Durham has been conducting “a lot” of interviews and going through a lot of documents; apparently, his investigation has been fairly unhampered by the virus. He said there have been discussions about plea bargains and cooperation from certain individuals, though, of course, he couldn’t name names.

He reported on Thursday’s HANNITY TV show that “multiple sources” with direct knowledge of the U.S. attorney’s investigation had informed him that Durham is looking specifically at the Defense Department’s Office Of Net Assessments, which had kept “confidential human source” Stefan Halper under contract to “write reports.” Durham wants to know if the Defense Department was actually funding Halper’s undercover (SPYING) activities “prior to the FBI having a predicate to do so.” (Never mind that the so-called “predicate” used later by the FBI was phony.)

Recall that the Office Of Net Assessments, like all offices at the Defense Department and within the intel community, would have been subject to audits and likely sweeping budget cuts if former national security adviser Michael Flynn had kept his job. That one fact probably explains a lot about what happened to him. Perhaps justice will be done.

"Listen, all signs are pointing to the building of a criminal indictment,” Solomon said. “Maybe it’ll come up around, just before or after Labor Day.”

But, incredibly, former special counsel Robert Mueller is still defending the “Trump/Russia” investigation, even though doing so involves contradicting his own report. Right after President Trump commuted Roger Stone’s prison sentence last week, Mueller wrote an op-ed for the WASHINGTON POST that, as reported by RealClear Investigations, didn’t just attack Stone but also disputed “broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives improper.”

And why would critics (like me) be making such claims? Well, maybe it’s because after years of examining their bogus “investigation” and finally obtaining documents and testimony that had been withheld even from defense attorneys, we could see that their investigation was illegitimate and their motives were improper.

Mueller’s op-ed contradicts the official findings concerning George Papadopoulos, whose barroom conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was NOT evidence that “the Russians had signaled” anything to him and also was NOT even mentioned by Papadopoulos to anyone in Trump’s campaign. The record, in the form of a recently-declassified electronic communication (EC) that officially opened “Crossfire Hurricane,” shows it was nothing but hearsay, with no evidence it had come from the Russian government or even from a Russian national.

It seems Downer didn’t know at the time he passed along this hearsay to the FBI that it had come to Papadopoulos by way of Josef Mifsud, a mysterious Maltese academic. Although former FBI Director James Comey has claimed without evidence in a WASHINGTON POST op-ed of his own that Mifsud was a Russian agent, the U.S. government has never tied him in that way to Russia, and the Mueller report takes care not to label him as such. Likewise, when Andrew McCabe was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 –- this testimony has only recently been declassified –- he said the tip given to Papadopoulos by Mifsud about Hillary’s emails was not considered evidence of a Russia connection.

But Mueller is still pushing this debunked narrative. “By late 2016,” he writes in WAPO, “the FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled a Trump campaign adviser that they could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to the Democratic candidate.” No, Mr. Mueller, they did not.

At his unimpressive congressional hearing a year ago, Mueller declined to comment on Mifsud’s identity or explain why the FBI hadn’t arrested him after his interview and charged him with perjury. After all, the Mueller report claims that he made false statements. Why didn’t they treat him the same shameful way they did Roger Stone?

Speaking of Roger Stone, Mueller goes on to vilify him in ways that don’t match the conclusions of his investigation. In the op-ed, Mueller writes that he “lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks” and also about “the existence of written communications with his intermediary.”

But as RealClear Investigations reports, “that claim from Mueller is at odds with his investigation’s failure to establish that Stone HAD [emphasis mine] an intermediary to WikiLeaks.” Stone had claimed this, but it turned out that the two individuals ever singled out by name, Randy Credico and Jerome Corsi, didn’t actually make contact with WikiLeaks. (Credico did interview Julian Assange on his radio show in August of 2016, but this had nothing to do with being a go-between with Stone.)

There's only one known contact between WikiLeaks and Stone from before the 2016 election, and it was WikiLeaks tweeting to Stone to stop making “false claims of association.”

Stone claimed to have advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of email material, but Mueller has never asserted that he actually did. According to RealClear Investigations, Stone did have “minimal and inconsequential” contact with Guccifer 2.0, but it was actually exculpatory for Stone, as none of the three short Twitter messages even mentioned the stolen DNC emails.

Former senior attorney for the special counsel Andrew Weissmann went even further in his own op-ed, this one in THE NEW YORK TIMES three days later. Weissmann, now a legal analyst for MSNBC (of course), wants to continue the investigation and see Roger Stone go before a grand jury. He still suspects that Stone hid incriminating evidence to try to help Trump, and by gum, he’s going to get to the bottom of this and find out what it is!

I think that even now, many people are unclear about just what Roger Stone was convicted of lying about. Did you know he wasn’t even accused of lying about any actual coordination regarding those emails? That’s because there WAS no coordination. Stone was accused and convicted of making false statements about his FAILED efforts to obtain information about WikiLeaks during the campaign. That’s all. He never was able to actually do it. And by the time they charged him with lying, he had already corrected the record, just not under oath. (They didn’t swear him in and give him the chance to do that, because then they wouldn’t have been able to indict him for lying. That alone is enough reason for Trump to commute his prison sentence.) Even the NYT itself reported that Stone “had no real ties to WikiLeaks.”

The contrast between Weissmann’s op-ed and the known facts of the Stone case, as laid out by RealClear Investigations, makes for some entertaining, if perplexing, reading. Weissmann’s inability to stop chasing windmills when it comes to Trump reminds me a lot of someone else who has been in the news lately. Emmet Sullivan.

Today’s corporations will go to some pretty absurd lengths to appeal to eco-consumers, but Burger King has just raised (or lowered) the bar with a commercial for its new burger made from cows that burp and fart less greenhouse gas than your average bovine. The cows are on a lemongrass diet that reduces methane. The commercial features young viral celebrity/country music yodeler Mason Ramsey extolling in song the virtues of less-flatulent cows.

Now, if only we could get green politicians like AOC to emit less gas.

As long as we’re on the subject, Amazon is also running an inadvertently horrifying eco-ad, as my bird-loving writers Pat and Laura, who rescue homeless parrots, point out. The spot starts with white text on a black background, listing all the ways in which Amazon is going green, such as electric vehicles, to eliminate carbon emissions. This is accompanied only by the lulling, natural sound of birds chirping.

Then at the end of the ad, the text gives way to video of how they plan to accomplish this: with a field full of spinning wind power turbines. Or as Pat and Laura call them, “Bird Cuisinarts.” Those spinning blades dice, slice, chop and slaughter countless birds, as well as bats that are also vital to the eco-system. All to produce a tiny fraction of the clean energy that can be generated by a safe, modern nuclear plant. Enjoy the bird songs while you can.

Crime in NYC

July 17, 2020

The NYPD Crime Stoppers are offering a $2500 reward for the identity of a man who brutally assaulted police officers with a bat during a protest at the Brooklyn Bridge. Video of him and more information is at this link:

Video also appears to show the “peaceful protesters” receiving a shipment of bats from a car shortly before the protest.

I’ll let you know whether Mayor DeBlasio blames the bat assault on the cops or President Trump. If you think I’m being flippant, note that the leftist Mayor of Portland blames the street violence and graffiti in his city on the Department of Homeland Security Agents there, and he’s demanding that they clean the graffiti off and leave town, even as he refuses to let Trump send in federal troops to end the lawlessness in his own city. I guess he must’ve heard all the talk about DeBlasio being the worst mayor in America and said, “Hold muh latte!”…

In truth, all of this lawlessness, violence and filth is going on in cities run for decades entirely by Democrats. It’s the natural order of things that leftists impose their insane failed policies and make a huge mess. On rare occasions, the people wake up and realize it’s necessary to elect Republicans to clean up the left’s disasters (as Rudy Giuliani did in New York.) But even then, sadly, memories are short. Voters start to think that a clean, successful city runs itself. They forget what it was like, so they think it's safe to put a DeBlasio back in power. And they discover just how quickly it can all slide back into the sewer.

If you want to see what happens when you elect leftists for too long, and then let them institute their own “solutions” to the problems they caused themselves instead of calling in a Republican to fix it, look at this shocking report from San Francisco. First, the city’s leaders let it be taken over by homeless people with crime, mental and addiction problems. Then came COVID-19 (on top of all the other diseases that were coming back from the Middle Ages.) Leftist solution: put the homeless people into the empty hotels. So how is that "fix" working out? The words “disaster” and “pandemonium” in the headline should give you a clue.

I have to warn you, this story requires a strong stomach to read. You probably should also avoid it if you’re prone to spikes in your blood pressure from things that are infuriating.

Anti-Trump "Lincoln Project" short on principles

John Weaver call your office...

July 17, 2020

The so-called “Lincoln Project” (I put it in quotes to stress that the name is an insult to Abraham Lincoln) claims to be a group of “principled conservatives” who oppose President Trump because he just doesn’t live up to their high standards of principled conservatism.

Funny, I’ve always thought of myself as a principled conservative, but I had no idea that “conservative principles” included taking a lot of donor money and putting in my own pocket, or signing up as an official representative of Russia, or working to defeat even moderate Republicans so that the Senate and White House can flip to the Democrats and usher in a new era of far-left policies, sky-high taxes and unbridled deficit spending that will destroy America as we know it.

I decided to look at some lists of conservative principles, and I admit, I could not find any of those things on any of them. But in an era when money-grubbing liberal frauds like the Lincoln Project pose as conservatives and are actually treated as such by the media because they’re useful in promoting the left’s agenda, I think it’s important to remind people what conservative principles actually are. They do not include “white supremacy,” nor do they include turning all power over to dangerous socialists. Who better to teach us what real conservatives stand for than the late Sen. Barry Goldwater?

And as long as we’re quoting the great leaders of conservatism, here’s a comment from Ronald Reagan that couldn’t be more timely or more sobering:

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States when men were free."

UPDATE: I told you yesterday about ViacomCBS severing ties with Nick Cannon over his podcast that spread vile conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism and anti-white racist rhetoric. I said that we finally knew how far a leftist had to go to get “canceled” from holding a high profile job. Well, I take it back: Fox decided that Cannon will continue in his most high profile gig, as host of “The Masked Singer.” After all, he’s apologized and is “remorseful.” Well, that settles it, then. Oh, and by the way, Cannon is demanding an apology from ViacomCBS. Don’t be surprised if he gets one.

Meanwhile, black actor Terry Crews is still facing Twitter mob demands that he be fired from the TV show “Brooklyn-Nine Nine” for criticizing Black Lives Matter, saying we shouldn’t demonize anyone because of their race, and that the solution to white supremacy isn’t black supremacy because “we’re all in this together.”

Well, you can see why they’d want him fired while pouring support out for Nick Cannon. Saying we shouldn't hate each other because of race and we should all work together is genuinely offensive to today’s leftists. It undermines all their hard work.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham appeared on Wednesday’s HANNITY TV show to talk about the Senate Judiciary Committee’s efforts to declassify an approximately 40-page FBI memo critical of the Steele “dossier,” and also to question the lead intel analyst and a case agent who interviewed Steele’s Russian “sub-source” –- actually Steele’s employee –- twice, first in January and later in March of 2017. (The warrant to spy on Carter Page was renewed in April and June of 2017, after the problems with the “dossier” were known. This is documented, and it is a crime.)

Sen. Graham didn’t mention names, and in the IG report the lead analyst is identified only as Supervisory Intelligence Analyst, never by name, but I think Graham must have been talking about this guy.

Yes, I know; the headline alone is a laff riot, if you want to laugh until you cry. Profiled here by Paul Sperry at RealClear Investigations, our “person of interest” is senior FBI analyst Brian J. Auten. He was central to the vetting process for the “dossier” that was used in the FISA application and three renewals to spy on Carter Page, but it’s also true that since 2010, he has taught a class on...wait for it...the ethics of spying at Patrick Henry College. (Motto: “Give me irony, or give me death!” Kidding.)

As Sperry reports, Auten “seems to have violated his own stated “golden rule” for spying, which involves using ‘the least intrusive standard” for surveilling U.S. citizens to avoid harming “a subject’s reputation, dignity and privacy.” Yes, we’ve seen how that standard was respected in the case of Carter Page, who was actually accused of being a Russian agent in order for the FBI to get inside Trump’s 2016 campaign. Page was put through the wringer over that horrific charge, telling RealClear Investigations that based on leaks to the media, people believed he was a “traitor” who conspired with the Kremlin to help Trump. He received death threats. Imagine if that happened to you.

Sperry goes into detail describing Auten’s involvement in downplaying the problems with the “dossier.” It’s a lengthy article, but I encourage you to read it (you won't be tested), just to see how one person in the right place within a bureaucracy can guide a chain of events. It's also quite interesting to see how a so-called “ethicist” can so skillfully rationalize his own lack of ethics.

Sperry reports that Auten’s name is indeed on a list of witnesses Sen. Graham intends to call now that he has received subpoena power for the Judiciary Committee, and also that Graham says they’ll be focusing on the investigators.

