Here's tonight's news:
The last 2+ years have taken a horrific toll on the American people. Under President Joe Biden, a once thriving economy is saddled with $31.5 trillion in federal debt, stubborn inflation, rising interest rates, and increasing consumer debt.
It is not surprising that the latest consumer confidence rating is only 64.90, which is down from 67.20 last year and 80.70 in the last month of the administration of President Donald Trump.
Under President Trump, consumer confidence was higher because Americans could afford groceries and gasoline for their vehicles. The inflation rate was much lower and interest rates were manageable, so the wages of Americans provided more purchasing power.
Trump passed historic tax cuts which unleashed the American economy. He was ushering America into a COVID-19 recovery by the end of his term. Unfortunately, all that progress was reversed by President Biden.
He not only imposed unconstitutional COVID mandates, but he also worked with Congress to pass several massive pieces of legislation costing trillions of dollars, which only increased the federal debt, and created skyrocketing inflation.
The Biden border policies have been disastrous as millions of illegal immigrants have flooded into our country. Under President Trump, the border was secure, the wall was being built and sane policies were in place to restrict immigration. All that progress was stopped by Biden at the beginning of his administration.
While President Trump was able to make America energy independent, Biden immediately declared war on the fossil fuel industry. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, issued a moratorium on new federal leases for oil and gas drilling. He resumed our participation in the Paris Climate Accords and appointed hypocrite John Kerry, as the country’s “Climate Czar,” to fly his private jet across the world and preach the “Green Gospel.”
The recently passed “Inflation Reduction Act,” cost $700 billion including $369 billion in “Energy Security and Climate Change programs.” The constant push toward “green energy,” woke policies and an unworkable progressive agenda is taking a toll on the American people.
It is very expensive to pursue such policies and these exorbitant costs are being dumped on the American people, who are having an extremely difficult time dealing with economic carnage being inflicted by Biden.
While our economy is in ruin, our national security has been seriously compromised by the Biden administration. Americans have a right to be concerned about their safety as a Chinese spy balloon was just allowed to traverse across the country, gathering military intelligence for our foremost enemy. It was finally shot down, but only after the balloon made an embarrassing cross-country trek.
Presumably, China will not pay a price for this espionage, as the brutal communist government is accustomed to such kid glove treatment. China was not punished for unleashing a deadly coronavirus on the world or for dumping an extremely dangerous drug, fentanyl, in our country.
The only President who confronted China was Donald Trump. He instituted significant tariffs on Chinese goods to both shrink the historic trade deficit with their country and rebuild our manufacturing base. There is no doubt that under President Trump, a Chinese spy balloon would have been eliminated immediately upon entry into our country.
If President Trump were in the White House today, the Russians would not have invaded Ukraine and North Korea would not be launching test missiles and provoking its neighbors.
President Trump believed in the old Ronald Reagan philosophy “Peace Through Strength.” He made tremendous strides in rebuilding our military to deter aggressive actions from our adversaries and foster peace.
The exact opposite is occurring under President Biden as the world edges closer to nuclear war. The military today is not meeting recruitment goals and our equipment levels are dangerously low. As we ship more weapons to Ukraine, our military is ill-prepared for the challenges that face our country.
No wonder more Americans are yearning for the days of President Donald Trump. In a new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News, Trump leads Biden 48-45%. This marks a significant turnaround from the most recent poll last September in which Biden led Trump by a 48-46%margin.
While the poll shows Trump doing very well, several Republicans are getting ready to enter the race for the presidential nomination. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is very close to announcing her candidacy. Other potential candidates include US Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.
Among this group, the most formidable candidate is Florida Governor DeSantis. However, a recent Harvard-Harris poll showed Trump leading DeSantis by a very comfortable 48-28% margin.
Trump deserves the GOP nomination again because of his incredible accomplishments as President. There would be no “Make America Great Again” agenda without President Trump. Too many of his Republican opponents are neocon globalists who want to use the American military to interfere in conflicts all over the world.
In contrast, Americans want our country’s problems to be solved. A recent Gallup pollhighlighted the top concerns for Americans: dissatisfaction with government, inflation, economy and immigration. Not mentioned among the top fourteen problems identified by Americans were climate change or the war in Ukraine, although both issues are top priorities for the Biden administration.
