An interesting article within Reuterspoints out how the Democrats in congress are working with the White House to craft legislation to make “social media companies accountable for the spread of disinformation.” Or put another way…. The Democrats are attempting to eliminate any ability of those who disagree with them; or worse yet, would outline their corrupt endeavors.
Ultimately this level of control is a reaction to fear. So the logical question is: what exactly are they fearful of? Perhaps the answer is in alignment with the reason Democrats have surrounded the capital with military guards, fence and barbed-wire.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Congressional Democrats have begun discussions with the White House on ways to crack down on Big Tech including making social media companies accountable for the spread of disinformation on matters such as the U.S. Capitol riot and addressing the abuse of market power to harm corporate rivals.
The conversations, described by a lawmaker and congressional aides, have included the contentious topic of what to do with a measure called Section 230, part of a 1996 law called the Communications Decency Act, that shields social media platforms from lawsuits over much of the content posted by users. (read more)
Remember, with Democrats there’s always an aspect to their schemes that is never covered by media. To quote Jonathan Gruber: “we rely upon the supidity of the American voter.”
As Joe Biden signed a major emergency disaster declaration for Texas,
he explained he would make a decision on whether to visit the state
next week. On Friday, Biden said he spoke with Gov. Greg Abbott
(R-Texas) and they discussed what exactly the state needed to address
the weather and utility crisis.
He added he would ask FEMA to speed up the paperwork so he could sign
it as soon as possible, but Biden hedged on whether he would visit
Texas to assess the situation first hand.
“It depends. The answer is yes. The question is, I had planned on
being in Texas the middle of next week, but what I don’t want to be is a
burden,” Biden stated.
“When the president lands in any city in America, it creates, it has a
long tail, and they’re working like the devil to take care of their
folks. If, in fact, it’s concluded that I can do it without creating a
burden for the folks on the ground while they’re dealing with this
crisis, I plan on going.”
His unclear response drew criticism, with some pointing to trips President Trump took to states hit hard by natural disasters.
An ungracious and neurotic elite whose judgment is bankrupt and whose privilege is paid for by those who don’t have it threatens to drag us to the depths of unreason.
These are crazy times. A pandemic led to national quarantine, to self-induced recession, to riot, arson, and looting, to a contested election, and to a riot at the Capitol.
In response, are we focusing solely on upping the daily vaccination rate?
Getting the country back to work? Opening the schools as the virus attenuates? Ensuring safety in the streets?
Or are we descending into a sort of madness?
It might have been understandable that trillions of dollars had to be borrowed to keep a suffocating economy breathing.
But it makes little sense to keep borrowing $2 trillion a year to prime an economy now set to roar back with herd-like immunity on the horizon.
Trillions of dollars in stimulus are already priming the economy.
Cabin-feverish Americans are poised to get out of their homes to travel, eat out, and socialize as never before.
Meanwhile, the United States will have to start paying down $30 trillion in debt. But we seem more fixated on raising rather than reducing that astronomical obligation.
We are told man-made, worldwide climate change—as in the now discarded term “global warming”—can best be addressed by massive dislocations in the U.S. economy.
The Biden Administration plans to shut down coal plants. It will halt even nearly completed new gas and oil pipelines. It cuts back on fracking to embrace the multitrillion-dollar “Green New Deal.”
Americans should pause and examine the utter disaster that unfolded recently in Texas and its environs.
Parts of the American southwest were covered in ice and snow for days. Nighttime temperatures crashed to near zero in some places.
The state, under pressure, had been transitioning from its near limitless and cheap reservoirs of natural gas and other fossil fuels to generating power through wind and solar.
But what happens to millions of Texans when wind turbines freeze up while storm clouds extinguish solar power?
We are witnessing the answer in oil-and-gas rich, but energy-poor Texas that is all but shut down.
Millions are shivering without electricity and affordable heating. Some may die or become ill by this self-induced disaster—one fueled by man-made ideological rigidity.
Texas’ use of natural gas in power generation has helped the United States to curb carbon emissions. Ignoring it for unreliable wind and solar alternatives was bound to have catastrophic consequences whenever a politically incorrect nature did not follow the global warming script.
In 2019, a special counsel wrapped up a 22-month, $35 million investigation into President Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Russia in the 2016 election. Robert Mueller and his team searched long and hard for a crime and came up empty.
