Tuesday, October 5, 2021

Why Is China Facing Mysterious Energy Blackouts? It Could Be Designs On Taiwan

China runs on coal. Environmental pledges to foreigners mean little to the Middle Kingdom unless those promises can be leveraged for other purposes.



Odd things are happening in the People’s Republic of China (PRC): electricity shortages due to lack of coal; factories shutting down; cities going dark with no warning, blacking-out traffic lights, stalling people in elevators, and killing patients in hospitals. The entire power grid is said to be near-collapse.

Why? Are these electrical shortages due to the weaknesses of an increasingly centralized economy under the control of the Chinese Communist Party? Might they be traced to China’s banning of coal imports from Australia — until 2020, the largest exporter of coal to China? Or might the PRC be weaning itself off coal shipped by overseas routes that might be disrupted during a conflict over Taiwan?

A power company in China’s Northeast posted a notice on its website that unplanned blackouts would become “the new normal,” with power cuts lasting through next spring. The post was quickly taken down. Media in Jilin province said the cause was a rise in coal prices leading to short supply — which doesn’t entirely make sense (more on that in a bit). Residents have risked their social credit score by using social media to say the lack of electricity was like living in next-door North Korea.

Some Western media report that the electricity shortage is due to an edict out of Beijing to cut regional energy use, implying that it’s part of a “push to enforce environmental regulations.” Chinese Community Party Chairman Xi Jinping promises that China will peak its carbon emissions in nine years. This has resulted in electricity rationing that has idled energy-intensive industrial activity. A nine-day production halt ending Sept. 30 was ordered in Ma’an, China, about 80 miles south of Shanghai. Even food processing plants have been shuttered.

In a directly related issue, China outlawed all cryptocurrency activities on Sept. 24. Last year, two-thirds of the world’s Bitcoin was mined in China using about 86 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, with almost two-thirds of that from coal power.

One Bitcoin transaction consumes 1,544 kilowatt-hours (kWh), or the equivalent of approximately 53 days of power for the average U.S. household, so about $200 worth of electricity. Bitcoin mining used 1.1 percent of China’s electricity in 2020. Coal produced 57 percent of China’s electricity in 2020, with the PRC importing about 8 percent of its coal, much of it for making steel.

Thus, banning cryptocurrencies, including their mining, saves enough electricity to reduce China’s thermal coal import requirements by about a third. Western media was quick to note a study in the journal Nature Communications by Chinese and Western academics that suggested cryptocurrency mining alone could force China to exceed its greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.

Chairman Xi further played into this Western environmental narrative when he announced on Sept. 21 before the United Nations General Assembly that China would end its financing of coal-fired power plants in other nations. While Xi didn’t provide any details as to exactly when this would happen, Helen Mountford of the World Resources Institute applauded the move, saying, “China’s pledge shows that the firehose of international public financing for coal is being turned off. China’s commitment, coming on the heels of recent pledges by South Korea and Japan, represents a historic turning point away from the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel.”

Li Shuo, a Beijing-based policy adviser with Greenpeace East Asia, said exactly what China’s communist regime allowed him to say about the announcement: “It’s certainly a positive step forward. It’s going to contribute to the ongoing global trend to move away from coal.”

The Biden administration, led by climate envoy John Kerry, has made cooperation about climate change a centerpiece of its relationship with China. The administration had implored China to end its practice of building new coal plants in developing nations.

If China moves now to cancel the deals it had in the works in 20 nations, it will forestall the construction of 40 gigawatts (GW) of coal power — about the size of Germany’s coal power output. By comparison, China built 29.8 GW of coal-fired power last year — three-quarters of the supposed gains achieved in Xi’s announced intention to stop financing international coal projects now in the pipeline. Further, China is now building almost 100 GW of coal plant capacity with another 105 GW pending.

In fact, China built more than one large coal plant every week last year, or more than three times the rest of the world combined, and far more than the United States has decommissioned in recent years. China generated 53 percent of the world’s total coal power in 2020, compared to 44 percent in 2015.

