U.S.—As times change, so does the hiring process. While it used to be common for job applicants to present a resume of qualifications or to list achievements and pertinent experience on job applications, that information is no longer relevant to most job markets. These days, what companies want to know first and foremost about new hires is simply this: what is the worst thing you have ever done or said?
Updated job applications will have an area where you can list your worst tweets, Facebook comments, or previous podcast appearances. Many have a list of racial slurs with boxes to check if you ever used any, at any time, in any context, and in any situation. Also popular is the "jokes you have told" section where you list every joke you have told, starting with the crudest or most culturally insensitive.
"When it comes to hiring, what really matters isn't all the work a person has put into their career. It usually comes down to one tweet or YouTube comment from a decade ago. We want people with squeaky-clean pasts, on and offline," said Zeller Industries CEO Marcus Zeller.
While the new hiring practice might cause applicants who are truth-tellers, risk-takers, and blatantly honest to be overlooked, CEOs and hiring reps all agree that it's not worth it to hire someone with an impressive body of work and a lifetime of achievement if they said something society disapproves of years ago in a tweet.
"Until some sort of mechanism is put in place to redeem people of past sins, this is the solution," said Marcy Schaeffer, CEO of QuickHire. "We aren't looking for excellent employees. We are looking for pure, sinless, guilt-free employees."
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Dave Collins
A trial in Great Britain has just concluded with potentially dangerous implications for personal freedom here.
Great Britain is currently the most watched country in the Western world -- watched, that is, by its own police forces. In London alone, the police have erected more than 420,000 surveillance cameras in public places. That amounts to 48 cameras per 1,000 residents. What do the cameras capture? Everything done and seen in public.
The cameras use facial recognition technology that can capture a grimace, a pimple, a freckle, even an eye blink as you walk the streets. Software then compares whatever the camera captures to government databases. By touching the screen showing your image, the police can have at their fingertips instantly a full dossier on you -- your medical, financial, law enforcement, educational, personal and employment records. Stated differently, by looking at your face on a computer screen, and without a search warrant or even any suspicion about you, British police can amass in a few seconds all the data that the government has accumulated about you.
These procedures were recently challenged by a privacy advocate named Ed Bridges in a trial in Britain's High Court. He learned that the police had twice scanned his face into their databases and accessed personal data about him -- once while he walked to a restaurant and once while at a political rally. His lawyers argued that the police need a basis in fact -- some articulable suspicion -- to scan anyone's face into their database, and that without that suspicion, the police are effectively engaged in a virtual fishing expedition among innocent folks.
The police argued that Bridges only knew of his face being scanned -- they wouldn't say why he was scanned -- by examining government records that he sought. And if he had not sought the records, he would never have known that his image had been scanned. Thus, they argued, he endured no harm. The police also argued that facial recognition helps them find wanted persons much more efficiently than any other police tool.
It developed during trial that the public surveillance systems were never authorized by Parliament or by any popularly elected local governmental body. Rather, the systems were purchased by the police, and they use them whenever and however they want. It also developed during trial that police have charged persons who recognize the cameras and then hide their faces from view. Punished for scratching your nose or wearing your ski mask or pulling your T-shirt over your mouth in public? Yes.
One would think that this Orwellian in-your-face invasion of personal freedom would have shocked the conscience of the court. It didn't. The court sided with the police.
Could the British model happen here?
Today, a half-dozen American police departments, including New York City, Chicago, Detroit and Orlando, Florida, have begun to use facial recognition surveillance, and in none of these places has the elected governing body authorized it. Politicians have looked the other way. Only in San Francisco -- where readers of this column will recall the city government infringes upon the freedom of speech -- has the governing body voted to prohibit the police from using facial recognition.
Great Britain -- where many American-style civil liberties are protected -- lacks a written constitution. Instead it has a 600-year-old constitutional tradition, acknowledged in court rulings and reflected in legislation. Yet, as we have seen, court rulings can bend with the political winds. Those winds are often fanned by the intelligence community and by law enforcement, which have succeeded in establishing sufficient fear among the public and sufficient acclimation to surveillance so that folks like Ed Bridges are made to appear as outliers wasting their time rather than patriots defending personal liberty.
Could the British model happen here?
