They’re Not Insane, They Have a Plan

Is it just deranged thespians and virtue-signaling politicians who have been driven mad? Not quite.

by Sebastian Gorka for American Greatness

What has happened to politics in America? I know we should never look to Hollywood for sagacity or nuanced political analysis, but things are out of control. Do you remember the TV show “Beauty and the Beast”? Or the original “HellBoy” movie? Ron Perlman starred in both and made a name for himself over the years play-acting tough guys. He seems to have forgotten it was all make-believe and that he’s only an actor. 

In the reaction he posted online to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signing a bill to prevent the systematic sexualization of children in Florida, Perlman ranted in an expletive-laden tirade like a character out of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And it’s not just actors who have lost the plot. 

In response to the eminently reasonable law, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a former cop who should know better, has spent taxpayer dollars on billboards in Florida to lure gay Floridians to move to New York. He seems to think homosexual Americans should love high taxes and skyrocketing crime rates. 

Is it just deranged thespians and virtue-signaling politicians who have been driven mad? Not quite. The ideological infection has spread all the way to the White House, with outgoing White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki breaking down at the prospect of the excellent Florida Bill becoming law. 

I could go on. Just consider the organized indoctrination in our schools by delightful teachers parading their trans agenda on TikTok. But at least the lunacy can’t affect the real world that you live in, where 2 + 2 = 4. The empirical world of real jobs, free markets, and concrete bottom lines will remain apart from this nonsense, right? Wrong. Thanks to the investigative journalism of Christopher Rufo, we now have internal videos from one of the biggest for-profit, capitalist entities in the world, the Walt Disney Co. These videos show their perverse agenda to sexualize their young viewers.  

Where did this all come from, and what do we do about it? Well, as with most diabolical movements in Western Civilization today, the radical transgender project can be traced back to the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxists. Whether it’s environmentalism, globalism, open-borders policies, or just systematic anti-Americanism, it can usually be traced back to that motley crew of malcontents. 

Transgenderism itself is particularly rooted in something called “queer theory,” the best analysis of which can be found in Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s crucial work Cynical Theories.  In it, using the works of key postmodernists, we learn that: “Queer Theory is a political project [designed] to challenge what is called normativity—that some things are more common or regular to the human condition.” If it’s normal, if it’s morally sound, if it’s traditional, it must be challenged and eventually overturned. 

How else can you explain the fact that a federal judge recently confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court can’t say what a woman is, despite being one. But it’s not just confusion over simple words a 2-year old could explain to you. It’s far more sinister. This judge isn’t simply confused over what an adult human female is, her strange attitude to sex extends to pedophiles and child rapists. Over the years Ketanji Brown Jackson has persistently sided with the purveyors of pedophilic pornography—so much so that she even gave a repeat offender just 12 months in jail for raping his 13-year-old niece. As far as I am concerned, this is why a decent nation has the death penalty. 

Looking back at the corporate world, why is anyone surprised that Disney has such a strange attitude toward the sexualization of minors or that its executives are fighting DeSantis? Could it have something to do with the pedophiles it employs inside its company and its theme parks? Is this a pattern of scandal or a one-off? Unfortunately, it is hardly uncommon. According to law enforcement “at least 35 Disney employees were arrested since 2006 and accused of sex crimes involving children, trying to meet a minor for sex, or for possession of child pornography,” and “so far, a total of 32 have been convicted.” 

So what is to be done? First, all of us must cleave to the truth. Never ever bend to the demonic cult that is endangering our children and our civilization. The facts are plain. God is on our side. So is science. Just ask MIT. A man is a man and a woman is a woman. At conception new and unique DNA is created. If that human has XX chromosomes she  is a woman until the day she dies. If that chromosomal make-up should instead be XY, he is a man until the day he dies. Those are the incontrovertible facts. Nonnegotiable facts. No matter what drugs you inject yourself with, whatever surgery you mutilate yourself with, or the clothes you wear, it remains true. All we need now is courage to speak the truth. Always. 

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- May 12

 

Gonna talk about my TV obsession for a bit here.

