Forget the Balloon. We’re Are Already At War with China

From COVID to corrupt deals with presidents, 

China is already here. 

by Bart Marcois for American Greatness

Two days after Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, the House of Representatives just passed a unanimous resolution condemning China for the spy balloon. Who cares? Nothing Biden said in that speech matters. The Chinese spy balloon doesn’t matter. These are trivial matters compared to war, and we are at war. China is waging war upon us but so far we have chosen not to recognize it. 

Biological Warfare

China sent people here infected with the Wuhan virus—called COVID-19 at China’s insistence—while China locked down the entire Hubei province. That was a biological attack on the United States. Whatever the origin of the virus, China’s government knew they had a lethal, virulent infection, but they sent sick people as vectors to carry the disease worldwide.  

The virus killed a million Americans and destroyed our economy. It severely weakened our educational system, our national unity, and our tolerance for risk. It turned Americans against one another by weaponizing fear. It caused a breakdown of civil society.  

We were no longer allowed to meet for church, school, social clubs, or any of the millions of social interactions that unite us. We were not even allowed to visit family members, or to be with loved ones as they died. Communist China did that to us, destroying more of American society than any war in our history. And we did nothing. 

Fentanyl

Fentanyl is an attack on the very center of our cities, towns, and families. Drug overdoses killed more than 107,000 Americans last year, twice as many as died during the entire Vietnam War. The sheer potency of the drug is so fearsome that just a couple of grains are sufficient to kill a human. Police and EMTs must carry Narcan, a drug that counteracts the fentanyl and other opioid overdoses they encounter daily.  

The chemical precursors for fentanyl and its analogues are manufactured in China and sent to the drug cartels in Mexico and Latin America that make and distribute it in America. Illegal drug addiction is a war that kills and disables the very population that is of age to join the military. If it has not touched your extended family yet, bless your good fortune, but know that it will. And yet we do nothing. 

TikTok

TikTok is a cyberattack on America and the West. The data-gathering is a difference in kind, not in degree, from that done by Google, Facebook, and other programs. There is no attempt to anonymize data collection. The primary purpose of the app is to introduce electronic eavesdropping into every device that hosts it.  

TikTok is aimed at constantly distracting our kids. It encourages them to try dangerous, sometimes life-threatening stunts. The algorithms are designed to make them more cynical and disassociated from family, study, and the essence of our history and culture. If you think that is accidental, consider the uses of TikTok inside China. 

In China, TikTok teaches science, promotes mathematical games, encourages knowledge of history and culture, and encourages good citizenship. Different content, different algorithms. TikTok is a branch of China’s war on American society. Again, it is aimed at the youth who should be preparing to become the leaders of the next generation, and who are or soon will be of military age. And still we do nothing. 

Attacking Energy Independence

American groups affiliated with or financed by the Chinese Communist Party have led the charge against fossil fuels and nuclear power. They have done this in the name of converting to so-called “clean” or “green” energy. They say we must abandon gasoline-powered cars, diesel trucks; gas, nuclear, or coal fired electricity; and gas heating and cooking; in order to prevent the global climate from changing. 

While we abandon the gas, oil, and coal that powered the industrial revolution and made America a wealthy, powerful country, Chinese industries consume billions of tons of all of it. They build nuclear power plants, while we decommission ours out of uninformed irrational fear.  

America has 500 years’ worth of coal, enough oil to supply all our domestic needs, and enough natural gas to satisfy domestic demand and supply most of Europe. But we have turned away from it in pursuit of a phantom. 

Unfortunately, as we turn to the illusion of “green” energy, we find that all its components are mined or manufactured in China or by Chinese companies in third-world countries. Nearly every source of the minerals necessary for batteries, solar panels, or windmills, is owned by Chinese interests.  

Joe Biden shut down our domestic fossil fuel production, and is transferring hundreds of billions of dollars in American wealth to China, in the name of so-called clean energy. No mention is made of the gaping scars left on the earth from Chinese strip mining; the child slave labor in artisanal mining; the incalculable Chinese emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide, and other “greenhouse gasses”; or any of the massive pollutions China unleashes on the earth. 

The war on energy independence is a war on America, and it funds senseless war overseas. Vladimir Putin only has the money to wage war on Ukraine because Biden drove up the cost of oil and gas worldwide by shutting down U.S. production. That doubled the price of Russian oil and gas.  