Our federal government's 60,000-person strong domestic spying apparatus already captures every keystroke -- even those which we think we have deleted -- on every device used to transmit digital data on fiber optic cable in the United States. That covers every mobile, desktop and mainframe device. The government, of course, will not acknowledge this publicly. Yet some of its officials have told as much to me privately. They have also told me that they believe that they can get away with this so long as the data captured is not used in criminal prosecutions.
Why is that? The last thing the feds and rogue police want is for government agents to be compelled to answer under oath how they acquired the evidence they are attempting to introduce. Yet the admission of spying assumes that the right to privacy, which is guaranteed in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, is protected from governmental invasion only for criminal prosecution purposes. And dozens of American police departments have accepted this assumption as they have begun to use devices that attract cellphone signals as one walks or drives near them, thus enabling them to follow movements of the innocent without suspicion.
The Fourth Amendment makes no such distinction among intelligence or law enforcement or governmental curiosity. Rather, the Fourth Amendment -- the essence of which is the right to be left alone -- was written expressly to prohibit what British police are doing to the British public and what American police and the National Security Agency are doing to the American public -- commencing investigations of the innocent without suspicion.
The Fourth Amendment is an intentional obstacle to government, an obstacle shown necessary by history to curtail tyrants.
Could the British model happen here? Digitally, it has. Could the ubiquitous cameras be far behind?
If you were under the impression that the mainstream media is unbiased and committed to reporting “just the facts,” then the media spectacle in recent days should disabuse you of that outdated notion. In fact, it should disabuse all of us of the idea that the news is objective and unbiased, and hasten the day when journalists and publishers can just be honest about their viewpoints, biases, and agendas.
A pair of articles adapted from a new book about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh illustrates the point will. The book, written by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, includes a supposedly new misconduct allegation against Kavanaugh, but the excerpt that ran in the Times omitted an important detail: the alleged victim never made a claim against Kavanaugh and told friends she had no memory of the incident described by Pogrebin and Kelly.
The Times was forced to make a correction when my colleague Mollie Hemingway pointed out the omission. In several subsequent media interviews, Pogrebin and Kelly blamed their editors, insisting they included the crucial detail in an earlier version of the article but it was taken out by mistake in the editing process—an excuse that strains credulity, especially since any final edits would have required the authors’ approval.
Then, it happened again. An excerpt of the book published this week in The Atlantic, “We Spent 10 Months Investigating Kavanaugh. Here’s What We Found,” also contains a major error. In a section explaining why they believe the uncorroborated accusation of Deborah Ramirez, Pogrebin and Kelly write, “The people who allegedly witnessed the event—Kavanaugh’s friends Kevin Genda, David Todd, and David White—have kept mum about it.”
As Hemingway noted, this isn’t true. In the original New Yorker story about Ramirez’s highly dubious accusation, Kavanaugh’s friends weren’t quiet. One male classmate denied any memory of the party in question, and others released a statement disputing Ramirez’s account: “We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not… Editors from the New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.”
Yet Pogrebin and Kelly continue to pretend they’re just reporting the facts. In a recent interview on “The View,” Pogrebin said, “What’s lost in all this discussion is that what we tried to do was kind of what we always do as reporters, which is seek the facts, and put them out there, and let people come to their own conclusions.”
But they’re not just reporting the facts. In the epilogue of their book, they admit as much, writing that even though they found no evidence—no facts—to support the claims against Kavanaugh, they concluded that his accusers were telling the truth because their “gut” told them so and because the accusers’ stories “ring true.” This is of course precisely the conclusion they’re trying to get their readers to arrive at as well.
The Idea Of ‘Objective’ News Is Relatively Recent
Obviously, Pogrebin and Kelly have an agenda, just as their reporting was obviously guided to a large extent by their emotions, not the facts. The problem isn’t necessarily that these two journalists are biased against Kavanaugh. The problem is that they pretend they’re not biased when everyone can see that they are. The entire purpose of their book is to dredge up these horrible accusations—however flimsy, regardless of the credibility of the accusers or the denials of supposed eyewitnesses—and smear Kavanaugh.
If you want to write a book about how you think Kavanaugh was a serial sexual predator in college, and how you believe the accusations against him even though they can’t be corroborated, then fine. Write away! But don’t then go on national TV and claim that you’re just a reporter reporting the facts.
All of this gets to a larger point, which is that journalism would be better off if major media organizations and journalists simply admitted they have biases and embraced viewpoint-specific news coverage.
