Yesterday, the worst miss in job’s report history made its debut. Only 266,000 out of over one million projected jobs were added to the economy, and it wasn’t just the economists who were surprised. Joe Biden’s handlers had pre-scheduled what was clearly meant to be a victory lap later that morning. But as the president shuffled out to take the podium, reality had punched him in the face, leaving him to levy pathetic excuses for how stagnation in the recovery was actually a good thing.
It was a watershed moment in the new administration that showed that policy actually matters, and obsessions over decorum seem rather shallow when the bullets really start to fly.
Naturally, given the seriousness of what we witnessed, that meant resident Never Trumpers were talking about Donald Trump yesterday — instead of the failures of Joe Biden and how inflation is threatening to crush the middle class.
This has a very “old man yells at cloud” vibe. On one of the worst days of the Biden administration so far, this was the hot take Hayes felt like sharing? It also happens to be wrong, precisely because the GOP is united. Unity is not defined by whether House Republicans want to keep an ineffective Bush throw-back like Liz Cheney in leadership. Further, anyone actually observing the current political environment can see that the GOP are heavy favorites to win in 2022. That’s not a reality that would exist if the GOP were in shambles, a picture Hayes continually tries to paint.
It was his next response that truly stuck out, though.
This is the delusion of Never Trump, in as stark of terms as I’ve ever witnessed.
Note the appeal to participation trophies instead of actually, you know, winning elections. Mollie Hemingway is obviously correct because Trump did actually win, and her qualifier of “electorally winning” is important. No one outside of the neoconservative consultant class cares about a 1% difference in vote share. What they care about is who campaigns in a way that can actually win the electoral college, and thus, the election.
Hayes turns into a tout for the popular vote here, because he thinks it fits his narrative. Further, even taking Hayes’ point as relevant, the actual gap in percentage between Romney and Obama was far higher than Trump and Clinton. Meanwhile, Trump’s 2020 loss mirrored Romney’s, in that regard.
There are other errors here, as well. Barack Obama was not a “popular incumbent.” In fact, in the heat of the 2012 campaign, he routinely carried an approval rating below 50%. What turned Obama into a “popular incumbent” by the time election day rolled around was the failure of Mitt Romney to wage an effective campaign. Attempting to separate Romney’s face-plant from Obama’s late rise is pure gaslighting.
Regardless, none of this really matters. It is an exercise in beating one’s head against a brick wall to continue to sugar-coat Mitt Romney as the true representation of a winning coalition. He simply wasn’t, as evidenced by the fact that he did not win. Hayes can cherry-pick whatever results he wants, but in the end, the GOP has moved past Romney’s vision of the Republican party. No amount of fluffing The 2012 loss and obsessing over Donald Trump is going to change that. That doesn’t mean you have to support Trump himself as the 2024 nominee, but it does mean you have to accept the reality of how the party has changed in regards to policy and posture.
The current dynamic is simple. Republican voters prefer a far more restrained foreign policy; they see China as a threat to be combated; they oppose big tech monopolizing the means of information distribution; they want immigration laws followed; and they give no quarter to big corporations that turn around and spit in their faces with woke ideology. It’s not 2005 anymore. Mitt Romney and those like him are never going to represent the GOP at a high level again. Liz Cheney is not the future of the party.
These are facts that can be accepted and worked with, or one can continue to yell at the clouds as they pass. Hayes and his cohorts have chosen the latter path. We’ll see how that works out for them.
A French expert on France’s religious heritage is sounding the alarm
that “one mosque is erected every 15 days in France, while one
Christian building [church or monument] is destroyed at the same pace.”
Edouard de Lamaze, the president of the Observatoire du patrimoine
religieux (Observatory of Religious Heritage) in Paris, is warning
French media about “the gradual disappearance of religious edifices in a
country” which has long been called the “eldest daughter of the
Church.”
His warning followed on an April 15 fire (“deemed accidental”) which
destroyed the 16th-century Church of Saint-Pierre in
Romilly-la-Puthenaye, Normandy, northern France, exactly two years after
the fire that ruined much of Paris’ famous Notre Dame Cathedral.
