America is caught between an external and an internal threat. The external is an economically aggressive and America-hating China and a nuclear-equipped, America-hating Russia; the internal is a non-nuclear, America-hating Left. (As I always note, “Left” is not the same as “liberal”; in fact, leftism poses a mortal threat to liberalism. The greatest contemporary tragedy in American life is that most liberals are unwilling to acknowledge this and continue to vote for the Left.)
To use one of the Left’s favorite terms, the Left poses an existential threat to America. Russia, unless it starts a nuclear war, does not. I should add that I do not discount the latter possibility. I was a high school freshman during the Cuban missile crisis, but I do not remember anyone my age or among my parents’ peers who believed the Cuban crisis would lead to nuclear war. I am less certain today. Russian President Vladimir Putin does not seem to be as rational as Nikita Khrushchev was, and Khrushchev had nowhere near the passion about Cuba that Putin has regarding Ukraine.
The Left may hate Putin, but hatred of America unites the Left and Putin. Again, this is not the case with liberals, most of whom love America. To illustrate this point, take the example of Superman. It was liberals, in 1938, who created Superman, an America-loving, American values-affirming (“Truth, Justice, and the American Way”) superhero. And it was leftists who destroyed Superman as an American hero. In 2011, they ended his American identity: Standing in front of the United Nations, Superman announced that he was renouncing his American citizenship to become a “citizen of the world.” “I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of U.S. policy,” he announced. Ten years later, DC comics announced that Superman’s motto would no longer be “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” but “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow.”
Every left-wing movement in the world despises America—and for good reason. America has stood for everything the Left opposes. It is the most capitalist, most religious, and most nationalistic major democracy. America’s unique success has been the greatest possible rebuke to left-wing ideology. America must therefore be brought down. Specifically, it must abandon its capitalist economy, its Judeo-Christian values, and its nationalism (as expressed, for example, in Americans’ celebration of the flag and national anthem; in Americans’ celebration of national holidays such as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving; in Americans’ opposition to anything hinting of world government; and in Americans’ belief that their country is “the greatest country in the world”).
So, then, America finds itself today attacked by three anti-American forces: Putin and China externally and the American Left internally.
If there is no nuclear war with Russia, by far the greatest of these threats emanates from the American Left. It has successfully de-Americanized and ruined every major institution it has touched: nearly all educational institutions from elementary schools through universities; virtually all major mainstream news media; the intelligence agencies (51 heads of intelligence agencies declared revelations of Biden family corruption emanating from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop “Russian disinformation”); the economy (the worst inflation rate in nearly half a century is the result of the cavalier spending of trillions of dollars and the Left’s energy policies which, within a few months, transformed America from energy-exporting to energy-importing); and even medicine (the American Medical Association and more and more medical schools are fully “woke”).
The only way to save America from its internal existential threat is for liberals to understand that the threat to their core values emanates from the Left, not the Right. Just to cite two examples, it is not the Right that opposes liberalism’s commitment to free speech; it is the Left that cancels people for saying anything the Left differs with—including stating obvious scientific and moral truths, such as that it is unfair to women to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports. And it is not the Right that opposes liberalism’s commitment to racial integration; it is the Left (holding the same position as the Ku Klux Klan) that calls for all-black dormitories on college campuses and all-black graduations.
America cannot defeat Russia and China without the help of other nations. And America cannot defeat the Left without the help of liberals. To put it in political terms, if America’s liberals voted their values, the Democratic Party would not win another major election—and it would either become irrelevant or decide to return to its liberal roots. Only America’s liberals, working in common cause with conservatives, can save America. Then America can deal with any threat—internal or external.
The United States is now overwhelmed with propaganda pushing for Americans to “stand with Ukraine” in its war with Russia. It is not enough to wish the people of Ukraine well. The media, Big Tech, and both political parties have made being a partisan of Ukraine some kind of moral duty. Those refusing to get swept up in anti-Russian hysteria can expect to be condemned as traitors and agents of Vladimir Putin.
Contrary to the claims of self-righteous talking heads and keyboard warriors, it isn’t “treason” to question how supporting a foreign nation at war with a nuclear state serves America’s interests. Without robust debate, sound policymaking on such a vital matter is impossible.
What is Washington hoping to accomplish in Ukraine? Whatever it is, the Biden Administration is prepared to do everything short of inciting World War III to make it happen.
