Friday, September 24, 2021

Our Aiding and Abetting Press

Without a truly free and unbiased press, 
the average citizen will get propaganda, not justice.


Politicians will always play politics, but our press isn’t supposed to. Our illustrious fourth branch of government is supposed to keep the politicians in line. Yet here we are. 

Mainstream press runs cover for the Left in this country because, for the most part, they are the Left. The media consistently either fail to cover the Left’s scandals, or they quickly move on to hype a less deserving story. They understand the short attention spans of busy Americans who rely heavily on attention-grabbing headlines. When a traditional media outlet actually runs with a story unflattering to the Left, the Democratic power structure is shocked and outraged. (See the recent story in the New York Times regarding the disastrous bombing of an aid worker and his family members including seven children, using their much-touted “over the horizon” drone technology, without eyes on the ground to let the drone pilot know the target was carrying water rather than bombs.) 

Under the Obama Administration, we saw a separate-but-not-equal treatment when the IRS denied nonprofit status to conservative organizations. James Rosen, a Fox News reporter at the time, and the Associated Press were spied on by U.S. agencies, which included calls made and received from Rosen’s parents’ phone number. 

That same administration released thousands of guns under the misguided Operation Fast and Furious to Mexican drug cartels, which resulted in the shooting death of a border agent with one of those firearms. There was the Benghazi disaster on September 11, 2012, which resulted in the deaths of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, despite pleas for additional security. The administration pushed the fake story of a video that supposedly sparked the violence.

In the Trump Administration, it was the Russia investigation, a bogus non-story perpetrated by Hillary Clinton and her campaign. It was a “perfect” Ukraine phone call made by President Trump and hyped by the deep state but actually prompted by Hunter Biden and his dad receiving millions of dollars in quid pro quo money from Ukrainian and Chinese interests. It was the Chinese Wuhan virus perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party and Dr. Anthony Fauci as well as other U.S. scientists who funded gain-of-function experiments with taxpayer monies. It was the stark contrast between free state governors like Florida and Texas versus lockdown cover-your-ass government officials who at once locked up perfectly healthy citizens while filling up senior homes with infected people (New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo) and dining at the ridiculously expensive French Laundry (California’s Governor Gavin Newsom). 

In the current abhorrent administration of a barely functioning senior citizen and deep state operatives, it’s pulling our military out of Afghanistan without pulling out U.S. citizens and U.S. allies from an enemy state which killed 13 of our troops as well as hundreds of innocent Afghans. We failed to even let our national allies know about it beforehand. What was really behind our abrupt evacuation from Afghanistan and the billions of dollars of high tech equipment left behind, and why doesn’t the press even mention it now? 

Our southern border is left open during a pandemic to an unvaccinated and unprecedented number of Central and South Americans. The American media pretends the person in the role of the president is mentally stable while somehow he cannot get through a teleprompter speech, let alone an unscripted moment, without getting lost and confused, especially when an ice cream truck or a small child is near. 

We shut down an American pipeline in favor of a Russian pipeline, inflating gas prices throughout the country. Consider the Pelosi fundraiser for maskless, wickedly wealthy guests and the Met gala princess, AOC, in her “Tax the Rich” dress both served by faceless, masked, lowly people of color. 

Where is the mainstream press on these crises and sensational stories? What happened to the reporting that may have incriminated their leftist friends, the barely touched stories that came and went as fast as the 24 hour news cycle? 

Where are the serious investigations into the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking story and subsequent suspicious death? What about all the many wealthy and powerful people who frequented his homes, one of which contained a rather disturbing painting of Bill Clinton in Monica’s famous blue dress and heels? Why don’t we know the full story about the mass murder in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Resort? 

What did John McAfee know about the elites in our government? You know, the guy who supposedly killed himself and who also happened to have a tattoo that read “$WHACKD,” that he said on Twitter meant “If I suicide myself, I didn’t. I was whackd. Check my right arm.” 

Where are the serious investigations into the origins of the China virus? The Burisma/China Hunter Biden laptop? Biden asking the Afghan president to lie and say the Taliban wasn’t quickly taking over the country? Is anyone holding Kamala and the celebridiots accountable for funding bail for Antifa and dangerous prisoners who then got out and committed more crimes? Does anyone in the government care about the violent crime statistics in our cities? Speaking of Kamala, where the hell is Biden’s Border Czar, as mass illegal non-vaccinated immigration is taking place on said border? 

Why haven’t we heard anything in the mainstream press regarding the recounts and shady election night happenings and missing ballots in only the handful of counties that mattered and turned our 2020 election into a shitshow? How can our press let the power structure in D.C. pretend that the January 6 riot was an insurrection when the only person shot and killed was an unarmed veteran Trump supporter, and there were zero firearms inside the Capitol found on protesters, and only one person found on the grounds carrying one? When will the people arrested, many of whom have had to endure solitary confinement for months and denied bail before their court dates, be let out of the D.C. jail? How can our government hold political prisoners for months without outrage from the mainstream media? 