Then Trump in December 2019 was impeached and acquitted in the Senate in early 2020. His purported crime was warning the Ukrainians about the Biden family’s quid pro quo racketeering.
After the revelations concerning Hunter Biden’s shenanigans not only in Ukraine but also in Kazakhstan and China, Trump’s admonitions now seem prescient rather than impeachable.
Trump had been threatened with removal from office under the 25th Amendment. He was accused variously of violating the Logan Act and the Constitution’s emoluments clause. His executive orders were often declared unconstitutional if not seditionary.
All these oppositional measures predictably failed to receive either public or even congressional support.
Finally, an exasperated Left decided to flog the presidential corpse of a now private citizen Trump.
It did so without a constitutionally mandated chief justice to oversee an impeachment trial in the Senate. The targeted president was no longer president.
There was no special prosecutor, little debate, and even less cross-examination. In the end, the second impeachment was sillier than the first. But, like the first, the show trial also wasted precious time and resources in the midst of a pandemic.
But the height of our collective madness is the current cancel culture. Its subtexts are “unearned white privilege” and “white supremacy.”
In the name of those supposed abominations, mobs tear down statues, destroy careers, censor speech, require veritable oaths, and conduct reeducation training.
Stranger still, those alleging “white privilege” are usually themselves quite wealthy, liberal—and white. These elites count on their incestuous networking, silver-spoon upbringings, and their tony degrees to leverage status, influence and money—in a way undreamed of by the white working class.
Quite affluent and privileged minorities likewise join the chorus to call for everything from reparations to “reprogramming” Trump voters.
The most elite in America are the most likely to damn the privilege of those who lack it. Perhaps this illogic squares the psychological circle of feeling guilty about what they never have any intention of giving up.
If blaming those without advantages does not satisfy the unhappy liberal elite, then there is always warring against the mute dead: changing their eponymous names, destroying their statues, slandering their memories, and denying their achievements.
The common denominator with all these absurdities? An ungracious and neurotic elite whose judgment is bankrupt and whose privilege is paid for by those who don’t have it.
Repairing free speech is the No. 1 priority in this nation right now.
Here’s a sad truth we now have to live with.
The America we know, the America we grew up with, the America we had until a year or less ago, is gone.
The Constitution of the United States of America, the “greatest
document ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man at any one
time,” as Gladstone called it, lies in ruins.
Among many other catastrophes, we have lost freedom of speech. This just happened within the last few weeks.
The president of the United States was denied the right to use the
internet to communicate with the citizens of the United States. That’s
because the internet is basically owned by a few private companies such
as Google, Amazon, and some others. These entities shut down access by
the president in his final days in office such that he could not be
heard.
The Bill of Rights of the Constitution explicitly calls for the government to not
interfere with free speech. But the gigantic internet powers are not
deemed to be part of government — even though they have virtually
god-like powers over communication, far beyond what the government has
right now. Thus, it is widely believed that the First Amendment does not
deal with internet freedom of speech issues.
Obviously, there is something deeply wrong with this situation. To
deny the chief executive the ability to communicate with the citizenry
is a display that the real powers in America are not elected by the
people. They get their power through entrepreneurship, stock market
manipulation, and other business means.
At the end of the day, the First Amendment is meaningless at this moment.
This has to be fixed. Repairing free speech is the No. 1 priority in this nation right now.
Meaningful debate and discussion about any of the major or minor
issues of the day is impossible without free speech. Yes, the
environment is a huge issue. So is the budget. So is aid for the poor.
So is defense, and so on and so on. But nothing useful can come of
debating these subjects if there is no freedom of speech, and if only
the point of view of the internet potentates is heard.
How do we solve this problem if it is “clear” that the internet
powers are private and the First Amendment applies only to restrain
government?
Here we have to go to the doctrine of Legal Realism, developed first
at Yale Law School (my beloved alma mater), and refined beautifully at
Harvard Law School, Columbia, and at many other places.
Legal Realism says (in a nutshell) that the law is whatever the
courts say it is. Precedent means nothing. Statutes mean nothing. The
judges make the rules depending on how they are feeling that day. They
then find earlier cases that support whatever they have decided that
day.
Remember, for a case or controversy to reach a high court, there must
be lines of cases on both sides of the issue. Otherwise the appeals
court would not bother to hear the case.