In addition to waging scorched-earth economic war, Washington is sending billions of dollars’ worth of heavy armaments into Ukraine. While this policy is being called moderate and restrained, or even “weak” by many chickenhawk Republicans, these are escalatory steps that promise to draw out and inflame the conflict, not resolve it.
The usual suspects reassure us that victory is just around the corner. But if Western pressure fails to subdue or, as neoconservatives covet, overthrow Putin (neither scenario seems likely), we could be looking at years and years of bloody insurgency. Indeed, Washington is already treating a long-term insurrection with U.S. backing as unavoidable. (Ironically, the United States is arming future neo-Nazi insurrectionists.) According to the Washington Post, officials see “no off-ramps” in Ukraine.
Is that supposed to be reassuring?
The overtly pro-Ukrainian bias in Western media has made honest, serious coverage difficult to find. Instead, we are left with a spurious narrative of inevitable Ukrainian victory that has blinded many in the West to the risks of continued escalation. The trajectory we are on is not sustainable. Russia has nuclear weapons. The conflict, and Biden’s misguided sanctions, are threatening global food and energy supplies.
To avoid getting locked in a dangerous cycle, our leaders will have to grow up and expand their thinking beyond “Putin is Hitler” platitudes. Diplomacy will require, yes, “appeasing” Putin a little and recognizing that he has rational strategic interests. The West is quick to dismiss Russian grievances with NATO expansion as nothing but a pretext for imperial ambition, but the West has made no serious effort—despite repeated warnings—to restrain its own imperial ambitions in Putin’s backyard. It doesn’t take a “Putin apologist” to understand that Western meddling in Ukraine has been needlessly provocative, and that it poses an obvious, logical threat to Russian security.
But narcissistic and unserious Western leaders have retreated into delusional self-flattery. Unable to believe or respect that Russia has its own interests, they have told themselves a story that Putin is “crazy” and, having attacked Ukraine for no apparent reason and without assessing the risks of an invasion beforehand, he is now facing imminent demise. But as newly emboldened neoconservatives trumpet Putin’s downfall, sanctions appear to be strengthening his support at home, not sapping it.
Meanwhile, the United States is staking its financial dominance over a country that has no vital U.S. interest and, in the process, pushing its two greatest competitors, Russia and China, closer together. Biden has been left begging foreign dictators for oil. Saudi Arabia won’t even pick up the phone. Who’s the crazy one, again?
The “Putin is crazy” narrative is a childish excuse to hold Putin entirely responsible for a war the West had a significant role in provoking, and must play a role in bringing to an end. Diplomacy is impossible if simplistic, absolutist moral narratives dictate policy. Ukraine is not a vital interest of the United States, but policy is being driven by emotion rather than what is rational and in the national interest.
While warmongers in Washington distract our attention, America continues to fall apart. The immigration problem that has plagued our nation for decades has never been worse. As the United States devolves into something resembling a Third World country, Americans have been asked—or, really, told—to stomach the highest gasoline prices of their lives for the sake of Ukraine. How long can we expect to pay this price? Would it kill us to worry about our own country for once?
Biden has done an awful lot of bragging about how poor and miserable he is making the Russian people, but it isn’t clear what his policy is accomplishing for the United States. It is also unclear how it will help the Ukrainians. It seems Washington is content to let Ukraine be razed if it means wearing down Russia in a nasty and protracted guerilla war. For “democracy,” of course.
The Ukrainians will have to decide what terms they find reasonable, but they have at least gestured at compromise with Moscow on its security concerns. To hear it from Biden, the West has exhausted its options for diplomacy. Yet, he calls Putin a “war criminal” and pledges to keep sending millions of dollars in arms to the Ukrainians. Washington has no interest in peace, only escalation and war.
After 9/11, Americans were the most united they had been in years. That goodwill was exploited in two catastrophic wars that deeply damaged the country, shredded civil liberties, and damaged U.S. credibility around the world. The very same neoconservatives who engineered those conflicts are now thumping their chests in vindication over the war in Ukraine. If history is any guide, we will look back at this moment with regret once the passion of the hour has passed.
Ketanji Brown Jackson Failed To Provide Clarity During Confirmation Hearings
On day two of her confirmation hearings, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson – Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court – remains as evasive as ever on her concerning legal record of leniency toward pedophiles and her views on critical race theory.
Several senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee have pressed her for clarity on her record but only received non-answers in reply. Judge Jackson simply circles important questions, turning them into declarative statements and evading any sense of concrete judicial philosophy. Senators – Republicans and Democrats alike – must continue to press her. American citizens deserve to know every facet of her judicial philosophy.
