Article by John Dietrich in The American Thinker

 

How Your Government Really Works

Some of the harshest critics of government corruption are thoroughly corrupt – and everyone in the upper reaches of government is complicit due to their silence. 

I spent over 40 years in government service.  I don't consider myself an expert on the subject but after 40 years you cannot avoid acquiring a more than basic knowledge of a subject.  One of the lessons I learned is that knowledge is power.  There are people in government who keep their ears to the ground in order to gain as much knowledge as possible.  I was not one of them, but I could not avoid learning who was sleeping with whom and other supposedly private matters.  An example of this lesson: a coworker of mine walked into a chief's office while he was on the couch with a woman who was not his wife.  I should not have to clarify that they were in a horizontal position.  This coworker was shortly promoted to supervisor and transferred to what I suspect was an ideal location.  Ambitious people pay attention. 

The higher reaches of powerful organizations are composed of ambitious people who are not necessarily competent in the areas they are responsible for, but they are aware of the situations that will advance their careers.  The current situation with the Lincoln Project illustrates this point.  The Lincoln Project claims to be "holding accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans."  That's a pretty noble endeavor.  One of the founders of this group, John Weaver, resigned after charges of sexual harassment which included a 14-year-old boy.  

Imagine a situation where a thoroughly reprehensible individual is an essential member of a team.  The team is working to prevent a disaster that will possibly result in death of millions. Without this individual the team will fail.  However, this individual is a monster, a pedophile, and a possible murderer.  What do you do?  Some people will ignore his behavior.  Others will denounce him and accept the damage this will cause.  It should also be noted that the prospects of whistleblowers are not very good.  By exposing this individual, you are alienating a large number of powerful people who may share his vices.  The Lincoln Project issued a severe condemnation of Weaver, denouncing his "deplorable and predatory behavior."  But this was only after a New York Times report detailed his history.  Perhaps his coworkers were unaware of his activities.  I find that unlikely though.  So, their self-righteous condemnations of President Trump ring hollow.

It is almost impossible for prominent people to conceal their behavior.  The late Senator John McCain's wife Cindy claimed, “Epstein was hiding in plain sight. We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing, but we had no one that was -- no legal aspect that would go after him. They were afraid of him. For whatever reason, they were afraid of him.”  The important part of this statement is: "We all knew about him."  Jeffrey Epstein was prostituting young girls and Cindy McCain knew about it. She did not report it.  What was she afraid of?  Vladimir Bukovsky pointed out one of the problems with exposing people: "The movers and shakers of today have little interest in digging for the truth. Who knows what one may come up with? You may start out with the communists and end up with yourself."

It is not surprising that men behave badly.  Every profession has members exposed as predators. Entertainment has Harvey Weinstein.  The news media has Matt Lauer.  The government has the Congressional Office of Compliance (COC) which supposedly disbursed the ridiculously low sum of $17 million over a twenty-year period to cover sex-related incidents.  Senator Ted Kennedy’s activities included public sex in 1985 and 1987 at La Brasserie restaurant.  Kennedy reportedly had a high-ranking aide who served as "a pimp… whose real position was to procure women for Kennedy."  The late NPR reporter Cokie Roberts claimed, "(Rep. John) Conyers’ predatory behavior was an open secret among the press corps."  She stated, “Don’t get in the elevator with him, you know, and the whole every female in the press corps knew that."  She also stated, "You know they are so used to it.  I mean, the culture of Capitol Hill for so many decades was men being bad.”  

Predatory behavior should be exposed, and the perpetrators should be punished.  However, this has to be done with discretion.  Some charges are fabricated or exaggerated.  There are often attempts to discredit the victims.  Paula Jones was described by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas as "some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks."  Leslie Stahl reported on CBS that John Tower danced naked on a grand piano with his mistress, a Russian ballerina.  Reporters had to go back 30 years in order to find questionable evidence that Judge Roy Moore was a pedophile.  You might have noticed that the individuals with bogus or questionable charges are conservatives.  That may be the case, but all members of the elite are complicit.  When Utah Senator Orrin Hatch -- a conservative Republican -- was asked if he thought Sen. Kennedy had a drinking problem, he responded, "I wouldn't comment on that."  Hatch knew all about Kennedy's behavior but would not even comment on his drinking.