While the PRC has pledged to end its financing of coal power abroad, U.S. investors, including the massive California state employee and teachers retirement funds, have sent tens of billions of dollars to China, including to Chinese firms involved in the PRC’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative.

China State Construction, a firm on the former Trump administration’s investment blacklist for aiding the Chinese military, has built multiple coal-fired power plants in other nations — with the help of California’s pension funds. CalSTRS, the California State Teachers Retirement System, owned 1.7 million shares of China State Construction in mid-2020 along with 2.8 million shares in Shanxi Xishan Coal & Electric, which operates eight coal power plants in China and nine coal mines to feed them.

So, while Chairman Xi picks up praise for pledging to stop building coal-fired power plants elsewhere, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom allows his pension funds to build coal-fired power plants within China.

What do these shifts in energy policy mean? The Western view, rooted in self-satisfied smugness, is that the PRC is making good on its promises to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. This view is now the consensus, especially among the foreign policy elite.

In truth, it may simply be that Chairman Xi’s effort to recentralize the economy around his edicts is running into the usual problems endemic to planned economies. In this case, the blackouts are akin to tales out of the old Soviet Union where factories would meet orders to increase shoe production by simply making more children’s shoes — the quota would be met but adults couldn’t find shoes.

Similarly, the Chinese communist regime may simply be running out of money to fund endless infrastructure projects at home and abroad. The collapse of Evergrande hints at larger problems. Thus, Xi made a virtue out of necessity when he told the UN that the PRC would halt the construction of foreign coal projects.

Both scenarios — Chinese inability to generate sufficient electricity or the need to conserve cash — are seen by the West as climate change cooperation. Our elites see what they want to see.

But there is another, more ominous possibility. A key tenet in deception operations is to project a scenario your enemy wants to believe. Thus, on the eve of D-Day in 1944, Allied deception operations reinforced the view among the German leadership that the invasion of Northern Europe would occur at Calais or even Norway, not at Normandy.

Might the PRC be preparing for conflict over Taiwan? If so, it might stockpile coal by curtailing consumption. China has already acted to boost domestic coal production while shifting imports from Australia, with Mongolia seeing a more than doubling of coal shipments to the PRC. Landlocked Mongolia has now replaced Australia as China’s number one supplier of the coal used to make steel. The net effect is that China has insulated itself from a loss of coal shipped by sea while obscuring this effort in a green cloak.

China runs on coal. Environmental pledges to foreigners mean little to the Middle Kingdom unless those promises can be leveraged for other purposes. The PRC’s apparent energy woes may not be what they seem.

🀄

X22, James Red Pills America, and more-Oct 5th


 

Been a peaceful day, folks! (well, for me.). Here's tonight's news:


Michigan Residents to Biden: "I Wish He’d Just Stay Out..."





Michigan Residents Have a Message
For Joe Biden Ahead of His Visit:
“I Wish He’d Just Stay Out of
This State and Leave Us Alone”




By Cristina Lailaa
Published October 5, 2021


Joe Biden is traveling to Howell, Michigan on Tuesday to pitch his unpopular $3.5 trillion ‘infrastructure’ plan.

Biden ‘won’ Michigan in 2020 after a large ballot dump in the middle of the night after Election Day.




As usual, Biden ignored reporters as he departed DC for Michigan.




Howell is largely Republican and the residents of this Michigan town have a message for Joe Biden: Stay away

One resident said of Joe Biden’s visit, “I wish he’d just stay out of this state and leave us alone.”

Other residents voiced their concerns about inflation: “Prices are going up.”

“People can’t find employees anymore.”

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Trump on What Went Right, What Went Wrong, and Running Again in 2024

Whether Donald Trump decides to run in 2024 or not, rest assured he will not stop talking about 2020 and the importance of election integrity.