Judge Jackson’s evasion of clarity is perhaps most evident in how she answered Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s question of “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” Judge Jackson replied: “No, I can’t … I’m not a biologist.” This is deeply concerning. How do you adjudicate Title VII claims without being able to answer such a simple question? And Title IX? Furthermore, Judge Jackson should know better than to answer a legitimate question so flippantly – as a judge, she has sat in judgment of thousands of people in courtrooms where she was required to make credibility determinations. If one of her witnesses answered in such a manner while under oath, they’d be risking admonition from the court. By providing such an evasive non-response to a straightforward and highly relevant question in today’s jurisprudence, Judge Jackson fell short of the candor expected of a nominee to the high court.
This has proven to be a theme in her confirmation hearings thus far. On critical race theory, she blatantly obfuscated her record, telling Sen. Cruz “I’ve never studied critical race theory, and I’ve never used it, it doesn’t come up in the work that I do as a judge.” But this isn’t what the record shows. Recently unearthed lectures reveal she believes that critical race theory plays a role in sentencing law – an area in which she is well-versed, having spent substantial parts of her career as a public defender and on the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
Additionally, Jackson has touted at least one of its founders as a hero – and admitted as much in her own words. In a 2020 lecture, Jackson highlighted Derrick Bell, “the godfather of critical race theory,” saying that her family had Bell’s book “on their coffee table for many years.” (Bell, for context, believed that “the Constitution was like ‘roach powder,’ … and his motto was ‘I live to harass white folks.’”)
More dangerously, she has openly promoted one of CRT’s descendant ideologies: the 1619 Project. In one lecture, Jackson dedicated an entire slide to the 1619 Project, echoing its central point that the “true founding” was in 1619 and called its thesis “provocative.”
The Declaration of Independence, of course, was signed in 1776 and enshrined the principles of equality and liberty into our founding document. If confirmed, Jackson would be interpreting its counterpart, the Constitution, as a Supreme Court justice – an extremely worrying prospect. The 1619 Project is so questionable that even The New York Times, which published it, quietly scrubbed some of its most inflammatory rhetoric from the online version, without an editor’s comment. Provocative, indeed.
While Jackson’s answers on critical race theory have done anything but provide clarity, her answers regarding her record of leniency toward pedophiles create even more cause for concern.
Sen. Josh Hawley – who has been at the forefront of alerting Americans to the fact that Jackson has a disturbing record of sentences for child pornography – asked her about one particular case in particular. She responded that she gave a lenient sentence to the child predator because "he presented all of his diplomas and certificates" and "had gotten into this in a way that was, I thought, inconsistent with some of the other cases that I had seen." She also minimized the crime by saying that an offender who only downloaded child pornography for 15 minutes shouldn’t have to spend decades in jail.
Rewind back to when Ketanji was on the U.S. Sentencing Commission. At a hearing on the subject, she said she “mistakenly assumed that child pornography offenders are pedophiles” and that “I’m trying to understand this category of nonpedophiles that obtain child pornography.” And back in law school? She suggested public policy is driven by a “climate of fear, hatred, and revenge” against sex offenders.
Jackson’s “empathy” is not merely theoretical debate – it has translated into her handing down alarmingly lenient sentences for child predators. In far too many disturbing instances, Jackson handed down lenient sentences to pedophiles well below those recommended by sentencing guidelines or requested by prosecutors. If child pornography laws are indeed too harsh – an argument no Democratic senator, despite their posturing on so many other issues during the hearings, has been willing to make – then it is for lawmakers, not unelected judges, to change those laws.
Simply put, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson must not be let off the hook. Senators must continue to press her for candor and real insight into her judicial philosophy. The American people deserve to know who Judge Jackson really is, and what will guide her decisions on the Supreme Court, if confirmed.
If you’ve been around RedState for more than a few years, you’ve probably got a decent understanding of what the infamous Steele Dossier entails. The now-discredited document was used by various entities during the 2016 election and into the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency — and as recently as 2020, you still had media figures defending it, unable to let go of the fact that they got completely played.
In the midst of all that, Hillary Clinton’s use of the dossier always took center stage. The former Secretary of State and twice-failed presidential candidate used a proxy law firm to contract Christopher Steele to build a dossier on Trump. Steele then used Russian “sources,” including now-indicted Igor Danchenko, to spin wild, completely untrue tales about collusion and pee tapes.