Incidentally, last December, FBI Director Christopher Wray wrote Inspector General Michael Horowitz to tell him he’d put every employee involved in the 2016-2017 FISA application process through “additional training in ethics” with “an emphasis on privacy and civil liberties.”

Don't know about you, but I feel so much better now. Hey, wouldn’t it be hilarious if we found out Brian J. Auten taught the class? No, really, I wonder if he did.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest upchuck of cockamamie condescension was her claim that Republicans don’t understand what it’s like to live in poor neighborhoods (yeah, none of us grew up poor!) and that crime is up in New York City because unemployed people need to shoplift a loaf of bread to feed their families (and apparently, loot a TV from Target, then shoot a few people on their way home.) She smugly said she had to “connect the dots” for us, proving that even connecting dots is beyond her capabilities.

For the record, the crime that’s up in New York City is violent crime. Shootings are up by 130% from just one year ago. This is not a result of poverty but of the idiotic policies of Mayor Bill DeBlasio, who has systematically destroyed the great city that Rudy Giuliani rescued from the failed leftist policies of DeBlasio’s mentor, David Dinkins. DeBlasio has dismantled all the effective policing that made the city safe again, demoralized the police, emboldened lawbreakers to ignore the law and attack police, encouraged rioters, and sparked a 400% spike in applications for retirements among NYPD officers. In this regard, he’s turning the Big Apple into yet another Democrat-run war zone, like Chicago. Except Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931. It’s taken DeBlasio only one-and-a-half terms to cause similar damage.

RELATED READING:  Your I.Q. will drop from reading this

That spike in violent crime includes senseless shootings of innocent people, many of them black. The latest heartbreaking murder came Sunday night when two gunmen opened fire on a group having a cookout in a park. They injured three men and killed Davell Gardner – a one-year-old child who was sitting in his stroller when a bullet struck him in the abdomen. In that same weekend, 35 people were shot in 28 incidents, including other young boys of 12 and 15.

DeBlasio’s response to this has been to cut $1.5 billion from the police budget while taunting the President by painting a “Black Lives Matter” mural across from Trump Tower (a divisive political statement at taxpayer expense during a financial crisis.) If black lives really mattered to DeBlasio, he’d do something to stop so many of them from being violently ended, like that of Davell Gardner. If we are all to know George Floyd’s name, then we should definitely know his, too.

As for AOC’s ludicrous assertions, Kim Hirsch at the Victory Girls blog notes that a 2014 study by the University of North Dakota found that poverty does not have a significant effect on violent crime in the US. But as Ms. Hirsch notes, crime has an effect on poverty, driving businesses out of high crime neighborhoods and depriving residents of jobs.

On a lighter note, Ms. Hirsch also points out that the dose of “reality” that AOC thinks she’s giving all us Republicans who don’t know what it’s like to be poor was actually cribbed from watching “Breaking Bad” on TV. She even missed the point of that show (nobody in it turned to crime to buy food, and far from glamorizing crime, everyone either died or had their lives destroyed.) I’d also like to suggest that she got the idea of criminals being guilty only of stealing a loaf of bread from the Broadway musical of “Les Miserables.” The only connection between that and real life in New York City today is that nobody is less miserable since Bill DeBlasio became mayor.

With all the political and racial unrest going on in the country right now, there’s a very different --- and extremely welcome (to me) --- kind of unrest going on at the same time. It’s happening in the media, as “cancel culture” starts to eat its own.

Yesterday, we brought you the story of Bari Weiss, a self-described “centrist” journalist who very publicly left her job as a writer and editor at THE NEW YORK TIMES after finding out what it was like there to try to express an individual, intellectually curious, non-sanctioned thought or even to report a story that didn't advance a leftist, anti-Trump agenda. In case you didn’t see her open resignation letter, here it is at her website. There is still smoke coming off of it.

Weiss justifiably slams media people, particularly at the NYT, for their sense of self-importance. “A new consensus has emerged in the press,” she writes, but perhaps especially at this paper that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

Seems to me that it should have been enough that Weiss was upset at Donald Trump’s victory and even cried at her desk when he won. But, no, that wasn’t nearly enough. In fact, they were all too busy sobbing at their own desks to notice her dismay. She soon found out that in the new Era of Trump, all so-called “journalists” were required from that day forward to have a single-minded focus on destroying...HIM.

(By the way, I thought it was interesting that Weiss’s colleagues called her a “Nazi” while also complaining that she was "writing about Jews again.” Just wondering: if they’re complaining about her writing about Jews, just who are the Nazis here? Do these so-called professional journalists even know what a Nazi is? But I digress.)

Brian Kilmeade, subbing for Tucker Carlson on his Tuesday evening show, played a clip of Ms. Weiss from “The Joe Rogan Experience,” talking about what happened. She makes a very interesting point about “cancel culture”: “The people who are inoculated from it [the ostracism, firings, etc.] are people that are already extremely successful and can take the risk. It’s why Ricky Gervais can be Ricky Gervais; it’s why J. K. Rowling can tweet what she tweeted a few months ago and survive it, because they’ve already accumulated enough capital. The people that I hear from that are completely screwed by it are people like artists and poets and untenured professors are aren’t famous and no one knows about, and are, you know, having to go with a begging bowl..to get support after they’ve, you know, made a bad joke, or whatever it is.”

Weiss apparently hadn’t reached the point in her career at which she could get away with expressing her own thoughts. Thank goodness actor/comedian Ricky Gervais had attained that level by the time Hollywood “cancel culture” inspired him to ridicule it, which he has done mercilessly. And he hasn’t let up. (My theory: he knows what he says is really what most people think.)

Kilmeade pointed out that another NYT editor, Liz Spayd, sounded very much like Weiss in an interview with Carlson back in December of 2016 (right after Trump was elected). Spayd lost her job (surprise!) shortly after doing that interview. “I consider it almost an unrecognized point of view,” she said, “that The Times has that comes from being in New York, being in that, you know, in a certain circle, and seeing the world a certain way, not being in touch with people who don’t live like them or don’t live in cities and who are the ones who elected Donald Trump to the presidency. They’re just out of touch with that.”

I’ll say it again: they should have just read my 2016 book GOD, GUNS, GRITS, & GRAVY.

Journalists who try to challenge their more radical, “woke” colleagues at The Times to look outside their safe little thought-bubble tend not to last long there. It’s a hostile work environment, to say the least. Weiss believes there are many in the same position she was in; they just do what they know is expected of them and don’t speak up. I would imagine that even some of the editors directing and correcting their underlings are doing it out of fear of “cancel culture,” protecting their own job security.

But now Andrew Sullivan has left his job at THE NEW YORKER. Sullivan is someone who does have quite a big name. He says the underlying reasons for his exit are “pretty self-evident” and that he’ll address them in his last column on Friday. Sullivan also has backed Weiss, saying, “The mob bullied and harrassed a young woman for thoughtcrimes. And her editors stood by and watched.”

Someone else has resigned, not from the media but from another influential post in popular culture: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art senior curator of painting and sculpture Gary Garrels. As reported by Robby Soave at REASON magazine, he was accused of “toxic white supremacist beliefs” in a petition from museum employees for daring to say he would still accept works of art from white men. I am not kidding –- that is ALL he said. I wish Garrels, after 20 years with the museum, had put up more of a fight against such a ludicrous accusation, but at least this puts into focus how a small minority of crazies are trying to run the show. More sane people will become fed up with this type of radical orthodoxy, and more WILL fight back.

Finally, today's look at what’s happening with media wouldn’t be complete without examining how it’s blurring the lines between news and outright campaign advocacy. CourierNewsroom.com, known as “Courier,” was created and funded by the Democrat-aligned digital organization Acronym. It is absolutely political, but because it’s organized as a media outlet, it doesn’t have to disclose its donors or the total dollars it spends promoting Democrat politicians. (In that way, it’s a lot like Black Lives Matter not having to report its source of funding.)

According to this story in POLITICO, “Experts in media ethics and misinformation worry that the advocacy-cloaked-in-journalism tactic is pouring gasoline on a raging fire of consumer misinformation and online disinformation." Yes, there is that, but I also agree with those who say that this trend will further undermine the public’s trust in news, which has already fallen to about as low as it can go. It gets harder all the time just to find accurate information on a candidate or an issue, even as partisan “fact-checkers” abound. That’s why we’re trying so hard here to sort it all out and be a valued and trusted source.

I noted recently that former employees of CNN are speaking out about how biased and unprofessional that network has become in its TDS-induced hysteria. Now, do I sense a trend?

Bari Weiss is a centrist writer/editor who was hired by the New York Times after the 2016 election shocked them into realizing they were out of touch with the American people (they could have known that sooner if they’d read my book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy.”) But instead of listening to her, they’ve allowed young, ultra-woke staffers to target and slander her, as they do anyone who makes them feel “unsafe” by voicing a non-far-left opinion. She finally had enough, and she not only quit the Times, she released her resignation letter, and it’s a must-read.

In it, she torches the Times as only an insider can, blasting the publisher and editors for their cowardly surrender to intolerant leftist groupthink. She says that stories are chosen and written to appeal to the narrowest of audiences. Instead of writing “the first draft of history,” even history itself must be molded to fit the preconceived narrative. She’s been subjected to a hostile work environment where suggesting any story that doesn’t advance the “progressive” narrative leads to attacks on social media and claims that she’s a racist, a Nazi and “writing about the Jews again.” No action is ever taken against the attackers, only the victims. She says Twitter has become the Times’ ultimate editor, and rules are applied extremely subjectively: those who hold to the leftist orthodoxy go unscrutinized while anyone who varies from it lives in fear of the “digital Thunderdome” and “online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.”

Her advice to anyone going into journalism today (aside from “don’t”):

“Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.”

I repeat, this is a must-read. Whatever suspicions you’ve had about the cowardly, biased tunnel-vision of the New York Times, the death of journalism in general, or how the adults must be totally cowed by the red diaper babies on their staffs, this confirms it all and more.

If you’d like more background on Ms. Weiss and some of her previous reasonable criticisms of the Times that earned her the hatred and scorn of the woke brigade, Instapundit has a good round-up. It includes a headline from the satirical site, The Babylon Bee, that contains more blunt truth than you'll find in a month's worth of the New York Times.

Vote by mail

July 15, 2020

Republicans warn that voting by mail would be a recipe for massive vote fraud (it would.) But that’s only part of the problem. It would also mean trusting the integrity of our elections to the US Post Office. Nothing against the hard-working men and women of the postal service, but there’s a reason why there so many jokes about things being lost in the mail.

Here’s a round up of the latest vote-by-mail stories. For instance, in Wisconsin, it was an absolute disaster, with ballots never getting to voters, arriving at the wrong destinations or getting back too late to be counted. The primary was April 7th, and they’re still not sure who the valid winners were…

California election officials have rejected over 100,000 mail-in ballots from their recent primary, due to mistakes…

And in West Virginia, a mail carrier pleaded guilty to changing the party affiliation on some mail-in ballots. He claimed he did it as “a joke.”

If all this doesn’t convince Democrats to abandon the idea of voting by mail, maybe this will:

The mail carrier in West Virginia changed the party affiliation on those ballots from Democrat to Republican. Maybe that will actually make Democrats care about stopping vote fraud.

For all the people jumping up and down and screaming about President Trump withdrawing from the World Health Organization, here’s a big, cold bucket of reality about why.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan, formerly a specialist in virology and immunology at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, is now in hiding in the US and in fear for her life because she says she knew the minute she told the truth about COVID-19 and China, she would be “disappeared and killed,” so she had to go to the US to speak out.

The truth is that the Chinese government knew early on that the virus was deadly and was transferred human-to-human, and they kept it a secret while the WHO downplayed the danger. They refused to let outside health experts in and warned doctors to keep silent. They could have prevented the spread of the pandemic if they’d done certain things and sounded an alarm, but they didn’t because of “the corruption among this kind of international organization like the W-H-O to China government, and to China Communist Party government.”

Read the full thing. It’s good info to have in your pocket the next time someone blames President Trump for every coronavirus death and claims we need to replace him with Joe “China’s no threat” Biden.

Speaking of Biden and his claim that he would’ve handled the pandemic so much better than Trump, take a look at this chart comparing the caseload for the COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus to the H1N1 (swine flu) that struck under Obama-Biden in 2009.

They promised to have 160 million vaccine doses by late October but produced only 30 million, too late to do most Americans any good. While Democrats blame Trump for over 3 million Americans being infected with COVID-19, nearly 61 million were infected with H1N1. As Biden’s then-chief of staff and current campaign health adviser Ron Klain noted, it was only due to luck that swine flu wasn’t more lethal and wasn’t “one of the great mass casualty events in American history.”

So if you’d like to bet your life on sheer dumb luck, vote for Biden! Say, that would make a perfect campaign slogan for him.

One of the most common symptoms of the brain-wasting disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome is how it targets and destroys the part of the brain responsible for long-term memories. This explains why, every time President Trump says or does anything, no matter how clearly it is within his powers as President, TDS victims fly into a rage and scream that it’s an “unprecedented abuse of power” and “no other President in history has ever done anything so outrageous!”