All the people who changed their social media avatars to Ukrainian flags could better support Ukraine by demanding that Biden and the Democrats stop their war on American fossil fuel and nuclear energy. The war in Ukraine would be over in 60 days if America became energy independent again, as we were under President Trump. All this was driven by Chinese efforts to stop our energy independence. And we do nothing. 

Shortages

Since the biological attack from Wuhan, America has faced shortages unimaginable in our lifetimes. The most insidious shortages came at the beginning of the lockdown. China withheld gloves, masks, and gowns, as well as pharmaceuticals ranging from aspirin to heart medications. Most Americans were unaware until then how dependent we are on Chinese manufacturing. It is no longer just plastic goods at Walmart, or low-quality steel and tools. It’s everything. 

We now are no longer shocked at seeing empty shelves. And the categories of shortages are growing. Even things produced here in America are affected. Chinese companies have bought many food-processing facilities and are trying to buy farmland and food producers.  

Other processors and distributors of food and medicine are facing mysterious fires and shutdowns. Infant formula and infant medicines such as Tylenol are difficult to find at any price. Two thirds of the world’s supply of acetaminophen is made in China. Is China throttling supply of medical products again, to teach us submission? The electrical grid is being attacked, by people and for reasons that are unclear. The result is a continued erosion of our standard of living and our way of life, in ways we have seen previously only during wartime. And still we do nothing. 

The Biden Family

The Biden family is a Chinese attack on us. China has been grooming Joe Biden, his brother James, and his son Hunter, at least since Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president. The contents of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” confirm that he attended meetings with his father and Chinese government officials while Joe was vice president. After those meetings, Hunter and his partners received a billion-dollar investment from CCP-linked entities and had multimillion-dollar contracts with CEFC and other Chinese companies.  

What has China received in return? For one thing, they have a feckless dotard in the White House who is more interested in telling self-aggrandizing lies than in presiding over a strong, united, and peaceful America. Biden is leading the Democrats as they cut everything that makes America powerful, safe, wealthy, virtuous, and united. He is now “earning” the millions of dollars he and his family have been given over the past decade by Chinese Communist Party entities.  

Biden has appointed officials who push the most radical social agenda in American history. Suddenly, being transgender is a public virtue, sufficient that it is a sole qualification to handle the nation’s most sensitive matters of nuclear waste disposal, or of public health. China does not allow gay relationships or gender transitions, but the CCP-funded Biden tries to require them by law. 

The Biden Administration is using all the weight of federal power to force the transgender ideology on schools. Parents who oppose sexual grooming in schools have been targeted by the Justice Department and the FBI, while child sex trafficking is allowed to flourish. School districts are threatened with loss of federal funding if they don’t consider invented genders to have Title IX protection. This is being pushed on America by an administration headed by a man who has received millions of dollars from China. 

The Biden Administration is undermining even the U.S. military. That is an attack on national security from within. It discourages American families with a generations-long tradition of military service from joining a force that will deprive them of freedom of conscience. We would have no crisis in recruiting if it were clear that the military is a force to defend our nation and our values, rather than a laboratory for social engineering. And yet we do nothing. 

Instead, American officials are distracted by a big balloon, and by disproving the lies in Biden’s State of the Union speech. They sit sucking their thumbs, ignoring China’s attacks. And the media and intelligentsia are just as clueless, or willfully blind. We are in the middle of a war, and they don’t even know they’re under attack. 

The Chinese don’t need the balloon to attack us—they are already here. 

X22, And we Know, and more- Feb 10

 

Two Lessons on Military Accountability for President Biden

posted by John Ullyot at Townhall 

In the wake of the Biden Administration’s decision this week to let a Chinese Communist Party spy balloon make its way across the U.S. unchallenged, including over some of our most sensitive military facilities, it is important to remember two key lessons on military accountability from recent decades.

Thirty-six years ago, in May of 1987, an 18-year-old German amateur pilot named Mathias Rust took off from a small airport near Hamburg Germany in a small single-engine Cessna to fly over northern Europe and gain some hours toward his professional pilot’s license. Two weeks later, after several stops, Rust departed from Helsinki, Finland, and turned his aircraft to a heading of 170 degrees, straight toward Moscow. 

His flight was promptly picked up by Soviet air defense radar, and top generals considered a number of actions to intercept and shoot down the invading aircraft. They scrambled a MiG fighter, but ultimately decided against taking defensive action. After flying over several hundred miles of Soviet airspace, Rust approached Moscow, circled near the Kremlin and landed his plane next to Red Square in front of incredulous onlookers.