That dossier was then laundered through DNC operatives and into the FBI/DOJ, with the latter using it to prop up an investigation into the former president that eventually transformed into the Mueller investigation, with many of the same people just shifting over. The dossier was also used in the fraudulent FISA warrant targeting Carter Page.
Now, Trump has finally made a move to attempt to extract some semblance of justice. That’s come in the form of suing everyone and their mother who had any role in spreading the libelous Steele Dossier with malicious intent.
You’ve got to love that Hillary Clinton gets top billing, and why shouldn’t she? Her behavior was appalling in contracting and disseminating the Steele Dossier, and the fact that she has remained unpunished for that is a travesty. But there are a lot of other relevant and recognizable names on the list. Marc Elias, for example, is currently running a grifting operation in which he raises lots of money to lose lawsuits challenging Republican redistricting attempts.
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, otherwise known as the “FBI lovers,” were at the center of the fraudulent FBI investigation against Trump before moving on to work for Robert Mueller. Bruce Ohr was a DOJ official who had direct contact with the flacks at Fusion GPS (Glenn Simpson) and Christopher Steele. You get the idea. No stone is being left unturned. Heck, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is even on the list. I have no idea why, but I know I’m here for it.
As to how successful this will be, I have no earthly idea. I know that it’s really tough to win a defamation lawsuit, far more so as a public figure. But, if there was ever a case of libel and slander (I’m guessing this lawsuit contains claims of both), where false material was spread with malicious intent, this would be it. It doesn’t get anymore clear-cut than this. Still, I have basically zero faith in our legal system. If anything is to come from this, I’ll have to see it to believe it.
Biden Administration Is Cooking The Books On Illegal Immigrant Arrests
The Biden administration has delayed for months an annual illegal immigration report that contains crucial statistics about this key national security issue, as the U.S. border crisis keeps breaking records since Joe Biden took the presidential office.
The Biden administration has published some immigration enforcement statistics in its “ICE Fiscal Year 2021 Annual Report.” This was recently required by Congress and is largely a narrative-driven report that provides a topical look at all parts of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), from customs operations to personnel hiring and oversight processes.
It is significantly different from the detailed immigration enforcement-focused report called the “ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Report” that the agency has published by the end of every calendar year for at least the last decade — with the exception of last year. As of this writing, the Biden administration has without explanation yet to publish this very important report, leading some to conclude that the data contained therein is a damning indictment of the administration’s enforcement policies. (Here’s the fiscal year 2020 version).
The recently released report does not include the many charts and tables that make up the missing enforcement report, effectively preventing Congress, the media, and the public from analyzing the effects of the Biden administration’s controversial guidelines that have severely limited the ability of ICE officers to enforce immigration law. Instead, the report includes only a handful of numbers and percentages, and messaging that is difficult to verify. Perhaps most troubling is that the Biden administration decided to develop a largely meaningless metric that is meant to trick people into thinking the Biden administration is taking public safety more seriously than the Trump administration.
In the new report they claim that ICE “arrested 12,025 individuals with aggravated felony convictions—nearly double the 6,815 arrested the previous fiscal year” and “ICE removed an average of 937 aggravated felons per month — the highest level ever recorded since ICE began collecting detailed criminality data.” One ICE officer I spoke with calls this “a complete manipulation of the data” and many ICE officers share that sentiment, including an officer interviewed by the Washington Times, who said, “I can tell you definitively there were more aggravated felony arrests in 2020.”
The Biden administration’s attempt to put a positive spin on its dangerous enforcement guidelines through this unreliable data is more troubling than most realize.
For purposes of immigration, Congress defines a number of crimes as “aggravated felonies,” such as murder, rape, and drug trafficking, but also considers a crime to fit in this category if it is “a crime of violence” or a “theft offense or burglary offense” for which the term of imprisonment is at least one year. The list is detailed and how states define and punish crimes creates some complexity in the law. Aliens convicted of aggravated felonies face a number of consequences including swift deportation, ineligibility for asylum, and a bar from lawfully re-entering the United States.
Over the past year, as confirmed by ICE officers who spoke with the Center for Immigration Studies, the Biden administration has repeatedly directed ICE field offices to mark arrests as “aggravated felon arrests” at every opportunity, where applicable. The program ICE officers use to create a system of record for managing cases allows for the entry of large amounts of information, ranging from basic information like name, birth date, and nationality to more complex information like criminal and immigration history. As with any system, too much information can be problematic (either for efficiency or legal reasons, for example) and officers generally put as much information as is sufficient for carrying out their responsibilities, which is, generally, either the removal or release of a foreign national.