 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/how_your_government_emreallyem_works.html#ixzz6meu9Kh3C

 

 

Don't Forget to Recommend
and Follow us at our

W3P Homepage

Biden’s Domestic War On Terrorism Seeks To Criminalize Political Dissent

Especially in such polarized times, there's cause to be wary 

of threats to our liberties from a national security regime 

with expanded domestic powers.

Ben Weingarten for The Federalist

The Biden administration is planning to use the full force of the federal government in pursuit of a new war. Its target? American citizens.

This countering “domestic violent extremism” effort, declared in the wake of the latest Capitol riot, represents the real-world counterpart to the corporate media rhetoric about the need to “deprogram,” “de-ba’athify,” and drone the Deplorables. 

If this is a dangerous political witch hunt masquerading as a national security imperative, it should disturb every American. Half of the country could potentially be ensnared as would-be if not actual terrorists.

In a little-discussed Jan. 22 press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki asserted “[the] assault on the Capitol … underscored what we have long known: The rise of domestic violent extremism is a serious and growing national security threat.” Consequently, the administration plans a three-part response:

• Developing a comprehensive threat assessment, coordinated with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security on domestic violent extremism.
• Building “National Security Council capability to focus on countering domestic violent extremism,” including conducting “a policy review effort to determine how the government can share information better about this threat, support efforts to prevent radicalization, disrupt violent extremist networks, and more.”
• Coordinating “relevant parts of the federal government to enhance and accelerate efforts to address DVE … an NSC-convened process will focus on addressing evolving threats, radicalization, the role of social media, opportunities to improve information sharing, operational responses, and more.”

In short, the Biden administration plans to turn the institutions and tools used to pursue foreign adversaries on “wrong-thinking” Americans. There are several reasons this is so troubling.

First, it is not clear why such an operation is needed. Contrary to Psaki’s statement, the studies, often conducted by left-leaning organizations, cited by those who claim the threat of non-jihadist “violent extremism” is growing and massive are highly dubious. 

If domestic terrorist groups are proliferating in sufficient, size, strength, and number to merit a robust new government response, on the scale of the Global War on Terror — as some are telegraphing — the authorities have not demonstrated it. The administration’s hyping of such threats, and the conversion of Capitol Hill to a warzone, without specific evidence of danger, should only increase our skepticism. It appears politics is trumping the truth.

One can argue that the rush to declare a war on “domestic violent extremism” is one of several logical conclusions of an effort that goes back to the beginning of the Obama presidency, to fear-monger over the threat of “right-wing extremism” and marginalize non-leftists. The resistance fever dream of Trump-as-Führer with his tens of millions of supporters as Brownshirts was seamlessly incorporated into this information operation.

With Trump toppled, the riot among non-leftists provided the catalyst for completing the total war on the true objects of the ruling class’s ire: dissenting Americans. It has concocted a narrative: There is a growing “insurgency” among “domestic violent extremists.” The riot was their 9/11. Consequently, the threat, highlighted by that despicable act, demands not only its own 9/11 Commission, but a war on domestic extremism, particularly “white supremacist extremists.”

The wall-to-wall coverage of a neophyte congresswoman, the portrayal of capitols across the country as under threat, and the Defense secretary’s call for a 60-day stand-down to root out “extremism” in the military following the disturbing political vetting of National Guard troops summoned to Washington for the inauguration all feed this narrative. 

One can be forgiven for thinking that a war on “domestic violent extremism” represents an extreme jump from a single event that, while inexcusable, pathetic, and disgraceful, thankfully resulted in less bloodshed and infinitely less destruction than what transpired across the country during the summer of 2020 — and preceded a dramatic spike in violence.

That there is nary a word from the Biden administration about pursuing violent members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter in connection with its countering DVE effort is part of a second major disturbing issue: Just as the Biden administration has not clearly defined the need for such a war, it has not clearly defined its targets. While it is not clear who the Biden administration is targeting, the implication again is non-leftists, potentially writ large.

“Violent extremism” is vague and leftists manipulate language. Hence, one man’s terrorist is another man’s “austere religious scholar”; “hate speech” is violence while physical violence is “mostly peaceful”; and concepts like “colorblindness,” “merit,” and even the classics themselves are considered instruments of white supremacy. Given the zeitgeist, readers of this article may well be a suspected violent supremacist by the left’s standards.