Average hard-working Americans are finally waking up to these crucial questions and are wondering what has happened to their once-great country. Without a truly free and unbiased press, the average citizen will get propaganda, not justice.


Why the Maricopa Audit is Mostly a Dud

 

Short article by Believe it!

So Here's the Breakdown

The audit shows a result that is close to the official tally. In fact it shows that Trump and Jorganson had too many votes, due to duplicate ballots being wrongfully counted more than once, and Biden had about a hundred legitimate votes that were not reflected in the official results. The auditors attributed this to human error, as these ballots were either damaged or otherwise unable to be scanned. The process is to duplicate these ballots once and scan them once. Somehow there were duplicates counted more times than should have been for Trump and Jorganson, and there were some that were not counted for Biden when they should have been.

The official results, while wrong, were close to the hand recount.

What this proves is that votes were not switched from one candidate to another, as they were in Antrim County Michigan. So Dominion did not switch votes in Maricopa, and neither were any votes switched in adjudication by adjudicators.

This is a good thing, since that would have been vote-stealing. That doesn't mean it didn't happen elsewhere, but it didn't happen in Maricopa.

What was found was that over 17,000 mail-in ballots are invalid. 100% illegal votes that should not have been counted, but were. Dr. Shiva found this through examination of mail-in ballot envelopes.

Dr. Shiva emphasized the point that the ONLY mail-in ballots his team found to be invalid were those without any signature at all, or those with only a mark but no signature, or with only a scribble instead of a signature.

This does NOT include signature matching. That is, ballot envelopes with signatures, but ones that might be forgeries or even entirely different names.

So just out of the tiny percentage of mail-in ballots that lacked signatures, there were a little over 17,000. That's about 1½ times the difference between Trump and Biden in just Maricopa County alone.


The Problem

We don't know who those 17,000+ invalid votes belong to.

When a mail-in ballot is removed from the envelope and pushed through to be counted as valid, that's it. There is no way to trace it back to the envelope it came from to verify if it had a signature or not. So we are likely never going to find out how many of those invalid votes were for Biden.

Also worth noting is that many of these mail-ins were received AFTER the deadline on election night, but they were counted anyway. All in violation of the election laws.

So when you have a state that is allowed to just keep counting ballots without end, it becomes easy to simply throw in a couple hundred mail-ins after the fact to push a candidate's numbers up.


Summary

All this audit proves is that the Arizona election cannot be confirmed either way. We began this venture not knowing if the Arizona election was stolen or not, and we leave not knowing if it was stolen or not.

But I will write that if it was stolen, it wasn't stolen by hundreds of thousands of votes, which a lot of people expected. At least, that's not what Maricopa's audit suggests.

The hand recount confirms votes were not switched.

The duplicated ballots did not produce any major discrepancies, and were attributed to human error.

The mail-in balloting scam produced over 17,000 invalid votes, and more arrived after the deadline which are invalid, and yet these were counted anyway.

We did not get any signature matching, which might show even more mail-in fraud.

We don't know which candidate had more invalid votes.

There was fraud. There was enough fraud to affect the outcome of the election in Arizona. But we don't know who benefited from the fraud.


Next Step

The next move for the Arizona legislature should be to conduct audits in the other Arizona counties. We have over 17,000 illegal votes confirmed! How many are there in the other counties?

Let the audits run! And BAN all mail-in voting! It is not secure!

Believe it!

Red Pill news, Arizona Audit news, and more-Sept 24


 



It's been a VERY busy day for our side, folks, and I love it!! Here's tonight's news:

Arizona Audit news:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/dr-shiva-az-senate-hearing-17000-total-duplicate-ballots-votes-voted-arizona-1-5-times-bidens-winning-margin/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/doug-logan-cyber-ninjas-speaks-dr-shiva-uncovers-additional-57000-issues-not-counting-shivas-17000-issues/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/ben-cotton-follow-cyber-ninjas-describes-plethora-massive-cybersecurity-issues/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/caught-az-audit-team-caught-maricopa-county-officials-deleting-computer-election-files-video/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/arizona-senate-audit-dominion-machines-contained-non-maricopa-county-data-south-carolina-washington-state-video/

National Sabotage by Immigration


If there is one truly existential issue for America in 2021 and beyond, it is immigration.


As the first year of a Biden presidency that has felt like a decade nears its end, only the most ardent Democratic partisans still insist that the country is on the right track. The rest of us are left to debate whether the rancid fruit of this regime is a result of incompetence or design. By analysis of this administration’s immigration agenda alone, the inescapable conclusion is that it is indeed the latter. The macabre consequences of this fact threaten to take America into one of the darkest chapters in its history.

These kinds of conclusions run contrary to the traditional American ethos. Those who grew up with Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” imagery or John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier vision experienced leadership that sought the best for America and its citizenry. In those eras, politicians from both major parties seemed to prioritize the good of the country; they only disagreed on the means to get us there.

