Article by C. Douglas Golden in The Western Journal

Trump Declares National Emergency After Scale of Our Dependence on China Comes to Light

If you don’t know what rare-earth minerals are, you’re not alone.

The problem is that if we can’t figure out how to source them from home, the implications for the United States could be dire.

It’s not exactly the sexiest campaign issue, I can understand — and it certainly slipped under the radar when the president signed an executive order Wednesday “to reduce the Nation’s vulnerability to disruptions in the supply of critical minerals.”

The rare-earth minerals are, officially, a group of 17 rare elements critical to U.S. security. While the minerals may be rare, their uses aren’t.

As Defense News reported, the minerals are crucial in the “defense industry’s manufacturing of missiles and munitions, hypersonic weapons, and radiation-hardened electronics — as well as consumer electronics like cellphones. The Trump administration previously identified 35 minerals as both essential and whose supplies are vulnerable to disruption.”

The issue isn’t just that the minerals need to be sourced from abroad. It’s that they need to be sourced from a specific (and problematic) country: China.

“The U.S. imports 80 percent of these elements directly from China, with portions of the remainder indirectly sourced from China through other countries,” Defense News reported Friday.

Last year, as Washington and Beijing sparred over trade, China indicated that rare earth minerals would be a bargaining chip.

The Global Times, one of Beijing’s most-outspoken (and least-grammatical) mouthpieces, made it clear the Chinese Communist Party was willing to hold the minerals hostage if the United States didn’t agree to stop cracking down on controversial Chinese tech giant Huawei.

 “Scaling down rare-earth exports to the US is ‘a smart hit’ against the US crackdown on Huawei and the US-China trade war, Wu Chenhui, an independent rare-earth analyst, told the Global Times on Tuesday,” the May 28, 2019, article read. “The latest move is also seen as China’s retaliation for the US export control of its high technologies to China, and as a strategic material, the export of China’s rare earths has to be adjusted now, analysts said.”

The Xinhua News Agency, usually one of the Beijing’s more restrained propaganda organs, also made it clear in vigorous language the CCP was willing to choke off America’s supply of the minerals.

“Waging a trade war against China, the United States risks losing the supply of materials that are vital to sustaining its technological strength,” a piece published by Xinhua a day later read.

“China produces a majority of the world’s rare earths, chemical elements that have magnetic and luminescent properties and are used in a range of consumer products and electronics.”

With Wednesday’s executive order, the Trump administration aims to change that.

The order states “that our Nation’s undue reliance on critical minerals, in processed or unprocessed form, from foreign adversaries constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.

“In addition, I find that the United States must broadly enhance its mining and processing capacity, including for minerals not identified as critical minerals and not included within the national emergency declared in this order.

“By expanding and strengthening domestic mining and processing capacity today, we guard against the possibility of supply chain disruptions and future attempts by our adversaries or strategic competitors to harm our economy and military readiness.”

The national emergency seeks to create “secure critical minerals supply chains that do not depend on resources or processing from foreign adversaries” and ensure “the United States develops globally competitive, substantial, and resilient domestic commercial supply chain capabilities for critical minerals mining and processing.”

The good news is that this isn’t a matter of China controlling most of the world’s reserves, but rather the CCP manipulating the global market over the long term to eliminate competition.

“In the 1980s, the United States produced more of these elements than any other country in the world, but China used aggressive economic practices to strategically flood the global market for rare earth elements and displace its competitors. Since gaining this advantage, China has exploited its position in the rare earth elements market by coercing industries that rely on these elements to locate their facilities, intellectual property, and technology in China,” the executive order reads.

“For instance, multiple companies were forced to add factory capacity in China after it suspended exports of processed rare earth elements to Japan in 2010, threatening that country’s industrial and defense sectors and disrupting rare earth elements prices worldwide.”

To encourage production within the United States, the order authorizes government grants to subsidize production equipment and suggests tariffs and quotas could be implemented on rare-earth imports from China and other problematic countries.

Unfortunately, tools outside of the regular free market apparatus will likely have to be used.

As Foreign Policy pointed out in a May article, “Given China’s state-mandated dominance of the niche rare-earth industry, it basically controls pricing and ensures that normal economic rules don’t apply. That makes it hard to respond to China’s current dominance by turning to market-based solutions, like urging mining companies to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into big upfront investments that could be rendered uneconomical with a single decision in Beijing.”

Ordinarily, this would be troublesome. Given the importance of rare-earth minerals in consumer tech and defense — as well as Beijing’s willingness to use their dominance in the market as blackmail — this is something a bit more serious.

“Each F-35 fighter, for instance, needs 920 pounds of rare earths; each Virginia-class nuclear submarine requires 9,200 pounds,” Foreign Policy reported. “Tomahawk missiles, guidance systems, and jet engines all need different combinations of alloys and specialized products using some of the 17 different rare-earth elements.”

Establishing these supply chains through incentives hasn’t worked thus far.

A national emergency, however, is a different matter.

Will it spur America’s rare-earth mineral mining capacity from its slumber? That remains to be seen.