After all, the notion that journalism should be unbiased or “fair and balanced” is of relatively recent vintage. For much of American history, everyone knew that different newspapers and magazines had their particular biases, sometimes openly partisan ones. If you read Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World you’d get one perspective on the news, and an entirely different perspective if you read William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The advent of “objective” or “fair” journalism was in some ways a marketing ploy by the successors of Pulitzer and Hearst, who hoped to distinguish their papers from “yellow journalism.”
It was good marketing, and bolstered by the advent of radio in the late 1920s and television in the 1940s, which brought the New Deal’s Fairness Doctrine to bear on news broadcasting. What emerged in the middle of the last century, then, was a unique set of circumstances in which the idea of “objective” news could thrive. As Telly Davidson argued in an essay for the American Conservative last year, a lot of this rested, as much of American life did in the postwar decades, on a broad cultural consensus:
What today’s controversies illustrate is that a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine’ and ‘objective’ newspaper reporting could only have existed in a conformist Mad Men world where societal norms of what was (and wasn’t) acceptable in the postwar Great Society operated by consensus. That is to say, an America where moderate, respectable, white male centrist Republicans like Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Gerald Ford ‘debated’ moderate, respectable, white male centrist Democrats like Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, and Jimmy Carter.
The Postwar Consensus Is Gone, and Never Coming Back
All of that is gone now, and has been gone for a while. The advent of the digital age has overthrown the postwar consensus of the electric age. Instead of uniting and binding us together, digital has atomized, fragmented, and enervated us. The result, in news media at least, is that everyone’s biases and prejudices are impossible to hide, making a mockery of the idea that the news is “objective” in any meaningful sense.
What we have instead is the advent of a kind of digital yellow journalism. There’s a reason President Trump’s “fake news” epithet has been appropriated by both sides of the political divide. It’s really just another way of saying “I don’t recognize your authority over the facts.”
Consider a strange article NBC News recently ran, asking readers to confess their climate “sins.” “Tell us: Where do you fall short in preventing climate change? Do you blast the A/C? Throw out half your lunch? Grill a steak every week? Share your anonymous confession with NBC News.”
This, from a network news outlet that Americans with fond memories of Tom Brokaw’s reassuring voice still think of as objective and unbiased. The article isn’t just biased in favor of the religio-environmentalist view of carbon offsets being the new indulgences, it unapologetically promotes such a view.
That journalists and editors are overwhelmingly liberal is nothing new. But the imbalance is arguably getting worse. Even financial journalists, once thought to lean conservative, are overwhelmingly liberal. Last year, a survey of financial journalists at places like The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post found that more than 58 percent identified as either “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.” Less than 5 percent said they were very or somewhat conservative.
Now more than ever, media outlets should recognize that the myth of objectivity won’t lend them credibility. In fact, a failure to admit bias will eventually undermine their credibility, not least because their reporters and editors will spout off on Twitter, or email and text chains will be leaked, or their readers will notice how errors and omissions always seem to benefit liberals and hurt conservatives.
To the extent that left-leaning journalists grasp this, many only seem to grasp it lightly. A great example is the opening paragraphs of Lauren Duca’s syllabus for a class called “Feminist Journalist” now being offered at New York University. (That Duca, mostly known for posting an offensive tweet upon the death of Billy Graham, is teaching a university-level journalism course is itself an indictment of the idea of objective journalism.)
Media coverage of our current political climate has been plagued by the mental Napalm [sic] that I call ‘both sides-ism.’ This is a kind of classic ‘he said, she said’ form of journalism where the reporter tries to give both sides of an issue, even if one side is completely bogus. You’ll also hear it referred to as ‘balance,’ although in many cases it’s ‘false equivalency,’ because attempting to appear balanced just serves to create more distortion. The truth is not a math equation. In the midst of the ongoing American dumpster fire, there is, I believe, only one side to journalism, and it is motivated by building a truer, more equitable democracy. As this course will establish, not only does this effort allow for feminist journalists, it renders feminist journalism a moral necessity. We cannot build to social justice without adequate representation of intersectional perspectives.
To Duca’s credit, she at least recognizes that objectivity in journalism is an illusion. But she takes the wrong lesson from this. Instead of embracing a transparency about her own bias, and recognizing that all journalists and media outlets have biases, she concludes there is “only one side to journalism.” No surprise that it happens to be the side she’s on—the side of “social justice.”
But in fact there are many sides to journalism, all of them informed by biases, agendas, prejudices, and animosities. Anyone can see that. Almost everyone does. It would be great if journalists would start seeing that, too.