Whole lot of TV shows across CBS and NBC being axed today, most of all at The CW (the network that used to be the most friendly with letting shows end on their own, well. Before it got sold earlier this year.).

Did I lose any? Just 2 CBS comedies that I mainly just watched to pass time. Didn't really care about them that much. Besides, I'm barely keeping track of what I'm trying to watch anyways.

Everything else that was axed today: 98% were woke POS shows that obviously no one cared about to watch. 🤣🤣 #GoWokeGoByeBye

Usually I dread the week before the networks announce their new schedules because of the unexpected cancellations, but this year, I say just axe as many of these loser woke shows as you can! No one cares about them because we're all sick of these rotten agendas being shown on a daily basis!

Now, on to tonight's news:

Imagine the Unimaginable ~ VDH

When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous—as we’ll see over the next few months.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable.

Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.

In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader Vladimir Putin now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war. 

A 79-year-old Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who should be removed from power. 

After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are conniving how best to exploit this rare window of global military opportunity. 

The traditional bedrocks of the American system—a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system—are dissolving.

Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.

There is no southern border.

Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination. None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.

Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles County D.A. refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.  

Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and politics determine whether the law is even applied.

Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans. An American president—in a first—casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.

Politics resembles the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has created a national hysteria. 

Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering their votes.

There is no free speech anymore on campuses.

Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention, grading, and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender, or ethnic category. 

When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical, and professional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and irreversible declining standards of living.

What happened? 

Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The United States has the largest combined gas, coal, and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.

Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. He kept printing trillions of dollars for short-term political advantage, incentivizing labor nonparticipation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows—at a time of pent-up global demand.

The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.

Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories—“modern monetary theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory—now dominate policymaking in the Biden Administration. 

The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism.  Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular. 

Is not that the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?

The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Joe Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate cabinet nonperformance. 

Why? The Left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense. 

So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer. 

Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts, and likely by the fall issue more COVID lockdowns. They will still dream of packing the Court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding more states, and flooding the November balloting with hundreds of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.  

When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous—as we shall see over the next few months. 

ZERO HORSEPOWER: Media-Driven Scandal Leaves Border Patrol Agents Without Critical Tool

ZERO HORSEPOWER: 

Media-Driven Scandal Leaves Border Patrol Agents Without Critical Tool

Joseph Simonson - Washington Free Beacon

A United States Border Patrol agent on horseback tries to stop a Haitian migrant from entering an encampment on the banks of the Rio Grande near the Acuna Del Rio International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas on September 19, 2021. / Getty Images

The Border Patrol agents cleared of criminal wrongdoing in the wake of a media-driven frenzy over images falsely suggesting they whipped Haitian migrants are nonetheless prohibited from riding horses, hobbling their ability to secure swaths of the border inaccessible by car, according to a Border Patrol union representative. 

All of the agents implicated in the controversy have been cleared by the Department of Homeland Security to carry out most of their professional duties, according to Chris Cabrera, a spokesman for the National Border Patrol Council and Local 3307.

"They’re just not allowed on horseback," Cabrera said. "There’s obviously no criminal element." The Border Patrol agents never faced any criminal proceedings, Cabrerra said. In November 2021, two months after the incident took place, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General declined to press charges on the matter and punted it to a Customs and Border Protection office to open an administrative investigation.

Questions about the propriety of the investigation emerged immediately after its announcement, with Republican lawmakers calling it politically charged. Photos and videos that surfaced of Border Patrol agents on horseback attempting to apprehend Haitians illegally crossing into the United States prompted a massive controversy. "Border Patrol agents are whipping Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas," declared Vice News. The Daily Beastran with the same conclusions, accusing the "officers on horseback [of] using ropes to whip at Haitian migrants." Atlantic writer Adam Serwer compared the scene to "something out of the 19th century," with CNN's Chris Cuomo echoing those remarks by saying the agents looked like something from the "bygone era of slavery."

At the time, in September 2021, thousands of migrants from Haiti swarmed the southern border and camped under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The influx of the migrants constituted one of the largest domestic humanitarian crises of Biden’s presidency.