One bit of information officers can add to the system when arresting an alien is whether the alien is an aggravated felon. Historically, ICE officers have generally not been keeping track of this metric because it has been largely irrelevant as to whether an alien is deportable, and because it can be difficult to determine whether criminal acts in an alien’s record count as an aggravated felony.
As inferred by ICE officials on the media call announcing the new report, the same criminal act committed by two people in two different jurisdictions may or may not make the person an aggravated felon due to the laws of each state and different rulings in circuit courts, for example. Until the past year, ICE officers have not been pressured to figure out whether an alien fits the definition of “aggravated felon” and, as a result, this information has not been tracked in any meaningful sense.
What the public has not been told is that the numbers appear higher in FY2021 due to the Biden administration repeatedly demanding that officers make it a priority to determine whether an alien should be labeled an aggravated felon and then record that determination into the system. In the past, some officers have clicked the “aggravated felon” button, but since there was no pressure to make this determination — which usually would require an officer to locate an ICE attorney and have them run a legal analysis — many officers did not bother to make it. There was generally no need for this under the Trump administration because ICE officers were allowed to deport an illegal alien for violating immigration laws, felon or not, as intended by Congress.
Not only has the Biden administration been pressuring ICE officers to record whether aliens fit the definition of an aggravated felon, the ICE unit responsible for putting together the latest report has been proactively reaching out to ICE field offices and requesting that they take a second look at certain cases and retroactively flag them as “aggravated felon” cases in the system, where possible. This was not done in previous years, but the administration nevertheless decided to compare its new FY2021 data to data from FY2020 when officers were not being pressured to keep a record on apparent aggravated felon cases. This is a scandalous effort by the Biden administration to politicize law enforcement data in an attempt to mislead the American people about the true effects of its policies.
Notably, the recent report includes the number of “offenses associated with” the illegal aliens arrested last year. Among the population of criminal aliens arrested in FY2021, the following crimes were on their records: 1,506 homicide-related offenses; 3,415 sexual assaults; 19,549 assaults; 2,717 robberies; and 1,063 kidnappings.
About four months of that fiscal year were under the Trump administration, so it’s possible many of these arrests occurred before the Biden administration’s guidelines were issued. Either way, those numbers are much lower than what occurred under FY2020, which saw the following crimes on records of aliens arrested: 1,837 homicide offenses; 4,385 sexual assaults; 37,247 assaults; 3,816 robberies; and 1,637 kidnappings.
Similarly, according to data on ICE’s webpage regarding the cooperative program 287(g), whereby sheriffs identify criminal aliens in their jails and assist with the transfer to ICE custody, ICE took in fewer criminalsthrough the program in FY2021 than it did in FY2020. Arrests of aliens through 287(g) convicted of assault were down 57 percent. For weapons offenses it was down 52 percent, arrests of aliens convicted for dangerous drugs were down 49 percent, arrests of aliens convicted for homicide were down 43 percent, and arrests of aliens for sex offense convictions were down 29 percent.
Some of these criminal acts would seem to fit the criteria of an aggravated felony, but with the Biden administration claiming an increase in arrests of aggravated felons, and the data showing arrests in these categories down, something doesn’t add up. The discrepancy can be explained by the Biden administration’s misleading use of inconsistently labeled and unreliable aggravated felony data. The Center for Immigration Studies recently obtained additional ICE data that further supports the conclusion that the Biden administration is manipulating the data.
Bottom line, the definition of aggravated felon is inconsistent across the country, it has not been consistently recorded in ICE’s systems, and consequently the metric has never been considered accurate or meaningful enough to be included in prior ICE reports. On top of this, even the crime data that ICE has reported is an admission that our communities are more dangerous because of the administration’s bad policies. The Biden administration has created a misleading narrative out of thin air and is hopeful that the public, and the courts, will not notice they’ve cooked the books.
The Biden administration must be forced to release the data from the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Report so an honest evaluation of its policies can be conducted.
Jon Feere was the Chief of Staff at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration and is now the Director of Investigations at the Center for Immigration Studies. For more, visit www.cis.org.
Wednesday’s drama between the Mo Brooks campaign in Alabama and Donald Trump is an interesting one, which sees some of what we’ve been hearing behind the scenes spilling out into the open.