Most of the monuments being destroyed are Catholic. There are around
45,000 Catholic “places of worship” in France, where Catholicism still
represents “a large majority.” Lamaze explained his concern in an
interview with Catholic News Agency:
“Lamaze told CNA in an interview that
in addition to one religious building disappearing every two weeks — by
demolition, transformation, destruction by fire, or collapse —
two-thirds of fires in religious buildings are due to arson. . .
‘Although Catholic monuments are
still ahead, one mosque is erected every 15 days in France, while one
Christian building is destroyed at the same pace,’ Lamaze said. ‘It
creates a tipping point on the territory that should be taken into
account.’
Lamaze believes that on average more
than two Christian monuments are targeted every day. Two-thirds of these
incidents concern theft, while the remaining third involve
desecration.”
Recent figures from the French central criminal intelligence unit
states the number of attacks on Catholic “places of worship” in 2018
alone was 877.
“‘These figures have increased fivefold in only 10 years,’ Lamaze
said, noting that 129 churches were vandalized in 2008… Currently, 5,000
Catholic buildings are potentially in danger of disappearing.
Lamaze cited the “deep negligence” of public authorities as responsible
for this state of affairs, noting that only 15,000 Catholic sites “are
officially protected as historical monuments,” with 30,000 Catholic
sites “practically left to decay.”
Article by Clarice Feldman in The American Thinker
Grandpa Knew Best
My
grandpa once told me, ”All my grandchildren were born smart. The longer
they go to school, the dumber they get.” I thought he was teasing, but
now that I’m his age, I see his point: You have to have spent a lot of
time in school to be as dumb as the experts on everything including
economics, energy policy, and even vote fraud. (and I’m not even getting
into academia’s participation in gender bending, history revisionism,
pronoun parsing like “birthing parent” instead of “mother.”)
Economics
Ask
a first grader if he’d do his household chores if he got the same
amount of money or even more from just sitting home and playing video
games and you’d get the right answer: No. This is something that escapes
the brain trust running this administration. It also escapes the
ninnies who write for corporate media. The Jobs Report that came out this week was terrible, making widespread expectations by experts and the media the subject of well-deserved ridicule.
A
disappointing 266,000 jobs were added in April, well below the 800,000
to 1 million per month needed to dramatically reduce the pandemic's
payroll-employment losses. Indeed, 8.2 million people are still jobless
since February 2020 -- the outset of the pandemic. Also, a little used,
but important, measure of labor market health, the
employment-to-population ratio, stands at 57.9% presently -- a near
40-year low -- compared to 61.1% pre-pandemic, according to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics (BLS). This means that millions of workers are
sitting idle or are completely disengaged from the labor market.
Did this surprise you? It shouldn’t but it seems to have been unexpected by all these media outlets.
– NYT columnist Paul Krugman (5/6/21): “All indications are that we’re headed for the fastest year of growth since the ‘Morning in America’ boom of 1983-1984. What’s not to like?”
And though not related to the jobs report, this CNN “analysis” piece went live just a couple of hours before the jobs report was released. Not the best timing on this pro-Biden puff piece:
With
this news, you’d think an administration that wanted to see people
getting jobs would rethink its plan of throwing away money to
disincentivize work, fuel inflation, and bring back Carter-style
stagflation. You’d be wrong. Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for more
spending. President Biden said, “I want to put today’s jobs report in
perspective.” He claimed this is another step showing “progress” since
he took office and proves why we need to print more money and inject it
into the economy. The job losses are mainly in the 10 states with
Democratic governors who have to hope their constituents are dumb enough
to miss the relationship between their policies and their lack of
economic gains.
Not
completely unrelated to unrestrained money printing and paying people
not to work is the rapidly rising cost of energy due to the
administration’s war on “fossil fuels.” Biden has set a draconian pledge
to cut carbon "pollution" 50-52% compared with 2005 levels. Even if you
believe (as I do not) that anthropogenic caused global warming is
substantial and deleterious, the goal is senseless. China is not going
to cut back on its use of fossil fuels and its carbon pollution surpasses all the developed countries combined. To
carry out this pledge, the U.S. would wreck its economy and the hardest
hit, as usual, will be the poorest of us unable to afford more costly
housing, food, and transportation.