Attorney General William Barr is reportedly floating a proposal to expand background checks for gun buyers that is similar to an unsuccessful 2013 bill sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) and Patrick Toomey (R–Pa.). The proposal would require background checks for "all advertised commercial sales, including gun sales at gun shows."
Manchin and Toomey's Public Safety and Second Amendment Protection Act would have required that federally licensed firearm dealers, who are already required to conduct background checks, be involved in all sales at gun shows and all transfers resulting from online or print ads. It explicitly exempted transfers "between spouses, between parents or spouses of parents and their children or spouses of their children, between siblings or spouses of siblings, or between grandparents or spouses of grandparents and their grandchildren or spouses of their grandchildren, or between aunts or uncles or their spouses and their nieces or nephews or their spouses, or between first cousins."
Barr's proposal would do pretty much the same thing, but it also would authorize licenses for "transfer agents" to help gun owners comply with the background check requirement. The idea, presumably, is that the new category of licensees would make compliance easier by providing an alternative to firearm dealers.
This proposal is less sweeping than the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, which the House of Representatives approved last February. That bill, which was supported by 232 Democrats but only eight Republicans, would ban almost all gun transfers by people who are not licensed dealers. It applies to any sale, whether or not it happens at a gun show and whether or not the firearm was advertised.
The House bill makes an exception for "a transfer that is a loan or bona fide gift between spouses, between domestic partners, between parents and their children, including step-parents and their step-children, between siblings, between aunts or uncles and their nieces or nephews, or between grandparents and their grandchildren." If money changes hands, in other words, a background check would be required even for transfers between relatives.
Both proposals share the same problems as any other effort to expand the reach of background checks. First, the categories of prohibited buyers are irrationally and unfairly broad, encompassing millions of people who have never shown any violent tendencies, including cannabis consumers, unauthorized U.S. residents, people who have been convicted of nonviolent felonies, and anyone who has ever undergone mandatory psychiatric treatment because he was deemed suicidal.
Second, background checks are not an effective way to prevent mass shootings, since the vast majority of people who commit those crimes do not have disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records. Third, background checks, even if they are notionally "universal," can be easily evaded by ordinary criminals, who can obtain weapons through straw buyers or the black market. Fourth, voluntary compliance is apt to be the exception rather than the rule, and enforcement will be difficult, if not impossible.
Since the Manchin-Toomey approach applies only to relatively conspicuous sales, enforcement would be easier, but only because unadvertised private sales would be exempt. The House bill would be mostly aspirational and symbolic, since the government has no way of knowing when guns change hands in private transactions if the sales are not advertised and do not happen at gun shows.
In a study published last year, researchers looked at what happened after Colorado, Delaware, and Washington expanded their background check requirements. They reported that "background check rates increased in Delaware, by 22%–34% depending on the type of firearm," but "no overall changes were observed in Washington and Colorado." It is hard to see how the federal government can do any better, since it does not know who owns which guns and cannot possibly monitor unrecorded private transfers.
After the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, last month, President Donald Trump signaled his support for expanded background checks. "Serious discussions are taking place between House and Senate leadership on meaningful Background Checks," he said in an August 9 tweet. "I have also been speaking to the NRA, and others, so that their very strong views can be fully represented and respected. Guns should not be placed in the hands of mentally ill or deranged people. I am the biggest Second Amendment person there is, but we all must work together for the good and safety of our Country. Common sense things can be done that are good for everyone!"
The White House, however, has not accepted ownership of Barr's idea, and most Republicans in the Senate will not support a background check bill unless Trump says he is prepared to sign it. Politicoreports that "a senator who met with Barr said the attorney general made clear he had authorization from the White House." That seemed to be news to the White House. Presidential spokesman Hogan Gidley told Politico "the president has not signed off on anything yet but has been clear he wants meaningful solutions that actually protect the American people and could potentially prevent these tragedies from ever happening again."
"People actively hate us," one recently retired U.S. Border Patrol agent complains in a New York Timespiece on morale and recruitment problems at the federal agency. In El Paso, an active duty agent admitted he and his colleagues avoid many restaurants because "there's always the possibility of them spitting in your food."
What's remarkable about the piece isn't the poor treatment directed at many Border Patrol agents; it's that you could replace "Border Patrol" with the name of any one of several other federal agencies and find a similar news story from recent years. Many arms of government are unpopular with large swathes of the American population, and people are not shy about expressing their contempt.