 

https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-declares-national-emergency-scale-dependence-china-comes-light/

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Article by Mary Margaret Olohan of the Daily Caller in WND

Biden campaign begins promoting candidate's "religious faith"

Christian leaders criticized 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden for “deceptive ads” highlighting the former vice president’s faith to Catholic and Evangelical voters.

Biden’s campaign is launching a seven-figure ad buy in October targeting religious Americans, Religion News Service reported Thursday, featuring three new ads and two 30-second television spots running on Evangelical and Catholic programs.

“We are running these ads to highlight to faith-motivated voters that Joe Biden is the clear moral choice in this election,” Josh Dickson, the Biden campaign’s faith engagement director, told Religion News Service in a statement. “Religious voters matter to this campaign and are a key part of our broad, diverse, and robust coalition.”

The first ad targets Catholic voters and is called “Principles,” according to Religion News, showing Biden discussing Catholicism with the editor-in-chief of the liberal America Magazine. The second ad, “Morning,” targets Evangelical Christians and discusses how Biden’s faith has helped him deal with the deaths of his wife, daughter, and son. In the third ad, “A Man Guided by Faith” a member of Biden’s parish describing why she believes Biden is a man of faith.

Christian leaders criticized these portrayals of Biden.

“We agree with Joe Biden that there’s a battle for the soul of America,” Concerned Women for America President Penny Nance, an evangelical, said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation, “but unfortunately he’s on the wrong team.”

“Religious voters across America aren’t fooled by Joe Biden’s deceptive ads featuring his Catholic faith,” said CatholicVote President Brian Burch in a statement provided to the DCNF. “Joe Biden has pledged to gut religious schools, strip away fundamental religious freedoms, and for the first time in American history, force taxpayers to directly pay for abortion.”

Burch reminded voters that Biden has promised to to renew legal action against the Little Sisters of the Poor if he should win the election.

“Look no further than the unprecedented assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor that Joe Biden has pledged to restart if elected,” he said. “CatholicVote’s Biden Report for Catholic Voters documents his decades long anti-life and anti-faith record and policy agenda. Both Biden and Harris have made clear they will prioritize the agenda of Bernie Sanders and AOC, and will destroy everything Catholics and all people of faith hold dear.”

The ad buy comes as both Biden and Trump battle for the Catholic and Christian vote in the upcoming election.

President Donald Trump’s campaign emphasizes the work he has done to protect religious liberty and to defend unborn babies throughout his presidency, issues that many religious voters prioritize.

CATHOLICS, President Trump has something to say to you! pic.twitter.com/PY2AMcaBMA

— CatholicVote.org (@CatholicVote) October 2, 2020

 Critics of the president have attacked Donald Trump’s personal faith, particularly after the president walked through Lafayette Square on June 2 and held a bible aloft in his hand as he posed for a photo in front of St. John’s Church. The church was covered in graffiti and charred from fires after nights of violent rioting in the nation’s capitol.

The scene sparked a backlash when journalists and others argued that police used tear gas to clear the president’s path to St. John’s. The city’s curfew was not set to go into effect for another hour, and Daily Caller reporters said the protests in D.C. that night were largely peaceful.

The Biden campaign frequently highlights Biden’s Catholic faith, but the former vice president has drawn criticism for supporting and advocating for policies which the Catholic Church explicitly opposes, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has warned that Catholics in politics “have an obligation in conscience to work toward correcting morally defective laws, lest they be guilty of cooperating in evil and in sinning against the common good.”

Earlier in his career, Biden frequently referenced his faith as a reason for his pro-life votes in the Senate. Biden has since changed his abortion stances and today champions almost unlimited abortion access as a presidential candidate, prompting a priest to deny Holy Communion to Biden during mass at a Catholic church in South Carolina in October 2019.

Biden has also promised that as president, he will reinstate Obama-era policies requiring the Little Sisters of the Poor to give employees access to birth control — though this violates the Catholic religious beliefs of the sisters, and despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled July 8 that the Catholic nuns are exempt from Obama’s contraceptive mandate.

The former vice president also advocates for same-sex marriage, though the Catholic Church teaches that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

 

https://www.wnd.com/2020/10/biden-campaign-begins-promoting-candidates-religious-faith/ 

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Article by Mike Z in RedState

Who Has the Right to Self-Defense?

Here’s a fun game to play. Read through the Bill of Rights and ask yourself which of these today’s left would give you. Speech? Hilarious. Press? Peacable assembly? Religion? Still kidding right? Unreasonable search and seizure? Ask Carter Page. How about a right so basic it didn’t even make the ten? Self-defense.

The media has taken the furor over the killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, intensified by an economic depression and enforced social isolation, and twisted an injustice into a justification for the rise of a new cabal of badgeless, media-approved, uber-Chauvins, effectively deputized by Democratic mayors, and often calling themselves “security.”

The way our rulers see it, the new security apparatus — call it BLM or Antifa, there will be other names — is against injustice, therefore it cannot be unjust. That wouldn’t make sense right? They say they are protesting injustice. They can’t possibly commit an injustice. Bad people do that. If good people assault or kill somebody for wearing the wrong hat or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that person must accept the justice inherent in their violent subjection. In those circumstances, to assert our inalienable personhood would be to subvert social justice.