Democrats, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, called the alleged whipping incident inhumane and alleged that the agents were whipping and attacking the migrants. One of the journalists who photographed the Border Patrol agents, however, said the footage was "misconstrued" and that he "didn’t ever see [the agents] whip anybody."

Cabrera criticized Biden’s remarks, asking how an investigation could be objective when virtually every senior Democrat in Washington, D.C., appeared certain of the agents’ guilt. 

"These guys didn’t have a prayer. The first thing [Biden] says is ‘you’re gonna pay,'" Cabrera said. "The only mistake those agents did was going out there doing their jobs." 

As the controversy proliferated across social media, Biden called the footage "outrageous" and vowed to punish the agents before the investigation concluded. The White House announced that it would suspend the use of horses in the Del Rio sector of the border. DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pledged to complete the investigation in "days, not weeks"— though the agency has refused to provide official updates in months.

"I promise you, those people will pay. There will be an investigation, underway now, and there will be consequences. There will be consequences," Biden said. "It's an embarrassment, but beyond an embarrassment, it is dangerous. It’s wrong, it sends the wrong message around the world, it sends the wrong message at home. It's simply not who we are." 

Although the White House pledged to ban horses in the area, a review of Chief Patrol Agent Jason D. Owens's Twitter account shows agents in the Del Rio Sector have been using horses for months. On April 4, Owens tweeted out pictures of agents on horseback apprehending migrants by the Brackettville Station. Another tweet from Owens on Jan. 29 shows an agent on horseback next to a group of more than 30 migrants.

"Comstock is one of our most remote stations w/ some of roughest terrain in the Del Rio Sector. Doesn’t matter," Owens tweeted. "It’s still busy."

In April, DHS reportedly concluded the investigation, although it gave no updates on the status of the agents in question. A report on the investigation has yet to be made public, although two senior DHS staffers expressed skepticism about a release any time soon.

"The only way this happens is if Republicans subpoena it in 2023," one of the staffers told the Washington Free Beacon.

DHS did not respond to a request for comment on why the agents are not allowed to use horses despite their innocence. Border Patrol has been using horses since the agency’s founding in the 20th century, with staff preferring to use animals instead of vehicles to navigate tough terrain and pursue suspects. 

New DOJ Notes Reveal FBI Panic After Trump Tweeted He Knew He Was Being Spied On

by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke for Epoch Times

Newly released notes taken by high-level Department of Justice (DOJ) officials during a March 6, 2017, meeting with FBI leadership expose some of the lengths the FBI went to, to cover up its spying on the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump.

The notes were released on May 8 by lawyers representing former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann as part of an effort to clear him on charges of having lied to the FBI. The notes, in reality, appear to do little to exonerate Sussmann but do provide quite a bit of information on the FBI.

The meeting at which the notes were taken took place just two days after Trump’s March 4, 2017, tweet in which he accused former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower. Trump’s tweet panicked FBI leadership, who were unsure exactly how much Trump knew about their efforts to tie him up with Russia collusion allegations.

What the notes reveal is that in response to the tweet, they tried to cover their tracks.

By March 2017, FBI leadership already knew with near-certainty that the Trump–Russia collusion claims were a hoax. They knew that Clinton’s campaign had a plan to vilify Trump by portraying him as a puppet of Putin. The FBI also knew that not a single claim in the so-called Steele dossier—which was the primary source of allegations of Trump–Russia collusion—had checked out.

In fact, at that point, the FBI had already spent three days interviewing Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, who disavowed pretty much every claim in Steele’s dossier. The FBI also knew that the Alfa Bank story, which claimed that a Trump server was communicating with a Russian bank—information that had been brought to them by Sussmann—was bogus.

In short, the FBI knew that all the claims of Trump–Russia collusion had proven to be fake.

But things took a sudden and dramatic turn on March 4, 2017, when Trump wrote on Twitter that he knew that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, a very public claim of spying that set off alarm bells with both FBI and DOJ leadership. Trump’s tweet so alarmed these DOJ and FBI officials that the topic dominated a meeting two days later that included FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and the acting U.S. attorney general, Dana Boente.