Vote Fraud: This Election Was Brought to you by the Letter Z
If
you asked any sentient person what would happen if you gave millions of
dollars to counties run by Democrats in battleground states in exchange
for turning over to your left-wing designees the right to control
election procedures and counting of ballots (in contravention of the
constitutions of the affected states and the U.S. Constitution, which
places the responsibility for setting election rules with state
legislatures), they’d agree that the likelihood that the process would
be corrupted was great. And as evidence slowly surfaces of the
consequences of the Zuckerberg Foundation’s selective grants and the
conditions of those grants, it seems undeniable that there was massive
corruption. The Election Wizard made a startling claim
this week. In preparing the U.S. Census, the government collects data
on citizens who self-report having voted in presidential elections. The
latest census report reveals a starling anomaly: Four million
fewer people reported having voted in the 2020 presidential election
than the official tally shows. Pollster Richard Baris says the Census
figures on voting are usually “spot on” and when they missed (by not a
great deal) it was on over recorded, not under recorded, that is, they
recorded more who voted than actually did.
This anomaly seems not so anomalous as more information is known about voting in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.
Wisconsin
Several outfits in Wisconsin have been doing fine investigative reporting on how the election procedures were corrupted. Based on an open records request,
1130 WISN reported that the City of Milwaukee “turned over the
administration [of the election] to liberal-leaning groups” one of which
was provided with “daily absentee vote data.”
The MacIver Institute reports
that an outsider, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein of the National Vote at
Home Institute, edited the Milwaukee absentee voting instructions, a
flow chart for vote-by-mail processing, and was handed “exclusive access
to the data base in daily reports.”
Under Wisconsin law,
“each municipal clerk has charge and supervision of elections and
registration in the municipality.” This is unambiguous. It is
unequivocal. Yet in five of Wisconsin’s largest cities, it didn’t
happen.
In
May, Racine Mayor Cory Mason -- a hyper-partisan Democrat -- emailed
the mayors of Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay and Kenosha to hold a
virtual meeting in which “the Elections Administration Planning Grant
will be discussed.” That grant, from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s
Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) would ostensibly be used to cover
the increased costs of running a presidential election during the
COVID-19 pandemic.
The
mayors met virtually at least four times from May to August to discuss
their joint bid for CTCL grant money, but Mason took the lead and even,
according to an email from City of Racine attorney Vicky Selkowe, sought
to “develop a robust plan for election administration for all five of
our communities.”
This
would, of course, run afoul of state law, as only the municipal clerks
or election boards in the other four communities have the authority to
plan for and administer elections, but it was clear that these five
cities did not have much regard for state law. According to emails, the
Racine Common Council approved the first phase of grant money acceptance
on behalf of all five communities, which became known as the Wisconsin
Five. All five eventually received CTCL grant money, with Milwaukee
getting more than $2.1 million.
It quickly became clear that this money came with strings attached.
According
to the agreement the City of Milwaukee signed with CTCL, CTCL set the
ground rules for how every penny of the money was to be spent, and
Milwaukee was not allowed to “reduce or otherwise modify planned
municipal spending on 2020 elections.” In addition, the city was not
permitted to “use any part of [the] grant to give a grant to another
organization unless CTCL agrees to the specific sub-recipient in
advance, in writing.”
CTCL
obviously had its own partner groups in mind and didn’t want
interference with its vision for how the election would be run.
This is a major legal and constitutional issue, as Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 (which
is known as the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution) holds that
“the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and
Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature
thereof.”
In sum:
By
accepting CTCL’s conditions for running the election, the City of
Milwaukee -- and the other four communities that accepted CTCL money --
violated state law. Nothing in the law allows for this sort of thing,
yet it quickly became clear that CTCL, not Milwaukee, was effectively
running Milwaukee’s election.
It
goes without saying that Spitzer-Rubenstein, who was neither
Milwaukee’s clerk nor a member of city government, was not authorized by
the Wisconsin Legislature to do any of this.
A
former Democratic operative, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, served as a de
facto elections administrator and had access to Green Bay’s absentee
ballots days before the election
Spitzer-Rubenstein
asked Green Bay’s clerk if he and his team members could help correct
or “cure” absentee ballots like they did in Milwaukee.