And so, when Trump announced that he was commuting the prison sentence of former campaign adviser Roger Stone, like clockwork, the howls erupted that no other President had ever committed such an outrageous abuse of clemency power, it was something that is “simply not done by American Presidents,” and it’s “the most corrupt and cronyistic act” in American history!!!!! (Is that enough exclamation points to capture their mood?)

As is usually the case in these situations, that’s hyperbolic nonsense. Even liberal law professor Jonathan Turley, who is no Trump fan and who believes that Stone should have merely received a new trial, reminded us in The Hill that Presidents have broad pardon powers and have used them in ways that infuriated their political enemies almost since the nation began. He says the claim of Trump’s action being unprecedentedly corrupt is “almost quaint.”

Turley looks back at American history (while we still have it), and cites similar pardon controversies, from Thomas Jefferson all the way up to Bill Clinton, who pardoned his brother, his Whitewater partner, and worst of all, financier Marc Rich, a major Democratic donor who was indicted on 65 criminal counts, including fraud, racketeering, tax evasion and illegal dealings with Iran. His companies pleaded guilty to 35 counts, but Rich himself went on the lam and spent years on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives list. He was living in Switzerland when Clinton pardoned him on his last day in office.

And since Prof. Turley observes the unwritten media rule of never saying a negative word about Barack Obama, it’s left to conservative media to remind us that Obama pardoned Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, a traitor who leaked a massive trove of sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks, and he commuted the 70-year sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera, leader of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN, responsible for 130 terrorist attacks in the US and at least six deaths.

Makes Roger Stone look like pretty small potatoes, doesn't it?

If it’s a new week, then there must be some new insane comments from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But I warn you, you might feel your I.Q. dropping just from reading this.

Like her claim that the surge in crime in New York City is due to unemployed people having to “shoplift some bread” to feed their families. That surge includes 44 shootings and eight fatalities over the Fourth of July weekend, and 15 shootings in 15 hours on Saturday alone. Those are some heavily-armed shoplifters!

She’s also complained that Mayor DeBlasio’s call to cut $1.5 billion from the police budget doesn’t go far enough; that it can’t just be budget tricks that move spending around or reduce overtime pay. No, cutting the police budget is not effective if it does not result in the reduced presence of law enforcement...during a major surge in crime…including an epidemic of shootings. Those can only be solved by getting rid of the police entirely. While they’re at it, maybe New York should eliminate fires by getting rid of the Fire Department.

And just to be mischievous, here’s AOC flashing a double “white supremacy” finger sign. Aren't regular people forced out of their jobs for doing this?

California tightens up

July 14, 2020

Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom once again ordered the closure of many businesses in the state (including worship services) due to an “alarming” rise in COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus cases.

However, just as with fellow leftist Bill DeBlasio in New York City, the one exception to bans on any large gatherings is BLM protests, which are still perfectly fine, even though the spike in cases has correlated to them much more than to business reopenings. Also to proximity to the US-Mexico border, which Newsom has been trying to erase.

In announcing his latest mass closings, Newsom scolded Californians, saying, “The data suggests not everyone is acting with common sense.” For once, I agree with him. Just look at who they elected Governor.

Over the past several years, investigative reporter John Solomon has proven to be a rich source of information about Obama-era misconduct that was mostly ignored and/or excused by the media. Thanks in large part to his reporting, we learned that one didn’t have to be a crazy hard-case conspiracy theorist to understand that the “deep state,” as we have come to know it, absolutely exists and was doing its dead-level best to take Trump down, both before and after he was elected President. And through his confidential but rock-solid sources, we learned about its inner workings months and even years before long-hidden documents, texts, scribbled notes, and sworn testimony finally gave us the proof.

And now, Solomon and co-author Seamus Bruner have a new book that one can tell from the title covers a lot of important ground. It’s called ‘FALLOUT: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties.’ Solomon and Bruner make quite a team, as Bruner has previously partnered with Peter Schweizer on projects such as the book CLINTON CASH, and he also wrote ‘COMPROMISED: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption.’ He’s also the Associate Director of Research for the Government Accountability Institute, and there's no word we want to hear more these days than "accountability."

Of FALLOUT, President Trump could not be more enthusiastic; he says, “This book is a MUST BUY!”

Of course, Trump himself had a role to play in all this, simply by (justifiably) making Uranium One a focus of his “Crooked Hillary” attacks during the 2016 campaign and making it dangerous for the Obama-Biden camp to let him continue making accusations. Solomon’s theory is that they had to do whatever they could to neutralize Trump so he wouldn’t be able to expose their own role in selling out to Putin; that’s why they launched their own investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia. They were trying to cover up their own corruption after cashing in. (As we’ve always said, look at what the Democrats accuse the Republicans of doing, and then you’ll know what THEY’RE doing.)

FALLOUT was written to provide the background for the “Trump/Russia” narrative he has already given us. It's sort of a "prequel" that answers the question, why were Russia and Ukraine the center of all this? As Solomon tells it, the story began much earlier, with Vladimir Putin’s quest for nuclear dominance, “one that produced a series of political scandals that ultimately posed one of the greatest threats to our democracy in modern American history.” It’s a story of intrigue that reads like a thriller --- but it’s real.

FOX NEWS reporter and legal analyst Gregg Jarrett –- another of our favorite authors –- says of FALLOUT, “The Russian and Ukraine scandals are unraveled, corruption and greed exposed. No one is better at uncovering the truth than these two investigative journalists.” It shouldn’t surprise you that Michael Flynn attorney Sidney Powell and investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson give raves as well, with Attkisson saying, “The Russian and Ukraine scandals not only corrupted government decisions, they helped enrich lots of Washington insiders. FALLOUT tells it all.”

This is a great time for the book to be coming out, as Democrats trying to help Biden win are trying, all over again (sigh), to point at Trump and cry “Russia Russia Russia!” They just can’t stop themselves; it’s all they’ve got even after years of investigation turned up no evidence at all against Trump but plenty of evidence against the Obama administration.

In fact, when Solomon appeared on Monday’s INGRAHAM ANGLE to introduce the book in an exclusive interview, one focus of discussion was Joe Biden’s former energy policy adviser, Amos Hochstein, who seems to have been playing both sides of the fence. According to Solomon, Hochstein, while working in the private sector as a U.S. lobbyist, had been an adviser to Tenex, a subsidiary of Rosatom, the huge and corrupt Russian nuclear conglomerate. In other words, Hochstein was actually helping the Russians, at the expense of the American energy industry. “Before long,” Solomon writes, “he was directly advising Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her successor John Kerry, and finally Vice President Biden (and even President Obama).”

As Solomon reminds us, Russia was one of the Obama administration’s biggest foreign policy failures. (Remember Hillary’s lame “Russia reset”?) They gave huge utility contracts worth billions of dollars to the Russians, making American consumers of energy dependent on Russian uranium (!). Of course, we've known about the Uranium One contract that gave Russia control of 20 percent of America's uranium supply. And then, after getting what he wanted, Putin did exactly as HE wanted and invaded Ukraine.

"The Democrats did not want that to be the storyline in 2016,” Solomon explains. So they tried to implicate Trump and his associates in corruption with Russia, even though they had to make it up and falsify evidence.

One thing I can’t wait to read about: Solomon tells of a weird FBI plot to invite Vladimir Putin to the 2013 Kentucky Derby to honor him as a “Kentucky Colonel” and, by the way, spy on him. (I am not kidding. Wow, we are finding out more every day about things the FBI was coming up with to do in their spare time.) Putin, of course, is no fool, and he probably prefers straight vodka to mint juleps, anyway, so he sent his regrets. This was at the time when the FBI had an informant inside Rosatom and was finding out how corrupt it was.

It was also when President Obama was pursuing his infinitely disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and the FBI was concerned that Putin was assisting Iran in carrying out its illicit nuclear program. So making Putin a “Kentucky Colonel” might have been a wacky idea, but at least one can see why the FBI was interested in finding out all they could.

Of course, Obama didn’t care. He was going to get that deal inked no matter what –- even though it was a Deal With The Devil.

Anyway, this looks like a fantastic read, and it really happened. Gosh, why even bother with fiction? You can’t make this stuff up! Here’s an excerpt, detailing one critical day in the life of undercover FBI operative Doug Campbell, whose agency code name, because of his deep religious faith, was “The Pastor.” No doubt he was praying extra-hard that day as he worked to expose the kickback scheme within Putin’s uranium empire by delivering a briefcase containing $50,000 cash and recording the exchange with a camera hidden in his pen.

Last year, President Trump announced that he was bringing back executions for federal crimes, and last night, the first such execution since 2003 took place, just hours after the Supreme Court cleared it.

Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, was put to death by lethal injection in Indiana for multiple offenses, including three counts of murder in aid of racketeering in the torture and killings of William Frederick Mueller, his wife Nancy Ann Mueller and his 8-year-old stepdaughter, Sarah Elizabeth Powell. Lee’s last words were to proclaim his innocence. I would urge you not to be swayed by that.

This horrifying crime took place in Arkansas in 1996, six months before I became Governor, but I was intimately familiar with it. As the linked story details, the family’s bodies “were discovered five months after they went missing. They had been shot to death and had plastic bags covering their heads, sealed with duct tape. Their bodies were weighed down by rocks and dumped in the Illinois bayou.”

Lee was an accomplice of the Keyhoe family, a ruthless white supremacist bunch when it meant more than saying something nice about cops. These were evil people. What they did to the Muellers, especially to 8-year-old Sarah, deserved the death penalty.

Bear in mind that I have made it clear that I have never taken the death penalty lightly. I think that anyone who does proves they’ve never been in the shoes of someone who has to give the go-ahead to take someone’s life. I’ve written many times that while it was my sad duty to have to approve executions, and I didn’t consider it my place to substitute my judgment for that of a jury that had sat through a full trial, I always reviewed every scrap of evidence and trial transcripts to ensure that there was no possibility of a miscarriage of justice.

For those arguing against a return of executions for federal crimes, I must warn them that this is not the case they want to use to try to convince the public that it’s unjust and unwarranted.

I spent much of last week drawing comparisons between the violent unrest and strict “cancel culture” going on in our country with the swift transformation of such places as Hong Kong, all to show how quickly that same socialist takeover and loss of freedom can happen here. We know exactly what the Democrat Party will do, step by step, to cement its control if it (shudder) wins in November, as we (and it) can see that Biden is a diminished human being who would be a mere figurehead with no principles of his own, a puppet of the left. That, obviously, is the plan.

Our freedom is something many of us took for granted in the past –- even on the Fourth Of July –- but we can’t do that now. If we do, there might be no more Fourths of July to celebrate, certainly not by waving an American flag around! Since last week, I’ve seen other pieces that reflect the same thinking.

Here’s one from a writer named Xiao Li, an American whose father came to this country two decades ago after the death of Mao but had grown up in China under Mao’s Cultural Revolution. When the writer was 18, his father took him on a trip to China to show him something of his youth, of which he’d spoken to his son very little before then.

Xiao tells of meeting a number of amiable older men, one by one, from his father’s past and hearing from his father after each meeting what each of these men had actually done to him under Mao. Memories fade, I suppose, and these men, many years after performing their duties as ruthless revolutionaries, had forgotten some awful things they’d done to him. Some of these men were his own family members. Xiao says, “Some of my father’s tormenters were blood relatives, who were especially keen to display their revolutionary credentials through violence, a situation that was sadly not uncommon. As Xiao explains, you can’t have a revolution without dissolving “the bonds of organic trust” between children and their parents or students and their teachers.

I’m reminded of what so many American parents are saying now about trying to have political discussions with their own kids. As soon as the parents introduce some unsanctioned point, the discussions unravel, with their kids yelling at them, calling them racists and white supremacists (!) and hurling demands at them straight out of WHITE FRAGILITY, such as “Do the work!” One hallmark of revolutionary thinking is that the family must be destroyed in favor of the State and that independent thinkers within the family must be exposed and shamed. We are seeing this now.

Xiao does reference another article that tries to differentiate the Chinese Cultural Revolution from the radical leftists’ quest for power currently going on in America. I’ll link to it here in case you’d like to read it. The author is right in saying there are some nuances of difference, but if you’re like me you will find no comfort in these. It’s like saying Alaskan grizzly bears will tear you apart and eat you alive but this one is more like one of those Canadian grizzly bears that might be satisfied with ripping your arms and legs off, so don’t be too concerned.

As Xiao puts it, “No historical analogy is ever perfect, and to seek exactitude over verisimilitude is to miss the point. In other words, as the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Xiao’s father and many of his contemporaries who lived through the era of Mao “can’t put their finger on the why,” but in America they are sensing something in the air that reminds them of the events of their youth in China.

One commonality Xiao sees is the fact that the young Chinese revolutionaries, the Red Guard, tended to come from privileged backgrounds; they were young and well-educated like the current American activists. In China, he says, “the young students saw their chance to to achieve revolutionary greatness...seeking to root out imaginary class enemies from within.”