On Wednesday, Trump rescinded his endorsement of Brooks, who is currently running for U.S. Senate in Alabama. Trump took aim at Brooks urging Republicans to move on from the 2020 stolen election and focus on winning future elections. Trump also accused Brooks of hiring NeverTrump consultants and changing his messaging in a way that made him plummet in the polls.
Brooks returned fire hours later, accusing Trump of being “duped” by Mitch McConnell, who prefers a different candidate. It’s a public fight between someone who was running as very pro-Trump and Trump himself.
In Georgia, Trump’s preferred candidate for Governor, David Perdue, is unable to raise money and is not getting any real backing from Republicans outside of Trump’s immediate circle. Perdue is also having to shift his rhetoric away from the 2020 election accusations because they aren’t landing with voters.
The National Journal ran a piece last week pointing out that Trump’s preferred candidates in these two races are floundering, and it could be indicating that Trump’s influence is waning. Today at Politico, another piece with a similar theme.
One suspects that Trump himself does not realize how far he has drifted from the original source of his appeal as someone who is not connected to a reigning power structure and may lie and even cheat but does not traffic in the usual political B.S. Now Trump is trying to create his own power structure. And, even if one accepts that in his self-delusion Trump really does believe the election was somehow rigged against him, he also says lots of other things that he self-evidently doesn’t believe.
There is little doubt that Trump genuinely believes that the United States has no interest in being at odds with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and no business getting enmeshed in the Ukraine conflict. But now that Russian atrocities in Ukraine make that view broadly unpopular, Trump does what any conventional politician would do — pretend that his view is something else, and ludicrously assert that as president he would be much more confrontational with Putin than the Biden administration, including threatening the launch of nuclear weapons.
Trump makes so much noise, and instills so much fear in Republican politicians, that it can be hard to see the deterioration that is taking place in his political foundation. My POLITICO colleagues Tara Palmeri and Alex Isenstadt have both done work highlighting some cracks in that foundation, as revealed by Trump’s clumsy efforts to play boss in his party.
Trump’s problem is, as of right now, not necessarily that he’s losing the GOP (though there are certainly a number of people in the GOP who wish to lose him). He has, essentially, three problems right now.
The first is that he’s effectively de-platformed. He can’t change the news cycle with his tweets if he doesn’t have a Twitter account to do so from. His expulsion from Twitter and Facebook did a lot of damage to his ability to message to his followers and the media that followed him a little too obsessively (no, not conservative media). Because he’s essentially voiceless, he can’t command the attention of the American public nearly as well, and that’s doing a lot of harm to his ability to make an impact in politics.
His second problem is his focus on re-litigating the 2020 election. He and the Democrats have the same problem here. He wants to focus on the “stolen election” claims. The Democrats want to focus on January 6, 2021. The American public, meanwhile, desperately wants to move on – especially given the current state of the economy. They don’t care about what happened during and after the presidential election. They just want someone who can fix the current mess.
This leads us to Trump’s third problem, and it’s the same problem he had in 2020: Messaging.
Trump and the candidates who are pushing his vendetta agenda aren’t connecting with voters because they don’t have a message that fits what the voters care about right now. In 2020, his messaging was erratic at best.
The campaign’s lack of coherent messaging has been happening for weeks. I mentioned it two weeks ago and frankly little has changed about what he’s doing. He’s still chasing after every issue he can bring up and trying to chase outrages to stir up his base rather than stick to a general platform and push it as hard as he can against the built-in biases of the media and the Democrats.
But, with all the rejoicing that Trump’s enemies are taking part in and with every rise they can get out of him going out into the open for the world to see, the fact of the matter is that the election is not being held today. We still have four months before the poll numbers should be creating a major panic. Four months until a lack of messaging will really hurt him.
At this moment, the Trump team needs to fire some people and restructure. He needs a team that isn’t led by sycophants but professionals who helped him pull out the win in 2016. Whatever the campaign is doing right now, it’s not effective and some heads have to roll.
Very little has changed from then to now, and it’s forcing Trump to pick bad candidates, not meet Americans where they are right now, and continue to drift further away from them.
In 2016, his strength was talking about issues that mattered to Americans, as well as providing a strong counter to what Hillary Clinton was offering. In 2020, he was chasing issues rather than defining them. That, coupled with the pandemic, hurt him immensely.
I suspect he isn’t running in 2024, given how 2022 is panning out. If he wants to have any sort of impact, it has to be in terms of choosing his successor and focusing on the key issues of the moment. He has to push a candidate to his side correctly. 2020 grievances simply won’t do the job.