Twenty years later, in August 2007, U.S. Air Force munitions handlers at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota mistakenly loaded six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads onto a B52H bomber in violation of strict controls on such weapons that required special clearance for their flying in U.S. airspace. The aircraft took off with its dangerous payload and promptly flew 1,000 miles over the central U.S. before landing two hours later at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Neither the pilots nor the ground crew were aware of the presence of nuclear weapons on the plane during the flight and for some 36 hours after landing.

What do these two public incidents have in common other than failure of leadership and dereliction of military responsibility in a very public way?  In both instances military leadership was held accountable at top levels. In the Rust aircraft incident, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took swift action, firing his defense minister and Air Force chief of staff within 48 hours. In the U.S. Air Force bomber mishap, known as a “Bent Spear” incident, defense secretary Robert Gates relieved both the Secretary of the Air Force and the service’s top general of their duties less than a year later, after an investigation and an additional incident involving sending nuclear fuses mistakenly to Taiwan.

Both incidents also show how critical accountability is to chief executives in maintaining good order and discipline in the military, as well as maintaining credibility with important overseas audiences. In Gorbachev’s case, his bold move burnished his credentials and established a firm grip on power, enabling him to usher in key reforms in subsequent years.  For Secretary Gates’s part, his firings sent a strong signal about civilian control of the military when it came to stewardship of our most lethal weapons, and he later was retained in his position in a rare move by newly elected president of the opposite Party, Barack Obama.

In the wake of last week's balloon incident, Biden has thus far held no one accountable in his military chain of command. This mirrors his inaction after the disastrous Afghanistan exit that resulted in the deaths of 12 Marines and one Navy corpsman while defending Kabul airport amid the botched pullout. Ironically, the only military member to be held accountable following the Afghanistan debacle was Marine lieutenant colonel Stuart Scheller, who was jailed, relieved of command, and later fired for his own insistence on accountability from military leadership over the operation.

Whether in Afghanistan, or in last week’s balloon incident, Biden's failure to take swift action when his national security leaders fail to fulfill their duties at the highest, public levels, it not only shows weakness to domestic audiences, it emboldens America's enemies around the world including China, Russia and Iran, who have taken their own belligerent steps since the Afghanistan debacle. Biden has a choice -- he either makes a strong statement to the world on accountability, or he continues to telegraph an image of drift and lack of seriousness on the world stage.

The Year Woke Went Broke

The Year Woke Went Broke

Corporate layoffs hit Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) hardest.

February 9, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield for 

Frontpage Magazine 

As companies aggressively lay off workers and cut costs, a survey released last month revealed that company events and bonuses are cut first, followed by diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. DEI job listings fell by a fifth last year and the woke collapse is accelerating.

That’s been the conclusion of other surveys and firms describing a corporate environment where DEI’s wokeness programs are the “first to go”.

Only 5% of recruiters say that DEI is a priority.

Corporate racism is collateral damage in HR cuts. 55% of HR departments surveyed were already cut or expected to have their budgets slashed. And DEI is the mask that HR wears.

Layoffs in the tech industry disproportionately affected white women, not because of sexism, but because companies under pressure were shedding the most expendable roles: primarily HR. Some companies like Twilio announced that they would be firing workers based on race. Or, as CEO Jeff Lawson put it, layoffs “were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.”

Mostly though companies were jettisoning dead weight regardless of race or level of wokeness.

Facebook dumped its special training program for HR managers who focus on diversity and fired everyone in it. To add insult to injury, Facebook offered them much less severance pay than other workers. Amazon dumped a good deal of its DEI personnel as part of an HR purge.

Layoffs tend to hit human resources where the invasive species of diversity consultants had built its nests. Corporate human resources departments had transformed private sector racism into a booming business, but it’s a business that rises and falls with social and economic trends.

Diversity spending had been declining during the pandemic. Mainline companies struggling with a challenging economic environment had less resources to throw at diversity seminars.

The race riots that burned cities and cost countless lives also helped make the agitators who had poured ideological gasoline on the fires of race very wealthy. Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo and other professional racists ushered in an intellectual rebrand of diversity, which had become as stodgy as HR, into the exciting new era of anti-racism.

While Black Lives Matter leaders and influencers like Kendi charged massive speaking fees, a legion of identity politics studies grads and diversity consultants began quietly cashing in. The nation’s workhouse businesses had limited resources, but the massive corporations, especially in the tech industry, were glutted with pandemic cash and eager to virtue signal.