Such notions seem quaint given today’s realities. Beneath the surface of Biden’s genial Uncle Joe schtick is an executive branch controlled by some of the most dogmatic left-wing apparatchiks ever seen in American politics. Among their witch’s brew of radical ideas, they have seized upon immigration as one of the quickest and most effective ways to transform the country to their vision.  

It is becoming increasingly difficult to give this administration the benefit of the doubt on anything. That became nearly impossible after independent journalist John Solomon broke the news of a letter from recently departed Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott to Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and its homeland security and governmental affairs committee.  

In his letter, Scott described a culture in the current administration where inexperienced political appointees routinely ignore or reject common-sense recommendations from career immigration enforcement professionals.

Perhaps the most alarming part of Scott’s letter was this: “The Biden administration’s team at DHS is laser-focused on expediting the flow of migrants into the U.S. and downplaying the significant vulnerability this creates for terrorists, narcotics smugglers, human traffickers, and even hostile nations to gain access to our homeland.”

This kind of behavior can no longer be excused as faculty lounge naïveté. It is the sabotage of a nation via immigration policy. How else can a rational mind read Scott’s letter? How can one not conclude that this administration is engaging in a form of Cloward-Piven strategy to destabilize the nation for its own political benefit?

If we had a legitimate watchdog press in the country, it would treat the Scott letter as a bombshell story that demands answers from this administration. Because the press corps are mostly Biden allies, however, we get urgent reports of what ice cream flavor the commander in chief had over the weekend while thousands of potentially COVID-infected foreign nationals enter the country illegally.

Further insult is paid to the American people when this administration responds to the few critical questions it receives on the crises it has created. When pressed by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy on the duplicity of requiring vaccinations or negative COVID tests for those flying into the country but no such requirement for those walking across our southern border, White House mouthpiece Jen Psaki responded that the latter are “not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time.” 

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, lampooned as the Baghdad Bob of the administration, routinely insists that the border is closed, all evidence to the contrary. When legitimate questions or criticisms are offered of what is clearly a disastrous policy, the preferred response from the Left is to accuse that person of being nativist, xenophobic, or racist.

Beyond that, this White House is not above giving oxygen to absurd, social-media-fueled theories. Psaki recently criticized images of what some interpreted as federal agents in Texas on horseback using whips to corral Haitian migrants. Despite the outrage from blue-check warriors on Twitter including U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the charge was proven to be demonstrably false when what appeared to be a whip in a photo was actually the reins to control the horse.  

For all the destruction this administration has caused on the border, there is evidence it also may be failing at its ultimate goal of owning the Hispanic voting bloc and cementing power for generations. A recent poll found that Biden’s support among Hispanic voters is cratering in Texas. It turns out they don’t want to live in an overcrowded country rife with poverty and lawlessness, either. 

If there is one truly existential issue for America in 2021 and beyond, it is immigration. Americans need to take a side and fight for it, or else stop complaining as the country they once knew and loved slips away.


Joe Biden Is Worse Than Jimmy Carter

 Joe Biden Is Worse Than Jimmy Carter

Then-president Jimmy Carter (left) and President Joe Biden (Bernard Gotfryd/Library of Congress; Tom Brenner/Reuters)

The present bears similarities to the tumultuous 1970s, but this time the blame lies squarely with the president.


Amid the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan, some on the right have started making comparisons between the presidency of Jimmy Carter and that of Joe Biden. The parallels between the Iranian hostage crisis and the disaster in Afghanistan are limited, but it is notable that the hostage crisis was the unforeseeable consequence of a series of events that the U.S. was not in any real position to control (which is not to claim that Carter handled the events leading up to the fall of the Shah particularly well, on the contrary). By contrast, what is now unfolding in Afghanistan is the direct and all too predictable consequence of a specific decision that — down to its disastrous timing — was ultimately Biden’s to take.

Another seeming parallel between Carter and Biden is the problem of inflation. Of course, inflation was a major issue throughout the Carter administration as well as during the Nixon and Ford years, with rates bouncing around wildly through much of the decade. But Biden’s inflation problem, like the Afghanistan debacle, is likely to end up resting mostly on Biden’s own shoulders if his spending plans go through, with the rate having jumped from 1.4 percent in January when he took office to 5.39 percent in June.

To be fair, at least some of the inflation that we have seen so far can be put down to both the supply-chain disruptions that have followed the pandemic and measures introduced, generally with a high degree of bipartisan support, during both the Trump and Biden presidencies, to help offset the impact some of the pandemic’s effects. The Fed, too, has played its part.

Persistent inflation could be avoided, but between the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Recovery Plan and the pending $1.1 trillion “bipartisan infrastructure” bill and the Democrats’ planned $3.5 trillion spending bill, it is hard to be optimistic. The only question is whether Congress will oblige.