For those of us who want a smaller, much less intrusive government, that should be viewed as a trend to nurture and encourage. And what a trend it is.
For instance, the tax man can't catch a break.
"The IRS has long been disliked, but its employees aren't used to being vilified," Bloombergreported in 2015, in language that foreshadowed current reports about the plight of immigration-law enforcers. One retired IRS agent told reporters that "throughout his career, he dealt with antigovernment tax avoiders in Arizona, but once the Tea Party scandal broke, his encounters with otherwise law-abiding ranchers became more hostile."
Likewise, J. Edgar Hoover's heirs have become controversial.
"Public support for the FBI has plunged," Timenoted last year after the famed law-enforcement agency's ongoing series of fumbles and scandals were complicated by questions over its role in the 2016 presidential election. "The FBI's crisis of credibility appears to have seeped into the jury room. The number of convictions in FBI-led investigations has declined in each of the last five years."
That's a lot of hate directed at these federal employees, but it's not necessarily coming from the same people. Perhaps inevitably in these fractured and polarized times, Americans belonging to one of the dominant political tribes tend to like the federal agencies despised by loyalists of the opposing political tribe, depending on their mutually incompatible views of what government should be doing and who it should be doing it to. Their diverging antipathies fit together into a jigsaw puzzle of misery for government workers caught in the crossfire.
"Americans' opinions about Immigration and Customs Enforcement are deeply polarized: 72% of Republicans view ICE favorably, while an identical share of Democrats view it unfavorably," Pew Research Center reported last year on opinions about Border Patrol's sister agency. With specific regard to Border Patrol, "Among Republican voters, 65% believe the enforcement is too lenient while just 12% say it is too harsh. Democrats are more divided but lean in the opposite direction: 40% say too harsh and 22% too lenient," according to pollster Scott Rasmussen. The heated debate between the two legacy parties over immigration is reflected in their attitudes toward, and treatment of, government agencies tasked with enforcing immigration laws.
Opinions of the IRS reflect a similar divide. "Democrats (65%) are more likely than Republicans (49%) to view the IRS favorably," Pew reported in the same 2018 survey. The numbers reflect not just long-time differences in views of taxation, but also Republican suspicion of the IRS after it was caught targeting conservative organizations.
It's the same for the FBI. "The 23-percentage-point gap in views of the FBI among Republicans and Democrats is among the widest of the 10 agencies and departments asked in the survey," Pew noted about the beleaguered law enforcement agency. "While 78% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have a favorable opinion of the FBI, 55% of Republicans and Republican leaners say the same."
Americans don't agree about which federal agencies they hate, but the fact that significant numbers of them do openly despise government workers plays havoc with morale. That, in turn, slams employee retention and recruitment.
To be clear, federal agencies don't need partisan animosity to make their employees unhappy; they're awfully good at doing it by themselves. Transportation Security Administration workers are so miserable that a blue ribbon panel convened this year to brainstorm schemes for dragging them from the depths of despair. And the entire Department of Homeland Security makes a specialty of managerial incompetence so extreme that politicians seek to raise morale through—literally—an act of Congress (is there nothing beyond the magical power of legislation?).
But red vs. blue infighting creates a no-win situation in which American political factions fundamentally disagree over the role of government, despise those arms of government that serve their enemies' purposes, and wield the agencies they control as weapons against anybody seen as opponents. It's at least theoretically possible (if highly improbable) to make a generic federal agency a better place to work. But how do you get Americans to show respect to government workers who they see as engaged in evil?
So, given that those of us who want a smaller and less bothersome state are often deeply opposed to those agencies' worst efforts, why not help the partisans lay on the hate? After all, the one thing that Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on is that government should be bigger and busier—"most either want to increase spending or maintain it at current levels," pollsters found this year—though, of course, Republicans and Democrats disagree on just where our huge and debt-ridden government should become more involved.
Helping the major political tribes attack each other's favored agencies won't formally reduce government the way libertarians like, but it could continue to hobble agencies so that they're less of a threat to our freedom and rights. At least for now, the most effective means of protecting liberty may lie less in winning political battles than in assisting the major partisan tribes in waging war against each other and the government agencies they currently disfavor.
President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., July 17, 2019. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters) The real source of Trump derangement syndrome is his desire to wage a multi-front pushback against an elite, postmodern progressive world.