We who love and revere the Constitution must now use Legal Realism to
the fullest. We must find cases that — even tangentially — say that if
an entity governs speech, it’s part of the government. And then the
First Amendment barring a disruption of freedom of speech will apply to
Google and Amazon and all other large internet hook-ups.
Looking for a case that defines “government” broadly enough to
include Google, etc., is a perfect project for law clerks all over the
country. Let’s remember that abortion, now a firmly entrenched part of
the Constitution, could not have been even remotely imagined as a part
of federal law 60 years ago.
It’s nowhere even one-millionth percent mentioned in the founding
documents of the nation. Neither is the “right to privacy,” which the
Supreme Court just found out of nowhere in Griswold v. Connecticut, a case about allowing drug stores to sell contraceptives in pharmacies in heavily Roman Catholic Connecticut. But Griswold
found that “right to privacy” and that in 1973 led straight to a
“right” to abortion. That finding has gone so far that in certain
states, mothers and “doctors” have the “right” to kill babies even after
they are born.
I hate abortion. But I clearly see how powerful Legal Realism is when I follow the law from a mud puddle to Griswold to the right to abortion praised from the rooftops at certain political party conventions.
We who love freedom of speech have to do something similar with
speech and what “government” is. It will be a mighty uphill struggle.
But we can do it. If we want to save America, we must do it. We must research, find a plaintiff, a legitimate plaintiff, and a court, and then we have to sue.
But while we sue, we must also speak and write and educate. We have
to create fertile soil for the seeds of freedom to sprout. I’ll write
about that next.
Many Americans are wondering what President Donald Trump is going to do next.
Newsmax had him on with Greg Kelly last night and asked about that, as well as covering several other subjects.
Many have encouraged Trump to start or take over a social media platform. Trump confirmed that he was considering doing just that.
“We’re negotiating with a number of people,” he said, indicating they might be in talks. That’s intriguing. He also said, “There’s the other option of building your own site.” He chastised Twitter for the harassment that his posts were subjected to, noting that Twitter let foreign countries say “all kinds of horrible things,” yet they are still on the site. He also teased that since he left that Twitter, “I understand it has become very boring.” He said that he wouldn’t be going back to Twitter.
Trump was asked if he was going to run again in 2024, but he wouldn’t commit on the record.
“I won’t say yet, bet we have tremendous support,” Trump responded.
As we previously reported, polls have indicated that Republican voters aren’t really even taking any other candidate very seriously with Trump having 53% even without saying he would run and with everything Democrats have thrown against him. That’s, of course, why Democrats tried to impeach him because they wanted to block him out from running again in 2024. That’s also why they’re trying to load up other ways of getting him before then which is why he’s likely playing running again close to the vest.
Trump had a few words about Joe Biden’s incredibly false statement that there was no vaccine before he got into office.
“I saw that he said there was no vaccine when he came into office, and yet he got a shot before he came into office,” Trump told Kelly. By the time Trump left, they were already giving about a million vaccinations a day. “We were giving millions of shots and millions of doses,” Trump explained, saying that Biden was “either not telling a truth, or he’s mentally gone, one or the other.” “Biden’s being killed on that whole thing,” Trump observed. “Even the haters are saying, you know this vaccine was announced long before. He is getting lit up on that one.”
According to Newsmax, the president also called out Biden’s bad comments on China. Biden gave a jumbled word salad of an answer when asked about China by Anderson Cooper on a CNN town hall this week. In the answer, he talked about how we had to understand that “culturally there were different norms” when he was talking about their treatment of the Uighurs, a horrible statement that appears to give the CCP a pass for the genocide against the group. Trump said Biden was compromised because of his family involvement with the Chinese. “His family’s involved with the Chinese, certainly, a long time and a lot of money.”
There is supposedly a schism in the Republican Party. You see it on TV, you read about it in the legacy conservative journals, and you see it discussed at length on social media. It isn’t real, but that doesn’t much matter; it appears to be real, and so it must be dealt with. We are to believe that a power struggle has been engaged between the establishment wing of the GOP led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Liz Cheney against the Trump wing of the party, which is nearly everyone else including, importantly, the voters.
It is entirely clear that the establishment wants Trump excised from the party even though the voters do not, but this misses a larger point. What McConnell and all of the right-leaning anti-Trumpers don’t understand, what they have never understood, is that the Trump phenomenon is not first and foremost a cult of personality, it is a set of policies and a worldview. Getting rid of Trump, even if that were possible, would not change that. The GOP of the last 30 years is over. To see what has replaced it, we must go back those 30 years.