Green
Bay’s clerk grew increasingly frustrated with the takeover of her
department by the Democrat mayor’s staff and outside groups.
Brown
County Clerk Sandy Juno said the contract stipulated that
Spitzer-Rubenstein would have four of the five keys to the KI Center
ballroom where ballots were stored and counted.
Brown County’s clerk said the city of Green Bay “went rogue.”
Election law experts said the city illegally gave left-leaning groups authority over the election.
In Green Bay, Spitzer-Rubentein also was given boxes of blank ballots before the election.
Arizona (Maricopa County)
Maricopa
County’s election board, under subpoena to turn over its election
equipment and records, claimed this week it did not have “administrative
access” to its voting machines. They claimed they had ceded it to their
external vendor. That means, if the defense is accurate, outsiders had
the ability to perform all the changes and functions in the system --
even the ability to completely control the system logs
by deleting or altering them. They’ve also refused to turn over the
routers for the computers, something that could result in contempt
action by the court. The consistent and increasing efforts by Maricopa
County election officials, Democratic Party and now the administration’s
DoJ to end the Maricopa audit ordered by the state legislature seems to
me a tell that it was every bit as corrupted as the challenges suggest
it was.
Nevada
In December, Jesse Binnall testified
before the Homeland security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the
irregularities in the presidential election there. Among his claims: the
rushed mail by ballot (without voter authentication) resulted in 42,000
people having voted twice; 1500 dead people were recorded as voting,
more than 19,000 people voted who did not live in the state (figure does
not include students or military), 8,000 people voted from nonexistent
addresses; over 15,000 votes were cast from commercial or
vacant addresses. In sum, he claimed over 130,000 “unique instances of
voter fraud in Nevada” and he argued that the figure was “almost
certainly higher.” He also cited the testimony of technical employees
who said, “the number of votes recoded by voting machines were stored on
USB drives and would change between the time the polls were closed" --
that “votes were literally appearing and disappearing in the dead of
night.’ efforts to conduct a full inspection of the voting machines was
denied.
The
Nevada Supreme Court refused to upset the election upon Binnell’s
claims. I can't find out whether Vote From Home or any other
Zuckerberg-funded outfit was working in Nevada, but Binnall’s claims of
people accessing the voting machinery and the great number of seemingly
irregular votes sound familiar.
This
week allies of Donald Trump announced the creation of the Election
Integrity Alliance to combat election fraud and to provide resources “to
state legislators and the public on challenges to free and fair
elections.” Some states have already tightened up requirements for mail
in balloting and authentication (voter ID) and have even made illegal
the receipt of outside funding to local election officials.
Terrorist incidents in the West peaked in 2017, and have fallen dramatically since, mainly due to the defeat of the Islamic State. Yet the politics of fear demands a substitute: right-wing terrorism. “Right-wing” is stretched so broadly today that it conflates ethnic and religious identities, i.e., whites and Christians. Identity politics is fashionable but makes for terrible analysis.
In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with a rarefied left-wing news site (Quartz, then under the same ownership as The Atlantic magazine) to claim that two-thirds of American terrorism in 2017 was right-wing. Their “right-wing” categories were slippery, including “alt-light,” as a gateway to “alt-right.” Worse, they categorized both anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism as right-wing. Extremist Muslims and Jews hate each other. Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center put them together as right-wing allies. Such an equation prevents admission of the fact that anti-Semitism is the bigger problem, and largely jihadi.
The Anti-Defamation League jumped on the bandwagon of fearmongering over “right-wing” terrorism, by launching its own study of American “extremist violence.” In January 2019, the ADL reported right-wing extremists as the “biggest threat” by the “numbers.” The report uses the term “white supremacist” interchangeably with “right-wing.” Here, critical race theory meets left-wing partisanship.
But the ADL does not fully reveal its data or methods. By contrast, official statistics show that whites (72 percent of Americans) are underrepresented in hate crimes (52.5 percent of perpetrators of hate crimes in 2019 were white). And there is no upward trend in white perps.
Trends tend to get pushed behind unrepresentative events. In the deadliest attack of 2018, a white male shot 11 people to death at synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was officially categorized as white supremacist (although all the victims were white). The ADL effectively treated that single event as evidence for a multi-year trend.