Carter, on the other hand, nominated Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. While there are disagreements as to why he did this, there is not too much dispute that he knew that Volcker would take a tough line on inflation, which he quickly proceeded to do. Biden remains oddly indifferent to the risk of inflation. Hopefully, Congressional Republicans and Democratic moderates such as Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) will thwart Biden’s spending ambitions.

As if the scales were already not tilted in Carter’s favor relative to Biden’s (at least to date), the starkest differences between the two can be found in the area of economic regulation. On this transformative issue not only was Carter much better than Biden, but he may be one of the most notable deregulatory presidents in modern history. He’s almost certainly the most unexpected.

As president, Carter led the way in deregulating America’s airlines and interstate trucking, as well as freight railroads and even beer brewing. Each of these reforms has stood the test of time, resulting in cheaper transportation, more industry competition, and better living standards for millions of Americans.

While Americans often complain about cramped quarters on airlines, the actual preferences of most ticket purchasers continues to be for inexpensive, “no frills” options. Meanwhile, just last year, over 1,000 supporters of the 1980 Staggers Act, which deregulated much of the railroad sector, signed a letter reaffirming their support for the policies outlined in that bill. As noted in that letter, since the act’s passage, “[r]ail traffic has doubled, rail productivity has more than doubled, rail rates are down more than 40 percent, and recent years have been the safest on record.”

In other words, deregulation worked, and it has been working to our benefit for decades since.

Lest you think you haven’t benefited adequately from more efficient transportation, Carter also signed legislation that legalized craft brewing, something that helped pave the way to the numerous innovations in beer brewing that have pleased millions of Americans, from hop-heads to those who prefer fruit and chocolate-infused flavors and everything in between.

And how is Joe Biden’s record by comparison? He hasn’t touched brewers (yet), but he is already attempting to re-regulate freight railroads. A July executive order on “providing competitiveness in the American economy” encouraged the Surface Transportation Board (STB) — the federal agency that oversees economic regulations for private freight railroads such as Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific — to consider imposing “forced access” more regularly.

This means that privately owned and maintained railroads could be forced to turn over traffic to competing railroads at potentially below-market rates — a clear violation of private-property rights and free-market enterprise as we know it. The order is akin to net neutrality for railroads. Railroads already voluntarily allow access to their competition in order to improve service across the industry, but the last thing Americans or freight railroads need is for Uncle Sam to get back into the business of heavily regulating railroads.

To date, the Biden administration has done virtually nothing to deregulate the economy. On the contrary, aside from its spending spree, what passes for “accomplishments” in the Biden administration largely involve undoing deregulatory executive actions on the part of the Trump administration on the environment, or imposing entirely new, onerous regulations such as the ban on new oil and gas permits on federal lands, which has now run into trouble in the courts

These points may not convince many conservatives that Jimmy Carter was a good president (and to be clear, I don’t think he was, myself), but perhaps they will convince some that Carter had significant and lasting accomplishments to show for his four years in office. Given his track record to date, Joe Biden is beginning to make Jimmy Carter look pretty good. That may not say that much about Carter, but it says a lot about Biden.


‘Our Kids Carpooled Together’: How Old Friends In High Places Assembled The Russia Collusion Hoax

Not just anyone can call up the FBI general counsel with claims of 
conspiratorial criminality by a presidential candidate and get 
a private sit-down. And yet that is exactly what happened.



The indictment of Washington attorney Michael Sussman — accused of lying to the FBI in order to smear Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign — reveals the ace up the sleeve of high-powered Democrats. It’s a card they played time and again to advance the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory: friends in high places.

They used friends in law enforcement to launch secret investigations; they used friends in the federal government to broaden those investigations; and they used friends in the media to spread the word about Trump and his organization being under investigation.

The Russia fiasco metastasized in large part because those involved in advancing the false allegations had important connections. They used friendships with powerful federal officials to encourage investigations against team Trump. Those targeted by Sussmann and others were unabashed outsiders, and as such lacked the sort of connections the insiders exploited so adroitly.

Sussmann was a partner at the Washington law firm Perkins Coie in 2016, which represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. But, according to the indictment handed down by Special Counsel John Durham last week, when he met with the FBI’s general counsel, James Baker, to allege that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians, Sussmann claimed he was representing another client. The indictment alleges this was false.

Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy. But for Sussmann it was.

Not just anyone can call up the bureau’s general counsel and, with amorphous claims of conspiratorial criminality by a presidential candidate, promptly get a private sit-down. And yet that is exactly what Sussmann did. How? Because, as Baker told congressional investigators, Sussmann came to him “based on a preexisting relationship.”

In closed-door congressional testimony Oct. 18, 2018, Baker told lawmakers about Sussmann’s convoluted claim that a computer server at Trump Tower was in secret contact with a possible Russian government cutout, Alfa Bank. “So he was describing a – what appeared to be a surreptitious channel of communications – communication between some part of President Trump’s, I’ll say organization but it could be his businesses. I don’t mean like The Trump Organization, per se. I mean his enterprises with which he was associated. Some part of that and a – an organization associated with – a Russian organization associated with the Russian government,” and it was “conducted in a way so as to make it a covert communications channel.”