The problem for the FBI was this: They didn’t know how much Trump actually knew about their actions. Just a day earlier, on March 3, 2017, radio host Mark Levin had reported that the Obama administration had obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants that involved Trump and several of his campaign advisers. Levin also reported that Trump’s off-the-cuff joke in July 2016—“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing”—had become the basis for the Russia collusion accusations.

But as we now know, the FISA warrants weren’t the only thing the FBI leadership was involved with. The FBI was actively spying on the Trump campaign and the incoming Trump administration’s transition communications, a fact that was also revealed in the new notes. The FBI had not only spied on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, but also on another aide, George Papadopoulos, going so far as to lure him to London, where they tried to set him up in a clumsy but elaborate sting.

There were also the new false accusations brought forward by Sussmann that Trump was tied to the use of a Russian Yota phone. And there was the matter of tech executive Rodney Joffe–a man with deep ties to the FBI–who had been using his access to non-public data to spy on Trump both at Trump Tower and at the White House.

In all likelihood, Trump probably only knew what Levin had reported the day before–that there was a FISA warrant on a campaign aide–but the FBI leadership didn’t know how much Trump knew and had to assume that he knew a lot more.

The discussion at the March 6 meeting was dominated by Trump’s tweet, with the FBI’s McCabe kicking things off by stating that the bureau was trying to determine what was behind Trump’s tweets.

Notes at the meeting were taken by three DOJ officials—Tashina Gauhar, Mary McCord, and Scott Schools. The notes were released because one of the notes appears to show that McCabe stated that Sussmann had represented clients when he took the Alfa Bank allegations to the FBI. Sussmann initially told the FBI that he didn’t represent anyone and was merely acting as a good samaritan. It’s that lie to the FBI by Sussmann that he has been charged with, and Sussmann’s lawyers are hoping to sow doubt by introducing that single sentence that appears to say otherwise.

This claim by Sussmann’s lawyers, however, is in essence a side-show, as the notes are double-hearsay evidence written six months after Sussmann told the FBI the exact opposite. 

The real bombshells are in the many pages of notes Sussmann doesn’t cite; those notes reveal the true extent of the FBI’s panic over Trump’s tweet. The first reaction from FBI leadership appears to have been to tell the acting attorney general, Boente, a sequence of lies about their investigation.

The notes reveal that the FBI repeatedly referred to Steele’s dossier as “Crown reporting,” suggesting the dossier represented some sort of official UK government intelligence when it was mostly information made up by Steele and Danchenko–a fact the FBI already knew at the time.

The new notes also revealed that FBI agent Peter Strzok lied to his DOJsuperiors about what triggered Alexander Downer, the Australian ambassador in London, to come forward to the FBI with information regarding his meeting with Papadopolous. It has always been the FBI’s official story that it was Downer who initiated the official Trump–Russia investigation, but that story is now undermined in the new notes, in which Strzok claims that it was Trump’s joke about Russia finding Clinton’s emails that had triggered Downer.

In truth, Downer had come forward before Trump had even made the joke.

The FBI also lied to the DOJ about the Carter Page FISA warrant, which they claimed was “fruitful” when it actually had revealed nothing nefarious–something the FBI was aware of by this time.

The FBI appears to have also tried to misrepresent and elevate the Alfa Bank allegations by claiming that the Trump Organization had sent a solicitation to Alfa Bank. Again, this was completely false. The FBI knew within days of Sussmann giving them the Alfa Bank data that it was useless and probably fake.

By Sept. 23, 2016, the FBI’s IT team had disproven the Alfa Bank allegations. But rather than admit that, the FBI actually tried to breathe new life into the Alfa allegations through its misrepresentations.

All of these exculpatory facts were not just hidden from interim DOJ officials at the March 6, 2017, meeting, but FBI leadership also twisted those facts to make them appear like there was a strong case against Trump when they knew there was no case at all.

But the March 6 meeting was only the beginning. Knowing that Trump might now be on to them, FBI leadership immediately increased their efforts to cover their own tracks by intensifying the focus on Trump.

On March 5, 2017, the day following Trump’s tweet, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went on CNN and claimed that there was no “wiretap activity mounted against the President-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.”

While Clapper took a defensive stance, the FBI soon went on offense and the bureau’s efforts began almost immediately.