Definitions Matter
Even foreign events raise alarm about American trends.
In March 2019, an Australian (Brenton Tarrant) murdered 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand. Tarrant left behind a manifesto, in which he identified primarily with Chinese Communism. He identified also with anti-imperialism, environmentalism, anti-capitalism, and anarchism. He specifically rejected Nazism, conservatism, Christianity, Donald Trump, and corporatism. The media, nevertheless, quickly deleted Tarrant’s manifesto while also misrepresenting it. The BBC described the manifesto as “right-wing,” without quoting from it. The Guardian newspaper described him as “neofascist” just because he targeted Muslims (which, at most, proves Islamophobia).
The Global Terrorism Index claims Tarrant as evidence that far-right political terrorism is “one of the more worrying trends.” The GTI is unaffiliated with the semi-official Global Terrorism Dataset, but uses its data. These data show that Jihadis were responsible for most of more than 13,000 terrorism deaths in 2019. The Global Terrorism Dataset itself categorizes a fraction of terrorism as either right- or left-wing. Most group motivations in the dataset are nonpartisan, such as “anti-Muslim” or “anti-police.” Further, for 2019, the dataset’s authors warned against reading too much into “diverse, sometimes complex, and often ambiguous ideological influences, typically without clear ties to formal, named organizations.”
The dataset does not categorize Tarrant’s 51 murders as political. If the GTI had put them in the far-Left category, far-Left terrorist murders would have outnumbered the other 38 deaths it attributes to far-Right terrorism, and all other terrorism deaths (19), in the West. How does the GTI get to the other 38 far-right terrorism deaths?
The answer is familiar. It conflates the dataset’s anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, and white nationalist categories with right-wing categories. The GTI reports no definition of left-wing terrorism.
Second-hand reporting was even less careful. One Ph.D. student pretended to be reporting directly from the dataset itself that “most” “terrorist attacks . . . in the United States alone from 2015 to 2019 . . . were [perpetrated by] right-wing extremists, including white nationalists and other alt-right movement members.” In fact, there is no “alt-right” category in the dataset.
No right-wing or anti-Muslim terrorist murders occurred in 2019, although in August a white male killed 23 shoppers at Walmart in El Paso, Texas, allegedly in opposition to Hispanic immigration.
Media Distortions
In September 2019, the Department of Homeland Security released a new strategy that prioritized white supremacists, to the delight of the media. Yet months went by without further white supremacist or right-wing terrorism. Indeed, the second deadliest terrorist attack of 2019 was by Black Hebrew Israelites (four murders in Jersey City), and the third was by an al-Qaeda offshoot (three murders at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida). Both attacks occurred in December 2019. No more terrorism occurred in America in the first four months of 2020.
During the first weekend of protests against the death of George Floyd in police custody, at least nine people were killed. About 28 were killed in BLM protests by the end of August. None was counted officially as extremist or a hate crime. A partisan think tank created its own dataset, in which many sources are written simply as “Twitter.” In September, it reported that Black Lives Matter protests are “overwhelmingly peaceful.” The media lapped it up.
In October, the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), in partnership with the ADL and others, claimed overwhelming right-wing terrorism in America during the first eight months of the year. CSIS counts five murders by terrorists inside America in that period. Of these, it attributes one to Antifa, at a Black Lives Matter protest. CSIS doesn’t explain why this was terrorism, while the other 26 or so murders at similar protests were not. (CSIS did not respond to emails asking for clarification.)
The CSIS typology is so chaotic and unreliable it takes some explaining. CSIS separates “ethnonationalist” terrorism, but places “racial or ethnic supremacy” under “far-right.” How is “ethnonationalism” different from “racial or ethnic supremacy”? The report’s explanation is weak: ethnonationalism “often include[s] struggles of self-determination and separatism along ethnic or nationalist lines.” Often? This means that sometimes it doesn’t. So, what would ethnonationalism look like when not separatist? CSIS doesn’t say.
CSIS makes clear that “far-right” doesn’t include all “racial or ethnic supremacy,” only white supremacists. CSIS places black supremacists under “far-left terrorism.” So now we know that CSIS distributes racial or ethnic terrorism across at least three categories: ethnonationalism; far-right; far-left. And by separating white and black ethnonationalism, the category that CSIS refers to as “ethnonationalism” ends up with no cases at all!