PALM BEACH, Fla.—Mar-a-Lago was eerily quiet. Hurricane shutters still covered many of the windows, and stacks of sod sat waiting to be planted along the main driveway, in preparation for the club’s official Nov. 1 opening. A receptionist ushered me into the official lobby: an expansive room with a soaring ceiling and a majestic view of the club’s western lawn. It was grand, gilded, and gaudy—a fitting expression of Donald Trump’s ubiquitous brand.

After a short wait, one of Trump’s press aides escorted me into a small room with a fireplace, a wooden bar, and a single round table with four chairs. Moments later, the 45th U.S. president entered, shook my hand, and took a seat. A waiter appeared seemingly out of nowhere to present Trump with— what else?—a can of Diet Coke and a glass of ice.

And with that, we were off and running on a free-form 90-minute conversation on topics ranging from China, the war in Afghanistan, and COVID-19 to General Mark Milley, George W. Bush, and Bob Woodward’s latest book.

On the Border and the Hispanic Vote

“We had the border so perfect,” Donald Trump laments. We’re just a few minutes into our interview at Mar-a-Lago, and he’s already steered the discussion to one of his favorite topics.

“You look at the border, countries are emptying out their prisons, we are like a dumping ground,” Trump says. “This country has changed so much in eight months, more than it has ever changed in its history, in my opinion.”

Trump calls Joe Biden’s handling of the border issue “the most incompetent thing I’ve ever seen” before adding, “until I saw the Afghan withdrawal.”

If Trump’s rhetoric sounds familiar, that’s because it is. When he famously descended on the escalator in Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, to announce his bid for the presidency, he wasted no time in attacking the establishment leaders of both political parties for failing to protect American interests on trade and immigration.

“We are a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” Trump said before continuing with his now infamous line about Mexico not sending its “best” people across the border:

“They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people.”

Trump’s harsh language on illegal immigrants shocked not just liberals and journalists, but also the Republican establishment, which just two years earlier had conducted an “autopsy” on the 2012 election seeking, in part, to explain Mitt Romney’s dismal performance with minority voters, particularly Hispanics. Exit polls showed Romney receiving just 27 percent support from Hispanic voters, the worst showing for a GOP presidential candidate since Bob Dole in 1996.

The party’s establishment’s proposed solution was a more inclusive way of discussing illegal immigration and throwing its collective weight behind Washington’s “comprehensive immigration reform.” After Trump chose the opposite approach, the conventional wisdom in 2016 was that his tough stance and coarse rhetoric would doom him in the general election. It didn’t.

Instead, Trump won a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote than Romney, while shrinking Democrats’ overall advantage with this demographic by eight percentage points. Four years later, Trump increased his share of the Hispanic vote to 32 percent, according to exit polls, but even that understated his strength. According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter survey of the 2020 election, Trump won 38 percent of the Hispanic vote, up 10 points from 2016.

Why, I ask Trump, did you do so much better with Hispanics in 2020?

“I think they know that I love them. I have great respect for them. They are very entrepreneurial people. Very smart and energetic people, and they see I’m doing the right thing,” he says. “They also know I’m tough on the border, and tough on immigration. And they knew better than anybody else that the border was important. A lot of people thought I was going to hurt myself with the Hispanics with my tough stance on the border. No, they don’t want people coming in taking their jobs, taking their house.”

Trump’s significant gains in majority Hispanic counties along the Texas border were nothing short of eye-popping. He increased his vote share by an average of 26.8 percent in 17 counties in southern Texas with an average Hispanic population of 88.8 percent. Trump recalled getting the news about his performance in border counties in a phone call from Governor Greg Abbott: “He said, ‘We can’t believe it; the numbers you got are the highest anybody’s gotten since Reconstruction. Best numbers we’ve seen since the Civil War.’”

Hispanic voters, Trump says, “understood better than anyone that I was doing the right thing in terms of their lives, the crime, their jobs.” He also reaped massive gains with Hispanic voters in Florida, particularly in the traditional Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County.

“The Democrats can’t believe the Hispanic numbers; they never thought they see that,” Trump says. “If you look at the results in Miami: Cubans, Venezuelans, you look at the numbers in Miami — they are through the roof. The Republicans get decimated in Miami, and I almost won Miami and then the rest of the state was mine.”