In the next step, the movement’s slogans and way of thinking worked their way down to “non-elite institutions and popular discourse.” We see this in America every day in the news media, on TV shows and in magazines. In other words, it’s not just on campus anymore. We also we see “the blatant denial of reality, the constant gaslighting which almost seems designed to ferret out people with any sanity left.” We must refuse to be ferreted.

Xiao’s article is a must-read as a follow-up to my commentary of last week. Also, my writer/researcher Laura Ainsworth has been busy tackling a different aspect of the current dark revolutionary spirit: the curious radicalism of white leftist women trying so desperately to make up for their “privilege” and the shame of not being born “of color.”

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Ainsworth: On the brainwashing of white women

The article Laura cited in her commentary had a link to a piece from last year by Peggy Noonan, which draws a comparison with the Chinese Cultural Revolution as powerful as any made by Xiao Li in his piece about his father. Noonan describes the “struggle sessions” implemented by Mao to humiliate people in various ways to get them to confess to social “crimes.” This is similar to the shaming that is done on college campuses in 2020. And today, we also have the internet, which makes this sort of psychological pressure much more pervasive in students' lives.

I’ve mentioned a few things we can do to fight the onslaught, but here is a great article I’ve found since: “Five Ways to Conquer The Cancel Culture,” by radio talk show host Dr. Michael Brown. Yes, he says, we can face this down and beat it, and we can take our cues from the Bible. If we stand strong and handle this attack on our values with assurance, the “cancel culture” will devour its own. We can see this already happening.

You also can’t go wrong with anything written by the brilliant Shelby Steele, whose book WHITE GUILT, though it came out in 2007, is a wonderful antidote for the toxic identity politics being practiced by leftists today. If anyone in your family is having to read WHITE FRAGILITY for school –- and, sadly, it seems every student is –- do what you can to make WHITE GUILT companion reading.

RELATED READING: What do Americans have to lose? Look at Hong Kong...

Friday, President Trump announced that he is commuting the three-year prison sentence of his former campaign adviser Roger Stone, which was set to begin in a few days. Trump is being vilified by Democrats and the media for making this move, but he probably figured he gets vilified by them for eating breakfast in the morning, so who cares? They’re already rushing to the cameras to declare him the “most corrupt President in history” for pardoning someone caught up in an illegal coup attempt, easily the worst political scandal in US history, which was hatched under the President they admire most, Barack Obama.

Trump’s spokespeople say Stone is 67 and his health would be at risk in prison. Besides, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the decision to commute was "in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial," that the charges were the "product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice," and he could not get a fair trial in ultra-Democratic DC.

The charges against him, such as false statements and obstructing the Mueller investigation, all stem from the probe itself, which we now know was based on political animus, fraudulent “evidence,” illegally-obtained FISA warrants and no underlying crimes. It was also discovered that the forewoman of Stone’s jury hid the fact that she was virulently anti-Trump and had been posting nasty comments online about him and Stone during the trial, but the judge ruled that that somehow didn’t taint the verdict one whit. Stone continues to maintain his innocence and was already appealing his conviction.

I’m sure we’ll hear caterwauling from now until November about how outrageous it is that a 67-year-old Trump adviser isn’t doing hard time in the big house for process crimes, and from the same people who are letting rioters and looters out in 24 hours, giving sanctuary to Mexican drug gangsters and freeing thousands of actual criminals lest they contract a virus in prison. I guess what I’m trying to say is, “Cry me a river.”

The latest proof that statue-smashing vandals are not attacking symbols of racism but just trying to destroy all Western culture and history:

In Boston, someone set fire to a statue of the Virgin Mary at St. Peter Parish. The pastor, Father John Curran spoke for many of us when he said, "I was shocked. (There's) disappointment, sadness. The image of Our Lady is so important for us and our faith. It's such a contradiction to her love. Mary would never desecrate anyone, never hurt anyone, only offer them the peace and love of Jesus. I think that's where it really hits us in our hearts."

Meanwhile, in Denmark, the beloved statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale heroine, the Little Mermaid, was defaced with graffiti reading, “Racist fish.” That would be idiotic enough by itself (she wasn’t even a whitefish), but this comes amid news that Disney is planning a live-action version of “The Little Mermaid” starring African-American singer/actress, Halle Bailey.

The Hans Christian Anderson story these people should be most afraid of is “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” That’s the one where everyone is too terrified to say what they’re really thinking about the Emperor who’s strutting around like he’s better than everyone else until one child innocently speaks the truth (“The Emperor is naked”), and he finally gets the backlash of ridicule and rejection that he richly deserves. Sound like anyone you know?

Investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield at FrontpageMag.com took a deeper look at some of the giant US corporations that are showering Black Lives Matter with millions of dollars, frantically virtue-signaling about America’s shameful legacy of slavery and backing efforts to silence conservative voices on social media. He asks why so many of these uber-woke corporations are making their profits off of actual slavery – not slavery from the 1860s that over 360,000 Union soldiers died to end, but current-day, 21st century forced labor in China.

Some of the corporations cited include Coca-Cola, Apple, BMW, Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch, GM, LL Bean, Gap, Volkswagen, and that paragon of ostentatious wokeness, Nike. Here’s what Greenfield writes about Nike, citing a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute:

“A factory making shoes for Nike was ‘equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and police guard boxes.’ Nike Shox were discovered being made in another factory by slave laborers shipped far from home to produce shoes for the sportswear giant. Too far for them to run away.

‘We can walk around, but we can’t go back,’ one worker said.

The same company that holds up Colin Kaepernick, a millionaire anti-American activist, as an icon of social justice, also profits from an alleged slave labor facility that moved to be closer to ‘the region’s cotton fields’. The millionaire victims of imaginary racism that Nike wants us to care about are on their billboards while modern-day slaves still toil in the cotton fields because their lives don’t matter.”

If you’re wondering why this is suddenly coming out, it’s not sudden; you just weren't told about it until now. The bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, whose members range from Sen. Marco Rubio to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, released a report on forced labor in China back in March. It inspired a proposed bill called the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act that names Nike and a number of other large US corporations as being suspected of profiting from forced labor. It’s also prompted sanctions on some Chinese officials, for which China just retaliated with some vague “sanctions” on Rubio, Ted Cruz, and other US critics of its unconscionable policies.

At least that’s getting a little media attention. But why have the media buried this story for so long while they hyperventilate over America’s long-banished era of slavery from the century-before-last? Greenfield believes it’s because it makes their big pockets advertisers look bad. I would add that there is also a tangled web of profits and ownership connecting news outlets (and sports franchises) to big media companies, Chinese investors, and reliance on both Chinese labor and the Chinese market. To put it bluntly, they’ve sold their souls to China.

It’s ironic that they vilify America while covering for China, where any criticism of that nation’s government, history, and culture would be ruthlessly and violently suppressed. These corporate honchos should savor the American freedom of speech that allows them to attack their own nation because if control of it ever fell into the hands of the people they’re covering for, that freedom would quickly become a thing of the past (Don’t believe me? Look at Hong Kong.) They would soon find themselves even less free to express a dissenting opinion than a conservative on Twitter.

IF I WANTED TO DESTROY AMERICA...

Do you ever get the idea that some of the people in our country just don’t like it? Even some elected officials who want to govern the country, like MN Congresswoman Ilhan Omar openly says we need to dismantle the very structures of America, including our economic system. I find that a bit strange coming from someone who escaped the absolute squalor of Somalia where the annual per capita income is $225 and came to America where she lives large and even somehow got elected to Congress. Is her goal to make us like her home country? I sure hope not! I’m starting to think that some loud voices in our world want to get rid of America once and for all. And they’ve observed that it doesn’t work to do it from the outside. An attack like Pearl Harbor or 9-11 only unifies the country and gives us the resolve to fight back. So suppose I wanted to destroy America? What would be the best way to do it?

I’d first replace the education system top to bottom. Instead of giving students the tools to think, reason, and analyze based on hard facts, I’d give them a system in which everyone thinks alike. Deviating from “group-think” would be strictly forbidden, and would result in a person being ostracized, scorned, and prohibited from even being employed. I’d erase all substance and symbols of history. Instead of ensuring that students actually read and understood the documents of our origin, like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, I’d focus instead on pop culture and fill history books with Lady Gaga, the Kardashians, and Beyonce. I’d demonize George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin by never allowing students to see what these men actually said or did. I’d find any flaw in them and make that the only thing kids learned.

I’d never simply teach that the country had some ugly chapters of slavery and racism, as did virtually every nation. I’d pretend that those things still exist now, despite the obvious fact that a black person was twice elected President by defeating white candidates which meant that a large number of white people voted for the black candidate. I’d ignore that black people have held virtually every cabinet agency at one time or another, served at the top of our military, advanced in business to become millionaires and billionaires, led the world in several scientific and medical innovations.

I would seek to undo a system of economic capitalism which rewarded work and innovation. I wouldn’t demand equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome, which would mean that there wouldn’t be an incentive to study all night for an “A” since everyone would get the same grade anyway. And why take the risk of starting a business based on a better idea to do or create something if working from early to late still netted you the same pay as the person who came late, left early, and never created anything? I’d just give everyone a trophy. No one would ever lose.

I’d get rid of law enforcement. Cops get in the way of us doing what we want, taking what belongs to others, and having civil order. If there is anarchy and chaos and people are terrified to live and work where they live, it’ll be easier for me to convince people that the problem is not LACK of law enforcement, but the presence of law enforcement. I’d use words that sound good to cover my real intentions. I’d say equality when I really mean favoritism; I’d say tolerance when I really mean intolerance; I’d say diversity when I really mean uniformity; and I’d say women’s health when I really mean doing a very unnatural surgical procedure to kill a baby and do real damage to a woman’s physical and mental health. I’d marginalize religion and brand its adherents as fanatics, bigots, hate-mongers, and racists because belief in moral absolutes like love, forgiveness, charity, sacrifice, and service are a real threat to controlling people and making them follow what they are told.

I’d never attack America with a bomb, bullets, or battleships. I’d just lie about her history and origins, destroy every symbol of its legacy both good and bad, indoctrinate instead of educate so as to have uniformity of thought, and I’d take away all ownership of private property and personal capital and give everyone the exact same thing so as to destroy the incentives that made people like me who grew up poor to work really hard to live better and with that to give better.

But I don’t want to destroy America. I love America. And it’s why I won’t let her get destroyed without a fight.

CNN's ignorance and bias

July 10, 2020

The talking heads on CNN make so many biased and ignorant comments about conservatives and Christians that I hardly consider it news anymore and seldom even bother to comment. This is especially true of Don Lemon. But yesterday, he went so far beyond offensive and made me angry enough that I had to call him out on it.

During an interview with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Lemon was talking about the tearing down of statues of the Founders because they weren’t perfect people when he said this:

“Jesus Christ, if that’s who you believe in, Jesus Christ, admittedly, was not perfect when he was here on this Earth.” Shockingly, Cuomo, who is Catholic and should know better, let that slide by without objection. It suggests that he subscribes to the same strange form of Catholicism as Nancy Pelosi, who seems to think that abortion is a sacrament.

The Bible makes it very clear in numerous places that Christ was the only perfect person ever to walk the Earth. This article at Faithwire.com cites a few of the passages.

Among those verses are that Jesus “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21), was “a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:19) and is “holy and blameless, unstained by sin” (Hebrews 7:26). In John 10:30, Jesus says, “I and the Father are one,” and Matthew 5:48 tells us that “your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”

It’s bad enough that CNN has become a fountain of stupidity, but the stupidity has now crossed the line into blasphemy. It’s also telling that a top anchor on CNN is so utterly out of touch with the majority of Americans, who are Christians. The media’s hostility to people of faith is obvious, but now, so is the fact that they’re hostile toward a belief system about which they don’t even know the most fundamental tenet.

I believe there’s a word for hating people you know nothing about: “bigotry.” Liberals might not care if they commit blasphemy, but maybe that will force them to do a little self-examination and, to use one of their favorite phrases, “educate themselves.”

A salute to Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Hackett for finally demonstrating to other corporations the proper way to deal with “cancel culture” cranks on their payrolls. We’ve seen far too many companies cave in to the childish demands of crybully leftist staffers, from the publisher who canceled Woody Allen’s autobiography to the New York Times, who fired an editor for daring to run an op-ed by a Republican Senator. So when some employees of Ford demanded that the company stop making police cars because they’re “accessories to police brutality and oppression” and “racist policing policies,” Hackett politely but firmly refused. He couched it all in a lot of soft-soap liberal buzzwords to keep from offending anyone, but the point was clear.

Personally, I would have suggested that if their consciences wouldn’t allow them to do their jobs, there are plenty of other people who’d be happy to take them, while, to quote Bill Murray from “Ghostbusters,” “someone with your qualifications would have no trouble finding a top-flight job in either the food service or housekeeping industries.” That’s also what should have been said to the entitled snowflakes at the Times and the publishing house, two businesses where there are easily a thousand eager applicants for every open position.