The Biden administration is also adhering to such standards. Based on its rhetoric and earliest executive actions — which emphasized “equity” over “equality” — anti-racism, critical race theory, and the associated panoply of woke progressive pillars are de rigueur within the White House. Under the “progressive-or-bigot” paradigm that flows from this worldview, non-progressives of all colors may well be branded “white supremacists,” “right-wing extremists,” and “domestic violent extremists.” 

The third disturbing aspect of the coming domestic war on terror is how it’s poised to threaten our most basic civil rights, beginning with free speech.

Under the new infinitely liberal reading of “incitement to violence,” our political class is calling for Big Tech to further police speech — which is to say, to squelch the First Amendment by proxy. The Biden administration is seemingly on board. Psaki noted the “domestic violent extremism” investigation process would include a National Security Council review of the “role of social media” and promote government “efforts to prevent radicalization.”

It’s also worth noting who is leading this effort, and his political and policy predilections. As Psaki revealed, Joshua Geltzer will be responsible for the “scoping effort.”

During a September 2019 hearing before the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittees on National Security and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the former Obama administration National Security Council official and prolific Trump critic called for adopting a “transnational” approach to countering “violent white supremacy.” This included increased terror organization designations, use of the intelligence capabilities of the “international terrorism”-focused National Counterterrorism Center, and tech companies “policing their platforms to remove not just incitement to violence, but also, the ideological foundations that spawn such violence.”

Geltzer was careful to caveat that creating a “domestic analog to the foreign terrorist organization designation regime” might be unconstitutional and that efforts to counter violent white supremacy “must not be used as an excuse for interfering with the lawful expression of political advocacy.” But it is hard to square these seemingly conflicting statements.

In this charged and hysterical political environment, we should be all the more so concerned about the threats to our liberties, particularly of a national security regime with vastly expanded domestic powers. The first role of government is to protect our lives and liberties. The heavy burden is on our leaders to justify infringements on the latter in service of the former.

Biden Continues To Proclaim Unity While Sowing Division

Democrat politicians don’t want healing, love, or compassion. 

They want power. 

If long-lasting, their reign will ensure America is never united again.

Margot Cleveland writing at The Federalist

On Friday, the president and first lady meandered through a Valentine display Jill Biden designed to decorate the front lawn of the White House. With Champ, Major, and a handful of media lap dogs in tow, the Bidens nodded with approval at the large white, red, and pink heart-shaped cut-outs adorned with trite truisms: “unity,” “healing,” “love,” and “compassion.”

But Democrat politicians don’t want healing, love, or compassion. They want power. If successful and long-lasting, the policies they push, and corporate media and Big Tech’s complicity in the leftward lurch of our country, will ensure America is never united again.

Last week’s photo-op continued the unity theme Democrats have been peddling since their primary season began in 2019. After Biden secured the nomination and ran on a “character counts” platform, the press continued to play along, ignoring both Biden’s scandals and his own bullying behavior.

Biden’s inaugural address proclaimed the unity theme as well, before the president began to divide the nation with the flick of his pen, signing a flurry of executive orders that pitted Americans against each other.

Biden’s reversal of the Mexico City policy was a painful attack on pro-life Americans, forcing them to fund international abortion providers with their tax dollars. Halting the Keystone XL Pipeline promises to decimate many of this country’s blue-collar oil workers. And by discontinuing the border wall and instituting a 100-day freeze on deportations, Biden has pitted border states against the federal government, as southern states fight to safeguard American citizens and their fiscal health. 

Unity does not mean abandoning policy priorities, Biden’s defenders counter. No, it is “more of a change in culture, not splitting the difference on policy plans. . . .The two sides will still wage vigorous battles over ideas, so this argument goes, but they should be debates of good will rather than search-and-destroy operations.” This definition of unity, however, fares no better: Biden and his allies don’t want debate, and they don’t possess goodwill.

Proof of the latter permeated the 2020 campaign, with Biden regularly repeating the lie that then-President Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.” Then, just two weeks before his inauguration, “Biden smeared Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas as Nazis.” And in abolishing the 1776 Commission and reversing Trump’s ban on critical race theory “training,” President Biden further displayed bad faith by branding the former president’s policies as “harmful,” “offensive,” and “counterfactual.”

Our country can survive the lack of goodwill in politics, as except for a faction of extremists, Americans love their neighbors, no matter their political persuasion. What our country cannot survive, however, is a silencing of debate—whether it be at the hands of the government or monopolistic powers aligned with the ruling class.