He’s right. Trump won 45 percent of Hispanics in Florida, including 58 percent of those of Cuban heritage. In 2016 he lost Miami-Dade to Hillary Clinton by 30 percentage points. Four years later, he lost the county to Joe Biden by just seven points en route to a three-point victory statewide.

Given his success with Hispanic voters, I ask Trump what the Republican Party should do to hold on to the gains he made as the GOP looks to next year’s midterms and beyond. He responds with the most concise answer of our entire 90-minute interview: “They have to hold on to Donald Trump.”

On Milley, Afghanistan, and George W. Bush

U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified Tuesday and Wednesday before the Senate and House armed services committees. These were Milley’s first public appearances since the publication of excerpts from a new book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, which made several explosive revelations, including the following:

  • Milley insinuated himself into domestic politics by conducting backchannel conversations with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which they called President Trump “crazy.”
  • He also inserted himself into the chain of command by telling senior U.S. military commanders that they could not launch nuclear weapons without his permission.
  • The JCS chairman also made secret phone calls to his military counterpart in the People’s Republic of China, promising to forewarn him of any impending U.S. attack.

While testifying this week, Milley defended his phone calls as fully coordinated and above board, and he denied any suggestion he had attempted to usurp the president’s authority.

Milley’s name came up repeatedly in my interview with Donald Trump last week. After initially disparaging him as “not the brightest bulb,” Trump said that he had liked the general while he was in the White House, but that Milley had changed.

“Don’t forget, he wasn’t this way,” Trump said. “He became this way because he was a politician. He tried curry favor with Biden. I saw that he choked under pressure, and what made him choke was the television camera. He was really bad.”

Trump said keeping Milley on as chairman of the Joint Chiefs is a “bad idea,” but when asked about other senior leadership in the military, he refused to single anyone else out by name as having done a poor job.

“They are good people,” Trump said, referring to other generals he had worked with, “but they make really bad decisions.”

As to Afghanistan, Trump was adamant that his decision to wind down the war was the correct one but ripped President Biden for bungling the exit. “It’s the single most embarrassing moment in the history of our country,” Trump said, adding that had he been in office, his administration would have handled it much better.

“For us to flee,” Trump said, “surrender with ‘hands up,’ and give them the best military equipment in the world, without a shot being fired. I had them at bay. We were going to get out too, but we would’ve got out with dignity and actual victory.”

I asked Trump how much resistance he faced in Washington in ending the war in Afghanistan, despite the policy’s broad popularity with the public.

“I had a lot of resistance from the military, and I had a lot of resistance from Congress,” he said. “A lot of people in Congress didn’t want to leave. . . . They would’ve stayed in forever. We were there for 21 years, and I said 21 years is enough.”

Trump was also unsparing in his criticism of former President George W. Bush, who was back in the news recently on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. At the Pennsylvania memorial to passengers who fought for control of doomed United Airlines Flight 93, Bush paid homage to the “heroism and decency” Americans showed in the face of evil. He also took a thinly veiled shot at Donald Trump and many of his supporters, saying domestic extremists are “children of the same foul spirit” as the violent jihadi terrorists who attacked America in 2001.

For his part, Trump didn’t appreciate the swipe.

“George Bush doesn’t have the right to lecture people, because he blew it,” Trump said dismissively. “Bush made the single greatest mistake in the history of our country, which was going into the Middle East. We spent trillions of dollars and millions of lives (counting both sides) and we are further away from utopia that they were looking for than we were 21 years ago when he did this. It was a terrible decision going into the Middle East, so when I hear him lecturing people, I just don’t think he has the right to do it. He was a failed president.”

Looking To 2024

When I sat down with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week, my plan was to wait until the very end to ask him about running for president again. But before he’d even taken his seat, Trump was touting his 2024 poll numbers.