1992 saw the first post-Cold War presidential election. In it, both the Republicans with George Bush and the Democrats with Bill Clinton chose a neoliberal, global-minded vision for their parties. But with so little daylight between them, a lane was created for other ideas and voices. Two figures would compete and ultimately lose in 1992 that presage Trump and the current populist moment on the right.
The first was an outspoken, boisterous billionaire who promised he would run Washington like a business. This of course was Ross Perot, who in 1992 ran the most successful third-party challenge for the presidency in modern history, garnering nearly 20 percent of the popular vote. And it wasn’t just his outsider status that relates him to Trump. It was also very much his policy approach.
Perot’s signature line was about the great sucking sound of jobs going to Mexico. He ran first and foremost on protectionist economic policies meant to keep jobs in the United States. He was also very suspicious about immigration and its effects on American workers. Finally, Perot was an anti-war candidate who did not believe the first Gulf War achieved its aims.
So here we have a billionaire businessman, opposed to trade deals, opposed to open immigration, and opposed to foreign entanglements. Is that starting to sound familiar? One area Perot seemed less interested in, or at least less focused on, was the culture war. But there was another figure in the 1992 race that was very much interested in it.
Much to the chagrin of the GOP in 1992, Patrick Buchanan launched a long-shot primary challenge against Bush. Front and center in the Buchanan campaign was a fight for the culture of America. He believed America was losing its way and its roots in the Judeo-Christian and Western traditions. He believed that Republicans were simply throwing in the towel on a whole host of social issues, from gay rights to school choice. Although he would lose to Bush, he did well enough to earn a convention speech that year, one that has become known famously as the culture war speech. Here’s a line from the opening, referring to that year’s Democratic convention. Who does this remind you of?
My friends, like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden — where 20,000 liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists — in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.
This is downright Trumpian. Not only was Buchanan attacking the excesses of the left, he was doing it in a mocking tone. At the time, the concept of political correctness, which 30 years later Trump would say is “killing us,” was new. But Buchanan was already railing against it. Long before Andrew Breitbart said it, Buchanan understood that politics is downstream from culture.
If further evidence is needed regarding the Reform Party roots of Trump, we need to look no further than the 2000 election, the last serious stand of Perot’s new party. Two names emerged as the top contenders for the presidential nomination of the Reform Party that year. One was Pat Buchanan. The other was Donald Trump.
By 2016, we had in Trump a single figure that brought together Perot’s populist and protectionist domestic and foreign policies along with Buchanan’s scrappy culture warrior status. But that still would not have been enough. The other key component would be the electorate itself, a shift Trump saw when almost nobody else did.
Throughout the 1990s, the Reform Party was a 20 percent party. That is to say somewhere around a fifth to a quarter of the country was sympathetic to its vision. The ’90s were, after all, pretty happy-go-lucky. The neoliberal approach from both Republicans and Democrats seemed to be more or less working. There was no appetite for major change.
The 21st century would change that. After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, the United States would embark on a new forever war. The opening of Chinese markets would put continued pressure on the American workforce, which was told time and time again that manufacturing jobs were not coming back. More towns, especially in the Rust Belt, were failing by the wayside of globalism.
On the cultural front, we would begin to hear all about our white privilege. Our kids would start learning a version of American history in which we were the bad guys. It was insisted that men can become women, Christian bakers were forced to bake cakes for gay weddings, and Catholic nuns were forced to pay for abortions. In almost every way, the problems described by the Reform Party 25 years earlier had all just gotten worse.
This was the political landscape that existed as Trump emerged as a candidate for the 2016 race. He tore through his competition not on the force of his personality, but on the force of his ideas, almost all of which have their roots back in 1992. Republican primary voters had had it with the establishment. They wanted change. They wanted a candidate who put their interests first, not the interests of a grand global, capitalist project, but the interest of the American worker and citizen.
If McConnell and Cheney succeed in pushing Trump to the sidelines, it won’t matter. Their Republican Party, the one that went along to get along, the one that wanted no piece of the culture war, the one that preferred to create a backstop of judges rather than using government to help the American people, is finished. It no longer speaks for the voters if it ever did.