Donald Trump is waging a nonstop, all-encompassing war against progressive culture, in magnitude analogous to what 19th-century Germans once called a Kulturkampf.
As a result, not even former president George W. Bush has incurred the degree of hatred from the left that is now directed at Trump. For most of his time in office, Trump, his family, his friends, and his businesses have been investigated, probed, dissected, and constantly attacked.
In 2016 and early 2017, Barack Obama appointees in the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice tried to subvert the Trump campaign, interfere with his transition, and, ultimately, abort his presidency. Now, congressional Democrats promise impeachment before the 2020 election.
The usual reason for such hatred is said to be Trump’s unorthodox and combative take-no-prisoners style. Critics detest his crude and unfettered assertions, his lack of prior military or political experience, his attacks on the so-called bipartisan administrative state, and his intent to roll back the entire Obama-era effort of “fundamentally transforming” the country leftward.
Certainly, Trump’s agenda of closing the border, using tariffs to overturn a half-century of Chinese mercantilism, and pulling back from optional overseas military interventions variously offends both Democrats and establishment Republicans.
Trump periodically and mercurially fires his top officials. He apparently does not care whether the departed write damning memoirs or join his opposition. He will soon appoint his fourth national security adviser within just three years.
To make things worse for his critics, Trump’s economy is booming as never before in the 21st century: near-record-low unemployment, a record number of Americans working, increases in workers’ wages and family incomes, low interest rates, low inflation, steady GDP growth, and a strong stock market.
Yet the real source of Trump derangement syndrome is his desire to wage a multi-front pushback — politically, socially, economically, and culturally — against what might be called the elite postmodern progressive world.
Contemporary elites increasingly see nationalism and patriotism as passé. Borders are 19th-century holdovers.
The European Union, not the U.S. Constitution, is seen as the preferable model to run a nation. Transnational and global organizations are wiser on environmental and diplomatic matters than is the U.S. government.
The media can no longer afford to be nonpartisan and impartial in its effort to rid America of a reactionary such as Trump, given his danger to the progressive future.
America’s ancient sins can never really be forgiven. In a new spirit of iconoclasm, thousands of buildings, monuments, and statues dedicated to American sinners of the past must be destroyed, removed, or renamed.
A new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care, and abortion on demand.
An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.
No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.
Trump variously goes after Antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities, and, above all, the media — especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
For all the acrimony and chaos — and prognostications of Trump’s certain failure — a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.
In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord was mere virtue-signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller’s bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.
Some of the most prominent Trump haters — Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci, and Representative Adam Schiff — either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.
Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved farther to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies, and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.
In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.
A New Jersey man has been accused of conducting intelligence-gathering operations for Hezbollah across New York City.
The U.S. Attorney's Office say Alexei Saab, 42, of Morristown was charged Thursday in a nine-count indictment for offenses related to his support for the terrorist outfit and separate marriage-fraud offenses.
He is alleged to have joined Hezbollah in 1996 before lawfully entering the US using a Lebanese passport in 2000 and becoming a naturalized citizen in 2008.
Locations including the United Nations headquarters, the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, Times Square, the Empire State Building, and local airports, tunnels, and bridges are said to have been under his surveillance.
And Saab is said to have provided detailed information on these locations to Hezbollah, including photographs and their structural weaknesses.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said: 'According to the allegations, while living in the United States, Saab served as an operative of Hizballah and conducted surveillance of possible target locations in order to help the foreign terrorist organization prepare for potential future attacks against the United States.
Wargaming the Electoral College: Trump's 2020 Game Plan Preview
How can a nontraditional GOP candidate beat a well-known Democrat who seemed to have most of her electoral ducks in a row -- that's the question we asked three years ago during the previous Wargaming the Electoral College series. As it turned out, the first winning scenario I explored for Trump, called "the northern route," turned out to be the one that won him the election.
Here's that map, which I published in July of 2016.
It was one of those But Only Donald Trump Can [Blank]™ victories. While the rest of the GOP contenders would have racked up huge wins in safe red states, Trump pitched his appeal at disaffected Democrats in the Rust Belt. If he didn't win Texas as big as Ted Cruz might have, so what? Trump carried Texas and Pennsylvania.