When Baker asked him how he came upon this information, Sussmann, according to Baker, said “that there were some cyber experts that somehow would come across this information and brought it somehow to his attention, and that they were alarmed at what it showed, and that, therefore, they wanted to bring it to the attention of the FBI.”

Asked for the names of the “experts,” Baker said, “I don’t think I ever found out who these experts were.”

Faced with flimsy sourcing for an abstruse allegation, Baker might have been expected to ask a lawyer whose firm was closely aligned with the Democratic Party some probing questions. But if he did, that’s now lost in a cloud of foggy recollection. “I can’t remember,” Baker told members of Congress when asked if he knew Sussmann was billing the DNC and the Clinton campaign for his time talking with Baker. “I don’t specifically remember when I learned that. So I don’t know that I had that in my head when he showed up in my office. I just can’t remember.”

“I just find that unbelievable,” Rep. Jim Jordan replied, “that the guy representing the Clinton campaign, the Democrat National Committee, shows up with information that says we got this, and you don’t ask where he got it, you didn’t know how he got it. But he got it from some, you know, quote, expert.”

Jordan asked Baker whether Sussmann ever mentioned he “may have got some of this information from the Democratic National Committee?”

“I am not sure what I knew about that at the time,” Baker said – a failure of memory that Sussmann’s lawyers are sure to take advantage of.

Baker suggested it was a mystery why Sussmann reached out to him – and then repeatedly made it clear exactly why Sussmann saw him as a possible collaborator. “I had a personal relationship with Michael,” Baker said, but “you’d have to ask him why he decided to pick me.”

“And so what you’re saying is you were the intermediary between Perkins Coie and the FBI because of your personal relationship with that attorney?” then-Rep. Mark Meadows asked.

“I believe so,” Baker answered – but he did so with the caveat: “You’d have to ask Michael why he came to me.” One plausible answer Sussmann could have given was that going to Baker was the best way to achieve his goal – after all, Baker did pass the information on to bureau investigators, and there would soon be stories in Slate and the New York Times telling of an FBI “probe” into Trump and Russia. 

For his part, Sussmann told congressional investigators that when he met with Baker, he told him, “I wasn’t looking for the FBI to do anything. I had no ask. I had no requests.”

Sussmann wasn’t the only old friend feeding Russia conspiracy stories to James Baker. In the fall of 2016, another Washingtonian with the general counsel’s ear was David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of the left-wing magazine Mother Jones.

“David had part of what is now referred to as the Steele dossier and he talked to me about that and wanted to provide that to the FBI,” Baker told lawmakers. “And so, even though he was my friend, I was also an FBI official. He knew that. And so he wanted to somehow get that into the hands of the FBI.”

How did a Mother Jones reporter/columnist get chosen to drop a dime on Trump with the FBI?

“David is a friend of mine”

“Longtime friend?”

“Longtime friend.”

“When did you first meet Mr. Corn?”

“Years and years and years ago,” Baker said to congressional investigators. “Our kids carpooled together. We carpooled with them when our kids were little.”

As with the materials from Sussmann, Baker took dossier sections from David Corn and passed them on to FBI counterintelligence agents.

Having such relationships was seen not as a liability, not as a risk of bias, but instead as something that boosts the credibility of those passing along information.

Consider former British agent Christopher Steele, who had a knack for cultivating friends in high places. In 2007 he met Bruce Ohr at an organized crime conference. They would continue to meet about once or twice a year, whenever Ohr was in London or Steele was in Washington. Orbis, the private intelligence firm Steele formed after he left MI6, produced a steady stream of short reports; Steele shared them with Ohr.

Their friendship developed to the point that, in the spring of 2010, Ohr connected Steele with the FBI and “pushed” for the bureau to make his friend a paid FBI informant, a “confidential human source.” The relationship he built over the years with Ohr would prove helpful when Ohr became one of the highest-ranking career officials at the Department of Justice, associate deputy attorney general – especially since Steele wasn’t the only one cultivating a connection with Bruce Ohr.

Ohr had also become “personally acquainted” with Glenn Simpson at the same sort of policy conferences year after year. That relationship was reinforced when the opposition research firm Simpson co-founded, Fusion GPS, hired Ohr’s wife, Nellie, as an independent contractor.

When it came time for Steele to tap Ohr in launching a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, Steele used all the trappings of friendship among international sophisticates: He took the Ohrs to breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.