Similarly, CSIS categorizes “religious” terrorism separately from “far-right,” but places Christian terrorism under far-right. The only religion CSIS places under “religious” terrorism is jihadism. This seems partisan. In a majority Christian country, one would expect more Christian than Jihadi extremism. Nevertheless, Christian terrorism is underrepresented, and Jihadi terrorism is overrepresented (relative to religious adherents in the American population). Counting deaths rather than incidents, jihadi terrorism is even more overrepresented. Placing Christian under “far-right” is always going to underreport religious terrorism and overstate far-right terrorism in America.
Politicized Reporting
The federal government did not help to counter the partisan narrative. The Department of Homeland Security got around to publishing its annual threat assessment in October, when it was “still evaluating” data for 2020. It warned that white supremacism was unusually lethal in 2019, but warned also that Jihadi terrorism will resurge within years.
In the whole of 2020, the only officially categorized terrorist attack within the homeland was the murder of two police officers by two men linked with the “Boogaloo” movement.
Yet the reporting in 2021 has returned to overreach. The usual suspects are at the center of it. In April, the Washington Post started a new website, using data from CSIS, to claim that “domestic terrorism incidents have soared to new highs in the United States, driven chiefly by white-supremacist, anti-Muslim, and anti-government extremists on the far right.” Note the usual careless conflations and misleading framing.
This year, the Biden Administration has characterized the invasion of the Capitol building in January as “white supremacist,” which warrants troops on the streets. The administration simultaneously warned of “white supremacist” infiltration of the military to compel a purge, and to request congressional funding for further investigations. In neither case has the administration publicized any evidence, although the media remains deeply persuaded by clothing, hearsay, and social media posts, as well as quotes from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Democratic Senators in March reintroduced a bill to establish executive offices to focus on domestic terrorism. Sounds laudable, except that their justification is “the continued rise in horrific incidents of domestic terrorism and hate crimes targeting religious and ethnic minorities and communities of color, as well as the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.”
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) justifies the bill with the exhortation “to be abundantly clear that white supremacists and other far-right extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States today.”
At the end of April, Biden gave his first speech as president to a joint session of Congress. He declared “the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today: white supremacism is terrorism.” He proceeded to conflate this with the death of George Floyd, although the policeman charged and convicted in the case was not charged with anything racial.
Yes, white supremacism exists. But a greater threat to American democracy is the misrepresentation of terrorism for partisan power.
Rural home in desperate need of high-speed internet.
Article by Randal O'Toole in the CATO At Liberty blog
Who Lives in Rural Areas?
One of the provisions of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan
is to spend $100 billion bringing broadband internet services to “more
than 30 million Americans” who live in rural “areas where there is no
broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds.”
That’s $3,333 per person or about $8,800 per household.
Who are these people who deserve such a big subsidy? Well, I’m one of
them. Here in rural central Oregon, DSL speeds are barely faster than
dial-up. The alternative is satellite, which is pretty fast but I don’t
like the idea of paying by the gigabyte. That’s just me; some of my
neighbors have it and it works pretty well for them. Satellite is
available everywhere, so it’s not like any rural Americans are
physically denied access to high-speed internet.
My main point, however, is that Biden either thinks, or wants us to
think, that rural people are all dirt-poor farmers deprived of the
benefits they could get from watching Netflix on cold winter nights. I’m
sure you can find some of those, but they are far from a majority of
rural residents.
Table B24050
of the American Community Survey shows the “industry by occupation” for
American workers. When broken down by urban and rural, we find that
just 4.6 percent of rural workers have jobs in the “agriculture,
forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining” sectors. Almost twice as many
rural workers have construction jobs and three times as many have
manufacturing jobs.
Of course, every “direct” job, such as farming or mining, generates
“indirect” jobs in, say, education and retail sectors. Every direct job
in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting is estimated to produce 2.3 indirect jobs
while mining jobs produce 3.9 indirect jobs. That means the 1.3 million
rural jobs in ag, forestry, etc. produce 3.5 million indirect jobs for a
total of 17 percent of all rural jobs.