If you're spent the last four years under a rock -- a rock without WiFi, for that matter -- you might think that Trump would play it safe in 2020, working to deny the Democrat nominee much chance of winning back PA, MI, or WI. But a couple of items from the last few days indicate that Trump will double down on 2016's winning formula, and try putting even more blue states into play next year.
Before we get to that, most pundits will begin 2020 with a map looking something like this one just below. We'll call it the Conventional Wisdom Battlespace.
But Trump doesn't hew much to the conventional wisdom, does he?
Last week, Time's Brian Bennett delivered a look inside Trump's plan to flip even more blue states next year. The story begins in New Mexico, which hasn't been won by a Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 -- and even that was a very near thing. Nevertheless, Bennett reports that Team Trump "is planning to announce a state director and additional ground staff there in the coming weeks." The play is to "energize a slice of the state’s Hispanic voters" just big enough to turn it red. Jared Kushner told Time, "I can see us very aggressively playing in 18 swing states," as opposed to just 11 last time around.
What would those states be? Kushner can't be speaking of only states Clinton won in 2016, because she won only 19 states (plus D.C.). Clearly then Kushner is talking about battlegrounds both blue and red.
Let's do what I did in 2016: Throw away the pundit's map we looked at a moment ago, and broaden the playing field to the widest likely realm.
Both Trump and Candidate D can count for sure on about the same number of Electoral College (EC) votes: 181 (R) to 176 (D). Add in the leaners for both sides, and you get 224 for Trump versus just 213 for Candidate D... but that still leaves both sides well short of the magic 270.
CO and VA used to be competitive, but the influx of Californians into the former and government workers into the later are obstacles perhaps too big to overcome in the short term. Democrats are working hard to turn AZ, GA, and NC, but if they couldn't put Stacy Adams over the top in a year heavily favoring the Dems, then I don't see GA in play in 2020. Similar story in NC: The MSM-DNC poured everything they could into that special congressional election recently, yet still came up short. NC looks relatively safe. And AZ is still red enough that freshman Dem Senator Kristen Sinema is tacking to the center.
So our battlegrounds are FL, PA, NH, MI, WI, IA, MN, NM, and maybe NV. Add those together and we're not even close to the number of states (18) Kushner was talking about contesting. Throw red-leaners AZ, GA, NC, and OH back into the mix, and we're still shy by five battleground states. Which blue ones might Trump try to peel away? I guess that means putting CO and VA back on the playing board... but we need three more.
We're getting deep into blue country here, but based on recent reports, my best guess is that Trump's game plan looks like this:
Even putting NJ and OR into play, I could still get only to 17 battlegrounds. What is Kushner's 18th state? IL? NY? DE? I just can't spot it -- can you?
But the point is this: Trump wants to broaden the battlespace enough that a clean sweep would give him the biggest GOP win since George Bush ran for Reagan's third term in 1988. (Bush declined to deliver Reagan's third term; voters declined to reelect him.)
Here's what that sweep would look like:
The real kicker? A bunch of states have signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. If Trump wins the popular vote, he'll carry the entire West Coast (including Hawaii), plus Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Delaware, New York, and the bulk of New England's ECs. Even being super-generous and letting the Dems hold on to MN in the case of a Trump landslide, look at what the NPV compact could do to the map.
(NPV states in light red.)
I would expect that if the election starts looking like a blowout, you'll see an awful lot of blue state assemblies scrambling to see who can pull out of the compact the fastest. Failing that, some well-financed moderate Dem or NeverTrumper might just jump in, in an effort to deny Trump a popular majority.
But back to Trump's expanded battlespace. Playing in places like New Jersey and Oregon is quite the longshot, but unlike any other Republican candidate of recent vintage, Trump is willing to try.
That alone makes me really like his chances -- not just of winning, but of winning bigger than many people expect.
Writer Freaks Out Over People Eating Delicious Chick-fil-A: 'They’re Eating Fried Chicken SPITEFULLY!'
A Canadian publication, The Star, has printed an unintentionally hilarious editorial by a very disgruntled LGBTQWTF writer, Andrew Wheeler. Mr. Wheeler is very upset. His outrage and dismay have been caused by your love of delicious chicken from Chick-fil-A. How dare you??? In an essay entitled “Chick-fil-A is ideologically opposed to my existence,” Wheeler rails against the insensitivity of people who love chicken and waffle fries because it hurts his feelings, or something.
This past weekend I saw something that made me unexpectedly queasy; a young woman slurping soda out of a fast food cup.It upset me because it was a Chick-fil-A cup.