Not long before the 2016 election, Christopher Steele had a falling out with the FBI, which had discovered he was not honoring the “confidential” part of his agreement to be a confidential human source. But thanks to Steele and Simpson’s relationships with Bruce Ohr, Steele’s ability to influence the FBI was not lost. He began to funnel his spurious tales through Bruce Ohr to the bureau. Lawmakers asked James Baker why the FBI — having shut down Steele as an official source — turned to Bruce Ohr as a way to continue gathering information from Steele. Baker saw Ohr’s friendship with Steele as an asset, not a liability: “Bruce,” Baker said, “had some type of preexisting relationship with the source.”

Ohr wasn’t the only official Steele cultivated; he had also become pals with Jonathan Winer sometime around 2000. During the Obama administration, Winer was a top State Department officer. And while at Foggy Bottom, Winer didn’t forget his old friend from London. For years, Winer encouraged colleagues at State to read the research reports produced by Steele’s private intel company, Orbis. Winer distributed well over 100 of Steele’s intel memos to Victoria Nuland’s State Department Eurasia team.

He also promoted Steele himself: “Toria and Paul, Three reports from Orbis,” Winer wrote in a November 2014 email, showing his nickname and first-name basis with “Toria” Nuland and Paul W. Jones, her deputy. He added, “The man behind them and Orbis, Chris Steele (as previously mentioned, former MI6 Russia expert, and a trusted friend of mine) is in DC next couple of days. If you’d like to meet with him, let me know and I can put it together.” Winer promoted Steele’s dossier with no less vigor and enthusiasm, distributing it among his friends at State.

From Michael Sussmann’s relationship with the FBI’s general counsel, Jim Baker, to Baker’s friendship with David Corn of Mother Jones; from Bruce Ohr’s long connection with Christopher Steele to Steele’s decade-long association with Jonathan Winer, the stealthy dissemination of allegations against Trump, his businesses and his staff remains a blueprint of how Washington works.


Too Much Inflation? Just Raise the Inflation Target!

 Too Much Inflation? 

Just Raise the Inflation Target!



In late August, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell suggested that the Federal Reserve would begin tapering before the end of the year admit an admission that price inflation was rising above the two-percent target. Nonetheless, the Fed took no immediate action in the following month. This week, Powell again suggested a taper would begin soon, stating it would begin soon enough that the process could “conclud[e] around the middle of next year,” and maybe could begin in November. This, of course, was highly conditional, with Powell noting this taper would only happen if “the economic recovery remains on track.”

Some interpreted this as a hawkish turn for Powell, but again, we should expect no immediate action on this. Lackluster economic growth remains a concern and Powell's qualifier on the “recovery” remaining on track will be key. Last week, Goldman downgraded the US economic growth forecast, and the Beige Book—which always casts economic growth in a rosy glow—also reduced its description of the economy during July and August to ”moderate.” Meanwhile, the Bank of England today signaled a worsening global situation with its own downgrade of growth expectations. In other words, if the economy isn’t improving enough—according to the Fed—then it can simply abandon plans to taper.

In other words, we may be looking at a repeat of the decade following the Great Recession. Growth was remarkably slow in those days in spite of immense amounts of monetary stimulus.  The Fed repeatedly spoke of an “improving economy,” however, and repeatedly hinted at tapering. It was only in 2016 when the Fed dared to allow the target interest rate to inch upward. This was largely done out of fear the Fed would have no room to maneuver in case of another crisis, however, and not in response to inflation, which remained low in the official measures.

But in 2017 and 2018, when CPI inflation began to push above two percent, the expectation arose that the Fed would finally begin to meaningfully taper to keep target inflation near the state two-percent target. This alarmed some inflation doves who were concerned—with good reason—that any reining in of the Fed’s easy-money policies would end the very fragile and lackluster recovery then underway. The repo crisis of 2019 was the first sign of trouble in the Fed’s very-minor tapering effort. But any other brewing liquidity crises were soon obscured by the covid crisis and the economic collapse that followed.

The target interest rate was quickly returned to 0.25 percent, and additional asset purchases resumed at breakneck speed, with the Fed’s portfolio soon topping eight trillion dollars.

But doves nonetheless felt the Fed had been too aggressive against price inflation, and the covid crisis gave doves an opportunity to press their case. In August of 2020, the Fed adopted a new policy in which it would pursue an “average” two-percent inflation goal. In other words, the Fed could now pursue a price-inflation goal above two percent for some periods so long as it all averaged out to two percent over time.

But even that hasn’t been enough for the advocates of ever more price inflation, as we now see in calls for ending the two-percent target altogether. The catalyst for this is the fact price inflation has been repeatedly creeping upward.

The Fed now admits that inflation has again surged, with expectations of an inflation rate exceeding four percent at year’s end. (This is CPI inflation, of course, not the much-larger asset-price inflation which the Fed studiously ignores.)

Presumably, the longer inflation persists above the target rate, the more the Fed will feel pressure to bring inflation back down through some sort of tapering. After all, the adoption of a two-percent target implies two percent is the "correct" inflation rate. Anything higher than that is presumably "too much." But the last thing the doves want is any concerted effort to get price inflation down right now. Many suspect today’s weak economy can’t handle even a little bit of tapering. 