The new rules are being established systematically and in a hurry, with new precedent-setting test cases playing out in the streets almost daily. Some might think: “The McCloskeys will get off.” Maybe they will. The McCloskeys are lawyers and they have money, but the cases will keep on coming, and the corporate and state media will be there every time, with the richest people in the world behind them, demanding that powerless peons who have asserted their right to live pay a dearer price then death. In the case of public media, they even get to charge you for your un-personing.

A beloved pinnacle of the un-personing project is the new security apparatus prerogative to harass, assault or murder random motorists. I mean, it’s one thing to kill a guy in a MAGA hat but to single out a family with kids in the car and start breaking windows, screeching, pointing guns, like what are you going to do about it? That’s power!

In June, NPR published “Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters.” If you were only to read this article on the subject, you’d have no idea that threatening random passersby, banging on their vehicles, even pointing weapons at them, has become a tactic at NPR-approved “peaceful protests.” There are dozens of videos of such scenes available online. No matter. In NPR-world, the only interaction that has ever occurred between people in cars and “peaceful protesters” is car-wielding extremists deliberately motoring into daisy-holding hippies.

The photo that NPR originally paired with the article showed a peaceful protester being struck by a car, no doubt driven by a crazed white supremacist. Except, video from the scene clearly demonstrated that the driver was a black woman, and that she was escaping a mob who reached into her window to attack her, and pointed a gun at her.

The arrest report for one of her attackers stated that the peacefully assembled, “began to reach into her car… and assaulting her, pulling her hair (pulling out a dreadlock) causing pain to victim.”

NPR chose this photo — of an innocent black woman trying to escape with her life — to demonstrate their point that only white supremacists attempt to escape mobs that attack them in their vehicles, several days after video of what actually happened went public.

NPR did post a non-apology, in which they admitted that they chose the wrong photo, but stood by their thesis that vehicular escape from the right kind of angry mob is always white supremacist, except maybe that once. They chose not to examine any of the other video evidence of mob assaults on hapless drivers, or address what non-white-supremacist people who find themselves in those situations should do.

A couple weeks after the “Vehicle Attacks” piece, 8-year-old Secoriea Turner, her mother and a friend found themselves in just that situation. The driver attempted to maneuver around a barricade manned by men with guns. And, here, at the site of a former Wendy’s, is where the media-approved tactic in which armed peaceful protesters set up makeshift, illegal roadblocks culminated in the inevitable. The vehicle was peacefully shot at least eight times. Secoriea Turner was killed.

The media did briefly acknowledge that maybe Secoriea Turner should have been allowed to live. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms denounced the killing, then appeared on CNN to blame President Trump. The media moved on.

The murder of Secoriea Turner should have been a moment, like the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where the nation stood up and said: WTF? How did this happen? How did “protests” supposedly against racially motivated police violence end up killing an innocent little African-American girl?

The media could have gone on openly cheerleading BLM and Antifa, while at the same time taking a moment to reflect on whether armed roadblocks and harassing random motorists are ethical tactics. Many people who have causes that they care about — that effect them personally, even effect their safety — do not use their cause as a moral rationale for imprisoning random motorists or sticking AK-47s in their faces.

Those people don’t work in mainstream media. Since the CHAZ/CHOP occupation in Seattle, the media have learned to love illegal roadblocks, again as long as the cause is correct.

During the CHAZ summer of love, NPR published a glowing fluff piece denying claims of businesses being extorted as so much white noise from “conservative news oulets.” About a month after Seattle police cleared the encampments (in response to four shootings), the far-right New York Times reported that extortion had taken place.

“Young white men wielding guns would harangue customers as well as Mr. Khan, a gay man of Middle Eastern descent who moved here from Texas so he could more comfortably be out. To get into his coffee shop, he sometimes had to seek the permission of self-appointed armed guards to cross a border they had erected.”

“’They barricaded us all in here,’ Mr. Khan said. ‘And they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.’”

Even without guns, even in the total absence of white supremacists, blocking rights of way can lead to tragic results. In Seattle, a woman was killed and a young black man’s life will be destroyed because he apparently accessed a freeway without knowing that protesters had wielded their white privilege to declare their sole ownership of public property. In their report on the incident, NPR — perhaps in an attempt to influence potential jurors — again repeated the claim that many collisions between drivers and protesters were “suspected attacks by right-wing extremists.”

After the murders within the CHAZ barricades, after Secoriea Turner was killed in a car evading an illegal road block, after the tragic death of Summer Taylor, and destruction of Dawit Kelete’s future on the I-5, maybe it would have been worth asking how much collateral damage is too much to accept as the result of an illegal “protest” tactic.

The corporate/state media can’t do it. To even ask is to question the prerogatives of the new security apparatus. To even ask is to imply that ordinary people have the right to travel unimpeded by the demands of righteous political actors.