So great is the need for a full airing of competing ideas to our republic that the Founding Fathers placed the freedom of speech, of the press, and the right to petition the government first among the individual liberties in the Bill of Rights. But what the Constitution forbids the government from doing, corporate America is doing on behalf of Democrats. 

Corporate media began the march to a totalitarian vetting of viewpoints by slanting the news and spinning narratives. What began as a mere bias in reporting, however, became a pure propaganda project when Trump entered the scene, first with the years-long peddling of the Russia-collusion hoax and then with big tech helping bury the Hunter Biden scandal.

Legacy media proved powerless to silence new media outlets and citizen-reporters. And with Twitter, Trump and other conservative politicians bypassed the filter of the press entirely.

But then came the purge. First, they came for Trump, followed by his high-profile supporters. Next, came the shuttering of Parler. On a smaller, but more personal scale, private citizens have seen the same: Support conservative causes, and face ostracization and unemployment.

The silencing of dissent will only get worse, with Big Tech and corporate media emboldened with every success and with the apparent helplessness of the right to respond. And really, what is the response? Antitrust challenges to the monopolistic power exercised by Google and Amazon? Removal of Twitter and Facebook’s legal immunity? Yet without the support of the Biden administration, neither approach has much chance. 

Stifling debate won’t change minds, however. And conservatives will not capitulate. They will either continue to speak in whatever public sphere they can, or they will remain silent publicly, but band together to work, pray, learn, play, and live, free within their enclaves to profess their traditional values.

All the heart-shaped unity placards cannot change that a republic cannot long survive this way.

Coronavirus: Priest providing 'takeaway ashes' for Ash Wednesday

 

A priest in the Republic of Ireland has made "takeaway ashes" available for parishioners to administer at home on Ash Wednesday.

Fr Brian Brady teamed up with a shop in Clonmany, County Donegal, to provide holy ashes in sauce containers.

Covid-19 restrictions in the country means all church services must be conducted online.

Fr Brady told BBC News NI it was vitally important that traditions continued through the pandemic.

"A lot of our parishioners would come every year for their ashes and it's so important that we honour those traditions - even at these most difficult times," he said.

"We really did have to stretch the old imagination on this one though."

'Huge community spirit'

More than 200 containers have already been distributed for the holy day.

The containers are limited to one per household and they also include a prayer.

 

 

Staff at the local Centra have being helping make up the containers, which are usually for sauces.

They have been using burnt palms from Palm Sunday to make up the containers, which have been blessed and left out for collection at the three churches in the parish.

 

 

What is Ash Wednesday?

Ash Wednesday marks the first day of Lent, a season of reflection and preparation before Easter.

Catholics traditionally attend a Mass at which their foreheads are marked with ash in the shape of a cross.

By observing the 40 days of Lent, Christians replicate Jesus Christ's sacrifice and withdrawal into the desert for 40 days.

The period of reflection is marked by fasting, both from food and festivities.

Shop owner Joe Joyce said he could not believe how popular the takeaway ashes have been, and he's also blown away by the amount of media attention they were getting.

Staff have now started working on more containers to help meet the demand, he told BBC News NI. 

 

 

 

"There is a huge community spirit here in Clonmany, and this is just another thing the village has got behind during these tough times," he said.

"Through our local community group, Clonmany Together, people have helped deliver groceries, they've delivered medicines, they've done online bingo and now this.

"It's just another simple gesture that people here wanted to do for others."

The Clonmany parish includes St Mary's in Clonmany, St Michael's in Urris and the Oratory of the Assumption, Ballyliffin.

 

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56074495 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Article by Mike Ford in RedState

 

No We Are Not, “All in This Together” (REDUX)

You see it on TV advertisements and you hear it over the grocery store public address system. “Attention shoppers, please wear your face diaper and treat your fellow shoppers as if they are carrying the Bubonic Plague and could kill you on the spot by merely glancing in your direction.” The announcement continues: “Because after all, we are all in this together.” All in this together. Please!

Some time back, I wrote a piece decrying this absurd notion of equal burden-sharing

We are certainly not all in this together. Government edicts have actually divided us into a nation of Haves and Have Nots.

On one side, we have the folks in “essential” positions, which insulate them somewhat from some of the financial burden. Long haul truckers, grocery store workers, are mostly doing okay. Along with them are people in jobs that allow telecommuting. They are also doing okay…for now.