In nearly every interview he’s done since he left office on Jan. 20, Trump has been asked whether he’ll run again. Each time he has hinted and hedged, teased, and toyed with his answer, saying only that his supporters would be “very happy” with his decision. I decided to ask the question a different way.

“Given your dominance in Republican primary polls, and given that President Biden’s approval ratings have fallen to 45 percent nationally and 31 percent in Iowa and 39 percent in Michigan,” I asked, “why wouldn’t you run?”

Trump parried with a noncommittal answer. “I love the country, and I hate what happened,” he said, adding that since he left office things have “gone to hell. It’s been a terrible time.”

With that, the former president was off and running, lamenting what had taken place in Afghanistan, which led to a lengthy detour. A bit later, however, I gave it another try. “So,” I said, “I know you might do it, but give me one reason you might not do it.”

This time, Trump was somewhat more direct, and a tad fatalistic. “Well, one reason could be your health. You get a call from your doctor and that’s the end of that,” he said. “That stuff happens; you hope it doesn’t. I just had a medical, just had a great result. You never know, there are many things that can happen; politics is a crazy world. It is a big commitment of you, your children, your wife, and your family.”

Trump couldn’t resist delivering his standard line that “people will be very happy with my decision,” adding that his new slogan is “Make America Great Again, Again.”

If Trump still has some doubts about 2024, during the 90-minute interview he expressed no doubts whatsoever about 2020.

“I feel very strongly that the election was rigged,” he said. “I don’t feel like I could’ve lost Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and I just needed a couple of them.”

The issue of the fairness of the election has become the third rail of American politics. Among Trump and a good chunk of his supporters, there is a sincere belief that Democrats took advantage of pandemic-induced rule changes like universal mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, drop boxes, etc., to corrupt the system enough to allow Biden to eke out victories in key battleground states. To Democrats and most of the media, it strains credulity that Trump could really believe such a thing. They dismiss these claims as “The Big Lie,” citing a host of lawsuits and recounts that have produced no evidence of fraud on anything approaching the scale necessary to have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.

Yet Trump still cannot get past a singular idea: that he could have done so much better in 2020 than in 2016, winning nearly 12 million more votes nationwide than he tallied four years earlier, and still lose the election.

“You win South Carolina big, Alabama by record numbers, then you lose Georgia?” he told me. “Doesn’t happen.”

Trump also mentioned his victories in traditional bellwether states like Ohio and especially Florida where he garnered over a million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, nearly tripling his margin of victory from 1.2 percent to 3.3 percent. “So many of those metrics that, when you add them all up, it gives very little chance to the other side,” Trump said.

Trump related that, before the election, Republican pollster John McLaughlin told him if he was able to win 64 million votes in 2020, improving on his 2016 total by just 1 million votes, he would win.

“I got 75 million votes and lost,” Trump said, before catching himself and adding, “Supposedly lost. I didn’t lose. You know, I’ve never conceded. It’s OK for Stacey Abrams to not concede, but if I don’t concede . . . ”

Adding to Trump’s skepticism about the accuracy of the election returns was what he experienced on the campaign trail, where he perceived a massive enthusiasm gap in his favor.

“Don’t forget when Biden went out, he couldn’t fill his eight circles. They had to use the press to fill the circles because nobody was there,” Trump said. “And I go out and I’ll get 40,000 or 50,000 people, and then I hear I lost the state? It’s just not possible.”

Trump’s continuing claim that the 2020 election was rigged now presents him, and his party, with a quandary. According to a recent NPR/Marist survey, only one-fourth of Trump’s 2020 voters express a “great deal” or a “good amount” of trust that elections are fair. On the other hand, 72 percent of Trump voters have “not much” trust or “none at all” in the fairness of elections.

Republicans have embarked on a series of legislative measures in state capitals that they insist will restore Americans’ faith in the electoral system and which Democrats and sympathetic journalists have attacked as everything from “Jim Crow 2.0” to “the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War.” No one needs to guess where Trump comes down: He takes credit for leading the GOP push on voting procedures. “Georgia has a bill, Texas has a bill. Some are stronger than others,” he said. “That’s one of the good things that I have done by being vocal about this.”