One suspect has been charged in the murder of Secoriea Turner, though police are still investigating. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Julian Conley’s attorney, Jackie Patterson, claims that, “Conley told him a man driving [Charmaine Turner’s] SUV went through the barricade and hit a man who was armed with a rifle.”

“And when that person fell to the ground, the person got up and started firing at that vehicle.” Maybe the shooters had heard the NPR report and were terrified that their otherwise peaceful, illegal armed roadblock was under attack by right-wing extremists. And perhaps it was, according to corporate media logic. Because sometimes surviving an encounter with the new security apparatus is an intrinsically white supremacist act.

The only evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse — the 17-year-old charged with murder for defending himself from several attackers in Kenosha — is a white supremacist, is not that he made a Blue Lives Matter post on Facebook, or that he showed up at the site of the riots with a gun. The people who were shooting at Rittenhouse also had guns, and even Facebook accounts. Apparently, what makes Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist is that he liked cops and he was armed for the wrong reason: self-defense. If he did not like cops, and he brought a gun so that he could shoot at whoever he whimsically thought deserved to to die, he would not be labeled a white supremacist.

If Rittenhouse had been a white convicted child molester who decides on the spot which minors in his general vicinity should never reach voting age — like his first attacker Joseph Rosenbaum — he would, again, not be labeled a white supremacist. Rittenhouse is a white supremacist because the child molester that selected him for termination was part of the new security apparatus. He had every right to kill Rittenhouse, cause social justice! So when JoJo determined to burn down the Rittenhouse, ‘House had a duty to meekly submit. He did not. What more evidence of latent white supremacy do you need? Ayanna Pressley, Joe Biden and pretty much the entire establishment media don’t need any at all.

NPR took care to label the volunteer group defending Kenosha homes and businesses from looters as a “militia,” a loaded word which screams “white supremacist!” to their audience. Though two of his attackers were armed, they were not referred to as militia members. The term “militia” does not necessarily apply to armed groups, silly(!), only to people who deserve to die! Especially those who repugnantly refuse their attackers’ righteous attempt to give them their due.

You don’t have to join a “militia” or even leave the vicinity of your own personal home or business for your continued existence to suddenly become a white supremacist act. Marine veteran and Omaha bar owner Jake Gardner stepped into the street to defend his business after the windows were peacefully smashed. He and his father were peacefully attacked. He fired off two warning shots, and was peacefully attacked again before asserting his white supremacist wish to keep breathing by shooting his second attacker.

Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine recognized that Gardner acted in self-defense, but impaneled a grand jury under pressure from local activists. Special prosecutor Frederick D. Franklin has since revealed the shocking truth that Gardner reputedly told people, before his survival crime, that he would defend his business and person, despite the fact that he had no right to defend either, should the mob require them! The grand jury indicted Gardner on manslaughter and other charges, but he committed suicide rather than turn himself in — a shocking double denial of new security apparatus demands. First, he refused to take his lumps when the new police were rioting against the old police. So the new police turned to the old police that should not exist to arrest him for his crime of not surrendering his existence. Then he foiled them again, arranging nonexistence on his own terms rather than accepting his rightful punishment for his initial intransigence!

NPR remembered Gardner as a “white Omaha, Neb., bar owner who was recently indicted for his role in the fatal shooting of a young Black man.” The same story did not mention that his business was under siege or that his father was attacked. “At one point,” the story says, “the white [in case you forgot] bar owner fired what the county attorney later described as two ‘warning shots.'” No mention that the “one point” was the first of the two points at which he was physically attacked, on video, by members of a group that outnumbered him, outside his business, which was under attack.

Who, we have no right to ask, outside the new security apparatus has the right to self-defense? The media did feel compelled to condemn (then quickly forget about) the murder of an innocent black child whose guardians tried to evade the NSA’s, but no compulsion to question their own continued cheerleading for armed illegal roadblocks and attacks on random motorists. The killers will probably skate.

A seventeen-year-old might spend his life in jail because he tried to survive a child molester and assorted other NSA’s who tried to kill him. A combat veteran dared to defend his business and his life, and was consequently hounded into taking his own life.

People have a self-preservation instinct. Americans have crazy ideas about inalienable rights. The new security apparatus has a raging desire to override our stupid instincts and our stupid rights, and all of the power of the corporate/state media, Big Tech, and the majority of state and federal government behind them. Who in America has the right to self-defense? We’re finding out aren’t we? Just watch the news.

 

https://www.redstate.com/diary/mike-z/2020/10/02/who-has-the-right-to-self-defense/

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10 Major DC ‘Consensus’ Lies President Trump Has Shattered Forever

J.B. Shurk reporting for The Federalist

President Donald Trump has shattered many things over the past four years, and many of them for the better, especially within Washington DC. Even the fact that a real estate mogul and government outsider swept the Republican primary then defeated his establishment Democrat opponent represents quite a political shakeup.

With every major social institution cutting against conservative values and the media waging a slanderous anti-Trump campaign since 2016, exposing falsehoods has also become a theme of this administration. Here’s 10 Washington lies Trump has shattered.