Big Tech monopolies, stuffed with the ill-gotten gains of the lockdown, invested heavily in DEI. So did most of the tech industry. Inflation has led to a rash of cost-cutting among those same tech companies as investors are no longer as casual about throwing more good money after bad. DEI is seeing the third highest fall in job offers after tech careers because its rise was heavily dependent on a tech industry boom. Now the parasite is suffering along with the host.

DEI brought academic racism of the critical race theory variety into corporate boardrooms, but another way to look at it is as a way for HR professionals, many of them white women, to elevate their roles or spin off booming businesses. Manufacturing a racism crisis destroyed a lot of lives but, as is often the case, made a small group of people successful and wealthy.

HR professionals are frantically struggling to survive the waves of layoffs by using DEI and black people as human shields. HR associations and organizations put out fake numbers insisting that most employees won’t take jobs or will even leave jobs at companies that don’t prioritize DEI. If HR people claimed that employees wouldn’t work at companies without bigger HR departments, the C-suite would laugh in their faces, but a fake racism crisis covers a multitude of sins.

Embedding critical race theory into corporations was lubricated by lies and misleading statistics. Corporate leaders and investors were told that workers were desperate for DEI (and those who weren’t were fired), that diverse workforces adapt better to change and that diverse companies outperform less diverse ones. And that customers would only buy from companies that reflected their values. When all else failed, cancel culture was deployed against CEOs from within.

The trouble with HR trying to hold the C-suite hostage with BLM is that pressure by investors to produce cuts is now scaring CEOs more than cancel culture. And a growing backlash by conservative leaders, especially by Gov. Ron DeSantis humbling Disney, has made them wary. That’s why there’s been a marked decline in CEO statements on the woke outrage of the day.

While corporate investments in diversity have dropped, they’re still far above what they were before the Black Lives Matter movement, with Fortune 500 backing and millions in funding, torched American cities, murdered police officers and robbed small business owners.

The diversity business has its ups and downs. Marxism is a luxury product and there’s less of a budget for virtue signaling now at the FAANG gang, the tech industry and a lot of big corps. Corporations embrace causes to refresh their brands, but DEI has become stale. There’s only so many times you can invite Ibram X. Kendi to intone about anti-racism at a mandatory C-suite Zoom seminar before everyone realizes that the leadership has no new ideas and no plan.

In tough times, the multinationals that went big on wokeness are assuring investors that they’re cutting back. The new wave of incoming CEOs are middle aged white geeks with a penchant for numbers and responsible leadership. The ad campaigns are still woke and ESG investing is an economic disease that is destroying pension value and undermining our economy, but corporate racism is becoming as outdated an artifact of 2020 as workplace mask mandates.

The Biden administration is aggressively pushing equity, but the companies shipwrecked by his economy have less time to meditate on their unconscious biases and promise “to do better”.

Wokeness, like the Biden administration, has gone broke. And America has gone broke with it.

DEI will be rebranded, reborn in the blood of more race riots and viral cancellations, but for now it’s withering as companies tighten belts and look for new shiny objects to distract investors.

Like AI. What happens if you combine DEI and AI?

DEI.AI offers “an AI-powered Diversity, Equity and Inclusion assistant” that you can ask to “help you better understand the landscape of DE&I”. No more “unpaid emotional labor” of explaining why all white people are racist. Now there’s an app to tell you exactly how racist you are.

A DEI app costs a whole lot less than a DEI department. And DEI dogma is easily automated.

There’s even a browser add-on that will scan your emails and “detect problematic language” like “grandfathered”. What could better embody diversity than replacing black people with software?

DEI, once exciting, is now just another formula, a set of tired rules that overlap all the others embedded in corporate and government workplaces that everyone is learning to ignore. And, like any other formula, the work of yelling at white people can be outsourced to software.

Assessing U.S.-China Relations in the Aftermath of the Spy Balloon

Here's hoping our self-regarding elites sober up to the Chinese challenge faster than the Soviets did after their own “airborne foreign intruder” incident 35 years ago.

posted by Josh Hammer at American Greatness

The utterly humiliating saga of a high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon successfully traversing the entire North American continent, only to be shot down off the South Carolina coast after completing its intelligence-gathering voyage, ought to serve as a wake-up call for America’s decadent ruling class. At Newsweek, Paul du Quenoy sagely compared the affair to the young West German pilot Mathias Rust’s successful 1987 landing of his small Cessna just outside Moscow’s Red Square, a similarly “irreparable blight” wherein a “sclerotic empire’s air defense systems stood powerless at the sight of an airborne foreign intruder.”