Some in his party disagree and wish Trump would stop trying to relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election. Instead, they want him to look ahead and help Republicans win back majorities in the House and Senate in 2022. Trump thinks this is backwards.

“The 2020 election fraud is the biggest and its most energizing issue within the Republican Party,” Trump said, “and a large percentage of elected Republican leaders, including Congress, don’t understand that.”

So far, Trump has a better track record of understanding what rank-and-file Republican voters want than the pundits and politicians in Washington, D.C. Whether he decides to run in 2024 or not, rest assured he will not stop talking about 2020 and the importance of election integrity.

“I used to say you can’t have a country without borders,” Trump said. But these days he adds a qualifier. “You also cannot have a country with a corrupt election process. And we have a very corrupt election process.”


The Radical Prosecutor in Charge of the January 6 Investigations

Channing Phillips is not colorblind, nor blind in the
 application of justice, as the American people expect.


In July, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia dismissed a case against a Black Lives Matter protester charged with attacking a federal police officer last summer in Lafayette Square. 

Channing Phillips, currently in charge of the office, dropped the charge after the defendant’s lawyer argued the facial recognition technology used to identify the suspect was unreliable and racist. Glenn Ivey, the defense lawyer, is a high-priced D.C.-area criminal attorney who just happened to work with Phillips in the 1990s.

The biased swamp in action.

Phillips, however, has not been as lenient with defendants facing charges for entering the Capitol on January 6. His office now is handling roughly 650 active criminal cases; the investigation is overwhelming his office and the court system. (On any given day, roughly half of the hearings in the D.C. federal district court are related to the Capitol breach probe.)

Channing Phillips is not a household name, but he is arguably one of the most powerful men in Washington right now, overseeing the Biden regime’s nationwide dragnet for Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election. This is Phillips’ third stint as acting U.S. attorney for D.C., having been twice appointed by Barack Obama to temporarily fill the position. In between, Phillips worked as senior advisor for Attorney General Eric Holder and then his successor, Loretta Lynch.

In March, Phillips replaced Michael Sherwin, the first prosecutor in charge of the Capitol breach probe who bragged about unleashing a “shock and awe” crusade to arrest at least 100 Trump supporters before Biden’s inauguration.

Phillips is more low-key in public but his office is no less ruthless. His prosecutors continue to seek pretrial detention for anyone accused of violence, including assault of a federal officer, the same charge his office just dropped against a BLM protester. In some instances, Phillips’ lawyers want even nonviolent offenders to remain behind bars for months awaiting a trial or plea offer. 

Prosecutors have sought prison terms for minor offenses including “parading, demonstrating, or picketing” in Congress. In a sentencing motion for a man who pleaded guilty to obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony count that Phillips’ office has attached to at least 200 mostly misdemeanor cases, the lead prosecutor referred to the nonviolent defendant with no criminal record as a “domestic terrorist.”

As his prosecutors ask for continuances, pushing trials into next year, Phillips’ office is slow-walking discovery. Phillips continues to conceal nearly 14,000 hours of surveillance video recorded by U.S. Capitol Police security cameras on January 6 under strict protective orders. The footage has been designated “highly sensitive” government material by Phillips’ office.

Further, Phillips’ merciless targeting of Trump supporters seems to be a personal vendetta of sorts. Contrary to Joe Biden’s promise that his Justice Department would be free from partisanship, Phillips has strong opinions—and no qualms about using his authority to advance his political interests.

Phillips’ father, the Reverend Channing E. Phillips, was a civil rights leader in Washington, D.C. and the first black American to be placed in nomination for president at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Reverend Phillips reportedly helped organize the Black United Front in the 1960s with other radical activists including Marion Barry, Stokely Carmichael, and Walter Fauntroy (who, in 2010, compared the Tea Party movement to the Ku Klux Klan). 