Those who tilt at the vain windmill of going back to the old GOP would have the party resurrect its support among suburban whites. But why? The lesson of 2020 was that Trump’s populism, rooted in the Reform Party, opens opportunities to working-class and non-white voters that are far more promising. Republican voters want more than the defensive Republican politics of the past 30 years, they want a new aggressive form of politics that advances their interests rather than slows down the erosion of their America.
There is no going back, and if that means losing some elections, it means losing some elections. Perot lost, and Buchanan lost — but did they? In fact, over time their ideas gained ascendency in the GOP and now define it. This is about much more than Trump. It always has been. The future of the Republican Party belongs to whoever can marshal the new GOP and expand its reach. That means putting the American people first. Republican voters will accept nothing less.
It’s possible that Trump supporters fell into a trap on January 6
Ya think?
Dinesh
D’Souza did a podcast pointing out Nancy Pelosi’s very peculiar
behavior regarding events at the Capitol in the days leading up to
January 6. In the five weeks since then, Pelosi has turned Washington,
D.C. into an armed, walled city and is working with the White House to
crack down on dissenting views – meaning, any views that run counter to
the Democrat party narrative. There’s something weirdly un-American
about what we’re seeing now.
On February 17, D’Souza did an hour-long podcast entitled “Trump’s Next Move.” You can find the entire podcast here. Townhall published the transcript of his discussion about Nancy Pelosi’s behavior before and after the events of January 6. It makes for unnerving reasoning.
D’Souza
points out something we’ve all noticed, which is that, on January 6,
many of the people peacefully walked and gawked through the Capitol
after having been invited in
– and treated respectfully – by the relatively small number of Capitol
police officers on duty. If you’ve ever visited the Capitol in the past,
you know that’s not how it ordinarily works.
Even
stranger is the fact that Capitol police officers, who expected to be
pulling extra duty, given that everyone knew large numbers of Trump
supporters would be flooding D.C., were instead sent home for the day. Additionally, D’Souza points out, when Trump offered 10,000 National Guard troops
to help out because the rally was in town, both those in charge of the
Capitol and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser rebuffed the offer. As Speaker of
the House, it’s inconceivable that Pelosi wasn’t part of this decision.
In addition, says D’Souza,
Steve
Sund, the U.S. Capitol Police Chief, called for National Guard backup
two days before January 6. His offer was declined -- and declined by
whom? Declined by the sergeant of arms working in cohorts, in
consultation with Nancy Pelosi's office.
The Sergeant of Arms later explained that they didn’t want the “optics” of troops
in town – but D’Souza states correctly that “this explanation to me
makes absolutely no sense.” Since January 6, the Democrats have been
rubbing security in everyone’s face, so those optics are fine with them.
Pelosi’s been moving people around like chess pieces since then:
Now,
right after January 6 what does Nancy Pelosi do? She fires the sergeant
of arms. She fires the Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund and she replaces
him with another guy and, very interestingly, the police union, the
union that actually represents the Capitol Police, took a vote and 92%
of them have voted no confidence in this quote “new leadership.” In
other words, in this guy Yogananda Pittman, Nancy Pelosi's man that she
stuck in there. The Capitol Police are basically saying we don't think
this guy is any good.
We also know from the WaPo,
of all places, that the FBI had advance warning that various radical
groups were planning to attack the Capitol. And yet, no one did
anything. It’s inconceivable that they kept this information to
themselves.
Despite all the Oprah-esque theater that leftist House members put on regarding the trauma they experienced on January 6 (a minor kerfuffle
compared to what the rest of America experienced in 2020), the events
on the day have been good for the Democrats. They’ve since used it to
stage a kangaroo second impeachment (although it backfired because Trump’s gone up in American’s estimation).
Even more importantly, Democrats are using January 6 to silence any political opposition. They’ve been trying to drive Republicans out
of Congress. On Thursday, they announced that they’re working with the
White House to come up with a plan so that social media will work even
harder to silence “disinformation” – which means, of course, anything that challenges Democrat facts or conclusions.
In
case you’re wondering, this is how totalitarian dictatorships operate.
Free speech is out; increasingly brutal suppression is in.
And
speaking of increasing brutality, there’s the fact that the Democrats
have used the events of January 6 to turn Washington, D.C., into a
security fortress of the type any tyrant would love.