That comparison is damning but proper. True, a different and less senile commander-in-chief might have—and should have—responded in a swifter and more decisive fashion, but the sheer fact of the matter is that America’s geopolitical archfoe felt emboldened to act as it did. The relevant question now presented to America’s ruling class is whether it has the humility to soberly acknowledge the fallen state of U.S.-China relations and to chart a path forward that best secures the national interest of our ailing and war-weary republic.

As Sohrab Ahmari chronicled in his most recent column for The American Conservative, post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis China has typically fallen into one of two categorical buckets: “integrationism” and “confrontationism.” But as Ahmari notes, in “horseshoe theory” of politics fashion, these two schools of thought on U.S.-China relations actually share a great deal in common with one another. The reason for that is simple: The “let China join the World Trade Organization”-style economic integrationists and the “defend Taiwan at all costs”-style foreign policy confrontationists both share an underlying conceit that we still live in a unipolar global moment of American geopolitical, economic, military and cultural hegemony.

That is a delusion, as this column argued nearly a year ago after the Russo-Ukrainian War flared up. The unipolar moment of unquestioned American hegemony that briefly existed in the aftermath of the Cold War is, in fact, now over. Whatever our issues may be with the Beijing regime and the regnant Communist Party of China—and I have many—it is simply undeniable at this juncture that China is a great power, with an intimidating nuclear arsenal and a sprawling “Belt and Road Initiative” of global economic clout. This necessarily demands a hard-headed, “great power competition”-inspired geostrategy. As this same column nearly a year ago put it: “We must reconcile ourselves  . . . to the inevitability of China’s continual rise and the likely return of a new Cold War-resemblant global chessboard.”

From the perspective of best securing the U.S. national interest at this stage, that “reconcil(iation)” has a host of tangible ramifications when it comes to economic and foreign policy.

From an economic perspective, the imperative is to be “hawkish” insofar as that means undoing by any reasonable means necessary the harms wrought by the neoliberal “integrationists”: decoupling as much as possible from yesteryear’s myopic trade and investment decisions, and reshoring critical supply chains and manufacturing capacities—or at least “near-shoring” them, to the extent they cannot be affirmatively reshored themselves. The promises of the neoliberals and trade globalists have simply not come to pass: Beijing is more politically repressive today than ever before, America’s productive capacities and trade deficits are as ruinous as ever, despondency-induced deaths of despair are skyrocketing in the denuded American heartland, and mass fentanyl has yielded a dystopian reality wherein over 100,000 Americans now fatally overdose from drugs annually.

The era of globalism is over. The imperative now is to decouple, reshore, and renationalize. Moreover, to help undermine the “Belt and Road,” the United States can try to enter strategic bilateral trade deals with nations that might otherwise fall to Beijing’s economic predations. The economic realm, more so than any other area, is where an ailing and decadent America can still make a dent and make the Chinese Politburo feel pain—while also buttressing America’s own economic hand, in line with the national “developmentalist” tradition.

But in the area of foreign policy and national security, the imperative is to be sober, realistic, and restrained. True, a worthier commander-in-chief than the doddering dolt from Delaware would have shot the Chinese surveillance balloon out of the sky the moment it crossed over into sovereign U.S. airspace. But to secure the territorial integrity of American airspace is one thing; to seek to project militaristic strength within the territorial sphere of influence of a fellow great power—again, no matter how noxious to our sensibilities such a great power may be—is something else entirely.

For example, as much as we may ardently desire to prevent Beijing from swallowing up comparatively free and economically critical Taiwan—news flash: only 100 miles east of the Chinese mainland—one sober conclusion to draw from the end of the unipolar moment is the obvious geographical reality that Taiwan sits comfortably within China’s broader sphere of influence. In this sense, the twin imperatives of “economic hawkishness” and foreign policy realism dovetail nicely: the foreseeability of China’s exertion of pressure on Taiwan, and its possible full invasion and absorption of the island, ought to galvanize the U.S. to expedite the reshoring and redevelopment of its lagging semiconductor industry. The recently passed CHIPS Act, though imperfect, was a worthy (if ham-fisted) first step in this direction.