1. The Press Does Not Choose Sides

The Trump era has exposed the press for what it is: an army of propagandists and saboteurs advancing narratives designed by Deep State Democrats.

Holy crap. This is crazy to watch. I've noticed this for years and have commented on it publicly, but the actual words that Trump or his administration speak and their actions do not seem to have any influence at all on the narrative, the questions, the stories. https://t.co/d9Qsop4nY4

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 1, 2020

Hillary Clinton did collude with Russian agents. President Barack Obama did spy on the Trump campaign and transition team. Former CIA Director John Brennan did manipulate intelligence to remove evidence that Russia backed Clinton. James Comey did use the fraudulent Steele dossier to secure FISA warrants. Joe Biden did use political leverage on Ukraine to drop a criminal investigation into his son. A Chinese spy did chauffeur Sen. Dianne Feinstein for 20 years. And Biden’s family did take millions of dollars from the Chinese government.

These facts have been ignored by a mainstream media too busy using anonymous sources to advance one lie after the next in order to damage an American president they despise. With few exceptions, reporters are political operatives, and finally, a Republican leader has called them out for it.

2. There Is No Deep State

With the release of FBI agent William Barnett’s 302 interview describing the prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn by the special counsel’s office as nothing but a means to “get TRUMP,” the evidence of vast misconduct by members of the federal government to orchestrate the removal of a legitimately elected president is undeniable.

Obama’s administration illegally unmasked and leaked the surveilled communications of Flynn and other Trump associates. Comey targeted the president in private meetings while pretending otherwise. Andrew Weissmann used the Special Counsel’s Office to protect Democrats’ “Russian collusion” narrative while attempting to entrap the president for obstruction of justice.

Eric Ciaramella and Alex Vindman appear to have used their national security positions to turn a Biden Ukraine scandal into a Trump impeachment. While prosecutors and judges have harassed Trump associates for four years, Americans continue to wait for the conclusion of John Durham’s investigation into this Deep State-attempted coup. There is no longer any doubt that a two-tiered system of justice exists, one for hunting Republicans and one for protecting Democrats.

3. Democrats Own Black and Hispanic Votes

Establishment Republicans predicted that Trump’s candidacy would destroy inroads with black and Hispanic voters for generations. Instead, the president has increased Republican support from both communities. Trump has proved that protecting legal immigrants, providing the conditions for robust economic growth on Main Street, and treating all Americans equally and without condescension — rather than as members of special racial classes — is a formula for success.

Democrats have taken black and Hispanic voters for granted for 60 years. Biden insists that voting for Trump proves “you ain’t black.” Americans of all colors and creeds are waking up to the reality that Democrats have used them for their votes and given them nothing in return.

4. MeToo Is About Protecting Women and Children

Who is Tara Reade? If she had accused a Republican of sexual assault, she would be well known. Because she alleges that Biden attacked her, she has disappeared from the MeToo movement, just as Democrats have ignored Juanita Broaddrick’s allegation of rape against Bill Clinton for decades.

The Me Too movement has little time for big-dog Democrat donor Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent sexual trafficking of young girls or the numerous Democrats, including Bill Clinton, connected to the “Lolita Express.” The movement does not care about Democrat donor Ed Buck, who is accused of injecting young black male prostitutes with methamphetamines before sexually assaulting them, leading to the deaths of two of his victims.

The MeToo movement imagines Republican crimes everywhere, while burying documented crimes by Democrats faster than Sen. Bob Menendez can allegedly engage in underage prostitution in the Dominican Republic and get back to New Jersey.

5. Climate Change Alarmism Isn’t About Raw Power

Carbon dioxide emissions in the United States have fallen more than in any other country in the world since 2000, as America has adopted clean coal technology and transitioned toward natural gas for electricity generation. The free market and energy innovation, not international governance, have accomplished this feat.

Regardless, climate change alarmists continue to insist that only a United States shackled by the Paris agreement will save the planet from a temperature increase of less than one degree Celcius over the next century while ignoring China’s role as the No. 1 polluter in the world. This is, of course, due to Democrats’ desire to control more and more of American life, including through outlandish policy proposals like the Green New Deal.

6. Free Trade Requires Wrecking U.S. Manufacturing and Enriching China

Until Trump ran for president, few on the national stage questioned why fidelity to free trade required American towns throughout the Midwest to be sacrificed, so Wall Street companies could use slavery by proxy in China to slash labor costs. Few American leaders looked at those destroyed Midwestern towns and wondered if aiding and abetting illegal immigration across the southern border might be adding insult to injury.

Most of Washington looked the other way while Middle America suffered more than at any time since the Great Depression. Most of Washington laughed when these Americans asked for good manufacturing jobs to come home.

Trump didn’t laugh. He immediately understood that Americans had been abandoned so Wall Street and Washington insiders could make fortunes on the greatest intercontinental transfer of wealth in the history of the world. Trump asked Washington why America shouldn’t have the best blue-collar workforce on the planet, and nobody had an answer.