There is a massive disconnect between the wishes of Americans and the actions being taken by our political leaders. The one exception to this rule is President Donald Trump, who understands that Americans want safe streets, secure borders, a strong economy, and a focus on our country. There is no appetite for America to continue in the role of global policeman.
No other political leader has the track record, the credentials, the stamina, the courage, or the toughness of President Trump. He is the clear choice for both the GOP nomination and the presidency in the 2024 election.
Only Trump can do what is needed to Save America.
One of the strangest things about the American response to Ukraine has been the willingness of the Left and the establishment Right to discount completely that the war is heading toward a rendezvous with ever-deadlier weapons and staggering fatalities—even as we witness increasing nuclear threats from a weakened and adrift Vladimir Putin. They insist that Putin is merely saber-rattling. And he might be. Supposedly, in his diminished and discredited state, Putin would not dare to set off a tactical nuclear weapon (as if diminished and discredited leaders are not more likely to do so).
But while we discount the nuclear dangers of a paranoid Putin reacting to the arming of our proxy Ukraine, the brazen Chinese, in violation of American airspace and international law, sent their recent “weather “ surveillance balloon across the continental United States with impunity. Only after public pressure, media coverage, and the Republican opposition did the Biden Administration, in the 11th hour, finally drop its increasingly incoherent and disingenuous excuses, and agree to shoot the balloon down as it reached the Atlantic shore—its mission completed.
Given the balloon may have more, not less, surveillance capability than satellites, may have itself been designed eventually to adopt offensive capability, and may have been intended to gauge the American reaction to incursions, the Biden hesitation and fear to defend U.S. airspace and confront China makes no sense.
Contrast Ukraine: Why discount the dangers of strategic escalation in a third-party proxy war, but exaggerate them to the point of stasis when a belligerent’s spy balloon crosses the U.S. heartland with impunity? Are the borders of Ukraine more sacrosanct and more worthy of our taking existential risks than our own airspace and southern border.
Russia did not just enter Ukraine on February 24, 2022. So where were the voices of outrage in 2014‚ from Joe Biden and others in the highest positions of the Obama Administration when Putin first absorbed Crimea and eastern Ukraine?
Why do the most fervent supporters of blank-check aid to the Zelenskyy government grow indifferent when we ask how Russia in 2014 managed so easily to reclaim vast swaths of Ukraine? Is it because of the 2012 hot-mic conversation between Barack Obama and then Russian Federation President Dmitry Medvedev in Seoul, South Korea, in which Obama promised: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space. . . . This is my last election . . . After my election, I have more flexibility.”
Obama’s “ flexibility ” on missile defense in eastern Europe was an understatement—given he completely canceled a long-planned major U.S. commitment to Poland and the Czech Republic, a system that might have been of some value during the present conflict with Putin. And certainly, Putin did give Obama the requested reelection “space” by not invading Crimea and eastern Ukraine until 16 months after Obama was reelected in his “last election.” Once he did so, the bargain was apparently sealed, and each party got what it wanted: both space (i.e., temporary good Russian behavior) and flexibility (i.e., canceling an air defense system).
So it was almost surreal how the bipartisan establishment forgot why and how Putin entered and annexed thousands of square miles of Ukraine so easily, and apparently on the correct assumption of an anemic American response. Did James Clapper in 2014 smear Obama as a “Russian asset” as he did Donald Trump in 2017?
In the “Russian collusion” and “Russian disinformation” hoaxes, the purveyors of those hysterias forgot the role of “reset” appeasement in empowering Putin to attack Ukraine in 2014—in the same manner as the Biden Administration’s ignominious retreat from Kabul was the context for Putin’s 2022 attempt on Kyiv. The common denominator in both cases was Moscow’s apparent conclusion that foreign policy under the Obama-Biden continuum was viewed as indifference to Russian aggression.
Why, after 2014, didn’t the Obama Administration arm the Ukrainians to the teeth? The surreal element of the first Trump impeachment was the reality that Trump was impeached for delaying offensive arms shipments (on the understandable and later proven assumption that the Biden family and elements of the Ukraine government were both utterly corrupt).
If Trump was impeached for delaying the offensive arms he approved and eventually sent, what was the proper reaction to Obama-Biden, who vetoed them altogether? And if the fallback argument is that Trump’s delay targeted his 2020 presidential opponent, then we arrive again at the same absurdity. For Joe Biden, by staging the Mar-a-Lago raid to charge Trump with the same “crimes” he knowingly at the time had committed, should then likewise be impeached for targeting his possible future political opponent.