For example, writing at the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Greg Ip noted that Powell appears to be banking on the inflation rate soon returning to two percent. But what if it doesn’t? Ip says if inflation remains above targets, the Fed should just raise the targets. He writes:

One strategy [Powell]—or his successor—should consider in that eventuality is to simply raise the target.

And why pursue higher inflation? Ip takes the popular view of the “mythical trade-off between higher employment and inflation”—as Brendan Brown describes it. For Ip, higher inflation is the way to ensure an employment-fueled expansion, and he writes:

Why would higher inflation ever be a good thing? Economic theory says modestly higher, stable inflation should mean fewer and less severe recessions, and less need for exotic tools such as central-bank bond buying, which may inflate asset bubbles. More practically, if inflation ends up closer to 3% than 2% next year, raising the target would relieve the Fed of jacking up interest rates to get inflation down, destroying jobs in the process.

According to Ip, the too-low two-percent target places the Fed in a straight jacket. The Fed needs more room to breathe. Rather than feel the pressure to taper just because price inflation has risen above the two-percent target, Ip wants to make sure the Fed can just keep on with the stimulus until price inflation exceeds three percent, or maybe even four percent. And who knows? After that, maybe “economic theory” will tell us that five percent inflation is an even better target. Certainly, that would be no less arbitrary a number than four percent or two percent.

But it’s a safe bet that if the accepted inflation target were four percent, we’d be hearing little-to-nothing right now about tapering, normalization, or any other effort to cut price inflation. The Fed would then be more free to keep the easy-money spigot open longer without having to hear complaints that the Fed had “lost control” of price inflation. That would be great for stock prices and real estate prices. Ordinary people, on the other hand, might fare less well


The Culture War Is The Big Tent



Reeling from Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, the Republican Party published an autopsy report at the request of then-chairman Reince Priebus. In corporate pastels, the document recommended Republicans moderate on social issues in order to be more “welcoming and inclusive.” Then came Donald Trump. Then came 2020.

In retrospect, the autopsy’s contention that Republicans needed to rebrand as the “Growth and Opportunity Party” is quite funny. If you were paying attention, it was quite funny then too. 

Consider the arc of conservative youth group Turning Point USA, which used to intentionally identify its focus as “fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government,” lead by a young “Objectivist” fan of Ayn Rand. Now the group holds “Culture War” events that would make Rand cringe.

Why? I think my friend Inez Stepman put it perfectly during a recent podcast. “The culture war is the big tent,” she said. This inverts the GOP’s donor-approved conventional wisdom, but it is absolutely true.

Again, if you were watching our culture closely ten years ago (see: Angelo Codevilla), you understood this long before the Trump era. Slower learners needed the Trump moment to see this more clearly. It’s also true that Democrats’ wild reaction to Trump pushed them even further left on cultural issues, which made the state of affairs even more obvious.

Watch this video of a woman tearing obscene OkCupid ads off the walls of a subway car as it careens through New York City. As of this writing, I do not know who the woman is. The video could be staged, but there’s no clear reason or evidence of that at this point. It appears authentic.

“This is propaganda,” the woman says. “It’s never going to go away until we the people say we don’t want this anymore,” she adds later, having recruited a couple other passengers to help tear the ads down.

Nonpartisan parents around the country are resisting the excesses of LGBT ideology and critical race theory. The issue transcends the narrow borders of identity politics. I still think the “realignment” will ultimately prove impossible, but it’s quite clear that there’s political capital to be gained by Republicans leaning into the culture war. The left pushed too far, too fast, and Democrats are now under the thumb of cultural radicals in politics and media, left to defend and promote an ideology that offends most of the country.

Look at the results of this recent poll from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. There is little support for reducing the size of the city’s police force. You’d likely find that opposition to such measures actually animates voters as well.

Democrats are out of step with the public on many high-profile questions, some of which they can’t ignore because the party establishment is culturally radicalized and demands they actively promote far-left priorities. Republicans who find that “socialism” polls poorly in the suburbs should recognize those results don’t speak to fears about the national debt. The label has a cultural connotation about creeping radicalism that can’t be tapped into with platitudes about free markets.

Not all culture war issues are politically expedient (although that doesn’t mean conservatives should budge on them). But contra the 2012 autopsy, standing against the excesses of cultural leftism and actually fighting back will bring voters into the GOP, not repel them. More importantly, of course, it’s a moral imperative with urgent stakes.


ACLU Thinks the Second Amendment Is a Threat to the…

 ACLU Thinks the Second Amendment Is a Threat to the First Amendment

"Restrictions on guns in public spaces are appropriate to make public spaces safe for democratic participation."

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(Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom)

On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its New York affiliate organization, the NYCLU, jointly announced they had submitted an amicus brief in the upcoming Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Corlett, which could determine the future of New York's onerous, barely navigable process of concealed carry licensure. Unfortunately, the organization that refers to itself as "our nation's guardian of liberty" is on the side of this illiberal process.