7. Defending Unborn Babies Is a Losing Political Issue

Trump is the first sitting president to speak at the annual March for Life rally in Washington. His presidency has unapologetically defended the lives of unborn Americans, and more voters are recognizing the fight for life as the most important civil rights issue in America today. During his tenure, Trump has appointed numerous judges who will uphold the constitutional right to life, and the pro-life movement was a feature of the Republican National Convention in August.

8. Judges Are Nonpartisan

Federal judges have overturned Trump’s legal orders at a faster rate than during any other presidency. While Obama somehow had the power to legislate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals into existence, Trump somehow lacks the same power to undo Obama’s overreach.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has gone to great lengths to argue that there are no “Obama judges” or “Bush judges,” but after watching Judge Emmet Sullivan’s persecution of Flynn, Americans know too many judges have become political operatives and too few still adhere to the Constitution as written.

9. Democrats Aren’t Purging History or the Constitution

When some Republicans joined with Democrats to tear down Confederate flags and monuments, Trump warned that the emotional purge was just the camel’s nose under the tent. Since then, the “1619 Project” has rewritten American history, Antifa and the Black Lives Matter organization have targeted statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson for destruction, and Democrats openly call for Congress and the courts to ignore the Constitution. The political left’s “Cultural Revolution” against America is in high gear now, and it is not going away.

10. The Obama Administration Was Scandal-Free

Obama’s deliberate sabotaging of the peaceful transfer of power by orchestrating a “Russia collusion” hoax that nearly took down his successor is one of the most egregious political scandals in American history. His administration’s efforts to use a cabal of high-ranking intelligence and law enforcement officers to conduct a disinformation campaign designed to implicate a sitting president as an agent of a hostile country can be described as nothing less than an attempted coup.

Along with “Fast and Furious,” the IRS targeting of conservatives, the cover-up of the administration’s culpability in Benghazi, the use of consent settlements to coerce companies to underwrite Democrat slush funds, and the Department of Justice’s cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s unsecured email server and pay-to-play schemes through the Clinton Foundation, the Russia hoax secures Obama’s legacy as a singularly corrupt American president.

Two NATO Allies Are Gearing Up For A Major Brawl

If the news of Turkish intervention on behalf of Azerbaijan is true, then Turkey just raised the stakes against France, and Europeans have a choice to make.

posted by Sumantra Maitra at The Federalist

As Americans were transfixed on a bitterly rancorous spectacle over the future of their constitutional republic, the nations of Armenia and Azerbaijan entered the third day in what could be described as open war without any official declaration. The historic faultline between traditional European Christendom and Ottoman frontiers once again erupted with bloodshed on both sides, and older great powers slowly beginning to take sides.

France and Russia have, thus far, broadly backed Armenia. Turkey, however, is sending supplies and soldiers to assist Azerbaijan and, according to Armenian officials, has downed an Armenian jet.

The region of Nagorno-Karabakh is a “frozen conflict.” Once part of the general sphere of influence for Orthodox Christianity, it then passed hands under the Ottoman Khanates. Historically, Russia has been an ally of the Christian Armenians, and Ottomans consider Azeris as kindred sharing the same bloodline.

During the time of the Soviet Empire, both Armenia and Azerbaijan were part of the USSR, and even though Nagorno-Karabakh was part of Azerbaijan geographically, it was settled by Christian Armenians. Following the Soviet collapse, the region formed a breakaway province Azerbaijan has vowed to reconquer.

Last week, Armenia accused the Azeris of a massive air and ground attack to reconquer the region. The risk here was that it would spill open to a major war, as Turkey has all but declared official support for Azerbaijan against Armenia, echoing shadows of Armenian massacres during and after the first world war, by Turkey.

Armenia argues Turkey has already officially joined the conflict, a claim yet unconfirmed by official western media. Armenia further claims that Turkey has used F-16s on Armenian airspace and, more importantly, shot down an Armenian jet, killing the pilot. Both Turkey and Azerbaijan have claimed that to be false.

#Azerbaijan handed over the air command of offensive ops against the #Artsakh to the Turkish Air Forces. 2 Turkish AF F-16 jets, #Az. SU-25s, Bayraktars carried out attacks at high altitudes in the direction of settlements of Hadrut and Martuni regions of the Artsakh Rep. 1/3

— Shushan Stepanyan (@ShStepanyan) September 30, 2020

Adding to the dispute is the claim that Turkey is sending its battle-hardened Islamist rebel proxies from Syria to fight on the side of the Azeris. Indeed, according to some early reports, those same rebels, who were ready to topple Syria’s Bashar Assad and were backed by Al Nusra as well as the Turkish government, are now flocking to Azerbaijan in their jihad against Armenia.

As is the pattern, the Armenian government alleges that up to 5,000 Syrian militiamen are already in Azerbaijan, a claim denied by Turkey and Azerbaijan as nonsense. Social media, however, paints a different picture, and has shown dead and captured Syrians being treated among Azeri forces.

There is, critically, another broader aspect of this conflict. As I wrote more than a month ago, much of the future of Europe is shaping up to be decided in a conflict between France and Turkey. Consequently, this is a chance for Washington to pass the buck to Paris.