That’s fine. These great Americans are working and they should get paid…and well.

Then there are the government employees at all levels. They are also continuing to get their paychecks, just like clockwork, little-to-no burden-sharing there.

And incidentally, not a lot of value added. I have some serious issues with that…especially teachers, which we will get into shortly.

Read: Opinion: Haves & Haves Not; We Are NOT All In This Together

Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, has a very interesting piece out regarding IPOTUS Joe Biden. His premise is that Biden’s actions since the inauguration have been herding more and more folks back into President Donald Trump’s corner.

The Washington establishment still can’t comprehend the dynamic which allows former President Donald Trump to withstand constant attacks and media hits without losing his core supporters.

At this point, the key to Trump’s following is President Joe Biden

He continues:

Every time Biden signs another left-wing executive order (supporting tax-funded abortion, effectively eliminating Title IX protection for women’s sports, killing tens of thousands of jobs in pursuit of a radical climate agenda) Trump supporters are reminded they have no alternative.

Read: Joe Biden is Trumpism’s Best Asset

I really like Newt Gingrich. I’ve been privileged to meet him when he came over to the sandbox for a look at our preparations for going North to Baghdad. Not only is he very personable, but he is as smart as a whip. Of course, that is to be expected, as his father was an Infantry Colonel. ‘Nuf said. Anyhow, he is spot-on in his assessment. He also points out something else I’ve been harping on for quite some time. That is, the haughty, condescending, flat out “I’m better than you” aura projected by the left. It’s also easy to see that these (and I use the term very loosely) Americans, just do not value us Cletus Jabronis as equal human beings worthy of any real consideration. To this point, Gingrich provides a helpful link to a Montgomery County, Maryland school system memo sent out in an email to parents. From the memo (emphasis, mine):

MCPS Hiring Classroom Monitors

As we prepare for our return to an in-person learning experience, we anticipate a need for adults to support the supervision of students. If you know any adults with a high school diploma/GED who would be interested in monitoring students at $15.72 per hour, please encourage them to apply to be considered for the position of classroom monitor. Duties include monitoring classrooms for teachers who are providing virtual instruction to students in the building and supporting in-person teachers. Interested individuals need to apply
on https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/careers/ We do anticipate the need for classroom monitors at our school however, we cannot guarantee our site would be the location all interested individuals would be assigned to work.

Read: Weekly Update to Parents Feb 7, 2021

Speaker Gingrich once again, sums up, most eloquently:

Note that the teachers refuse to go back to work in the schools, but it seems safe enough for common, untrained parents to monitor the students in-person.

More of the same divide. One set of rules, work environments, and even personal risk, for the elites. The rubes in flyover country, the bitter clingers, well, they can learn to code — or perform menial labor for a teacher who can’t be bothered to come to work.

You can read more about this attitude in

These United States, a Tale of Two Cities

And

Days of Life Stolen

https://redstate.com/darth641/2021/02/16/opinion-no-we-are-not-all-in-this-together-redux-n327440

Don't Forget to Recommend
and Follow us at our

W3P Homepage

Ignorant Senator Shares New York Times Article Thinking It's Real

Babylon Bee🐝

WASHINGTON, D.C.—A U.S. Senator has made what some are calling "an embarrassing mistake" after he shared a New York Times article on Twitter, apparently unaware that The New York Times is a popular fake news site. 

The New York Times is a well-known publication that started as a newspaper but has switched to satire in recent years. According to sources, the Senator had been misinformed by some political operatives telling him that the newspaper was a "trustworthy source of news." 

"We all need to do our part to fight the spread of misinformation," said the senator in a statement. "I'm embarrassed to say I was tricked by this headline. I thought the article was real. I quickly took the tweet down after learning that The New York Times is a satire site known for spreading hate and lies. I promise to do better in the future."

Congress has called for an inquiry into the spreading of fake news on the internet and has called for social media companies to do more to diminish the presence of fake New York Times articles in users' feeds.

"Satire sites like New York Times, Newsweek, and USA Today are filling the internet with dangerous misinformation, hatred, and bigotry," said one Congressional spokesperson. "We must act now to halt their influence."

McConnell’s Impeachment Ploy Was Not Statesmanship, But An Attack On The Base...

Friday's floor speech was no quick tantrum: It was the last stupid moments of 

the minority leader's plan to purge the GOP of Donald Trump.