On March 15, 2017, FBI Director James Comey suddenly decided to brief the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), about the Carter Page FISA application, which FBI leadership believed Trump had found out about. Comey would provide them with copies of the actual FISA warrant two days later. At this same time, Comey also began his briefing of the congressional Gang of Eight—the eight individuals within the U.S. Congress who are briefed on classified intelligence matters by the executive branch—regarding the Page FISA.

On March 20, 2017, Clapper suddenly changed his narrative, shifting from denying the existence of any spying to denying any abuse of the FISA process.

Also on March 20, Comey publicly testified to Congress, revealing for the first time the existence of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump and his campaign.

During his testimony, Comey inadvertently acknowledged that he had also intentionally withheld the required congressional Gang of Eight notification of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation. Under questioning, Comey stated that he did so because of “the sensitivity of the matter.”

The combined efforts of Obama intelligence officials and the FBI would soon culminate in the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, which essentially tied up Trump for the next three years. And in doing so, they ensured that little or no progress was made in bringing the actual perpetrators of the Russia hoax to justice. 

Abortion Extremism

Abortion Extremism

 BY JOHN HINDERAKER FOR POWERLINE

The abortion issue has been more or less a wash, politically, for decades. The Democrats believed that leaking the Dobbs majority opinion would help them in the midterm elections, but a great deal of polling since then suggests that abortion will continue to be a 50/50 issue, more or less, although Democrats may gain somewhat by distracting attention from their awful performance in Washington.

But then there is the question of abortion extremism. While most Americans are conflicted about the core question of when abortion is proper and should be permitted, there are collateral issues on which opinion is clear. Like the Democrats’ threatening the lives of the Supreme Court justices who disagree with them. 

My law school classmate Chuck Schumer disgraced the Senate by threatening Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in 2020, saying they “won’t know what hit them” if they didn’t vote his way in an abortion case, and having “released the whirlwind” they would “pay the price.” This was shameful and, as far as I know, unprecedented in American history. 

Liberal activists have acted on Schumer’s threats by demonstrating in front of conservative justices’ homes. This is illegal under Virginia law and, I think, under federal law as well, but don’t hold your breath waiting for law enforcement to intervene. Justice Alito and his family have reportedly moved to an undisclosed location to escape threatened violence from the Left.

While opinion on abortion is closely divided, opinion on the Left’s thuggish tactics is not. The Trafalgar Group finds that only 16% approve of the Democrats’ tactic of publishing the justices’ home addresses and mobilizing demonstrations there, while 76% disapprove:

The same survey found 52% believing that the Biden administration’s failure to condemn these intrusions encouraged the protests to become unlawful or violent. And, of course, no one outside the far-left precincts of Antifa and its political cheerleaders like Keith Ellison is in favor of firebombing one’s political opponents.

So, to the extent that the Democrats are associated with this kind of thuggery, they likely will suffer in November. Ann Althouse is one pro-abortion commentator who recognizes the threat that violence or “violence-adjacent” behavior by liberals will hurt the pro-abortion cause.

On the other side, there is no risk that anti-abortion activists will commit arson, invade personal spaces or perpetrate violence. But there is a chance that some will try to build on the Dobbs decision to move on to other topics like gay marriage, a debate that the vast majority of Americans have no desire to re-open. Even worse was Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves suggesting that contraception might somehow be in play:

When asked if Mississippi might next target the use of contraceptives such as the Plan B pill or intrauterine devices, Reeves demurred, saying that was not what the state was focused on “at this time.”

“My view is that the next phase of the pro-life movement is focusing on helping those moms that maybe have an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy,” Reeves said. “And while I’m sure there will be conversations around America regarding [contraceptives], it’s not something that we have spent a lot of time focused on.”

It was a short step from those mealy-mouthed comments to an absurd headline in the London Times: “Republican states plot to make birth control a crime.” Stupid? Of course. But this is what the Democrats will try to do: deflect attention away from the actual import of the Dobbsdecision, that abortion will again be regulated by the states, and toward a fanciful parade of horribles.