For the last six months, France has been posturing as a great power ready to take the mantle of European security in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, Lebanon, Libya, and yes, Armenia. In an effort to balance Turkish expansionism, France has been sending warships and promising financial and military aid. Addressing the issue, French President Macron recently proclaimed:

France remains extremely concerned by the warlike messages Turkey had in the last hours, which essentially remove any of Azerbaijan’s inhibitions in reconquering Nagorno-Karabakh. And that we won’t accept.

It appears Turkey has now called this bluff. As always, effective deterrence depends on the credible threat to act and escalate.

France has been aligning with Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt against Turkey, but it remains unclear if Paris truly has the will or capability to join a conflict to balance Turkey if push comes to shove. It should probably figure out how far actions and tangible measures will accompany its words and symbolism, because Turkey has no intention of stopping its expansionism from Libya to the Mediterranean.

While there may be a temptation in both Washington and London to view this new conflict from the prism of the last cold war — Russian-backed Armenians seemingly fighting against a North Atlantic Treaty Organization-Turkey-backed Azerbaijan — that would be a flawed analysis.

What we essentially have here is a new frontline between two NATO partner countries and historic great powers, France and Turkey. If the news of Turkish intervention on behalf of Azerbaijan is true, then Turkey just raised the stakes against France. This is a security issue for Europe and Europeans to solve themselves, as they face a Turkey which is far more vengeful than former foes in Russia.

Instead of being baby-fed and protected by the United Kingdom and the United States, Europe needs to make a choice. In this burgeoning conflict, it’s time for Washington and London to prudently let France and Europe take the lead.

The Democrats’ Leftward Lurch Is Sinking Joe Biden In Florida

Democrats' enthusiastic embrace of the radical socialist reforms faithfully implemented in the very regimes Florida Hispanics fled are tanking Joe Biden in the critical battleground state.

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist

MIAMI, Fla. — Democrats are facing a problem in Florida.

In a must-win battleground with 29 electoral votes up for grabs, the critical swing state President Trump flipped by a razor-thin margin four years ago has remained the epicenter of the southern campaigns. California Sen. Kamala Harris made Florida her first stop as Joe Biden’s running mate, and Trump came to the state twice last month. Ivanka Trump visited as well. Biden even made an appearance in Florida, marking one of the few rare occasions the 77-year-old didn’t call a morning “lid” canceling that day’s campaign schedule.

There’s no path to the White House for Trump without Florida. The president can hold on to two of the three Midwestern “blue wall” battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, but would still lose the White House without the Sunshine State.

However, recent polling suggests that Democrats are having a tough time in this key southern state, where an unexpected group of voters is fleeing the Democratic Party. Hispanics, a once-reliable voting bloc for Democrats, appear to be breaking for Trump in growing numbers. Trump is expected to capture 36 percent of the Hispanic vote in November, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll conducted shortly after the party conventions. While that’s far from a majority, it’s also far higher than the president’s overperformance among this group in 2016, when the president took 29 percent of the Hispanic vote. That was better than Mitt Romney’s 27 percent in 2012 but short of John McCain’s 31 percent in 2008.

Zoom into Florida today, though, and Trump is winning among Hispanic voters 50 percent to Biden’s 46 percent, according to a recent NBC/Marist survey out last month.

An even closer look at Miami-Dade County shows where the problem lies. A Democratic stronghold carried by Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016, Biden leads there by 17 just percent. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 70 percent of the county is Hispanic.

There’s a reason former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg just rolled out a $40 million ad blitz to run in all 10 media markets of the Sunshine State this week, nearly half of the $100 million the former presidential candidate and New York mayor has pledged to spend on Biden’s behalf. It’s because Biden is losing.

While there’s a litany of reasons Democrats’ grip on Florida’s Hispanic voters appears to be slipping, it’s the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left that’s mostly to blame.

Horrors of Socialism Fresh Among Florida Hispanics

While the first post-revolutionary wave of Cuban migrants to the United States came several decades ago, memories of the atrocities under Fidel Castro’s communist regime remain fresh in the minds of Cuban emigres and their descendants in South Florida.

Now, some Cuban-Americans are experiencing a moment of deja vu, seeing the Democratic Party enthusiastically embrace similar socialist rhetoric and policies faithfully implemented in the very society they fled.

Irena Vilarino, a small business owner whose family owns a dozen Miami-area restaurants, is one of them. Vilarino came to the states when she was four years old, and her family first settled in West Palm Beach in 1980. The family started out selling fruit and eventually worked their way up, like many other new immigrants, purchasing their own restaurant four years later.

Today, Vilarino operates several Miami establishments with her siblings and ran for the Republican nomination in Florida’s 26th congressional district this year. Vilarino says the president who has categorically condemned the communist regimes raging across Latin America and re-introduced sanctions on Cuba has successfully tapped into the South Florida experience. His message powerfully resonates among the region’s Hispanic voters.