America’s ruling class, which is all too frequently entangled in an economic bed with China, far too often approaches these matters with an unhealthy dose of wistfulness. It is always far easier, alas, to act as one wishes the world to be and not as it is. But if our self-regarding elites care about one thing, it is surely their own standing and, ultimately, their own survival. Here’s hoping they sober up on the Chinese challenge faster than the Soviets did after their own “airborne foreign intruder” incident of 1987.

DeSantis Might Be a Tougher Nut to Crack than Trump Might Think

posted by Brandon Morse at RedStateVIP

The 2024 election is approaching faster than people might think and some of the candidates are already in campaign mode. For former President Donald Trump, that means attacking his foremost threat in an attempt to get it to break before he even reaches the stage.

That foremost threat happens to be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and sure enough, Trump has been laying into the man. In return, DeSantis has been doing nothing to respond outside of the occasional comment about not having time for the attacks since he’s busy running Florida.

As my colleague Bonchie recently covered, DeSantis was asked about an attack by Trump ReTruth, accusing the governor of being a “groomer.” He simply responded that he’s working for Florida, not smearing other Republicans.

This is just one of many attacks. Trump even gave DeSantis a fancy new nickname “Ron DeSanctimonious.”

While DeSantis hasn’t cracked from the attacks yet, some believe it’s only a matter of time before DeSantis has to enter the ring with Trump where the former President will destroy him.

As reported by The Hill, former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin said this very thing on “The View”:

“On DeSantis, I think he’s so overhyped. I’m just gonna be honest. I have seen Trump take out every mini version of Trump for the last five years,” Griffin said during Thursday’s edition of ABC’s “The View.” “Right now, the party wants someone other than Trump, they want Trump-lite, so they’re boosting and hyping DeSantis.”

However confident supporters are of Trump’s ability to go head to head with DeSantis, Trump’s climb to the top will be steep. Not that he hasn’t climbed that hill before, but as polls from the Club for Growth shows, DeSantis hasn’t lifted a finger against Trump and he already has a double-digit lead against the former President.

This is because DeSantis is enjoying a massive advantage that Trump doesn’t have; he’s still in office. If he was your typical Republican governor then this might not be that big of a deal, but DeSantis isn’t a typical Republican governor. This is the governor that made a name for himself by going on the offensive on almost every problem he’s come across. Whether it was COVID-19 restrictions or Disney, DeSantis didn’t hesitate to go scorched Earth.

While Trump might share that quality, the spotlight is currently on DeSantis since he’s currently the one able to make decisions and changes within the system. His deeds are fresher in the mind.

If you were to take a different perspective, you could say that DeSantis is fighting back against Trump but he’s doing so indirectly by directly making Florida a place that conservatives dream about. With this in mind, every time Trump makes an accusation calls him a name, or says something insulting, DeSantis can turn right around and do something in Florida that makes conservatives applaud him.

On Trump, all DeSantis has to do is nothing.

The question becomes, how will Trump get around this? So far, all the attacks that he’s unleashed on the governor have come up rather short, and some have even backfired. If Trump is going to win the 2024 presidency, he’s going to have to take a new approach. It was one thing when he was bashing establishment Republicans and Democrats, but DeSantis is something else.

This doesn’t mean Trump doesn’t have a way in. His base is still wide and very enthusiastic, but there’s still a lot of football left to play and there’s still time to find new ways to win over Republicans who are currently enraptured with the Florida governor. Still, this will be a new test for Trump as it may require him to adopt strategies he’s never had to go with before.

If Biden’s Federal Elections Takeover Is ‘Free And Fair,’ Why Are The Plans Completely Redacted?

Despite finally fulfilling a FOIA request, Biden’s Department of the Interior sent Citizens United a heavily-redacted document.

Victoria Marshall reporting for The Federalist

After several executive agencies in the Biden administration were sued for refusing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests from conservative advocacy group Citizens United over the White House’s attempt to federalize elections, the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Indian Affairs finally turned over its first batch of requested documents. There’s one problem: More than half of the 54-page document is completely redacted.

“The Biden administration is the least transparent in history, and these absurd redactions are just the latest example. What are they trying to hide from the American people?” Citizens United President David Bossie told The Federalist.

As The Federalist previously reported, in March 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing hundreds of federal agencies to engage in a federal takeover of election administration. It also permitted federal agencies to work with “nonpartisan” third-party entities to get voters registered, yet left-wing dark money group Demos publicly admitted it’s worked with federal agencies, “in close partnership with the ACLU and other allies,” to advance the aims of Biden’s directive.