The younger Phillips apparently shares his late father’s worldview. Less than five months before taking over the office, Phillips wrote to his predecessor and said the D.C. office—the largest in the country—“has a unique obligation to take a stand against . . . injustice and to serve as a national leader in the quest for racial equality.”

After the death of George Floyd, Phillips retweeted a post by former Attorney General Eric Holder, a screed that condemned America’s alleged systemic racism: “The problems we face are truly societal and historical in nature,” Holder wrote on May 29, 2020. “For too long, people of this nation have been mistreated solely based on the color of their skin. It is incumbent upon the leaders of our country . . . to move this nation towards that true ‘new birth of freedom’ long promised, but never realized.”

To which Phillips tweeted, “Well said!”

After D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had the words “Black Lives Matter” painted on a street near the White House, Phillips tweeted that the move was a “powerful gesture.”

In June, Phillips co-signed a letter authored by Obama-era prosecutors calling for sweeping police reforms. “[I]t took the death of George Floyd in police custody to galvanize a movement, but we are heartened by the thirst for change that has swept the country,” Phillips and 60 other former colleagues wrote in June 2020. “We must change our vision of public safety that, for too long, has perpetuated policing that endangers Black and brown people rather than protecting and serving them.”

The following month, Phillips accused critics of Kim Gardner, the St. Louis city circuit attorney prosecuting Patricia and Mark McCloskey for defending their home against Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020, of leveling “racist attacks.” Phillips claimed the “inflammatory language” used by Gardner’s critics, including President Trump, “threatens the ability of every prosecutor in this country to do the job they were elected to do.”

In 2014, Phillips tweeted a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristoff titled, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4.” Phillips called it a “good read.” The following year, Phillips posted an NPR article about a murder case in Mississippi. “Powerful,” Phillips tweeted. “A Black Mississippi Judge’s Breathtaking Speech To 3 White Murderers.” 

The man now prosecuting Trump supporters, charging the overwhelming majority with misdemeanors but nonetheless bankrupting their families and destroying their reputations in the process, has clear animus toward President Trump and his former advisors, including Attorney General William Barr. Phillips blasted Barr for moving to dismiss the perjury case against Lt. General Michael Flynn, a product of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into imaginary Trump-Russia election collusion. Barr, Phillips argued at the time, should resign and be investigated by Congress.

“Today’s huge losses on Wall Street may be just what is needed to convince those few undecided voters and those who are still inclined to vote for Trump simply because of the economy that holding such a belief is fool’s gold,” Phillips tweeted on October 28, 2020.

But Phillips’ prosecutorial outrage is indeed selective. He signed an amicus brief last year in a case opposing law enforcement tactics to quell months of rioting in Portland. Phillips claimed the “violent actions of federal agents against peaceful protesters have damaged already-fragile bonds of trust with law enforcement.” (He has expressed no similar concerns over law enforcement’s attacks, including the use of rubber bullets, explosive devices, and tear gas, against peaceful protesters at the Capitol on January 6, despite extensive evidence.)

Phillips is not colorblind, nor blind in the application of justice, as the American people expect. Is he using his temporary post to punish white Trump supporters who participated in the events of January 6 as a way to impose what Phillips views as “racial equity” in the justice system? Why is his office vengefully tracking down Capitol protesters, arresting people every week, while letting “social justice” offenders off the hook?

It’s unclear whether Joe Biden will seek Phillips’ formal confirmation—he is far beyond the 120-day limit allowed for “acting” U.S. attorneys. If he does, Senate Republicans have plenty of questions they need to askChanning Phillips.

An Open Letter to American Academia

 An Open Letter to American Academia

October 4, 2021

During my educational lifetime — K4-12 in private school (Riverdale Country School, NYC 1956-65); college (University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, 1965-69); law school (Fordham University School, NYC, 1974-77); and graduate school (the George Washington University, Washington, DC, 1983-85) — I was under the tutelage of over one hundred professors.