Benny
may have taken a lighthearted tone when he toured the D.C. wall that
went up overnight, but the fact is that it’s turned our Capitol into an
armed encampment, one that Democrats clearly intend to keep pace with continuously shifting deadlines for their departure:
One
could say that Pelosi was Machiavellian enough to position matters in
advance of January 6 to create a trap for Trump and his supporters.
Equally, one could say she simply elevated a stupid, drab, depressing
event into a crisis so that she could not refrain from letting it go to
waste. No matter the viewpoint, the fact remains that January 6 was the
best thing that ever happened to a political party anxious to jettison
the Constitution and achieve total control over America.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) committed a mortal political error on Saturday when, after voting to acquit President Trump on constitutional grounds, he accused the former president of the crime of being “practically and morally” responsible for the invasion and vandalization of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and the deaths of five people.
McConnell not only signed on to the ultimate NeverTrump loyalty oath of submission to the totalitarian big lie there was no possible doubt about the legitimacy of the election verdict; he also declared Trump had no choice but to accept the result and quietly leave Washington with his tail between his legs.
McConnell took it upon himself to declare the end of the Trump era in the Republican Party, nailing his flag to the mast of return to the McCRomBush swamp of alternating Democrats with Dem look-alikes in the White House, and leaving the overwhelmingly Democratic political establishment serenely undisturbed.
The good old days were fine for McConnell, enjoying the six-year terms in the rotten borough of Kentucky to maneuver with impartial cynicism in the Senate lobbies and stirring himself to vehemence only on the issue of confirming constitutionalist federal judges.
He is so distant from the profound issues that agitate and divide the American electorate, which has grown by 70 percent since McConnell was first elected to the Senate in 1984, that he seems to have lost sight of the gap that exists between the Republican voters in the country (upwards of 75 percent of whom remain Trump supporters) and his own electorate of 50 Republican senators. Sixteen of them are up for reelection next year, all in states Trump carried in November.
McConnell’s Beltway Myopia
The former president’s unambiguous rejoinder to McConnell’s gratuitous assault upon him last Saturday expressed his intention to intervene in primaries to ensure that the movement he founded and led retains control of the Republican Party in Congress.
Perhaps McConnell, who is nothing if not a sophisticated Capitol maneuverer, was so horrified by the affront to what he imagines as the Senate’s dignity on January 6 that he lost sight of the nation and supposes Trump is no more popular with the public than Trump is with McConnell and his cronies. Or perhaps McConnell was seized by a suicidal ambition to end his long career as a man of great and discreetly exercised influence at the center of American government with a beau geste of someone who can only regain the leadership of the Senate by what he considers to be unconscionable appeasement of a man he dismissed five years ago as a mad interloper who should be dropped “like a hot rock.”
Apart from cavernous differences in personality, background, and positions on a number of policy issues, the fundamental schism between former President Trump as the official Republican leader and McConnell as the Republican Senate leader is that McConnell was pleased to see Trump defeated. Insofar as he considers such things as he embarks on his seventh term as a U.S. senator from Kentucky, McConnell is so comfortable and successful in the tranquil bipartisanship of pre-Trump politics that he is convinced Trump’s support will melt, leaving everything as it was before.
With that outlook, McConnell was able to put out of mind the disagreeable fact that while Joe Biden (contrary to Trump’s claims) clearly won the popular ballot by over 5 million votes, there is substantial evidence that the questionable legal changes to voting rules in professed accommodation of COVID-19 conditions were responsible for Biden’s Electoral College victory. Given that that question, despite the febrile and near-totalitarian efforts of the Big Media-Big Tech cartel to suppress such thoughts, is entirely plausible, the irritation of the former president and his followers is comprehensible. This is particularly the case because of the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the lawsuit from the Texas attorney general, supported by many other states, alleging that several of the swing states failed in their constitutional obligation to conduct honest and fair elections, inflicting an unjust result upon the entire country.
McConnell’s verbal assault on Saturday was so gratuitously vituperative, Trump had no choice but to respond forcefully—as he has.
Democrats Can’t Quit Trump
This eruption of a bare-knuckled struggle for control of the Republican Party occurs as the Democrats succumb to a lunacy of their own. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) inflammatory repetition of charges of crimes and insurrectionism against the former president have been accompanied by a demand for a 9/11-like commission of investigation into the January 6 events at the Capitol. This demonstrates once again her pathological addiction to Trump-hate and the Democrats’ inability to breathe normally and function sensibly without being at war with the Great Evil Orange Ogre.