But be clear: there is far more demonstrable evidence that the Biden family was corrupt and leveraging the Ukrainian and Chinese governments than there is of Donald Trump pilfering “nuclear codes” and “nuclear secrets.”
Part of the American people’s bewilderment over the left-wing zeal to send $100 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine and to damn anyone who asks for clarification of our long-term strategy in ending the war is precisely the contrast between Putin’s lethargy between 2017-2021 and his restless aggression in 2014 and again in 2022, the bookend years to the hated Trump Administration.
Putin moved on all these occasions because Obama’s refusal to arm Ukraine, his quid pro quos with Putin on missile defense, his rhetorical “red line” in Syria, and his abrupt withdrawal from Iraq that birthed ISIS—in the same manner that Biden scrambled from Afghanistan—promised that America’s response would be muted if Putin’s invasion was “minor,” and offered a safe exit for Zelenskyy.
If we truly seek to navigate an end to Russian aggression, by one means or another, the beginning of our wisdom would entail how exactly we got here in the first place—and require us to learn from our disasters.
If we wish to wonder why Vladimir Putin believed that the Biden Administration’s response to his aggression would be like the Obama-Biden reaction in 2014, then we need only look to the August 2021 American collapse in Afghanistan. That summer, Joe Biden made the decision to yank precipitously all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, abandoning a $1 billion embassy, a multimillion-dollar refitted airbase, and hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. military equipment, including 22,174 Humvee vehicles, nearly 1,000 armored vehicles, 64,363 machine guns, and 42,000 pick-up trucks and SUVs 358,530 assault rifles, 126,295 pistols, and nearly 200 artillery units.
Recent reports, denied by the United States, allege that Putin is negotiating with the Taliban to buy some of the abandoned American arsenal to help replenish Russia’s enormous materiel losses in Ukraine. What helped the Soviets win World War II were the American gifts of 400,000 trucks and Jeeps. Over 60,000 American armored vehicles, Humvees, and trucks, now in the hands of the Taliban would be a valuable addition to Putin’s arsenal. The media assures us that poorly equipped Russian soldiers struggle with obsolete guns dating back to the early postwar period, while assuring us that either the Taliban would not sell, or Russians could not use, over a half-million late-model American automatic pistols, assault rifles, and machine guns.
Americans are quite critical of the supposed anemic European response and lack of aid matching the American largess. But, in fact, Biden likely reversed course from his initial remarks about minor incursions and a safe ride out for Zelenskyy, and a prior aversion to sending offensive arms, because the frontline Europeans were terrified of Putin on the move and demanded an American-led NATO joint effort to supply Ukraine.
The belated but increasingly muscular response of the United States to pour aid into Ukraine may stall the Russian advance and even its anticipated spring offensive. But the growing involvement of the United States has raised the issue of deterrence, as China closely watches both the response of Europe and the United States and the ability of revanchist Russia to invade. If Russia were to mobilize and use all its resources—10 times the GDP of Ukraine, 30 times the territory, 3.5 times the population—it would likely require a far greater sacrifice of Ukrainian blood and Western treasure. And the war that may have already cost over 200,000 dead and 300,000 wounded will likely prove the most lethal since the Vietnam War, in which over 3 million soldiers and civilians died on both sides of the conflict.
More importantly, will the zealots, who demand that we empty our arsenals to supply Ukraine, vote in Congress for massive increases in the defense budget to ratchet up arms production to ensure that our depleted stocks of weapons are restored rapidly?
In sum, there would be broader support for Ukraine’s military aid if advocates were transparent on the following 10 issues:
1) The United States will be as firm and deterrent vis à vis China as it is now belatedly with Russia.
2) We will acknowledge that Ukraine is a mess because Vladimir Putin between 2009 and 2016, and again in 2021, concluded that the United States either would not or could not deter his aggression.
3) Just as we attempt to help to protect the sovereign borders of Ukraine, so too must we consider just as sacrosanct our own airspace and our southern border.
4) All those in government and the media who demand more weapons for Ukraine, after the war ends, with the same zeal must demand immediate increased arms production to ensure their own country is as well protected as Ukraine.