If trial courts must call on ‘biologists’ every time the subject of sex comes up, it is hard to see how justice can be done.
Article by Kyle Sammin in The Federalist
But occasionally, we learn something by accident. At Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee asked a seemingly innocuous question: “Can you provide a definition of the word ‘woman’?”
The nominee was unable to do so.
It might seem like a question that goes more to politics than to the job of a judge, but when sex discrimination is frequently before the court — including as recently as last year in Bostock v. Clayton County — it behooves a judge to have some inkling about what “sex” means.
Blackburn’s questioning began with a reference to the 1996 case of United States v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s policy of only admitting men by a 7-1 vote, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing the opinion of the court. (You can watch the testimony here, beginning at about 13:10:00.) Blackburn quoted from that opinion, specifically to Ginsburg’s point that “[p]hysical differences between men and women, however, are enduring: ‘[T]he two sexes are not fungible; a community made up exclusively of one [sex] is different from a community composed of both.’”
“Do you agree with Justice Ginsburg,” Blackburn asked, “that there are physical differences between men and women that are enduring?”
It sounds like a softball — even young children know that there are physical differences between men and women. Jackson knows it, too. Everyone in that room knows it. But she declined to admit it.
“I am not familiar with that particular quote or case,” she said, which strains credulity. Had she committed that line to memory? Probably not. But to be unfamiliar with a landmark case, the most consequential majority opinion Justice Ginsburg ever authored? United States v. Virginia was surely a topic of discussion in 1996, Jackson’s third year of law school, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. It beggars belief to say she was unfamiliar with it entirely.
The senator pressed on: “Do you interpret Justice Ginsburg’s meaning of ‘men and women’ as ‘male and female’?”
Judge Jackson demurred. “Again, because I don’t know the case, I don’t know how I interpret it.”
So Blackburn made it even simpler: “Can you provide a definition of the word ‘woman’?”
Again, Jackson pretended to not understand something that people have understood since the beginning of time.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not in this context, I’m not a biologist.”
The problem of pretending “sex” and “gender” are indefinable terms bears heavily on decades of anti-discrimination jurisprudence. Reading further into Ginsburg’s opinion in U.S. v. Virginia, it is clear that her arguments for legal equality between the sexes are nonetheless premised on the idea that there are two separate sexes.
‘Inherent differences’ between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual’s opportunity. Sex classifications may be used to compensate women ‘for particular economic disabilities [they have] suffered,’ to ‘promot[e] equal employment opportunity,’ to advance full development of the talent and capacities of our Nation’s people. But such classifications may not be used, as they once were, to create or perpetuate the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women. (internal citations omitted)
The Supreme Court in the VMI case noted that men and women were different and noted further there are circumstances in which that difference can matter in law. Ginsburg’s point, and that of the six justices who signed on to her opinion, was that it did not matter in that case.
The court’s ruling was not that there was no difference between men and women, or that there was a difference, but no one could possibly know what it was. It was that men and women do have “inherent differences,” but that the state should not discriminate on that basis absent some “exceedingly persuasive justification.”
To say that the definitions of “man” and “woman” are unknowable absent some expert training in biology is to turn the whole precedent on its head. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock last year already degraded this principle, stretching the meaning of sex discrimination to cover discriminating against someone based on “traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.” But even that reimagining of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act still hangs on the idea that the classifications known as “man” and “woman” exist and are knowable.
If sex is unknowable, how can a law against sex discrimination be enforced? If an element of the offense is literally indefinable, the law must fail under the “void for vagueness” doctrine.
First explained in Connally v. General Construction Co.in 1926 and upheld many times since, the doctrine requires that laws be clear if they are not to violate the due process clause. A law “must be sufficiently explicit to inform those who are subject to it what conduct on their part will render them liable to its penalties.” Therefore, “a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application violates the first essential of due process of law.”
Until recently, no one would say that the definition of “woman” was something “so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning,” but Judge Jackson seems to disagree. What would this mean for our sex discrimination laws, where being unable to define “sex” makes it impossible to determine if the law even applies to a situation? If trial courts need to call expert “biologists” every time the subject of sex comes up, it is hard to see how justice can be done.
Fortunately, this is all a lie, not a genuine misunderstanding.
Judge Jackson, like Blackburn, is a woman, and she knows exactly what that means. Bowing down to the postmodernists’ mystery cult is something prominent people on the left deem politically necessary, but should a future Justice Jackson be called upon to decide a case in which a woman was paid less than a man for the same job, her recollection of the definition of “woman” will be magically restored.