So I don’t think that the merits of the Dobbs decision per se will swing many ballots, but if voters think that one side or the other has gone off the deep end, it could matter. The difference, of course, is that the Democrats have in fact gone off the deep end and won’t be able to help themselves, while Republicans will only be perceived that way if they go out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot.

Twitter CEO: Two Top Execs Out, New Hire Freeze

 

Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal announced in an email to employees on Thursday that the company's leaders for the consumer division and revenue will depart the social media company.

The news comes as billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is working to close a $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. Agrawal also said in the email that Twitter would pause most hiring and would review all existing job offers to determine whether any "should be pulled back."

Kayvon Beykpour, who leads Twitter's consumer division, said in a tweet thread on Thursday that his departure was not his decision.

"Parag asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction," Beykpour tweeted.

Bruce Falck, who leads revenue product at Twitter, will leave after five years at the company. In a tweet on Thursday, Falck thanked his team and partners at Twitter.

"We were able to achieve the results we did through your hard work. Quarterly revenue does not lie. Google it," he tweeted. 

https://www.newsmax.com/finance/companies/twitter-shakeup-hiring-freeze/2022/05/12/id/1069607/   

Biden Criticizes Sen. Rick Scott’s ‘Ultra-MAGA Agenda’

Biden Criticizes Sen. Rick Scott’s ‘Ultra-MAGA Agenda’

Mike Pence wouldn’t let it go, and when the incumbent Republican claimed again and again during the 2020 vice presidential debate that a Biden-Harris administration would make every part of the Green New Deal a reality, then-Sen. Kamala Harris replied, again and again, that wasn’t quite right.

It was true that the Biden-Harris campaign had called the Green New Deal a “crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face,” but as the California Democrat made clear to moderator Susan Page, their climate plan was not a carbon copy of what other Green New Deal advocates, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, wanted. “I will repeat, and the American people know,” Harris said, taking Pence’s attack head on, “that Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”

Watching the exchange from home, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, co-chair of the Biden-Harris campaign’s own climate task force and the stateswoman most responsible for catapulting the GND into the national conversation, tweeted, “fracking is bad, actually.” And then ... that was that. A month later, Biden and Harris won not just fracking-friendly Pennsylvania but the entire election.

Voters believed Biden and Harris. They accepted that it was possible to adopt the spirit of a plan, even copy-and-paste some of its provisions,without endorsing each and every particular policy proposal. But now in the White House, Biden and Harris have lost that kind of appetite for nuance.

The president claimed Tuesday during remarks about historic inflation that “the Republican plan is to increase taxes on the middle-class families and let billionaires and large companies off the hook as they raise prices and reap profits in record amounts. And it’s really that simple.” Except that it wasn’t. At least not according to some Republicans and the Washington Post fact-checker.

Biden was talking about Sen. Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Senatorial Committee who released an 11-point plan designed “to rescue America,” who proposed that all Americans pay some income tax as part of that plan, and who sparked a protracted fight among party leadership over policy. The president dubbed it “the Ultra-MAGA Agenda.”

The Scott plan includes more than 120 bullet points covering everything in broad strokes from economic to education policy. But the most controversial provision, the one Biden zeroed in on, reads: “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.”

With regards to that provision, is it fair to say that Scott represents the totality of congressional Republicans? Glen Kessler, the Washington Post fact-checker, did not think so. “One cannot instantly assume every person in a political party supports a proposal by a prominent member,” Kessler reported before awarding the claim that Biden repeated on Tuesday “Three Pinocchios” last month.

While Scott has spurred discussion, he has not achieved anything resembling consensus. “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half of the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said of the two least popular proposals in the Scott plan. “That will not be part of a Republican Senate majority agenda.”

His counterpart, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, was also seemingly unimpressed. Asked if the House GOP agenda, due sometime this summer, would overlap with Scott’s plan, McCarthy told reporters flatly, “No, ours will be our own.”

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, meanwhile, dismissed the part of Scott’s plan that would raise taxes as “an unserious presentation." And even while sitting next to the senator on stage during an event at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group’s generally supportive president, Kevin Roberts, raised a skeptical eyebrow at the tax proposal. Criticism was so intense that by the end of March, Scott was comparing himself to beleaguered Civil War generals.