So who are the other 83 percent? A lot of them are people like me:
exurbanites, meaning people with urban-like jobs who have decided to
live in rural areas. This probably includes most of the 1.5 million
rural people with finance and real estate jobs; the 2.4 million with
professional, scientific, and management jobs; and 1.7 million with
transportation jobs, among many others.
Nor are most of these people materially deprived. American Community Survey table 24021
says that rural incomes are 95 percent as high as urban incomes. Since
housing and other costs tend to be lower than in many major cities,
incomes adjusted for purchasing power parity may actually be higher in
rural areas. In some fields, including transportation, actual rural
incomes are considerably higher than urban incomes.
Regardless of income, exurbanites made a conscious choice to live in
rural areas knowing that they would be giving up some of the benefits of
living in big cities. Ruralites have to drive further to get to a
supermarket, have less convenient access to professional services, can’t
go out to eat every night or frequently attend the theater, and their
internet access is likely to be slower. These are trade offs we made in
order to be away from crowds and closer to nature.
Moreover, even without Biden’s bill, they aren’t likely to lack
access to high-speed internet much longer. According to the Federal
Communications Commission, partly due to existing federal programs, the
share of Americans who lacked access to high-speed internet fell from
25.5 percent in 2010 (which probably included almost everyone living in
rural areas) to 6.5 percent
in 2019. That’s fewer than 30 million, but no matter what the exact
numbers, the trend is the same: people are getting connected, so this is
a problem that is rapidly going away.
Well-off, exurban households clearly neither deserve nor need an
$8,800 subsidy to get broadband service, especially when those who
really need it can always get satellite service. Personally, I’d love a
faster connection, but given I can already get it from a variety of
satellite services, I'd rather just have the $3,333 so I can choose my
own provider.
The Central Intelligence Agency is always looking to recruit new
agents and advertising is one way it has done so in the past. The
difference this time is in a newly created series of recruitment videos
that reflect the spirit of the age in which we live, rather than
appealing to abilities and patriotism.
The videos seem to suggest that the super-secret agency has been
infiltrated, not by spies from Russia, China, or al-Qaida, but rather a
subtler and nearly invisible enemy.
That would be the infiltration by woke liberals, whose primary goal
appears to be the undermining of every tradition and institution -- from
Disneyland's Snow White ride (the famous kiss scene by the Prince has
been deemed sexually aggressive because Ms. White is unconscious and
cannot give consent, so it will be re-imagined) -- to America's foremost
intelligence agency.
The latest CIA video features a Latina officer who identifies as a
"cisgender millennial." Even the word "cisgender" is so new that my
spellcheck does not (yet) recognize it. The video is part of a new
series called "Humans of CIA" designed to attract a more "diverse pool
of candidates."
From the script: "I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cisgender
millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I
am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise."
Really? What else could it be?
WebMD defines anxiety disorders: "They're a group of mental illnesses
that cause constant and overwhelming anxiety and fear. The excessive
anxiety can make you avoid work, school, family get-togethers, and other
social situations that might trigger or worsen your symptoms."
Forget the other stuff. Why would the CIA be fine with an agent suffering from such a malady?
Some conservatives immediately began mocking the video. Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas) said: "If you're a Chinese communist, or an Iranian mullah,
or Kim Jong-un ... would this scare you? We've come a long way from
Jason Bourne," a reference to the star of the spy movies, not to mention
the real-life drama of Virginia Hall, whose World War II exploits for
British, French and American intelligence are chronicled in a book by
Sonia Purnell entitled "A Woman of No Importance."
Donald Trump Jr. joined the mock fest when he tweeted that the agency
has gone "full woke. China and Russia love this" and are "laughing
their asses off." Trump junior added: "wokeness is the kind of twisted
PSYOP (psychological operations) a spy agency would invent to destroy a
country from inside out." Such operations have traditionally been used
to influence the reasoning and emotions of people, a strategy now
full-blown in America.