But that does not solve the problem. The point of voiding vague laws is that the vagueness means they will be interpreted based on the whims of the state, not a neutral principle. Knowing what it means one moment and pretending not to the next introduces vagueness where none existed before, and with the same effect: the growth of arbitrary state power.
Ignoring facts leads to ignoring laws. Jackson’s misstep on this point undermined the idea that she would rule neutrally on politically sensitive matters and threatens to introduce a dangerous arbitrariness to American jurisprudence.
The Trans Lobby Doesn't Want To Erase Just Women's Sports.
It Wants To Erase Women
It’s official: Men are the best women.
This is not about the swimming. That is to say, the reason people suddenly care about collegiate swimming is that National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) women’s swimming is no longer women’s swimming. The triumph of male swimmer Lia Thomas (formerly Will Thomas) is national news because it shows there are no limits to the charade of trans ideology.
We are supposed to pretend that a hulking man is a woman, and that it is a sign of moral progress when he beats female athletes in the pool and exposes his penis and testicles to them in the locker room. As one of his teammates put it, “It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women.”
Even for those who care little about NCAA swimming, the injustice of this situation matters. It demonstrates that trans activists and their allies do not care whom they hurt in pursuit of their ideology. The trans agenda was presented as a polite fiction — playing along with a small number of people who wanted to be the other sex — but what were supposed to be white lies have become very dark.
In the Thomas case, the harms are obvious, from the displacement of female athletes to women having to share a locker room with a man who apparently leers at them while flashing his junk. These blatant injustices offered an opportunity for the trans movement to show there are limits to its demands. But the movement and its allies have instead quickly pivoted from assuring us that such things would never happen to telling us that they are good and that we had better get used to them.
The left’s destruction of women’s athletics is only a small part of the campaign to subjugate women and girls by legally and culturally erasing their existence. The trans goal is a society and legal system in which the subjective claims of self-identification are what determine who is a woman.
But when being a woman is merely a matter of self-ID untethered from biology, it becomes impossible to establish safe havens for women and girls. This vulnerability is intentional; the trans agenda wants to have a man in every girl’s locker room, bathroom, prison cell, and even fifth-grade science camp cabin.
And everyone knows it. Thomas appears to have thrown some races in an effort to tamp down on criticism, but it is too late to hide what is going on. Nonetheless, a lot of people want to pretend otherwise in the hope it will all go away. They know Thomas is a man. They know, or at least intuit, that transgender ideology is justified by bad science and worse philosophy. But they are afraid to say so.
This fear is not baseless. Trans activists and ideologues have disproportionate power, and they are ruthless with it. Getting kicked off of social media may be the least of your concerns. Saying that Thomas is a man can result in an online mob trying to ruin your education or career. Thus, story after story on Thomas involved criticisms from anonymous teammates and their parents — the injustice was apparent to all, but no one involved wanted to be labeled “transphobic.”
Thus, although it was generally admitted that the trans movement has gone too far and that lines needed to be drawn, it often seemed that no one in authority wanted to draw those lines, including supposed conservatives. And this problem extends well beyond this particular case. A lot of Democrats are uncomfortable with transgender toddlers and amputating healthy body parts from adolescents, but they are rarely willing to speak up.
This liberal hesitance arises from more than just the intimidation wielded by the trans movement. Rather, discussing any limits on gender or sexuality opens an awkward can of worms for them. Acknowledging that human embodiment and sexual dimorphism require restraining desire and claims of subjective identity could roll back a lot more than Lia Thomas’s swim career.
For instance, if the differences between men and women are real and important, that might suggest that having two daddies is not interchangeable with having a mother and a father. If the differences between men and women matter, then an economic system that sees men and women as interchangeable units of labor is deeply flawed and anti-human. If the differences between men and women matter, then how they are united matters, which means that a sexual culture ordered toward the indulgence of desire may not be ordered toward human flourishing.
Thinking seriously about embodiment and the differences between men and women challenges the preconceptions of many on the modern left. It also reopens a multitude of questions that cultural liberalism thought it had settled on its terms. Thus, although many liberals are discomfited by the Lia Thomas saga, they are at a loss as to how to respond.
The thing about slippery slopes is that they’re slippery, and it’s hard to stop after picking up speed. But unless the left is comfortable with abolishing women, they’re going to need to find some brakes, and some balls.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