In their stupidity and their sickness, Pelosi and her allies want to maintain Trump as the center of attention. They were barely able to do this throughout his term because he was the president and responded constantly and often with tactically mistaken vehemence to their endless provocations. Now that he is an ex-president, they will only give him occasion to continue to dispute the fairness of the election result and to steal the limelight from his successor. And it will be another complete failure like the Mueller investigation of the fictitious collusion between Trump and the Russian government in the 2016 election.
We now know that Pelosi herself ignored the request on January 4 of the chief of the Capitol Police (whom she has since fired), for reinforcements out of concern for what might happen on January 6, a concern which the president himself revealed that he shared. Such an inquiry as she demands will, like Robert Mueller’s fatuous investigation into “Russian collusion,” effectively vindicate the ex-president. Pelosi appears to have been bitten by the same bug as McConnell, and they’re both fulminating and withering from a mysterious political bilharzia—a self-destructive obsession with their chief opponent. It is not requited.
It is starting to look like the beginning of the fall of a row of Democratic dominoes: Pelosi loses her political mind, the media-confected canonization of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo explodes, the vain and incompetent Gavin Newsom of California is on the verge of being recalled, and the ludicrous imposture of the Lincoln Project disintegrates amid charges of sexual perversion and gross pecuniary corruption.
It must be said that President Biden has maintained comparative equanimity and generally kept his distance from the nonsense of Trump’s second impeachment. All those months in his basement fully masked may have insulated him from more dangerous political contagions than the coronavirus. The notion that Donald Trump is about to be abandoned by the force that he created is poor and wishful thinking.
Tom Cotton's Bold Strategy to Fight the New 'Cold War' Against China's 'Evil Empire'
On Thursday, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) released a roadmap to counter
the Chinese Communist Party and prevail in a new “Cold War” against this
“Evil Empire.”
“This Evil Empire preys on—and spies on—Americans. It imprisons
innocent people in concentration camps. It uses slave labor to fuel its
factories. And it denies basic freedoms to all its 1.4 billion people,”
Cotton declared in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Institute in Chicago.
“We need to beat this Evil Empire—and consign the Chinese Communists,
like the Bolsheviks, to the ash heap of history.”
He released a report entitled
“Beat China: Targeted Decoupling and the Economic Long War” that laid
out three central goals to combat China: decoupling, mitigating the
effects of decoupling, and reorganizing the federal government to better
respond to the CCP.
Cotton praised Reagan’s historic success at defeating the Soviet
Union without firing a shot, but he warned that the “Cold War” against
China “will be more complicated than the first. China is wealthier and
more populous than any enemy America has ever faced. It’s also more
entangled with us economically.”
Cotton acknowledged that America’s “deep dependence on China didn’t
grow overnight.” Rather, Americans actively pursued a “strategic
partnership” with the Chinese Communist Party on the grounds that open
markets and open borders would make China rich and then lead China on
the path to freedom. China indeed became rich, “but instead of
reforming, the Communist Party began to exploit new connections between
our free society and its totalitarian society.”
As Cotton noted, the CCP made spies out of the Chinese students who
came to American universities to study. Beijing forced companies to hand
over proprietary technology in exchange for access to China’s market.
China has also threatened to cut off essential goods, the production of
which the U.S. outsourced to China. This week, the CCP proposed export
controls on rare-earth minerals that are vital for various forms of
American technology, including weapons systems.
The CCP’s nefarious malfeasance regarding the COVID-19 pandemic should also underscore the need to counter China. The CCP lied to cover up the
pandemic early on, and waited until after 5 million people had left
Wuhan before locking down the city. The party destroyed early samples of
the virus, silenced doctors who tried to warn the world about it,
pressured the WHO into lying about the pandemic, requested personal
protective equipment (PPE) from across the world and then extorted foreign countries when they made the same request. The CCP even prevented U.S. companies from shipping their medical gear back home.
America has to fight back, and Cotton laid out three steps to do so.
Cotton’s strategy hinges on the idea of decoupling, separating the
U.S. from China on the economic and political fronts. “Any serious
strategy to beat China must start with a commitment to decouple our
countries in key areas, in order to exploit the leverage we have over
China and minimize its leverage over us,” he explained. “As we pull
apart, we’ll also have to rebuild parts of our economy to minimize the
costs of separation.”