By the way, I’ll throw the Ford CEO a salute, but only with my index finger. If he wants the full-hand salute, then the Ford Foundation should stop giving money ($7.6 million since 2018) to groups like Black Lives Matter that are now pushing to defund the police departments that buy police cars from Ford. That’s both bad politics and bad business. You’d think the shareholders would bring that up to him.

Now, here’s a CEO who deserves the full-hand salute for bravery

As exasperating as the news is that Judge Emmet “Captain Ahab” Sullivan refused to comply with an order by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and drop the case against Michael Flynn, it’s hardly unexpected. After all, the original Captain Ahab just kept pursuing his great white whale until (spoiler alert!) it finally dragged him down to his watery grave.

The investigation of the attempted coup against the Trump Administration has uncovered widespread misconduct in the FBI and DOJ, including evidence that Flynn was set up, he did nothing wrong and the FBI knew it, and exculpatory evidence that should have been turned over to his attorneys was hidden. The DOJ rightly requested that the case be dropped, which is the prosecutors’ prerogative. But Sullivan, attempting to act as both judge and prosecutor, still refuses, even after being ordered by his superiors to hang it up. He’s clinging to a novel legal theory that if a defendant changes his plea, he can be charged with perjury for making the plea he withdrew (and never mind that we now know Flynn’s initial guilty plea was coerced: after having lost his job, reputation, home and life savings, he was being threatened with having the same done to his son if he didn’t plead guilty.)

It's obvious that there is no real case against Flynn, but Sullivan apparently hopes either to force Trump to pardon Flynn so it can be made into a political issue, or else drag the case out beyond the election in hopes that anti-Flynn conspirator Joe Biden is elected. Then the coup cabal can return to power, kill the investigation into their own misconduct, cover up their crimes and go right back to their unconstitutional abuses of government power against political opponents, just as if Hillary had been elected in 2016.

So now, the case will have to be heard again by the entire DC Circuit Court. If there is any justice remaining in Washington at all, let us pray that the judges quickly dispense with this unfunny farce, release Flynn so that he can get on with the serious legal business of suing the pants off of the people who targeted him, and order that Sullivan be removed from the bench and have to run 15 laps around the courthouse. I know that last part isn’t technically within their constitutional powers, but that hasn’t been much of a factor in this case so far.

From the Gov: My writer/researcher Laura Ainsworth was intrigued by the title of a piece by Stella Morabito in THE FEDERALIST called “Why Do So Many White Women Hate Themselves?” and asked to post it with her own commentary. As she herself is a white woman –- but one who most decidedly does not hate herself –- that seemed like a great idea. Here’s what she had to say…

………………………

In recent days, I’ve been dismayed to see young, white female protesters screaming in the faces of cops on duty, even black cops. Under different circumstances, those same cops would have jumped into action to save the lives of those very women –- or anyone else of any race or gender. That thought obviously hadn’t penetrated the tiny pea brains of these women. “You’re a traitor to your race!,” one white woman shrieked hysterically at a black officer.

Their conduct was so out-there, it seemed to me like some strange psychological phenomenon, and now I see that the same thought has occurred to Stella Morabito, a senior contributor at THE FEDERALIST. Something is seriously wrong.

We’re talking cult behavior. This is the result of drinking the Kool-Aid as devotedly as the truest true believer at Jonestown. Perhaps you or someone you know has a daughter or granddaughter like this, and you feel defeated trying to even talk to her. What is going on with these middle- and upper-middle-class white women?

Actually, this weirdness has been a long time coming. I’ve written from time to time about the indoctrination being carried out by fashion magazines, within whose pages it is assumed that all readers hate Trump (and all Republicans), support abortion on demand as a woman’s “health” right, and think America would be a utopia if only it were run by an all-female committee headed by Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama.

Young white women are made to feel terribly “privileged,” simply for being born white.

Capitalism and profit are bad, bad, bad. Never mind that the prices of some of the clothes and accessories in these magazines rival those of a new car or the down payment on a house. Money to buy important fashion "must-haves" and “investment pieces” is a necessary evil; one must feel extremely guilty about possessing such wealth and find major ways to atone. (It helps if the designers you choose are “woke” and support the right causes.) If you’re buying a 1.04-ounce jar of face cream that costs more than what a sun-shriveled field laborer in some poor country makes in a year, you’ve GOT to atone, big-time.

Your parents wanted to give you everything. So they took out a second mortgage and sent you off to one of the “best” schools, where you learned about alternative economic systems and climate justice and were introduced to a new “morality” intended to replace the old one. Since the dawn of human existence, females have been regarded as the moralizing force of society, and today, young, educated women are taking up this duty once more, but to enforce the new cultural morality. In 2020, their behavior suggests they’re the most self-righteous of all the “woke.”

I remember hearing someone comment years ago that the real reason women weren’t on the battlefield is that, once provoked, they would actually be TOO bloodthirsty. I don’t know where this observation came from, but after seeing that one woman screaming in the face of a nonthreatening cop, I thought for the first time that there might be something to it. It was scary.

Stella Morabito’s article points out that it was white women who were guarding a “blacks only” (!) area inside Seattle’s CHOP. It was a 29-year-old white woman who was arrested for torching the Wendy’s restaurant in Atlanta, her way of punishing the establishment simply for calling 911 to report a man asleep in his car in their drive-thru line. Other white women have physically assaulted peaceful protesters with whom they disagreed.

"Some observers see all this as a contradiction,” Morabito writes. “Since the ‘woke white woman’ is educated, many think she must be smart. Since she comes from a middle- or even upper-class suburban background, people assume she must be emotionally stable. Because she is socially aware, she must be interested in trying to understand people as individual human beings. How is it that such a woman can so easily become an arsonist, a terrorist, a mobster, and a taunter of black police officers?”

I’m reminded of Winnie Mandela, the radical wife of black South African political hero Nelson Mandela (before they divorced). During his imprisonment, she became known for endorsing a practice called “necklacing.” “With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country,” she famously said. In case you don’t know, “necklacing” involves placing a tire filled with gasoline around a person’s shoulders and arms and setting it on fire. The victim is burned alive and can take up to 20 minutes to die.

Morabito cites an extreme case of cult initiation, the Symbionese Liberation Army’s abduction and brainwashing of 19-year-old newspaper heiress and college student Patty Hearst in 1974. “They isolated her in a closet,” she writes, “and put her through Maoist-style indoctrination sessions, schooling her in ‘white privilege’ and ‘systemic racism,' even though those terms were not yet in wide circulation.” Hearst was also raped and called horrible names I won’t use here.

That’s not quite the same experience as devouring TEEN VOGUE and being required to read WHITE FRAGILITY in freshman year, but these are all different ways of accomplishing the same thing.

Morabito agrees, citing a powerful, MUST-READ article by Peggy Noonan about the “struggle sessions” held by Mao during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. These were designed to torture people by humiliating and berating them to get them to confess to social “crimes.” “I don’t want to be overdramatic,” Noonan writes, “but the spirit of the struggle session has returned and is here, in part because of the internet, in part because of the extremity of our politics, in part because more people are lonely.” (This article is from March of 2019, before the virus made most of us a lot lonelier.)

As Morabito points out, there’s nothing new about emotional blackmail; the new part is how it’s being used “so blatantly” to make people support Black Lives Matter (and Marxism). Many young women are cutting friends and family out of their lives if they don’t declare that racism is systemic. A friend of mine who is white and the father of a 16-year-old girl has been informed it’s not enough for him not to be racist; he has to be ANTI-racist. He is required to “do the work.”

I’m with Morbito that we “must challenge the menace of this psychological weaponry embedded in today’s turmoil.” I’m not about to start calling out my friends and family as racist, because they aren’t. Instead, I’m calling out the combination of toxic social media and cultural indoctrination as the scourge of our time.

Now, let’s see if you’re allowed to share THAT.

Joe Biden unveiled his economic plan in Pennsylvania Thursday. If I had to sum it up in a few words, they would be: “Exactly like Trump, only with a lot more government. And he doesn't really mean it.”

It’s almost funny to see how much “America first” rhetoric Biden has cribbed from Trump, after spending the past three years accusing Trump of being a xenophobic fascist for putting America first. I guess it’s not xenophobic if you don’t really mean it. I have to assume Biden’s talk about bringing back manufacturing jobs from overseas and standing up to China and being “laser-focused on working families” is all banana oil. That’s because he’s done nothing about any of those issues during 42 years in government, the last eight as veep to a President who scoffed that Trump would need a magic wand to bring back manufacturing jobs. Also, Biden mocked Trump for suggesting that China was our adversary. And frankly, I don’t think he can laser-focus on anything these days.

What he’s mostly done is take popular buzzwords from Trump, like “bring back American manufacturing jobs,” and parrot them while proposing a lot of big government plans that would actually retard growth. Before the pandemic (from CHINA) knocked down the economy, Trump was standing up to China, renegotiating bad trade deals, bringing manufacturing back to the US and creating real private sector growth, with record low unemployment in all demographics and wages rising for the first time in years.

One of the biggest keys to that was that Trump cut taxes and slashed the onerous regulations that were acting like a boot on the neck of business. Biden now claims he will “stimulate” the economy by having the government spend hundreds of billions of dollars on American goods (with money raised from new high taxes on Americans, who might have spent their money on American goods themselves if they hadn’t had to send it to Washington) and tons more new regulations to pick winners and losers in the markets and punish industries that don’t do what he wants them to do.

Sorry, but I’ve seen those policies, and their lousy results, before. I believe it was during the Obama-Biden Administration. Trump calls his plan, “Keep America Great.” If Joe is looking for a name for his, I’d suggest “The ‘Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me’ Plan.”

In commentaries over the past couple of days, I’ve illustrated how quickly freedom can be lost --- Hong Kong is the current real-life example --- and shown the true nature of the threat our country faces, as we need to know what that is before we can combat it. Turns out, it really is very much like the Chinese Communist Party that clamped down on Hong Kong, with the same Marxist underpinnings as the CCP.

For example, let’s take a look at Black Lives Matter, which has shown itself NOT to be as much about black lives as many thought. Thanks to Tucker Carlson for bringing attention to a CNN interview segment with “America’s Got Talent” host Terry Crews criticizing BLM’s indifference towards black-on-black shootings. Host Don Lemon said this: “The Black Lives Matter movement was started because there was talking about police brutality. If you want an ‘All-Black-Lives-Matter’ movement that talks about gun violence in communities including, you know, black communities, then start that movement with that name, but that’s not what Black Lives Matter is about.”

Never mind that BLM’s campaign to “Defund the Police” has direct bearing on the safety and security of black people in violent neighborhoods. Some black residents of Minneapolis are definitely disenchanted with the attack on police, as they know they NEED COPS. “It’s time to tell the city council that utopia is a bunch of B.S.,” said one violence prevention advocate. “We are not in Mayberry RFD; we are in the wild wild west.”

(By the way, Carlson also aired a very different clip of Lemon from 1991, in which he lamented that “more than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock --- that means absent fathers. And the studies show that lack of a male role model is an express train right to prison.” He goes on to blame “the hip-hop and rap culture that many of you embrace.” How “un-woke” is that?? This was one of the few times I’ve ever heard Don Lemon make sense, but CNN will have to fire him immediately for his past failure to blame white people for problems in the black community. But I digress.)

Anyway, we’re finding out just what BLM really is about. Since it’s billed as a “grassroots group” and not legally organized, it doesn’t report where its money comes from and how it is spent. But it’s the project of a 501(c)3 promoting “alternative economies” and “climate justice” called Thousand Currents, and, as Carlson pointed out Wednesday, the vice chair for fundraising of Thousand Currents is Susan Rosenberg, a convicted terrorist who spent 16 years in federal prison until she was pardoned by...wait for it...Bill Clinton on his last day in office. (She’d been sentenced to 58 years.) As former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik said, Black Lives Matter is “a revolutionary Marxist group...a group that wants to overthrow this country.”

Kerik said the DOJ should be looking into BLM as a terrorist organization, and he’s right. The founders of this group were inspired by a woman who is now in exile in Cuba after assassinating a New Jersey state trooper and being involved in a number of bombings and executions of NYC, New Jersey and San Francisco police. That should tell you all you need to know about BLM.

Such activity has been going on since the 1960s and ‘70s. BLM isn’t the kind of organization that U.S. corporations should be supporting or even paying lip service to. Yet they’ve been so intimidated by “cancel culture” and cries of “institutional racism” that they’ve gone along. But, as Kerik says, “If ‘Black Lives Matter was truly, you know, working for black lives, they’d be marching tonight in Chicago, or Baltimore, or Cleveland, and I can give you 20 other cities.”

Most media will ignore this, of course. In the four months leading up to the next election, we’ll have to work overtime beating back lies from the media, which can be counted on to spout nothing but DNC talking points. The people who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome are not going to be cured in the next few months, but we can help inoculate others against the lies.