My instructors encompassed a broad political spectrum, from progressive far-left to conservative far-right. Needless to say, none were true extremists — avatars of imposing totalitarian belief systems on free societies. Most were disciples of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a political philosophy that dominated American life from FDR’s first presidential win in 1932, to the revolutionary year 1968 that shattered the Roosevelt Coalition.

I can remember most of my teachers whom I encountered during those 18 years spent in educational institutions. A few were truly great teachers; many were good to excellent; others were so-so; and inevitably there were a few who were bad apples. A few regarded me, in turn, as excellent or good; many thought me so-so; and a few thought me a royal pain. All of them were correct: like many pupils, I did well when I liked the teacher and subject, so-so when I liked one but not both, and awful when I liked neither.

Although their pedigree spanned most of the American political spectrum, and their competence levels ran the gamut, so to speak, from A to Z, they all had several things in common:

  • None of them even attempted to indoctrinate me, nor did I witness them trying to do so with my fellow classmates.
  • None of them would have considered grading me poorly if I did not share their political beliefs.
  • None of them would have refused to reveal to parents what material they were teaching us — let alone brazenly lied outright.
  • None of them worked in schools that would have denied the rights of parents to know what was being openly taught in the classroom.
  • None of them would even have dreamed of encouraging students to inform on their parents, monitoring their elders for any of the myriad, and constantly expanding, violations of multicultural political correctness — “micro-aggressions” in today’s debased parlance.

Yet today we find ourselves in such a poisonous academic environment that school boards around the country openly scorn parental rights, as they seek to do to this generation’s students what was never done to us. Ground Zero for todays movement to hyper-politicize Academia is the Commonwealth of Virginia — the state whose ancestors provided more Founding Fathers and Constitutional Framers than any other — all now under withering fire from the “woke” professoriate and other occupiers of the commanding heights of American culture.

The Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, a former occupant seeking to return to the Statehouse, also the leading fundraiser for the Clinton machine during its dominant years in power, openly proclaims that parents have no right whatsoever to know what their children are being taught in the state’s schools. We will know this November if the voters of Old Dominion share his view of the power and prerogative of the professoriate and their teachers unions.

Once before, after the former Soviet Union shocked the world on October 4, 1957 by launching Sputnik I into low-Earth orbit to ignite the Space Race, Americans saw education recast to place more emphasis on mathematics and the hard sciences. America rapidly responded by launching its first satellite, Explorer I, on January 31, 1958. The culmination of that effort was the July 20, 1969 Moon landing. But Americans last walked on the Moon in December 1972. The unified America that rose to meet that grand challenge is a distant memory. In the event, sparking cultural revival today is a far more complex challenge than was merely revamping parts of the educational curriculum.

In a country whose factions have become divided to the point of civil war, it will take serial mass voter uprisings against educational tyranny to restore educational institutions to their traditional role — or if need be, replace the current deeply corrupt system if it cannot change. If Academia continues its current course, it will produce an America less free, less prosperous, less civilized, a former superpower permanently weakened on the world stage.

And American Academia will then discover the truth first revealed by Jacques Danton in 1794, as the French Revolution turned on its creators:

All totalitarian revolutions, like the Roman agricultural deity Saturn, eventually devour their own children.

As we come upon the 64th anniversary of the challenge to explore the Heavens, there is some good news. For its part, NASA has put land rovers and a helicopter on Mars — the first-ever flying machine to circle another planet in our Solar System. And private spaceflight with reusable rockets has become a prominent feature of present and future space exploration.

The next step should be to reform academia so as to promote and preserve the society that made so many things possible that were once thought impossible. We cannot do this if our elite educational establishments graduate students with more credentials in “woke” pseudo-studies, and fewer in disciplines airily dismissed by today’s totalitarians as “white supremacy” studies.

Those remaining in Academia who wish to reverse the downward spiral in student achievement and academic freedom must make their voices heard. They must ally themselves with voters of all persuasions who share the same goals. It may already be too late to undertake this endeavor. But if it is not so, the time to begin rebuilding our educational institutions is now.