Cotton encouraged the Joe Biden administration to build on the Trump
administration policy of sanctioning notorious actors in the CCP,
especially human rights abusers, cutting them off from the U.S.
financial system.
“We ought to expand this campaign to include entire Chinese companies
that steal American intellectual property—or even benefit from stolen
IP. The message should be clear: steal from Americans once, look over
your shoulder forever,” Cotton urged.
He also called for Congress and the president to reverse China’s
Permanent Normal Trade Relations status President Bill Clinton signed
into law in 2000. Before that law, Congress and the president reviewed
China’s trade privileges each year in light of the CCP’s progress on
human rights.
Cotton urged the U.S. to tighten export controls “to prevent China
from obtaining cutting-edge technology with military applications.”
He also called for the U.S. to “cut off the spigot of money that has
fueled China’s rise and corrupted our elites, creating a China Lobby
stretching from New York and Washington to Silicon Valley and Hollywood,
touching corporate boardrooms and college campuses in between.” America
should scrutinize inbound investment from China while preventing
outbound investment into China. This would include “preventing American
pension funds from investing in companies with close ties to the
Communist Party or People’s Liberation Army.”
Cotton called on America to admit fewer Chinese nationals for work
and study, and to admit none in advanced STEM fields at the graduate
level and above.
These “decoupling” policies would not just hurt China. They will also
leave American investors fewer options, American universities fewer
students, and American industries fewer manufactured goods, at least in
the short run.
America must ramp up its own economy to meet the threat from China, Cotton insisted.
He acknowledged that cutting the number of Chinese students in STEM
fields would “be a painful divorce for universities and Big Tech
companies that rely on Chinese nationals to pay their bills and staff
their labs.” Yet Cotton insisted that “with the right incentives and
support, we can replace Chinese nationals with American students—and
once the supply of bright young Americans has been exhausted, we can
turn to our allies, instead of deepening the talent pool of our
number-one enemy.”
The senator insisted that America must break its “dependence on China
for basic goods that are critical to survival, such as essential
medicines, medical supplies, and rare-earth elements. The United States
foolishly sent much of this production overseas in the belief that it
was ‘low value.’ Now we have to bring it back. A nation that cannot heal
itself, care for its sick, and keep its aircraft in the sky is not
secure—and will not remain a superpower for long.”
Cotton argued that America should pair export controls on
cutting-edge technology “with investment in R&D and manufacturing so
the future of these critical technologies is made in America, not in
Asia—and certainly not in China.”
3. Restructuring the federal government
Cotton noted that the federal government has not faced “great-power
competition” for three decades, “so decoupling must come with a
reorganization of government.”
He argued that export-control authorities like the Bureau of Industry
and Security should move from the Commerce Department to a
national-security department like State. He called for the Department of
Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to expand and establish a
“separate task force devoted to sanctioning China’s IP thieves, military
companies, and state-owned puppets.” Finally, he called for the
secretary of defense to have a more prominent role at the Committee on
Foreign Investment in the United States “to ensure the national-security
perspective takes precedence in decisions regarding Chinese investment
in our country.”
Cotton admitted that his strategy “is merely a sketch,” but he argued
that America must reposition itself to avoid the CCP’s exploitation and
rebuild itself “to prepare for a protracted Twilight Struggle that will
determine the fate of the world.”
Tragically, Biden has not yet shown a firm commitment to combat an
enemy as powerful and influential as the Chinese Communist Party. While
he has pledged to hold the CCP accountable for its horrific human rights
abuses regarding the Uyghurs, he admitted that “culturally there are different norms” in China. Biden has yet to explain Hunter Biden’s extensive business deals in China — many of which arguably empowered the CCP at America’s expense — nor has he explicitly addressed the allegations of Tony Bobulinski, who claimed Joe Biden himself was personally involved in some of those deals.
Instead, Biden signed a wide-ranging executive order
on climate change that will fundamentally restructure the federal
government to fight a supposed “crisis” and actually make America more
vulnerable to China.
While Cotton’s plan for restructuring the federal government to
combat China might worry some conservatives, it is a tiny act of
reshuffling compared to Biden’s attempt to shoehorn climate alarmism
into every nook and cranny of Washington, D.C. — and the Chinese
Communist Party poses a real threat to the United States, while climate
alarmists have falsely predicted doom for decades.