As for “Republican” officials suffering from TDS and vowing to “burn down” the Republican Party by supporting Democrats, Kurt Schlichter at TOWNHALL has some choice words for them.

"GOP dummies,” he asks them, “what is your excuse? I want to know the thought process by which you slack-jawed nimrods who make up a startling proportion of the Republican Party’s political cadre got the idea that we sent you to Washington to rename army bases and switch-up holidays...You want to be ‘reasonable’ --- stop that!...You simps are staggering into the world’s most obvious ambush.”

It goes on, with a long list of things our elected “Republicans” need to do. We’re going to have to get angry at those do-nothings and communicate our immense displeasure directly to their offices. The Republican rank-and-file have to make their voices heard, now.

Schlichter has a brand new book called THE 21 BIGGEST LIES ABOUT DONALD TRUMP (AND YOU!), and it is fabulous, full of inspiration for the fight ahead.

Schlichter is really funny, especially when you’re in that mood I increasingly find myself in, the one that says “I have had enough!!” So read it, enjoy it, get out your yellow highlighter and study it, and use it to make the case whenever you can for Trump 2020. It’s not enough just to savage the Democrats, although, heaven knows, there’s plenty to be said there, too, and organizations such as Black Lives Matter must be exposed for what they are. But voters need reasons to vote FOR someone. They’ve been lied to nonstop, and it’s up to us to be the antidote for the poison. Some will tune us out, but others won’t. This book looks to be the greatest defense of Donald Trump, warts and all, that anyone will see.

To quote Schlichter from his Introduction: “Lies have always been a part of politics, but today defamation has replaced actual debate. It’s almost quaint to see someone offer a coherent, thoughtful argument instead of spewing a spray of cheesy slander. When was the last time you heard someone provide a detailed, pointed critique of Donald Trump’s policies? Not of his character or his alleged personal failings, but his POLICIES?”

He goes on to point out that this is not what you hear. Instead, you hear lies about what a racist he is. There’s plenty in this book to counter that fake argument, and numerous others.

So we’ve got to get busy these next few months. Take advantage of every opportunity to get involved. With people you know, don’t be intimidated; speak up confidently with facts and reasoned argument. To some, your approach will seem refreshing and, yes, “almost quaint.” Others may call you names, but be like our President and simply decide, with so much at stake, not to CARE. We can’t change most minds, but we can change some, and some is all we need.

......................

Postscript: Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, has refused to bow down to BLM. She's the only owner in any major pro sports league with the courage to call out BLM for what it is, Marxist and divisive. The WNBA players' union is calling for her to be "canceled" (removed). She will not be silenced. Good for her!

MORNING EDITION

July 9, 2020 

By Mike Huckabee

DEFEATING THE ENEMY WE FACE

In commentaries over the past couple of days, I’ve illustrated how quickly freedom can be lost --- Hong Kong is the current real-life example --- and shown the true nature of the threat our country faces, as we need to know what that is before we can combat it. Turns out, it really is very much like the Chinese Communist Party that clamped down on Hong Kong, with the same Marxist underpinnings as the CCP.

For example, let’s take a look at Black Lives Matter, which has shown itself NOT to be as much about black lives as many thought. Thanks to Tucker Carlson for bringing attention to a CNN interview segment with “America’s Got Talent” host Terry Crews criticizing BLM’s indifference towards black-on-black shootings. Host Don Lemon said this: “The Black Lives Matter movement was started because there was talking about police brutality. If you want an ‘All-Black-Lives-Matter’ movement that talks about gun violence in communities including, you know, black communities, then start that movement with that name, but that’s not what Black Lives Matter is about.”

READ MORE AND COMMENT HERE>>>

BULLETIN: SCOTUS RULING ON TRUMP TAXES

This morning, in two 7-2 decisions, the Supreme Court allowed Democratic Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr. access to President Trump’s personal and business tax returns, but denied Democratic Congressional investigators access to them.

There are more details on the rulings at the link. In the meantime, we’ll start the clock ticking on how long it takes the Manhattan DA to illegally leak the tax returns to the Congressional Democrats and the New York Times. Tick, tick, tick…

"MODERATE" JOE BIDEN UPDATE

A group of Biden and Bernie Sanders supporters are working on what’s called the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations, a compromise suggested Democratic platform that appears to be largely cut-and-pasted (plagiarized?) from Bernie’s 2020 campaign platform of straight-up, open-borders socialism.

Here’s an example of the kind of “moderate” policies you’re likely to get under a President Biden: not only would the estimated 11-22 million illegal immigrants currently in the US get amnesty (and Obamacare), and virtually all immigration laws and border controls be removed, but the US would be declared an asylum for all the world’s migrants. That’s currently estimated at about 160 million, or roughly half the current US population.

HIDDEN JOE BIDEN

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is getting a lot of attention for a piece that many interpret as a trial balloon for the DNC, to see if Americans will actually buy their feeble excuses for Joe Biden staying hidden in his basement until the election and not debating President Trump. Biden already agreed to three debates (his campaign taunted Trump for not being brave enough to debate Biden more than three times, even though Trump requested four debates.)

Now, it’s obviously dawning on them, to their horror, that Biden will actually have to show up and talk without a prompter or a ventriloquist for a total of six hours, which is 10,000 hours in Joe Biden ad lib time. So Friedman is test-marketing a couple of excuses: that Biden shouldn’t debate until Trump releases his old income tax records (surely, the issue that weighs most heavily on Americans’ minds at this moment in history) and that because Trump “lies” all the time, poor Joe would have to use all his debate time correcting him (Joe Biden being the very definition of a walking fount of encyclopedic knowledge.) So Biden should only debate Trump if he’ll agree to have a panel of “fact-checkers” there to pick apart everything he says (and coincidentally, use up all the time when Joe would’ve been talking.) That would make it a debate between Trump and a panel of liberal advocates, with Joe reduced to spectator.

A few quick asides: First, that “lie” accusation is rich coming from a writer for the former “paper of record” that’s now a full-time fake news dispenser and DNC propaganda organ and that spent three years deluding its liberal readers with “Russian collusion” fairy tales. Second, we all know what “fact-checker” means these days: someone who declares every policy dispute, difference of opinion, debatable minor detail or obvious joke by a Republican to be a “Pants On Fire LIE!” Meanwhile, the Democrats can put out an ad that tells 10 blatant lies about Trump, and the media doesn’t bat an eye.  And third, we already saw how well it works to have debate moderators play “fact-checker” in 2012 when CNN’s Candy Crowley “corrected” Mitt Romney’s description of Obama’s handling of Benghazi, in effect doing Obama’s debating for him, even though she later admitted Romney had been right.

While the column was obviously intended to bash Trump and lay the groundwork for Biden avoiding debates, all it did in reality was draw renewed attention to the herculean efforts by Democrats to keep their candidate hidden and renew the uncomfortable questions about his fitness for office.

Still, I like to be helpful whenever I can, even to my political opponents. So since “Trump will lie” and “He hasn’t released his tax records yet” don’t seem to be persuading anybody that Joe Biden would be justified in not debating, here are eight more suggestions to fill out…

The Top Reasons Joe Biden Can’t Debate Trump

8. Joe left the border open, and his border collie got in and ate his debate prep.

7. He’s only been in Washington for 42 years and hasn’t yet had time to finish his plan to transform America overnight.

6. Can’t debate until “Beto” O’Rourke finishes teaching him to speak bad Spanish.

5. Won’t debate until the organizers assure him in writing that none of the questioners will be dog-faced pony soldiers.

4. No debates until it’s agreed they will air exclusively on Joe’s all-time favorite TV channel: BET.

3. In the spirit of Obamacare, Americans have to elect Biden first and then find out what he will do to them.

2. Hunter hasn’t finished finalizing the sponsorship deal to put the Chinese flag on his necktie.

And the #1 Joe Biden excuse for not debating Trump…

1. Joe’s pretty sure he already debated Trump in 1949.

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY (KJV)

 



Byron York of the Washington Examiner compares what President Trump said at Mount Rushmore to what Trump-hating media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post told their readers that he said. Their "reporting" reflects reality about as accurately as a Picasso portrait with three noses.

Let this stand as an important lesson: from now on, and especially until the election, do not believe anything that these media outlets tell you that Trump (or for that matter, any Republican) said. Go to the Internet and check out the original source. That’s what my staff and I have been doing for years, and we’ve had to issue far fewer corrections than the New York Times does.

It’s sad that this is necessary, but these outlets have willingly quit the journalism business to become 24/7 Baghdad Bobs for the Democratic Party. Believing that you know what Trump said because you heard it from them would be like thinking you really understand Israeli government policies because you watch Al Jazeera.

And in a second ruling that also strikes a blow for religious liberty, the Supreme Court again ruled 7-2 (Ginsberg and Sotomayor dissenting) that religious schools should be free from discrimination lawsuits if they don’t hire people for ministerial positions whose lifestyles conflict with their religious beliefs.

Read the details of both cases at the link. Religious schools were already supposed to be protected from these lawsuits, but again, litigants are searching for ways around those protections and liberal judges in places like California are only too willing to help them do that. This ruling expands that protection to cover less ministerial positions and more types of discrimination lawsuits to help head off all the various ways in which people were trying to use the law to force religious schools to hire people who contradict their beliefs and teachings.

As this article points out, the decision will raise controversy because opponents claim it allows religious organizations to discriminate against employees who are not in fully ministerial positions, such as math teachers. But the alternative is to allow the government to decide which positions in a religious institution qualify as “ministerial,” and that doesn't sound like a job that the government should be doing at all. It sounds instead like a perfect example of what the Founders were banning when they wrote that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:  Supreme Court rules on abortion-health care fight

Tuesday, Minnesota Rep. and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar condemned the entire American way of life, telling an audience “As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality…We cannot stop at the criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”

Conservatives immediately pointed out that Omar was openly calling for the destruction of the US political and capitalist economic systems, and demanded to know if Joe Biden and fellow Democrats backed those goals. Which is silly…they’d never admit that!

I take a more charitable view of Rep. Omar’s bloviations. Let’s look at the evidence:

She came to America as an immigrant from Somalia, a nation that is under the following travel advisory from the US State Department: “Do not travel to Somalia due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, health issues, kidnapping, and piracy.” So at least we can assume she thinks America is slightly better than that or she wouldn't be here.

After having come to America, she got elected to the House, where she currently pulls down a healthy $174,000 a year. That’s about 773 times the average annual income in Somalia ($225 US.) She has parlayed that position into other lucrative areas, including a book deal for a memoir (“This Is What America Looks Like”) with an advance alone that was reported to be in the $100k-$250k range.

I think we can also assume that she will personally benefit from the reported $878,000 paid since 2018 to her latest husband’s political consulting firm out of donations to her Congressional campaign. They’re taking advantage of a loophole in the federal anti-nepotism law that bars Congress members from hiring relatives for government jobs but not from doing campaign work.

So while Rep. Omar might enrage a lot of people by seemingly wanting to turn America into Somalia, a more charitable view might be to take inventory of all the ways she’s turned into a money-grubbing capitalist since escaping Somalia for our oppressive, racist shores. Maybe mouthing a lot of anti-American, anti-capitalist garbage to her deluded leftist followers is just her business model. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of rich liberals.

By the way, none of this is to suggest that I think she’s not a dangerous figure who shouldn’t be within 300 miles of government power. If her constituents are having trouble finding someone better to send to the House to replace her, I will happily provide them with a local phone book and a dart free of charge.

And now, a rebuttal to Rep. Omar by a Venezuelan refugee who has seen exactly where all her socialist rhetoric really leads (and it’s not to Rep. Omar’s now-fat bank account):

This morning, the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s order protecting the Little Sisters of the Poor from having to provide abortion-causing drugs to workers under their health insurance plan. (For the record: this is an order of Catholic nuns who take a vow of poverty and provide care to terminally ill indigents, so just imagine how shriveled a soul you’d have to have to threaten them with ruinous fines and legal costs just because you love abortion so much.)

The ruling was 7-2, with Chief Justice John Roberts remembering he’s supposed to be a conservative and protect people’s First Amendment rights. Only abortion-rights-above-all Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from what should have been the most obvious slam-dunk decision possible (“No, the government shouldn’t be able to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for abortion drugs! Are you insane?!”) It will now be up to historians to argue how anyone could have ever thought that was (A.) remotely Constitutional or (B.) not a repulsive and reprehensible idea.

The nuns have already had to fight for years against the government forcing them to violate their most sacred beliefs, and having won that exception, to fight for it again. Just as with the same-sex marriage lawsuits against Christian bakers and florists, losing in court doesn’t stop those bent on destroying religious liberty, they just find some other legal loophole to attack from. Let’s all pray this will settle it for good.

Let’s also pray it will serve as a long-overdue lesson to the SCOTUS to stop throwing bombs into settled moral and Constitutional issues, and then expecting people to go bankrupt fighting endless lawsuits in order to clear up the legal murk that they created.