The late historian Will Durant had the definitive statement about
what happens to nations that ignore traditions and policies which have
worked in the past: "A great civilization is not conquered from without
until it has destroyed itself within"
An even higher authority preached: "For a time is coming when people
will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow
their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever
their itching ears want to hear. (2 Timothy 4:3 NLT)
The Biden administration is weakening America from inside out,
especially by ignoring the crisis at our southern border. Wokeness is
spreading at least as fast as COVID-19 ever could.
Unlike the virus, there is no vaccination for this moral and intellectual pandemic.
The CIA has had problems in its
past, but none as serious as this. If they continue to succumb to
wokeness, the "I" in its acronym will stand for insanity.
Our
country was founded on a shared Judeo-Christian morality that was based
on the biblical covenant of the Old Testament. Usually abbreviated as
the Ten Commandments, they encompass virtually all of what we need to
know to be good people and citizens of a cohesive, civil society. Our
Constitution, in the words of John Adams, “was made only for a moral and
religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any
other.”
As
a part of our society becomes untethered from God and religion, we are
witnessing the weakening of our constitutional republic and the
corresponding rights that were enshrined within it. Our God-given rights
can never be stripped away from us but those in power can remove them
from our governing documents or simply ignore them.
The
left, intentionally mischaracterizing the First Amendment, has deemed
it appropriate to secularize most aspects of our government and the
public square. The results of this effort are now being manifested as
moral relativism and a full assault on the values that traditional
Americans hold dear. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are no
longer glorified. Instead, we have death, servitude, and a meager
government stipend being celebrated throughout the land.
You shall not murder unless you’re wearing the euphemisms of patient choice, pro-choice, and now even infanticide, as in a “discussion”
between physicians and the mother, after a botched abortion. This one
commandment has been violated at least sixty-two million times since Roe vs Wade,
leaving a horrifying path of destruction not only for the loss of
innocent life, but also for the guilt, remorse, and pain left in its
wake.
Liberty
and the pursuit of happiness are somewhat joined at the hip but neither
have a place of honor in the Democrat party. Progressives no longer
disguise their goal of a socialized America. Socialism is completely
incompatible with individual freedom. Government control of the economy
and the individual worker are not the hallmarks of a free society.
Taking money from one group of people and handing it to another is not
only legalized theft, but it also diminishes the incentives of those
whose money is taken while wreaking havoc on the families of those
receiving money they didn’t earn.
You
shall not covet your neighbor’s possessions, but socialism cannot
survive without rampant envy and coveting. People can grant government
the authority to redistribute the existing money supply but if you steal
enough money from the producers, they simply stop producing. If the
producers stop producing scarcity dramatically drives up prices for all.
Increasing
the money supply, as we are doing today, is the quickest path to
devaluation. The more dollars there are, the less each one will be
worth. We’ve been somewhat sheltered from this type of inflation by our
reserve currency status but that won’t protect us forever and we are now
seeing prices starting to move up. When all is said and done, socialism
makes everyone poorer and unhappier. History has demonstrated this
reality, time and again, but the lesson never seems to stick.
Bearing
false witness against your neighbor is the most widespread ethical
failure of our time. It has become so commonplace that it is largely
ignored in the workaday world, but it is deeply destructive to the
wellbeing of our republic. The recent, high-profile examples have also
been the most injurious to our confidence in government institutions.
President
Trump spent the entirety of his four-year term defending himself from
charges that almost everyone involved knew were false. The corruption
embedded within our Justice Department must be profound for those
falsehoods to be continually propagated for years without significant
resistance or backlash.
The
public remained oblivious to all the malfeasance thanks to the efforts
of an even more corrupt institution: The news media. They constantly
beat the drum for impeachment despite the lack of any evidence beyond a
criminally false dossier. They were complicit in the scheme to make the
dossier public knowledge and they were the primary vehicle used to
perpetuate all the lies. To this day no one has faced justice for this
attempted coup but average citizens remain in prison for simply entering
“the people’s house” to protest a clearly fraudulent election.
Liberals
exalt the government with its one commandment: Thou shall comply. They
want us all to take a vow of poverty in worship to their deity but it
will be a challenge for them to undo a 250-year tradition of freedom
before the next election. That won’t stop them from trying but even
while owning the executive and legislative branches of our government,
they’ve become ever more hysterical and they’re driving their god into
bankruptcy. Maybe they suspect that their time is short.