Such an order set off alarm bells among Republicans and good government groups, reminiscent of the widespread takeover of government election offices by Democratic activists and donors in the blue counties of key swing states during the 2020 presidential election. Through their infiltration of state and local offices, Democrats were able to conduct partisan get-out-the-vote operations and swing the election in then-candidate Biden’s favor. This order is a taxpayer-funded version of that effort, turning federal agencies — including those that dole out federal benefits — into voter registration hubs and partisan get-out-the-vote centers.

Citizens United wanted to find out more about it, which is why last June, it filed FOIA requests with the DOI and State Department seeking email and text messages that mentioned both the executive order and the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits executive branch employees from engaging in election activities. When the agencies failed to comply, Citizens United sued. On Jan. 31, DOI sent its first round of documents per Citizens United’s request.

But the 54-page PDF sent to Citizens United is mostly redacted, save for logistical emails between White House staff and agency department heads. The plan and implementation scheme for the “Promoting Access to Voting” executive order itself are completely redacted.

In a cover letter sent with the documents, the Biden administration defended the redactions under U.S.C. § 552(b)(5), which allows agencies to withhold information under the “Presidential Communications Privilege” (exists to ensure “the President’s ability to obtain candid and informed opinions from his advisors and to make decisions confidentially”) and the “Deliberative Process Privilege” (“protects the decision-making process of government agencies and encourages the frank exchange of ideas on legal or policy matters”).

But according to Jason Foster, president and founder of Empower Oversight, a transparency and government accountability group that frequently files FOIA requests, these redactions are a prime example of the federal government’s blatant over-redacting and censorship.

“Federal bureaucrats do everything in their power to conceal information from the public,” Foster told The Federalist. “Whether it’s over-classification or improper redactions and stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests, they instinctively err on the side of hiding information to avoid embarrassment, conceal misconduct, or cover up corruption. It’s up to Congress to reform the FOIA process, and in the meantime, it’s up to independent organizations to sue aggressively to force the federal government to comply with transparency laws.”

While good government groups can sue over improper redactions, this process can usually take about a year to uncover just one document from a series of files, those familiar with the matter said. Now that Republicans control the House of Representatives, however, they have the power to compel the federal government to produce non-redacted versions of requested documents, a Citizens United official told The Federalist.

During the 117th Congress, nine House Republicans wrote a letter to the White House raising concerns about the executive order, specifically regarding the fact that the order supplants the authority of the states to set election law and administer elections under the Constitution. When asked about the Biden administration’s secrecy over its elections directive, Freshman Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., who chairs the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, echoed her colleague’s sentiments.

“Everyone should have concerns about this executive order and the involvement of any federal agency in our election process,” Hageman told The Federalist. “First and foremost, elections are the constitutional responsibility of the states, not our federal bureaucracy. This is yet another example of the federal government overstepping its authority and infringing upon states’ rights. Even if this order was well intended — and I have serious doubts that it was — it is unconstitutional.”

Hageman emphasized that the White House cannot get away with such extensive redactions of election-related processes.

“Large-scale redactions are not in the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act,” Hageman added. “This is one of the few tools we have to hold our government accountable. Are we to accept that the information is classified to such an extent that the document is unable to be coherently interpreted? Sunshine is the best disinfectant, and the federal government cannot be allowed to continue to obscure and obstruct.”

Of particular interest in the 54-page document is a draft letter on page 32 from Indian Affairs Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland to White House Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice, formerly President Obama’s national security advisor and “right-hand woman” who is known for her involvement in spying on the Trump campaign in 2015 and lying about it. In that role, she also spread lies about the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, helped Obama staffers target Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and turned a blind eye to the Biden family’s foreign business affairs.

One line in the draft letter reads: “The plan promotes voter registration and voter participation (REDACTED) and the Department’s agency action to achieve these objectives.” The redacted portion might point to a Hatch Act violation, a Citizens United official told The Federalist.

“These documents relating to the Biden White House’s efforts to turn the federal workforce into a partisan voter registration committee must be released to the public in their entirety,” Bossie said. “Congress must investigate this executive order to see if the Biden Administration is violating the Hatch Act on a massive scale.” 