Several bogus studies claiming hydroxychloroquine was dangerous and didn’t help with COVID-19 were highly touted, then retracted, but not before causing clinical trials to be halted and the FDA to bar doctors from obtaining the government’s stock of the drug for coronavirus patients.

Now, a large scale study by the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan found that the drug “significantly” reduced the death rate of hospitalized patients, from 26% to 13%. For the math-challenged, that’s cutting the death rate in half.

A study spokesman said, “As doctors and scientists, we look to the data for insight. And the data here is clear that there was a benefit to using the drug as a treatment for sick, hospitalized patients.”

But the data is also clear that simply because President Trump suggested it might be worth a try – and in the anti-Trump media narrative, everything Trump says must always be denied, refuted and proven WRONG – the media ballyhooed bogus studies and caused people to be afraid to take a drug that might have saved their lives or to be denied it if they wanted to try it. I’d call that deadly journalistic malpractice, and I’m not alone.

Since these media outlets have tried to blame Trump personally for every last death from a pandemic unleashed on the world by China, how about if we hold them responsible for letting their lethal cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome cause them to try to destroy a cheap, plentiful, safe drug that might have saved countless lives?

Here are some reminders of what Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) said about hydroxychloroquine, and a convincing argument that every unnecessary death that it might have prevented is on their heads.

Yesterday, I brought you the story of what has happened to the rights of the people of Hong Kong in an attempt to show how quickly it can happen here. Truly, the Democrat Party cares no more about your rights than the Communist Chinese Party cares about Hong Kong’s. As a follow-up today, I’d like to explain a bit about the philosophy we’re up against and the grip it currently has on our media and culture. We have to know about our enemy – and, yes, it is our ENEMY – in order to figure out how to defeat it.

To help me in this, I’ve linked to an excellent piece in THE FEDERALIST by John Andrews, former president of the Colorado Senate (where I’m sure they could use him now) and former vice president of Colorado Christian University.

Andrews is right in seeing “Marxist fingerprints” all over the current mess in our country. The infiltration has been going on for decades. I’m sure it once seemed farfetched to many when the more outspoken conservative commentators, such as Mark Levin, frequently warned of Marxism in America. Today, no one would call that over-the-top. He has always been right about this; it's just more obvious now.

RELATED READINGWhat do Americans have to lose? Look at Hong Kong...

As Andrews notes, the assumptions underlying Marx have pervaded schools and universities, mass media and popular entertainment, corporate philosophy, medicine, the arts and sciences, even many churches and seminaries. They define today’s Democrat Party as well, “Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi no less than Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama.” That’s why I said yesterday that it doesn’t matter whose names are on the ticket this fall.

So what are these Marxist assumptions? Well, they certainly don’t spring from the Judeo-Christian values we hold dear, the spiritual connections that enrich our lives. Both Marx and Hegel were materialists, considering all things spiritual to be inconsistent with their way of looking at the world. The idea gives new meaning to Madonna’s song about “living in a material world.” Living in THIS “material world” is a grim, empty way to exist, with no real objective concepts of right and wrong, only what your leaders tell you. But in places such as North Korea, it’s how the people exist. They know nothing else. They are ALLOWED to know nothing else.

Atheists tend to see the world as a random collision of atoms affected by physical forces, so they’re much more likely to “gravitate” (ha) to this way of seeing life. And it’s true that more Americans are atheists today than in previous generations. But it should be stressed that many people who doubt the existence of God have still been exposed in our culture to religious beliefs about right and wrong and understand the value of these concepts in our lives. They love America and dread the thought of our freedoms being taken away just as much as any churchgoer. Some of them may even be induced to start praying for our country, as in the old saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Still, as Andrews says, “Cultural Marxism is increasingly defining the worldview within which all debates and decision-making take place, even for most of those who rightly fear and despise Marx.” The goal: “deconstructing the American way of life from top to bottom, leaving no sphere of our lives untouched.”

I would add that race is just a pretext for all of this. Create chaos, add heat, mix well, cook until done.

Andrews warns of the three main ways Marxism accomplishes this deconstruction. (If you’ve read George Orwell, especially ANIMAL FARM, you’re ahead of the game. Ironically, Orwell himself was a democratic socialist but an unsparing critic of how Marxist societies worked in practice, particularly under Stalin. Brilliant as he was, it seems he was too much of an idealist to realize in those days that his socialist dream of a classless society and nationalizing everything was not also going to be free.)

Anyway, the first step: dehumanizing of the individual. We’re seeing the Democrat Party doing this with identity politics, which reduces every person to his or her group victimhood or guilt.

Second, demoralizing relationships. In a world with no objective right and wrong, everything boils down to the material; forget such things as personal dignity, family ties and duties, promises, tradition and heritage, even love and life itself. Really, all the things that make us human have no value in such a world.

I would add that if you’ve read Orwell’s “1984,” you know that in such a society, truth itself is meaningless, as the truth is whatever your leaders say it is. (It’s not enough for you to say that 2+2=5; you must truly believe that 2+2=5.) To give a current example, if it’s politically correct for you to believe that, as a white person, you are a racist, but you know you’re not, you will have to undergo sensitivity training and read WHITE FRAGILITY as many times as it takes for you to sincerely believe you are one. If you can’t believe this about yourself and do what is required of you to atone, you will have to be a nonperson.

Third, institutions must fall. The idea of civics and the citizen, with a shared history, is seen as absurd. Look at how it’s being destroyed now, with statues crumbling and history being twisted. Even language has to be controlled, as it’s a shared part of the culture used to communicate and seek truth. We can see that happening today as well.

Importantly, ANIMAL FARM shows that the noble idea that “all animals are equal” inevitably is tweaked into “...but some are more equal than others.” We see this now in the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Try saying that “all lives matter” and see where it gets you. And don’t think that those at the top of the socialist pyramid will ever give up their wealth and control. Rather, they will cast it in stone and make sure no one else gets it.

Why would “educated” young people and “the masses” living in leftist cities ever want this kind of nation? They’ve been brainwashed into thinking capitalism must be overthrown. In their artfully poisoned minds, America must atone with “social justice” for generations of racism and exploitation. America is evil, with an evil history and corrupt values that must be erased for all time. Even seeing an American flag "triggers" them. Trying to reason with a person indoctrinated in this view is like trying to communicate with a cult member. He’s not interested in what you think, only in getting you “woke” or getting you out of the way.

We’ve got people like this expressing themselves quite openly in the House of Representatives. Here’s just one.

I realize that today’s commentary hasn’t exactly been a treat to read, but knowing what we’re dealing with is the first step in developing a plan of action. Many of you have written in frustration to ask, “What can we DO??” Tomorrow morning, we’re going to talk about what we can do. A long-term plan is important, but we’ll focus on the short-term for now, as we have four months to keep leftists from taking over America.

Warning to anyone playing poker with President Trump: Never assume he’s bluffing. Tuesday, Trump officially served notice to the UN and Congress that the United States will withdraw from the World Health Organization, effective one year from today. Of course, that means he’ll need to be reelected because if Biden gets in, the WHO will be only one of many international organizations in thrall to China that will have more sway in the White House than American citizens do.

Trump’s announcement drew the expected condemnations from Democrats, the media and even some Republicans. The general thrust was “It’s outrageous to withdraw from the World Health Organization during a worldwide pandemic!” Going unspoken is the fact that if the WHO hadn’t covered up for China and repeated its lies, there might not even be a worldwide pandemic. As Trump pointed out, we give the WHO $450 million a year while China gives it $40 million and seemingly has total control over it.

I mention the money because opponents will try to claim that withdrawing from the WHO means Trump is turning his back on world health initiatives. No, it means the money that was going to the WHO can instead go to more effective, efficient and honest health organizations. This is the same false argument presented whenever we talk about cutting funding to Planned Parenthood and liberals scream that we’re slashing “women’s health care.” No, the money would instead go to real local medical clinics that actually provide women’s health care, not to those that spend all their money on abortion facilities rather than purchasing a single mammogram machine.

Personally, I second Charlie Kirk’s tweet in that linked article: now that we’ve notified the UN that we’re withdrawing from the WHO, let’s next notify them that we’re withdrawing from the UN.

Of all the Fourth of July celebrations in my lifetime, this was perhaps the strangest --- and also the most important for us to ponder.

The Fourth of July is usually a time to get together and enjoy our freedom as Americans, and we mostly take for granted that we will always have it. But the very fact that this year was so out of kilter should tell us how very much we have to lose. Leftists here in this country –- a trifecta of the power-mad, the indoctrinated and the ignorant –- want to “burn it all down” to set up a fantasy Marxist utopia ruled by identity politics, which is just another form of racism. Look around; they’re in the process of doing it. We can’t take our freedom for granted any longer.

We forget how quickly everything can change. A system of government can fall just like...THAT! (I’m snapping my fingers.) It’s like toppling a statue; no matter how much skill and care and artistry went into creating that unique piece, or how many centuries it has stood, it can be turned into rubble with one hard pull of a rope or a few sticks of dynamite. Even a constitutional republic like ours can be very quickly taken over and altered beyond recognition, with little or no hope of going back. We are at risk of that now.

Look at what China has done to Hong Kong in just a week. All it had to do was pass a law, and now Hong Kong authorities are forced to strengthen regulation of the media and the internet. Beijing also has given itself broad powers to deploy state security agencies and to establish a bureau overseeing “national security” in Hong Kong. As reported in BLOOMBERG NEWS, China may even block citizens of Hong Kong from leaving for the U.K. Thousands took to the streets last week in protest, but it won’t change any of this. The “one country-two systems” framework that has governed the former British colony since it was returned to China in 1997 is essentially over, now that China has chosen to disregard that agreement.

As Mike Pompeo said to Laura Ingraham on Monday, “We can see this is going to end up being just another Communist-run city. It’s unfortunate; Hong Kong was such a special place, where there were all the freedoms that the people of Hong Kong were promised by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s much like the promise they made to tell us the truth about where the coronavirus came from...It’s the same kind of broken promises that’ll lead the United States to take the right response.”

Fine; we should hold them accountable. But the CCP is going to steamroll Hong Kong anyway, just as surely as they rolled their tanks through Tiananmen Square. They are liars and not to be trusted. The rule of law has been eviscerated in Hong Kong; now it’s the rule of the CCP.

Alarm bells have sounded in Taiwan as well, as CCP control of social media also applies to the millions of Taiwanese messages of support for Hong Kong’s democracy movement and Taiwanese independence, as well as criticism of human rights abuses in China. Of course, they’re also worried that their country is next.

Hong Kong is now essentially just another Chinese city, according to Jillian Melchior of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. The people of Hong Kong weren’t even allowed to read the legislation before it was passed. What it does, she says, is criminalize dissent on a sweeping scale. “Basically anything but complete submission to Beijing is illegal,” she says. “It’s bringing the Chinese system of justice to Hong Kong.” She means even in the physical sense; mainland government offices will be coming there as well. In other words, there’s no need to extradite people from Hong Kong to China to exact “justice” –- China will just do it there. How conveeeenient.

Life in prison is now a very real possibility for anyone in Hong Kong who expresses dissent against the CCP. The same law also applies to foreigners, including journalists, who have spoken out against the CCP; they might risk arrest simply by stepping inside Hong Kong or even touching down at the airport there.

"This is the end of legal autonomy,” Melchior says, “and it’s the end of rights for Hong Kong’s people.” She’s talking about the basic rights we as Americans take for granted: freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of speech. And the law as written is so broad, it can be used to target anyone the government doesn’t like.

More details here.

So, since we’re talking about basic rights that Americans enjoy, let’s look again at the threats we as Americans face in the year 2020. In about four months (!), we’ve got an election coming that has the potential to bring about the end of many freedoms we enjoy. In case you didn’t know, leftists don’t like freedom. At least, not for you.

Let me tell you what is going to happen if the Democrats win in November. It doesn’t matter if Biden is at the top of the ticket or not or who is #2. Hard-core leftists run the party, and they will run the government like they’re the CCP and we are Hong Kong.

They will cement their power in numerous ways, with help from a compliant media. If they happen not to take the Senate, it won’t matter; they’ll just govern by executive order. They’ll fire Attorney General Barr and immediately close all investigations except those relating to President Trump. They’ll pack the Supreme Court with far-left judges. They’ll further reward schools for indoctrinating students into hating America. No monuments to America’s past will be left standing. Courts will rule in favor of states going around the Electoral College, effectively destroying it and making sure “flyover country” never gets a say in another presidential election. They’ll open borders, make Washington DC a state and let non-citizens vote, canceling out the votes of many citizens. With help from social media and the political correctness brigade, conservative speech will be shut down. The most reasonable, fact-based observations, even in fields such as science and technology, will be classified as “hate speech” and disallowed. Perhaps even the American flag will become "hate speech." The police will indeed be defunded, property rights will be disrespected, and more infringements will be made on the 2nd Amendment. Individual rights in general will be sacrificed to the god of identity politics, which will rule the day.