In the press release announcing the brief, the ACLU averred that "restrictions on guns in public spaces are appropriate to make public spaces safe for democratic participation, including First Amendment activity such as assembly, association, and speech." In other words, the ACLU has decided that exercising one's Second Amendment rights may run counter to someone else's First Amendment rights, and is favoring the latter over the former. As evidence, the ACLU cites a case from last summer in which a Black Lives Matter rally in Florida was disrupted when a counter-protester—who also happened to be a concealed-carry license-holder—pulled out a handgun and threatened some marchers.

Regardless of one's permit status, it is already illegal to threateningly brandish a weapon, including in Florida. It remains to be seen how one could not defend both rights equally, even in such a scenario.

The ACLU has been and continues to be a forthright defender of civil liberties in many situations, and a thorn in the side of presidential administrations of both political parties. At the same time, however, its defense of the Second Amendment has been rather lackluster. Even the organization's internal philosophy on the subject is, at best, muddled, ranging from an erstwhile recognition of an individual right while pressing for "reasonable" regulations, to its most recent claim that the Constitution affords "a collective right rather than an individual right." How a "collective" right can be achieved without a lot of people exercising an "individual" right is left unaddressed.

In recent years, the ACLU has evolved on the issue even more distressingly: In 2017, the Virginia ACLU sued on behalf of alt-right activist Jason Kessler when the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, would not allow him to hold his approved rally, dubbed "Unite the Right," in his preferred location. The ACLU won the suit, but the rally infamously devolved into violence, with dozens of injuries and one death. In the aftermath, a portion of the ACLU staff revolted, signing an open letter in which they decried the organization's "rigid stance" on defending the rights of the alt-right and white supremacists.

The following year, the national organization put out an internal memoclarifying its case selection guidelines: Rather than stridently fighting for the right to speech and peaceful assembly even for the most detested people, the organization would now weigh such competing considerations as "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values" and "whether the speakers seek to carry weapons." While the memo does reaffirm the ACLU's commitment to "continue our longstanding practice of representing [disfavored] groups," former Executive Director Ira Glasser and former board member Wendy Kaminer both questionedwhether the language of the memo was simply to give the organization cover to refuse such cases in the future.

If that were the case, it would directly contradict the historical role of the ACLU, which has famously taken on such cases as National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie and Brandenburg v. Ohio, both of which it still touts on its website. In both cases, the ACLU won the right for neo-Nazis to march and chant hateful slogans, in the latter scenario while armed. Brandenburg, specifically, narrowed the rubric of speech that the government could criminalize, a big win for freedom of speech. Yet Kaminer wondered whether, "given its new guidelines," the ACLU would even take up such a case today.

More than a decade has passed since the Supreme Court weighed in on a major Second Amendment case, after affirming an individual right to armed self-defense in 2008's District of Columbia v. Heller and incorporating that right among the states in 2010's McDonald v. Chicago. Those cases, however, were limited to an individual's right to possess firearms in his own home, leaving the prospect of concealed carry for another day.

Concealed carry is a contentious topic in plenty of places around the country, but in New York, it can be especially inscrutable: In order to successfully obtain a license to carry a concealed weapon, applicants must demonstrate that they have a "proper cause" to do so. "Proper cause," of course, is never defined, and judicial decisions have even determined that a "generalized desire to carry a concealed weapon to protect one's person and property" is insufficient to qualify as "proper cause."

In practice, of course, this leads to unequal application of the law, wherein low-income individuals who want weapons for protection are denied, while the wealthy and well-connected are approved. Long before he was under the purview of the Secret Service, former President Donald Trump employed his own private security team, since at least the 1990s. Nonetheless, Trump acknowledged in 2012 that he personally did, in fact, have a New York concealed carry permit.

In the ACLU/NYCLU joint press release, the organizations even concede that "like so many other laws in our country, some gun restrictions were historically enacted and targeted disproportionately against Black people." This is undoubtedly true. And yet, they nonetheless argue that "across-the-board restrictions on open and concealed public carry have long been applied universally to all persons, and are an important means to maintain safety and peace in public spaces and help curb threats of violence against protestors." Therefore, if a legal restriction is applied to everyone, rather than simply people of color, it passes muster.

Interestingly, this puts the ACLU/NYCLU on the opposite side of the issue as a consortium of public defender organizations. Earlier this year they filed a brief of their own in favor of scrapping the New York law, based upon the "hundreds of indigent people" they represent each year, who are prosecuted for keeping handguns for self-defense, "virtually all [of whom]…are Black and Hispanic."

The Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments in November. In the meantime, though, it is a shame that the ACLU has continued to take a position contrary to its own explicitly stated goals. When the organization calls itself "the nation's premier defender of the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution," it apparently refers to all but one.