5) Just as we deplore Russia interfering in our elections, so too we must cite Ukrainian interference in 2016, as evidenced by the pro-Clinton skullduggery of Alexandra Chalupa, Valeriy Chaly, Serhiy Leshchenko, Oksana Shulyar, and Andrii Telizhenko, along with the Biden family’s financial relations with Burisma and top Ukrainian officials. We expect and prepare for enemies to tamper with our elections, but Ukraine is a supposed friend that nonetheless likely was more involved in 2016 than were the Russians—and yet was never held to account.
6) Unfortunately, we cannot believe any of the predictions emanating from our top intelligence and military leaders about the course of the Ukrainian war, given they were simply wrong about the Afghanistan collapse, wrong both about the initial resiliency of the Ukrainians and later the supposed imminent collapse of the Russians, both biased and wrong about Hunter Biden’s laptop, implicated in the Russian collusion hoax, and once again misled the American people about the time of arrival, the nature, and the purpose of the Chinese balloon, and the various garbled reasons why it was not immediately shot down.
7) Those who feel international negotiations about the status of Crimea and the Ukrainian borderlands are tantamount to surrender, and therefore taboo, must prepare the American people for their envisioned victory of ejecting every Russian from pre-2014 Ukraine, by assessing the dangers of a nuclear exchange, the eventual cost in arms and weapons of $200-500 billion, and a price tag of economic aid to rebuild a ruined Ukraine that will vastly exceed our military aid.
8) Those who advocate Ukraine’s entry into NATO, must remind the American people that should Putin then mount a second offensive into Ukraine, American troops, along those of 29 other NATO nations, would be sent to Ukraine to fight nuclear Russia and its allies.
9) We should apparently accept as regrettable, but tolerable that the war in Ukraine has united China and Russia, ensured they are both patrons for nuclear North Korea and soon-to-be nuclear Iran, and are near to drawing Turkey and India into their orbit—or nearly half the world’s population.
10) Given that China is a more existential threat than Russia, and given that the Chinese danger to the whole of Taiwan is far greater than is the Russian threat to all of Ukraine, we would expect those advocating blank-check support for Ukraine, would of course be as adamantly protective of Taiwan, even if the two wars were to become simultaneous. We expect those who demand no limits in weakening Putin’s dictatorship, harbor even more animus for the far more dangerous totalitarianism of China.
In a recent addition to the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi revealed to the public how Twitter — the preferred social media platform of politicians, academics, and journalists — co-opted the algorithmic blacklist of a bipartisan neoliberal propaganda outfit known as Hamilton 68.
Hamilton 68 was a digital dashboard that, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky recently discussed, was used to perpetuate and mainstream the myth of Russian interference in American politics through algorithmic censorship and suppression.
But it wasn’t just egghead professors, left-wing activist journalists, and the tragically narcissistic (Adam Schiff) who perpetuated the thoroughly repudiated lie that Russia determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election by hijacking the internet.
Hamilton 68 was of unique interest to the unelected members of the American government who staff the national bureaucracy and compose the federal civil service. It was — and likely still is — used by these bureaucrats on a regular basis to substantiate and launder bogus intel into the government’s policy-making narrative to further establish a rule of permanent bureaucracy and chip away at the democratic nature of the American republic.
Amanda Milius, a former member of the Trump administration and the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Content at the State Department, recently confirmed this when speaking to The Federalist.
According to Milius, from the day Hamilton 68 went online, senior officials at the State Department were elated because it enabled them to effectively outsource large swaths of their information sourcing for communications. Naturally, this was a huge time saver since “everything [was] 100 times redundant,” and having access to pre-sourced and verified intel from somewhere you trust while trying to maintain a fast-paced digital communications bureau with 24-hour access to the rest of the world would be a massive time saver.
Once the department began to process intel from Hamilton 68, they insisted that they could “use it as a tool to track all the Russian misinformation, which at that moment in 2017, was the shiny ball of foreign policy.”
Milius noted that with the election of Donald Trump, there was a distinct shift in the bureaucracy’s expressed priorities. Previously, the federal government had been preoccupied with the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), but along with Trump’s ascension to the presidency, federal agencies began to place a disproportionate emphasis on utilizing “public-private partnerships” to root out alleged Russian influence.
Another former senior government official recently suggested that information-based operations, a practice that in the digital era found its roots in the GWOT, was found to be useful in the domestic private sector as well. And this is likely how Hamilton 68 came into being. Individuals who had acquired specific skills while serving the country brought those skills home and began using them in service of political goals.