Chick-fil-A is an anti-LGBTQ2 organization, not just because the founder publicly opposed same-sex marriage (he believed in a “biblical definition of marriage,” which doesn’t exist), but because company profits are donated to charities that oppress and marginalize queer people, especially queer youth.
I don’t know what LGBTQ2 is, and I don’t want to know. What I do know is that Wheeler here has never read a Bible. If he had bothered to even try, he wouldn’t have had far to go. The definition of marriage is in the very first book, in the second chapter: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24 It’s not hard to discern what this means. What it doesn’t say is what bothers people like Wheeler the most. It does not say “Therefore a man (or non-binary trans-alien furry) shall leave his fathers or mothers and hold fast to the otherkin of his choice.” Now THAT is not in there. Despite that, your personal and deeply held beliefs must change to satisfy this whiny guy.
Luckily for Wheeler, none of us want to force him to read or believe the Bible, like he wants to force us to stop reading and believing it. We just want our chicken sandwiches and diet lemonade without having to wade through screaming protesters. (Although, as he points out, that won’t stop us either.)
LGBTQ2 activists protested Chick-fil-A’s opening on Friday, but people were happy to cross the protest line. Some also tried to tell the protesters that they weren’t bad people. A lady yelled, “You think I’m homophobic? I have gay friends.” One man told me he voted for Trudeau. A smirking guy hiding behind large sunglasses insisted that McDonald’s is just as bad.
I bet it would make Wheeler’s head explode if I told him that I have gay friends... who eat at Chick-fil-A! And they don’t hate themselves, they just love fried chicken. But I will agree with Wheeler that the smirking guy should be arrested. Where does he think he is? A free country? It’s Canada.
Wheeler went on to expose the real goal of Chick-fil-A, which is not to provide excellent and cheerful service with a side of the best dipping sauce on earth, but a dastardly plan to hurt gay children. “Buy a meal from them, and they’ll use your money to increase the suffering of queer kids,” claims Wheeler. There really are people who think that Chick-fil-A executives sit around a smoke-filled board room devising ways to make gay children suffer. This has to be some kind of mental illness. Wheeler continued, “I will not support a company that is ideologically opposed to my existence, and that uses the money spent there to campaign against my existence.” That would be a surprise to the survivors of the Pulse Nightclub in Florida who were met by Chick-fil-A workers handing out free food and bottled water in the aftermath of the shooting. Or the protesters who staged a kiss-in at a Chick-fil-A and were offered free lemonade. It’s almost as if Chick-fil-A wants to serve everyone some of its scrumptious offerings.
But maybe it’s not the company that Wheeler really has a problem with. No. I think it’s you. Your’e an a-hole.
Of course, people are not just going to Chick-fil-A to eat fried chicken. They’re eating fried chicken spitefully. They’re defiantly standing in line with all the other freethinkers because they’ve been asked not to. They know that going to Chick-fil-A hurts queer people, but they’ve never thought much about queer people before and they’re not going to start now. It’s a strange form of identity politics where the identity is “a--hole.” The line to get into Chick-fil-A is the a--hole pride parade.
This is the whole reason why the LGBTQWTF mafia is never going to win over rational people. They want to force you to agree with them on every single issue and they think they’re going to get there by insulting and canceling you. If you don’t celebrate their existence (instead of ignoring the attention-seeking activists) they want you punished, silenced, shut down, shamed, and unable to put food on the table. Wheeler has these inner fears that people hate him and don’t want him to exist and so he acts in a way that makes normal people hate him and not want him to exist. It’s not because he’s gay. It’s because he’s the a-hole who can’t even let people like a chicken restaurant of their choice.
When it comes down to it, there are lots of people who have lots of beliefs that are foreign to us. They’re allowed to have them. And it’s none of my business what those beliefs are. I wish a bunch of people didn’t exist, like communists and those people at the mall who try to put a straightening iron in my hair as I’m walking by. And yes, the LGBTQWTF outrage mob. I wish they didn’t exist, mostly because they are the ones hurting queer kids. They are making it very difficult for the majority of straight people to give a crap about the plight of gay people. Most of us just want them to shut up now and get back in the closet because they're annoying. When you try to shame people for eating chicken, you’re not being a good ambassador for your cause. In fact, this kind of behavior only increases the division between us and reinforces the belief that giving in to any demands by the Lavender Mafia is signing our own death warrant.