“I think of myself more like Grant taking Vicksburg, and I think as a result of that, I’m always going to be perceived as an outsider,” Scott told the Associated Press. “I’m going to keep doing what I believe in whether everybody agrees with me or not.”

That struggle is ongoing, and so is the feud between McConnell and Scott, but Biden isn’t waiting around to see who ends up on top. The president has declared a winner. “I can’t believe that the majority of Republicans buy on to Scott’s plan,” he said. “But that’s a plan in writing, and he’s in the leadership.”

It may be in writing, but it is hardly settled GOP orthodoxy. It isn’t even an official NRSC document. A spokesperson for Scott told RealClearPolitics that “this is his plan that he put out in his own personal political capacity.” They added, “It’s not an NRSC plan and no NRSC resources were used to create or promote it.”

When pressed on Biden’s claim that a majority of Republicans support the plan, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki rattled off a list of Republicans who had voiced support for the effort generally, including the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.

“Chairman Ronna McDaniel praised Sen. Scott’s proposal as a, quote, ‘clear plan’ for Republicans that offers, quote, ‘real solutions,” Psaki told a Fox News White House reporter. “She’s the chairwoman of the party. Rick Scott is not a random senator. He is literally in charge of winning back the Senate for Republicans and what the plan is. So he is the person who’s put forward this plan.”

But McDaniel, not unlike Biden and Harris with the Green New Deal, has not signed off on every chapter and verse. In an interview with the AP, she voiced support for Scott’s efforts generally. When the conversation turned to the specific provision that would raise taxes, she replied, “I’m not a policymaker.”

And yet, despite McConnell’s condemnation and McCarthy’s tepid rejection, the fact that Republicans in Washington remain divided over whether they need a governing agenda may have created a policy vacuum and an opportunity for the White House to go on offense. As Biden said, the Scott plan is on paper. Some read it and heard echoes of Mitt Romney.

How was ensuring that everyone pay income tax, having “skin in the game” as Scott puts it, materially different than the sentiment Sen. Mitt Romney held during his doomed presidential campaign? After all, at the time, that Utah Republican told supporters that 47% of voters would support President Obama’s reelection because they are “dependent upon government ... believe they are victims ... believe the government has a responsibility to care for them ... [and] pay no income tax.”

That was the question that RCP put to Scott last month at a press conference. The senator said he didn’t remember what his Senate colleague said back then. “I can tell you what I believe in, and you’re welcome to ask Sen. Romney what he believes in,” he said before adding, “I thought what happened in the CARES Act was really bad – that you paid people more not to work than to work, and I don’t think that was good for people.”

“The people that are paying taxes right now – I’m not going to raise their rates; I’ve never done it,” he said at that same event last month, before adding: “I’m focused on the people that can go to work, and decided to be on a government program and not participate in this. I believe whether it’s just a dollar, we all are in this together.”

As the New York Times noted, Scott has promised that his plan would make everyone mad at him, even Republicans. And some, he told a crowd at Heritage, “will do it with anonymous quotes.” A month later, he is still delivering. One senior Republican official told RCP that Scott was giving Biden an opportunity to confuse the GOP message: “The party that traditionally rallies around cutting taxes, confirming judges, and killing terrorists, is now being terrorized by a GOP senator trying to raise taxes.”

The White House has found its foil for now, and the Biden-Scott brawl has become personal.

The senator released a statement early Tuesday morning saying that Biden was “unwell,” “unfit for office,” and “incapable of carrying out his duties.” When that criticism was read aloud by a reporter, the president replied, “I think the man has a problem.”

Inflation, the topic that the two men’s antipathy momentarily overshadowed, has meanwhile hit a 40-year high.

Rick Scott’s 11 point plan 
https://rescueamerica.com/11-point-plan/

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/05/11/biden_criticizes_sen_rick_scotts_ultra_maga_agenda_147583.html

Joe Biden Labels Donald Trump “The Great MAGA King”

During a speech filled with obfuscation, nonsense and economic doublespeak, Joe Biden turned to discuss the federal deficit.  During his remarks in Chicago Biden called President Donald J Trump “The Great MAGA King,” as if that would be a bad thing… lol.  WATCH:

We’ve gone from Deplorable, to MAGA, to Ultra MAGA and now The GREAT MAGA.