Christopher Bedford reporting for The Federalist

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “got a load off his chest” with his speech closing out Friday’s second failed impeachment attempt against former President Donald Trump. “Unfortunately,” however, “he [also] put a load on the back of Republicans. That speech you will see in 2022 campaigns.”

Who’s responsible for that quote? It might surprise some it wasn’t Donald Trump Jr. or Rep. Matt Gaetz — it was Sen. Lindsey Graham, a moderate, hawkish Republican not up for re-election for six whole years. 

“I would imagine if you’re a Republican running in Arizona or Georgia or New Hampshire, where we have a chance to take back the Senate, they may be playing Sen. McConnell’s speech and asking about it as a candidate,” Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.” “And I imagine if you’re an incumbent Republican people will be asking if you’ll support Mitch McConnell in the future.”

McConnell isn’t a man used to public rebukes from the corporate wing of his party, but after the past month’s antics they are rightly deserved. Friday’s floor speech was no quick tantrum: It was the last stupid moments of the minority leader’s plan to purge the GOP of Donald Trump — a plan that began to unravel nearly immediately after its poorly conceived Jan. 12 rollout in the pages of The New York Times.

So what’s all behind this? After four years of yelling “MAGA!” while pushing his own classic, corporate Republican policies, McConnell had hoped to rid himself and his conference of the conservative populist nationalism the former president had championed and go back to the way things were. He wants a return to promising to tackle illegal immigration before winking at corporate America that nothing will change. He wants to raise money on fighting the abortion of our infants while comfortably lifting nary a finger. He wants to shrug and change the subject when asked about men dominating women’s sports and using women’s bathrooms. He wants fewer taxes and more wars. Hell, he wants someone to blame for the Republican losses in the Georgia special election, and with them the loss of his seat at the head of the Senate.

Instead, his push to impeach ended with rebuke from his own conference. Angry and embarrassed, he blamed his own colleagues as well as the former president, performing a 20-minute attack ad for the left to use on Republicans for the next election cycle and beyond. 

Observers might call this stand selfless statesmanship, but a true statesman distinguishes himself from the operative, ideologue, or even philosopher by mediating between the real and ideal, prudently seeking out the possible without regard to his own interests. After five years of Russian and Ukrainian conspiracy theories and loudly cheered mob violence against Americans, Washington Democrats sought to smear the president and his supporters as the sole culprits of our divisions. They’d been hurling these accusations for years, and the terrible mob attack on the Capitol combined with Trump’s refusal to accept a finished-if-deeply-flawed election gave them the sword to make one last, unconstitutional try of it. McConnell tried to swing that sword.

“I think his speech is an outlier regarding how Republicans feel about this, “Graham said Sunday. “…The process they used to impeach this president was an affront to the rule of law… The trial record was a complete joke, hearsay upon hearsay, and… if you use this model I don’t know how [Vice President] Kamala Harris doesn’t get impeached if Republicans take back the House because she actually bailed out rioters and one of the rioters went back to the streets and broke somebody’s head open. So we’ve opened Pandora’s Box here and I’m sad for the country.”

Graham is right. The second impeachment trial was the final act in years of Democrats trying to usurp the former president and isolate and ostracize his supporters. After January’s shocking $8.3 million post-election fundraising haul — driven largely by small gifts averaging $32 a person — the decline of corporate and PAC influence in favor of base voters’ influence is starkly visible. Corporate politicians like McConnell don’t like this shift because it makes them responsible to that base, so this year, instead of trying to lead a changing party, he stamped his approval on Democrats’ attacks on it.

Far from over, as so many in power would prefer, the lines of the populist conservative fight for the Republican Party and the country are more clearly and publicly drawn than ever before. When they eventually take back the Senate as the pendulum of voter anger inevitably swings back against the current Washington rulers, Senate Republicans would do well to remember the opening months of 2021 — and remember Mitch McConnell.

Article by Kevin Cochrane in The American Thinker

 

Urban to rural: The next migration is now!

The "Great Migration" of the early twentieth century had segregation and the racist policies of the South as one of its roots.  The largest human migration, Chunyun — the Spring Festival Season in China — is founded on the idea of visiting one's family.  Today, we are witnessing a historic migration in the United States from metropolitan to rural areas that many view as an escape from rising crime rates, urban decay, or maybe something else.