“When you see yourself forced to emigrate, you never lose that sense of loss,” Vilarino told me over lunch in one of her restaurants as she teared up. “You carry that with you forever… It’s a little indescribable… This is my home, but you always feel that sense of displacement.”

It’s not just Cuban-Americans who are anxious over the Democratic Party’s embrace of socialism, with promises of taxpayer-provided health care and a radical expansion of the welfare state while enthusiastically endorsing draconian lockdowns in the name of public safety. The situation in some Latin American countries has only worsened over the last decade. The decline of socialist Venezuela, for example, has become perhaps irreversible, with consequences rippling across the region.

That’s a key distinction between McCain’s support and Trump’s, Vilarino said. A recent second wave of socialist devastation under authoritarian regimes is re-traumatizing Latin American voters, many of whom see the Democratic Party using the same rhetoric deployed in their home countries.

“What happens with leftist regimes is they normalize what is not normal,” Vilarino said. “They normalize cheating, they normalize lying, they normalize stealing, they normalize envy, they normalize division.”

Black Lives Matter, But Do Hispanic Lives?

The Democratic Party has in large part become an extension of the Black Lives Matter movement, for which Biden has promised to be a vehicle. That’s a problem for many of Florida’s Hispanic voters, Miami-area Republican strategist Dave Reaboi tells me. The left’s obsession with identity politics is driving division, pushing away Hispanics who see themselves more as Cuban-Americans or Colombian-Americans, or even just Americans.

“Some Hispanics may see the Democrats’ explicit appeals to racial tribalism as alienating, necessarily pitting Hispanics against African-Americans,” Reaboi said.

The left-wing woketopians now running the Democratic Party are running on the logic that all minorities are against the white “cis” majority, victims of wealthy oppression in a systemically racist society, when in fact many Hispanic voters have become very successful within a generation or two of arriving in the United States, embodying the American dream.

Through their blanket demands for reparations and the destruction of free enterprise, the Black Lives Matter movement has tried to include Hispanics in its narrative that the United States was founded on slavery and oppression, even though many Hispanics have arrived in the United States long past slavery and even Jim Crow, and have had a very different experience than black Americans.

Hispanics in South Florida, who have risen from abject poverty to prosperity, have also actually lived through real oppression.

Attacking Law Enforcement Means Attacking Hispanics

More than half of the sworn officers serving in the Miami Police Department are Hispanic, according to the latest public data. That means every time a police officer gets attacked, there’s a good chance the victim is either Hispanic or possesses a significant personal connection with the Hispanic community.

The left’s glorification of thuggery, amplifying historic animosity towards police in the name of social justice, has only further alienated Hispanic voters. John Cardillo, a law enforcement analyst with strong ties to the south Florida law enforcement community and a former police officer, began his career with the Miami Police Department. Cardillo said he’d be hard-pressed to find an institution more integrated with the community then the police. He says he saw more interracial marriages among police than anywhere else, tying the Hispanic population that much closer to local law enforcement.

So when “Democrats [are] refusing to acknowledge that Antifa is a real thing,” Cardillo said, referencing the domestic terrorist group targeting police, it only pushes Hispanics away.

Latinx Is ‘An Absolute Insult’

An August study from the Pew Research Center shows just one in four Hispanics has ever heard of the term “Latinx,” the politically correct alternative to “Hispanic” or “Latino.” Further, only 3 percent use it.

But the absence of the phrase’s use among Hispanics hasn’t stopped Democrats and their allies in the media from imposing the term on them. Biden uses it, NPR uses it, BuzzFeed uses it, Vox uses it.

It’s the type of passive pointless progressivism that infantilizes Hispanic voters, and it’s increasingly common in the Democratic Party. Cardillo says it only frustrates Hispanic voters, who see it as self-serving rhetoric from condescending politicians.

“I think it’s an absolute insult,” 28-year-old Anthuan Rubbio told me in the parking lot of a local brewery. “It’s ridiculous. It’s Latina, Latino, Latinas, Latinos. Like, that’s what it is.”

Rubbio said he’s frustrated with the victimhood mindset the left has imposed on Hispanics consistent with the soft bigotry of low expectations, a common grievance among south Florida Hispanics. Cardillo emphasized that’s partly why Trump has resonated with Hispanic voters. The president speaks to them as equals, he says, not a group that requires special assistance.

“No Latin wants an X next to their name, it just sounds dirty,” Vilarino said with a chuckle before making a serious point about the message it sends when Democrats lump Hispanics together as a special-needs group:

This is one of the things that you lose. You lose your identity. For instance, a person from New York is very different than a person from Texas, right? Yet, they’re both American, right? But they’re different cultures. So a person from Mexico is very different than a Cuban, which is very different from a Colombian, who is very different from an Argentine. And yet here we’re all lumped together. But it’s bad enough that we’re lumped together, you know? And the good thing about that, you know, here, we become one as a culture. As a Hispanic, Latin culture. But now they want to put an X next to our name. We don’t want it. Tell them to save it.

Democrats are on track to lose the Hispanic vote in Florida and therefore the state, pending no change in the party’s anti-police platform and proposals to form the same society many Hispanics and their families have just fled.