And Milius’ experience with the State Department’s “bot detection” efforts that were meant to keep tabs on people spreading Russian disinformation online substantiates this. She affirmed that the public-private partnership between the federal bureaucracy and Big Tech, in particular, established a sense of comfort and familiarity between the two bodies. Because bureaucrats were able to “take free trips to Silicon Valley and hang out with people from Google and Facebook and Twitter,” the managerial elite in both entities knew they were operating on the same wavelength.
This additional face time likely provided both groups reassurance that their ideological goals were similar and that they would have allies in the quest to delegitimize and stonewall Trump’s presidency.
Once Hamilton 68 came online, an inordinate amount of attention was placed on 644 Twitter accounts that were flagged as “bots” spreading “Russian disinformation.” Thanks to Taibbi’s reporting, it is now publicly documented that these accounts were overwhelmingly run by American citizens and other Western civilians with no connection to Russia whatsoever. But to people involved in conservative politics at the time, it was clear that Hamilton 68 was a con.
“It was run by the teams that ran Russiagate, so this was yet another arm of their public attack on Trump and Trump supporters,” Milius said. “I was looking at the list of users, and I was like, ‘Bro, my secret handle is on there. Like all my friends are on there. I know these people. They’re not bots.’”
Milius stated that the individuals behind Hamilton 68 were directly providing “someone or multiple people” at the State Department with the lists of accounts being algorithmically monitored.
Such collusion would indicate the government was effectively taking orders from a politically biased third party about which private citizens it should monitor, suppress, and allow to be libeled by the corporate media.
And despite the fact that — as we now can deduce — the people behind Hamilton 68 knew what they were doing was fraudulent, the users who were algorithmically placed on these curated lists had information about them used to source not only news stories about a malicious foreign presence in American domestic issues but as the basis for intel used in reports within federal agencies.
Furthermore, the data analytics included alongside Hamilton 68’s information were frequently drastically inflated to manufacture a sense of severity, Milius said, further indicating to her and to some of those with whom she worked that the entire operation was bogus. When data analysts in the State Department would compare the analytics provided by Hamilton 68 with the actual data from the monitored accounts’ traffic, they would find massive discrepancies, she noted. The people behind Hamilton 68 were blatantly lying, and if people looked in the right places the lies fell apart.
But because their numbers were few and leadership enjoyed the convenience of pre-sourced intel, Hamilton 68 continued to be utilized by the State Department.
Even Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, knew that Hamilton 68 was bogus. There is no reason to believe that GS-15s in the State Department had a good-faith reason to accept it at face value. After all, bureaucrats overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton in 2016, so why wouldn’t they take a chance at sabotaging someone they believed would lead the U.S. down the wrong path?
Milius contends that the political bias of entrenched bureaucrats who make decisions in federal agencies played a key role in deciding to utilize a tool like Hamilton 68, subsequently prolonging the narrative of Russian collusion.
“They wanted [Russian collusion] to be true so badly,” she said. “They felt like they were freedom fighters. In their minds, every Trump appointee was probably a Russian plant because, in their minds, Trump was a Russian plant.”
“The whole media pretended that this Russaigate thing was real. It didn’t just affect citizens. It affected everyone who worked in Washington, D.C., which includes everybody that worked with the [State] Department, the CIA, and more,” she continued. “These people were going home at night being told Trump and his people were Russian agents and then would come into work with the idea that they were going to save America from us.”
If Trump and everyone affiliated with him are Russian assets, and Russian assets pose an existential threat to the country, why wouldn’t a well-meaning new hire at the State Department who wants to grow in his career treat an intelligence briefing sourced from Hamilton 68 with the utmost importance if his boss told him to?
Whether they were conditioned by their superiors and Big Tech or not, hundreds if not thousands of entry and mid-level bureaucrats perpetuated the lie the Russian government hijacked American politics. They, along with the corporate media and the universities, went along with this narrative to weaponize society against people — American citizens — who supported a democratically elected president from a major political party.
Taibbi’s reporting shows how Hamilton 68 was used by Big Tech and the corporate media to perpetuate the myth of Russian collusion by unfairly suppressing and regulating speech online. Milius’ experience at the State Department indicates how it was used to weaponize one of the most important parts of the federal government against the American people.