We don’t have to live in Hong Kong to experience a loss of personal rights on this level. We can just stay right here in America and let the far left take over our country in November. Think I’m exaggerating? Some of it is already happening. What did leftist-run American cities look like to you this Fourth of July?

Biden's Radicalism

July 7, 2020

While President Trump’s speech defending America’s history, heroes and values was mercilessly attacked by the media, their Presidential hope, Joe Biden, also made a 4th of July statement. His vision of America (which I’m sure they would never call dark or divisive) is of a place rotten with racism, a “systemic racism” that he vowed to rip out in its entirety (translation: government will take over everything) and that once elected, he will “transform America.” Into what, downtown Minneapolis? The CHOP autonomous zone in Seattle?

As was noted when Barack Obama used that phrase, how can anyone claim to love America, then vow to fundamentally transform it? Biden’s radicalism is especially eye-opening, considering that he’s what now passes for a “moderate” in the Democratic Party. It’s even rubbing off on his potential running mates, who are so scared to upset the mobs, they can’t even say they wouldn’t blow up Mount Rushmore if elected.

The narrative of Biden as a “moderate” is the basis of what I call the Democrats’ Trojan Horse campaign (or maybe that should be Trojan Donkey.) The Party has moved so far to the left that they could never get elected if they admitted what they really plan to do, so they’re hiding it behind Biden’s bland image. But nobody seriously believes that Biden will set the agenda, any more than we believe that Lambchop was the brains behind Shari Lewis’ ventriloquist act.

Possibly the most hilarious self-reveal came when Ted Cruz listed some of the radical ideas that they represent, and to refute him, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sarcastically tweeted back that the Democrats wanted to do all those radical things, so they nominated Joe Biden.

Yes, that’s precisely why they nominated Joe Biden. Because if they nominated someone like AOC, they wouldn’t win, even if those are the policies you’ll get either way. What you should be asking yourself is this: “If Joe Biden is such a moderate, why is he being defended by one of his top campaign advisors, notorious socialist and ‘Green New Deal” pusher, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?”

I hope you had a safe and enjoyable Fourth of July weekend, which means I hope you didn’t turn on the news for the past four days, except to watch President Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore. Here it is if you missed it, and if so, it’s today’s Must-See. It may be the most important speech of his Administration, and one of the most important of any President.

After weeks of riots, looting, arson, vandalism of national monuments and historic statues, slander of America’s founders, bullying and intimidation of law-abiding citizens and “canceling” of anyone who dares voice an opinion unapproved by the radical left mobs, Trump took to national television to stand up and fight back against leftist fascism and on behalf of America’s great heritage of liberty, justice and government of, by and for the people. In the most memorable line of a stunning speech, he declared that Americans “only bend the knee for God.”

Naturally, the anti-Trump media had a hair-on-fire hissy fit. The New York Times repeated the mischaracterization of his Inaugural speech by claiming that Trump gave a “dark and divisive” speech. The most hilarious bit was their claim that he created a liberal “straw man” by trying to convince us that the left is engaging in violence, rioting and anti-American radicalism. I have to assume that the Times’ reporters haven’t glanced at their own news pages in the past month.

Of course, for the Times, denying reality is par for the course.

RIP Charlie Daniels

July 7, 2020

I am still in shock after receiving a message Monday from country legend Charlie Daniels’ representative, letting me know that he had died of a stroke at 83. He was so big, so strong, so omnipresent in music for 70 years, and so bold and outspoken in defense of America and its veterans, police, and first responders that it seems almost impossible that he could have left us so suddenly. I’m proud to say that he was a friend of mine and a friend of our TBN show, where he appeared just recently to promote one of his many initiatives to help our veterans.

Fox News immediately contacted me to write a tribute. I hope you will read it at this link.

This obituary from the Nashville Tennessean includes some highlights from Charlie Daniels’ amazing career and the many fellow icons who worked with him, from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Ringo Starr and Elvis Presley. He was truly a “musician’s musician,” the "best there's ever been" on both fiddle and guitar, and the man the greats called when they wanted to make music history.

Here are some of the many tributes to him that are pouring in from fellow music stars.

To show the deep love and respect that Americans felt for Charlie Daniels, here are some photos of his body being driven to the funeral home, accompanied by a police escort, followed by a group of fans on motorcycles, and saluted by fans lining the sidewalks to pay their respects as they held up the American flag he revered.

Finally, it’s especially unfortunate that he leaves us at a time when so many people are turning on the patriotic American values he fought so hard to protect and defend. I wish he could have lived to see what I hope and pray will be the crushing repudiation by voters of the current wave of violent, ignorant, intolerant and divisive anti-Americanism. But he left us a great legacy of writings and recordings to help inspire patriots to fight back.

One of the greatest was a song that came out during a similarly depressing, if less violent, time in America’s history: 1980, the end of the Carter years when we were told that malaise was our “new normal,” that America was in decline, that we could be pushed around by countries like Iran, and we’d better just get used to it. He released a battle cry of a song that reminded us not to believe the demoralizing lies and anti-American propaganda. Some say he helped save the nation, as that song fired up patriotic Americans to go to the polls, elect Ronald Reagan, and reclaim America’s greatness. He revived it again after 9/11, as you can see in this live video. I think it’s high time we start playing it again, right up to and beyond Election Day 2020. It’s called “In America.”

The June Jobs Report

July 7, 2020

Last week, it was reported that a record 4.8 million jobs were added to the economy in June, dropping the unemployment rate back down to 11.1% and bringing the two-month total to nearly 8 million jobs restored since the coronavirus lockdowns began. Even with some states reimposing lockdowns and closures because of a rise in cases, this is more proof that the underlying economy remains strong and is being artificially held down by the virus and the official reactions to it.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden had to dump a big shovel full of gloom and doom on the good news. I won’t bother recounting it all here, but you can read it at the link if you’re not easily inclined to losing your lunch.

A couple of reminders:

(1.) Joe Biden was part of the Administration that turned what should have been a quick economic recovery into an 8-year struggle in economic quicksand; the slowest recovery in history, where people working three part-time jobs were told to get used to it because anemic job creation and below-2% GDP growth were the “new normal.”

(2.) Biden blames Trump’s “bungled” response to the coronavirus for both the job losses and the deaths from the disease. Yet Biden was part of the Democratic crowd that accused Trump of racism and xenophobia when he shut down travel from China (a nation that owns Biden so thoroughly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a receipt). They also predicted 2.2 million US deaths and now blame Trump that there are 126,000 deaths, even though most of them were in the Democrat-run states of New York and New Jersey and due to idiotic policies like forcing nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients. Biden also points to the recent rise in cases, implying that it's due to the economy reopening, conveniently ignoring the massive superspreader events that Democrats not only endorsed but participated in. Finally, how many of those victims might be alive today if Democrats and the media weren’t more interested in badmouthing the now-proven drug hydroxychloroquine to make Trump look bad than in saving patients’ lives?

Another Trump comment that the Times took issue with was his assertion that Democrat-led cities have allowed violent thugs to run rampant in the streets. Seriously, where does he get these crazy ideas?

Maybe from watching the real news. Even the New York Times was forced to report the tragically bloody holiday weekend in Chicago, where at least 72 people were shot between Friday morning and Sunday night, 15 fatally. They included a 7-year-old girl who was visiting her grandmother when she was killed by drive-by shooters who attacked a family gathering with a number of children. Several other victims as young as 10 were wounded around Chicago.

New York City had 44 shootings with 63 victims, the direct result of Mayor Bill DeBlasio dismantling the effective policing that Rudy Giuliani instituted when he brought the city back from the devastation of the Dinkins years.

And in Atlanta, 8-year-old Secoriea Turner was riding in a car with her mother and another adult when they came too close to where protesters were gathered at the burned-out Wendy’s whose parking lot was the site of the police shooting of Rayshard Brooks. The group opened fire on the car, hitting it multiple times and killing that innocent little girl. She was black, but apparently, her life didn’t matter to them, any more than any of the other victims of the violence that’s raged since the death of George Floyd, something that people of all races and political views condemned. Over the weekend, four people including Secoriea Turner were killed in Atlanta alone.

The heartbreaking murder of Secoriea Turner finally – FINALLY – convinced Atlanta’s Democrat Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to say “enough is enough” and order the area around the former Wendy’s to be cleared out (so now, it’s enough lawlessness and death? And who will clear it out? The police I assume.) I wonder if even this would be enough if the Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, hadn’t declared a state of emergency and ordered 1,000 National Guard troops to Atlanta to protect government buildings that Bottoms would not protect.

Maryland’s Republican Governor may soon have to take the same stand in Baltimore.

Frankly, I'm sick of hearing these Democratic officials say, "Black lives matter," then standing back and allowing people to be killed by rampaging criminals. If any lives matter to them at all, then knock off the fatuous rhetoric and let the police stop the killing!

This weekend we celebrate 244 years as an independent nation, but the events of the past few months leave us wondering if we will have many more to celebrate. We started as a unique country based on the notion that our rights come from God, not government; that because we recognize God as the creator of us all, we are all equal in intrinsic worth and value; that we would not require a big government because we would mostly self-govern and live with the understanding that the great freedoms we enjoy require great responsibilities. As the scripture teaches, “unto whom much is given, much is required.”

We were never perfect and still aren’t. We’ve had some very ugly chapters in our history, but the brilliance of our Founders was to create a nation that would be governed by law and not by our passions and emotions. We would grant rights even to those accused of awful crimes so that we wouldn’t be ruled by a mob, whose sense of justice would be at best uneven, and at worst, as evil as the crime, it was seeking to avenge. It made our system at times slow, sometimes unfair, and just plain wrong on occasion. But the ideal way to make all of us accountable to the same laws and suffer the same consequences for violating them.

All of that is at risk of going away if we allow people in the highest levels of law enforcement and the intelligence community to get away with trying to stage a coup d’etat against an elected President. A man of color in Minneapolis was murdered by a cop and a video of the murder is seen by the world. While no one defends the cop’s action, some use the tragedy as an excuse to break windows, assault innocent people, loot stores, and burn businesses that were actually owned by people of color. When that happens, we are rewarding anarchy and mob rule.

But while the news reports the worst of our nation’s sins, there are truly outstanding things of love, kindness, and sacrifice that are happening around us every day. We need to hear more of their stories and tonight you will. I hope you’ll celebrate America this weekend. Sure, we aren’t perfect, but we are a better nation than any of the over 70 nations I’ve visited.

244 years ago, some very courageous souls risked their fortunes and their very lives to give us a country unlike any ever created. I don’t want to lose this country by those who would trade liberty for the lunacy of a system that would resemble the government like it was in the time of the Judges of the Old Testament, where “every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

Let’s celebrate America. But let’s fight to preserve the best of it, and change and reform the worst of it.

On the Fourth of July, we celebrate having this exceptional nation and the freedoms it gives us, but we must always remember that we have those things because of all the soldiers who put their lives on the line to secure them for us, from Revolutionary times forward. There’s a story I love to tell that illustrates that for young people.

When I was Governor of Arkansas, I got to know an outstanding high school teacher in Little Rock named Martha Cothren. She was one of my original Huck’s Heroines, and I was always telling her it was my goal to make her one of the most famous teachers in America, because she’d be such a great example to all teachers. Here’s just one reason why.

Martha became concerned that many of her kids didn’t fully appreciate their precious American freedoms. So she prepared an unusual lesson for them. On the first day of school, the kids shuffled back into class only to discover that it was completely empty. Not a desk in sight. So they asked, “Miss Cothren, where are the desks?” She replied, “You don’t get your desk until you can tell me how you earn it.”

The kids were stunned, but they started trying to guess how they earned their desks. By getting good grades? No, that’s not the answer. By behaving in class? No, that’s not it. The first period ended with the kids leaning against the walls or sitting on the floor, but they never had figured out how they earn their desks.

Well, in trooped the second-period class. They were greeted with the same empty room and the same question they couldn’t answer. This went on all day, and by lunchtime, word was circulating all over school that Miss Cothren had gone crazy.

Finally, during the last class of the day, she told the students, “Okay, nobody’s figured out how you earn your desks, so I’ll tell you.” She opened the door, and in walked 27 military veterans, each one carrying a desk. As they quietly placed them in neat rows, Martha said, “Kids, you don’t have to earn your desks because these guys earned them for you.” She said you get free desks, free books and a free education, but it wasn’t free to these veterans…or to their friends who never came home from the wars they fought to give us all that freedom. She said, “Whenever you sit in that desk, try to remember who earned it for you.”

After that lesson, Martha was approached by one of those veterans, a news photographer, with tears in his eyes. He told her that when he returned from Vietnam, he was cursed and spat on, and made to feel ashamed of his service. He said, “Today is the first day since I’ve been home that I felt like someone appreciated what I did.”

Unfortunately, there can’t be a Martha Cothren in every school. I certainly wish I could replace every America-hating “history” professor in every university with a clone of her. But other teachers and parents can make sure their kids know who earned their desks for them. And we can all make it a point to say “thank you” to current and former members of the U.S. military. Seems to me, the 4th of July would be a great time to start.