Before we dig into the current exodus from American cities, we should have a quick peek inside those other historic population movements

Let's start with a second look at the "Great Migration."  Historians bookend it somewhere between 1916 and 1970, when more than six million Black Americans moved from the southern states to northern and western cities.  Putting this in perspective, in 1940 (roughly the midpoint), the U.S. Census pegged the entire Black population of America at around twelve million folks.  That's right: over fifty percent of all Blacks moved out of the South during that 50-year period!

Most say it was to escape Jim Crow and racial prejudice.  But Blacks, once installed at their new addresses in cities like St. Louis, Chicago, and even Omaha, still faced blatant racism, riots, and even the bastion of the unionized left — the AFL — advocating the segregation of Blacks and Whites in the workplace.  Racism is partly a cover story for why they moved.  In reality, they moved for jobs — factory jobs, railroad jobs, warehouse jobs — that paid better than sharecropped agriculture.  The Great Migration was an economic event, not so much a social cause.

Every spring, halfway around the world, the Chinese celebrate by traveling home for a week.  Boarding trains, planes, and automobiles, they crisscross the country by the billions — 3.5 billion at last count.  Yes, it is about having a week's vacation, but even as recent as a decade or so ago, this mass migration was nowhere near this size.  Its growth isn't about a resurgence in family relations; it's about returning home from jobs taken in urban areas and in specialized economic zones.  Because of government limits on relocating, a third of China's entire workforce has escaped rural agriculture for the cities by leaving their families behind to maintain an "official" residence.  It's the Great Migration without really moving, and again, it's about economics.

So much for the history lesson — now let's flip forward to the present time.  We'll call this period "Backwards Land."  People aren't escaping the poverty of subsistence agriculture to live in cities; they're doing exactly the opposite.  The giant concrete jungles of the west, the upper mid-west, and the east are witnessing a new mass migration — people are leaving town!  Is it because of crime?  Is it because of liberal politics?  Is it a bird?  Is it a plane?  Not so fast!  Guess what's causing it.  Shhhh...it's economics.

Actually, it's a special kind of economics we'll call "Tech-nomics."  During the "Industrial Migration" of the late 1800s, people moved to the cities because technology created jobs.  Interchangeable parts, assembly lines, electricity, even communications created millions of opportunities to earn more money than staying on the farm hoeing chard.  People moved from rural areas to urban centers because they were paid more.

Today the reason for the opposite migration is also simple, only this time it's not about income.  It's about costs.  It's too expensive to live in cities, and technology now affords the opportunity for millions to work anywhere.  The urban areas seeing the greatest exodus are mostly those with the highest costs of living.  And perhaps the only upside to the COVID-19 epidemic is the realization by companies that people don't all have to show up daily in the same physical place to be just as productive.

Large firms like Nationwide Insurance, Hitachi, and Novartis are all embracing the idea of remote work.  These giants, along with scores of other companies big and small, are either moving most or all of their workforce online or encouraging voluntary online moves by their employees.  And the employees love it!  A recent Gallup poll found that over three fifths of all workers forced to move online because of the pandemic would prefer to stay that way forever.  More importantly, once freed from the burden of showing up at the office, these workers and their families are hightailing it out of town — migrating to the countryside.

Let's take a look at an example.  People are fleeing the San Francisco area by the tens of thousands.  Once they no longer need to toil away in nondescript cubicle farms, why would they stay in one of the most expensive places on Earth?  Housing, transportation, taxes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera — why not move your employment online and your family to, say, Boise, an emerging "Zoomtown"?

In 2019, the median household income in San Francisco was about $114,500, and the median home price was around $1.4 million.  That's a ratio of almost 11 to 1.  That same year in Idaho, the median income was $60,000, and, according to the Boise Regional Realtors, the median home price was about $360,000 — a 6 to 1 ratio.  And that assumes you retain your same job and same employer but that your salary gets cut by 50%.  True, you may have to take a small pay reduction, but not by half, and yet your housing costs will be cut by almost 400%!

Yes, a few people are fleeing cities to get a simpler, less crime-filled, less polluted life.  Most, however, are leaving because, just like in the 1800s, technology has moved the jobs.  A better quality of life?  Yes.  Lower costs?  Definitely yes!  It's about economics folks, and full disclosure: I wrote and filed this article from my home while eating nachos in my underwear.

 https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/urban_to_rural_the_next_migration_is_now.html#ixzz6mdrsvZDT

 

Don't Forget to Recommend
and Follow us at our

W3P Homepage