Both narratives likely only give us a look under the hood. We know about the Hamilton dashboard — which is still operational, albeit under the slightly different moniker of Hamilton 2.0 — solely because of the “Twitter Files,” and we know of the use of Hamilton 68 at the State Department because of people like Milius who are willing to share their stories.
We have no reason to believe Hamilton 2.0 isn’t being used by the government, nor do we know whether systems similar to the Hamilton dashboard are being used to curate lists of people on platforms other than Twitter.
But we do know that unelected members of the government are weaponizing themselves against the American people in collaboration with the private sector as they chip away at our democratic republic. This is irrefutable.
So the question remains: what else is the U.S. government using to monitor its citizens while mobilizing against domestic targets who have done nothing wrong?
Axios is positioning this announcement as FTX asking for political donations to be returned. However, the request is realistically from the FTX debtors.
(Via Axios) – Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX is sending notices to former donor recipients asking for the donated funds to be returned, the company said in a press release Sunday.
Why it matters: Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX Digital Markets Co-CEO Ryan Salame were two of the largest political donors during the last election cycle. Now the company’s debtors want the money back.
The big picture: FTX’s debtors are confidentially contacting “political figures, political action funds and other recipients of contributions or other payments.” (more)
Additionally, the Twitter Account “Unusual Whales” which tracks and researches financial transactions, has published the first list I have seen that makes it easy to see who FTX donated to. The list IS HERE and is alphabetized.
Never underestimate the willingness of American mass media and their audiences to be fascinated for a few days by a balloon from China. The fact that the Pentagon said it was an immense surveillance balloon carrying a load of instruments the size of three school buses made the story even more irresistible.
You should also never underestimate their willingness to miss the real intent of this ancient diplomatic ploy by Xi Jinping.
Combine that with the mental clarity of our president – who boasts that half of the women in his administration are women – and you’ve got a narrative guaranteed to endure a bunch of news cycles.
The only possible better enticement would be if the Washington Post somehow tied the balloon caper to Donald Trump colluding with China. Like Russiagate, it need not be true, just briefly credible in that troubled newsroom. Maybe it would earn another Pulitzer.
Now, Commander in Chief Joe Biden says he commanded the military to shoot down the Chinese balloon on Wednesday. Donald Trump, who is no longer commander in chief, was more emphatic. He ordered the balloon’s doom in all-caps: “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON.”
But the U.S. military feared that wasn’t safe somehow. So, it didn’t obey immediately. It allowed the communist balloon to complete its alleged intelligence mission, transmit its data up to Chicom satellites, and exit U.S. airspace before perishing off North Carolina.
There, an F-22 dutifully launched a Sidewinder missile that destroyed, not the balloon, but the huge equipment capsule that might have revealed WTH the Chinese were looking for.
The GOP’s scripted reaction came from Rep. Mike Turner:
Taking it down over the Atlantic is sort of like tackling the quarterback after the game is over.
China was more upset about the shootdown than Joe Biden was over the actual incident. But he was on another break.
But wait! Let’s think this through without the mainstream media’s Tom Clancy fixation. Any nation with a space program has all kinds of satellites. This includes China, which has even established a research station on the backside of the Moon and is creating its own GPS network.
The Union of Concerned Scientists reports there are 6,542 satellites currently orbiting Earth, of which 3,372 are active, including 1,030 for “Earth observation,” 22 for “Earth science,” and 18 “Other purposes.”
Some are stationery. Some can be re-positioned. And many pepetually circle Earth, capable of photographing every inch of the planet every day.
China’s intelligence services have already compromised numerous U.S. universities and instructors with large sums. This includes the University of Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden had a now infamous D.C. office and was paid an enormous amount for not teaching.
China’s newest jet fighter suspiciously resembles an early design of the U.S. F-22. Already possessing the world’s largest military, China has expanded its ICBM sites and naval fleet, now larger than the U.S. Navy.
Chinese intelligence successfully placed a female agent in the bed of a congressman on the House Homeland Security Committee. And in 2015, China hacked into — and for weeks mined undetected — data of the Office of Personnel Management.
Those files contain confidential personal and professional information on multiple millions of federal employees, information that would be gold for targeting potential spy recruits.
Does seem rather paper-tigery, doesn’t it?