When asked why the Interior Department isn’t being transparent with the public about Biden’s federal takeover of elections, the Bureau of Indian Affairs referred The Federalist to the U.S.C. § 552(b)(5) exemptions in the cover letter sent to Citizens United.

Madonna is morphing into Hillary

If she would act her age and stop dressing like a 13-year-old girl at the mall, perhaps she wouldn’t look so hideous.

posted by Dianny at Patriot Retort 

My brother texted me on Tuesday to ask if I’d seen the pictures of Madonna at the Grammy Awards.

Of course I had. It was inescapable.

Sure, I don’t watch Hollywood award shows. But, as I said on Tuesday, with social media driving the news cycles, it’s impossible to avoid what happened on award shows anymore.

I replied to my brother’s text with one word, “Bloat.”

Then I followed up by suggesting that if Madonna would embrace her age and stop dressing like a 13-year-old girl at the mall, perhaps she wouldn’t look so hideous.

She’s like Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.”

Then this morning, as I was having my tea before work, another image of Madonna at the Grammys scrolled across my Twitter feed, and it suddenly dawned on me.

Madonna isn’t turning into Bette Davis. Madonna is turning into Hillary Clinton if Hillary suddenly stopped wearing her oversized Muumuus and went for something age-inappropriate. 

My brother thinks Madonna’s appearance can be explained by Botox.

But isn’t the point of Botox to make you look younger? You don’t get Botox to age 11 years and morph into Hillary Clinton, for crap’s sake.

Unsurprisingly, Madonna is taking the mockery of her appearance at the Grammys about as well as Hillary took losing to Donald Trump. And just like Hillary, the over-the-hill pop star blamed the mockery on “misogyny.”

She also claimed she was “caught in the glare of ageism.”

Yeah, only because you insisted on dressing like it was still 1983 and you’re still only 24.

The only person committing ageism here is Madonna.

When you are old enough to look like Hillary Clinton, doing your hair up like Pippi Longstocking on a humid day won’t change the fact that you are no longer the bustier-wearing Material Girl writhing on a gondola while lipsyncing to “Like a Virgin.”

Embrace the passage of time, honey, and learn to age gracefully.

‘Lia’ Thomas Exposed His Junk to Female Teammates

‘Lia’ Thomas Exposed His Junk to Female Teammates

Matt Margolis for PJ Media

AP Photo/John Bazemore

Will “Lia” Thomas made headlines during the 2021-2022 academic year for crushing his competition in NCAA women’s swimming, sparking widespread outrage. After years of being a mediocre swimmer on the men’s team, Thomas woke up one morning and identified as transgender, transitioned, joined the women’s team, and started breaking records against his female teammates and tournament competitors. Since robbing real women of opportunities wasn’t enough for him, he also disrespected his teammates by exposing his male genitalia to them in the locker room.

And now, Riley Gaines, a former teammate of Thomas, is calling for changes to be made by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

“We were not forewarned beforehand that we would be sharing a locker room with Lia. We did not give our consent, they did not ask for our consent, but in that locker room, we turned around and there’s a 6’4″ biological man dropping his pants and watching us undress, and we were exposed to male genitalia,” Gaines said.

Gaines, a 12-time NCAA All-American, five-time SEC Champion and record holder, and two-time Olympic trial qualifier, is now pushing the NCAA to require separate locker rooms for transgender athletes because what felt worse to her than a biological male competing with biological women was the humiliation and violation of sharing private single-sex spaces with Thomas.

“That to me was worse than the competition piece,” Gaines added. “Not even probably a year, two years ago, this would have been considered some form of sexual assault, voyeurism. But now not even are they just allowing it to happen, it’s almost as if these large organizations are encouraging it to happen.”

Gaines, a spokesperson for the Independent Women’s Forum, claims that the NCAA has become a champion of transgender athletes at the expense of women’s sports. The 22-year-old originally planned to go to dentistry school but is putting her career plans on hold to be an advocate for female athletes who are reluctant to speak out.

“People are terrified, especially speaking from my experience of talking to other NCAA swimmers specifically. Lia Thomas’s teammates even. They are told their school has made their stance for them. They are told if they feel uncomfortable seeing male genitalia in the locker room, they should seek counseling resources. They’re told they will never get into grad school if they speak out,” Gaines said.

“All of these terrible, awful things that are not true. They are told, of course, that they will be called a bigot and hateful and transphobic, but it doesn’t make you any of those things to acknowledge that there are two sexes, you cannot change your sex and women deserve opportunities.”