We shall celebrate our latest elevation with the dance of The Great MAGA King below:

The unbearable rightness of being a Democrat

The unbearable rightness of being a Democrat

Top Democrats keep emailing me to tell me how angry they are. They’re asking for money, and people apparently donate more if those seeking handouts are in a rage.

I mentioned recently that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) asked me for support on the grounds that she was made “sick to [her] stomach” by originalist Supreme Court justices moving to overturn the “constitutional right to abortion.”

Then, the "Ragin’ Cajun," Democratic operative James Carville, emailed me saying he was “furious.” That was his one-word headline. “I’m so damn angry,” he went on, “I can hardly type this message to you.”

A flunky doubtless typed it for him, which is an amusing irony but beside the point. The salient thing is that Col. Cueball, like Pelosi, thinks it’s persuasive that his feelings are running high. On the Left, anger is seen as self-justifying. Fury is its own excuse. If you’re throwing a fit, you must be right. Rage or nausea make your argument unassailable.

This exactly fits Allan Bloom’s landmark 1987 analysis The Closing of the American Mind. He saw that university leftism was dragging America into a sort of anti-rational imbecility that displaced reason with emotion, and he noted that “civilization or, to say the same thing, education, is the taming of the soul’s raw passions.” He added, “Indignation or rage was the vivid passion characterizing those in the grip of a new moral experience.”

These passionate militants graduated to run the Democratic Party and send me fundraising emails. There is an adamantine chain of causation between their emotional preening and the urge to violence that recently produced the firebombing of a pro-life/anti-abortion organization’s headquarters in Wisconsin. If you’re a left-winger, you can lob Molotov cocktails at people whose opinions you dislike and feel self-righteous about it.

Graffiti scrawled on the Wisconsin organization’s wall declared, “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.” The dauber doubtless justified his or her physical threat because, you know, he or she was really mad.

And why not? After all, rage supposedly justified a national orgy of destruction two years ago after the police murder of a black man, George Floyd. And, just this past week, President Joe Biden’s White House took days to stop making excuses for mobs attempting to intimidate conservative justices outside their homes. Initially, press secretary Jen Psaki refused repeatedly to condemn it, saying, “The president’s view is that there is a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness … about that leaked document.”

Passion, fear, sadness — emotions rather than reasons. With a veneer of excusable emotion, the Left uses violence again and again to get its way. This is right out of Saul Alinsky’s militant handbook Rules for Radicals, which inspired Hillary Clinton’s university thesis and has now been absorbed into the Democrats’ DNA.

The Madison, Wisconsin, police chief responded to the arson by intoning the piety, “There is no room for hate or violence in Madison.” But it’s not true. There is plenty of room. The Left has for generations opened a wide space in which its adherents may indulge their hate and inflict their violence. The wide-open space is all of America.

So, when the Senate passes a bill to boost security for Supreme Court justices, as it did unanimously on May 9, don’t be fooled into thinking that Democrats oppose physical threats in principle. If they did, it wouldn’t take them longer than 72 hours to work out what they believe. It betrays the fact that their objection to mob rule is entirely circumstantial.

Why did they eventually get there? Because they realized that it might kill them in the midterm elections six months away. They loved the Floyd riots two years ago until they didn’t. Spikes in violent crime turned out to be unpopular, Virginia voters threw out their Democratic governor, and they’re chopping Democrats off at the knees in polls as elections hove into view.

The polls show, one hopes, that the public is at least for now seeing Democrats for what they are — a party led by ancient radicals who encourage their base to threaten opponents, stoke fear, and visit violence on those who get in their way. Occasional pious statements about the need for peaceful protest are unconvincing from such a source, and the electorate is, appropriately, unconvinced.

The truth is coming home that they’re not right simply because they’re angry. Their anger is due to the fact that the majority knows they’re wrong.

Hugh Gordon 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/the-unbearable-rightness-of-being-a-democrat