So why, one might ask, would China feel the need to dispatch, on only nominally predictable wind currents, a 19th century-style observation balloon visible from the ground with a non-stealth instrument capsule the size of three school buses to drift slowly across its top strategic global competitor? And then, promptly admit ownership?
I’ll tell you why: Face.
It’s one of the most important facets of life in China. And Asia.
An example: At the 20th Communist Party Conference in October, Hu Jintao, who chaired the party for a decade, was seated next to Xi. Suddenly, two men appeared and removed Hu. On national TV. Xi just watched the arrest that was clearly orchestrated to humiliate and ostracize his predecessor.
No one in China ever wants to lose face in public. Suicides have happened over face. Fair to say, Americans’ frenzy over this observation tool hovering above underground ICBM control sites, the home base of the B-2 Spirit bomber, and other sites of strategic interest to a once-and-likely future military opponent was pretty darn public.
The old-fashioned instrument of war drifting in slow motion at will over the United States for its entire mission with no official action beyond hollow words says bluntly to Americans:
We own you. We can send a balloon over your strategic sites. And you don’t do anything.
The balloon also amplifies China’s message to the world: “See, the Americans are paper tigers, just like we said.”
P.S.: “Don’t trust this president. He’s a doddering fool.”
There is ample evidence of that for the world to see. In 2021, Biden thoroughly botched the Afghan troop withdrawal without notifying allies and then casually broke his promise to evacuate anyone who wanted out.
The United States, in effect, has no southern border anymore and is paying a huge price for that. On his first day in office, Biden intentionally began destroying U.S. energy independence. He then begged Saudi Arabia in person to produce more oil. The alleged leader of the free world was rejected.
Then, Biden began draining America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve by one million barrels a day, now at its lowest level in 40 years. He’s now not refilling it. The other day Biden noticed Bill Clinton in the White House and welcomed him to Congress, which Biden left 14 years ago.
It was the Pentagon that identified the Chinese balloon as an intelligence-gathering device. Yet Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin allowed it to perform its dual function for almost a week claiming it was too risky to down it over rural America where hardly anyone is.
Too much risk, by the way, was the excuse for abandoning Americans in Benghazi when Biden was VP. Four died.
Of course, the military could have eliminated the Chinese balloon over water after Alaska before Canada. But that would require foresight and decisiveness. And it would violate the Biden Doctrine of Timidity.
Its first mainland stop was Montana. That’s a very big, very beautiful place, where high-school football teams can travel 700 miles for an away game.
Montana is the fourth largest state, but it ranks only 48th in population densitywith just seven people on each of its 147,000 square miles. In fact, Montana is home to more than twice as many cows and sheep as people.
Montana ranchers no doubt appreciate Austin’s concern for livestock safety. But the failure to down the Chinese balloon over one of the country’s least-populated states before it could complete its cross-country spy junket has much more to do with hesitant incompetence than always “putting the safety and security of the American people first.”
China claimed the errant device was “mainly meteorological.” The U.S. similarly lied about its downed U-2 spy plane in 1960.
Besides checking on the weather around Montana’s numerous Minuteman III ICBM silos, the Chinese balloon also wafted over the Show Me state, which has only 87 people per square mile.
Interestingly, seven of Missouri’s 70,000 square miles belong to Whiteman Air Force Base, home field for America’s B-2 bombers that can fly nonstop around the world and deliver 20 tons of munitions each. Probably coincidence.
Turns out, Chinese balloons have often flown over this country in recent years with only verbal U.S. complaints. To no effect. None were shot down. A Chinese balloon scanned Florida, which is headquarters for U.S. Central Command. Also Hawaii, headquarters for the Pacific Fleet.
And Chinese balloons also just happened to drift over the Western Pacific U.S. territory of Guam, 3,000 miles beyond San Francisco.
Guam does have beautiful beaches. But the island is also home to a major naval base for Polaris nuclear subs that leave the harbor and submerge, not to surface again for 90-days of patrolling throughout Asia or not even the crew knows where.
Oh, look! At the other end of Guam just 30 miles away is Andersen Air Force Base, where 130,000 Vietnamese refugees landed in 1975 at the end of that war.
Andersen is also home to B-2, B-1B, and B-52 bombers. If you see armed guards circling the planes, they’re loaded with nuclear weapons.
As you can see, the spy-balloon tale has absolutely everything going for it to make compelling mid-winter entertainment, which is what news has become in the Internet age.