Electing Placeholders

Democrats don’t win by seeking consensus. It’s high time Republicans stopped bothering with it as well.

by Paul Gottfried for American Greatness

In a recent column, Dan McCarthy made a telling observation: “Biden’s approval ratings are anemic. Yet he has reason to be confident that the 2024 electoral map will return him to office.” Joe Biden, McCarthy contends, gained the presidency in 2020 by winning over much of the country’s industrial heartland and North Central region. But he did not achieve that feat because of his mental acuity or personal appeal. He won because those areas that went to him are swarming with Democratic voters, and unless someone can change the electoral map, Biden’s party will prevail again in 2024. 

Let me state this point a bit more starkly. Democrats are likely to win the next presidential race because their ideological block is large and cohesive enough, so that no matter whom they run, they can still win in heavily populated regions. In Pennsylvania last November, we not only elected a badly brain-damaged social radical to the U.S. Senate buy we also re-elected a dead Democrat to the House of Representatives. How this happened may be hard for conservatives to understand. As political observers, they may place too much emphasis on the quality of the candidate; and so, they agonize over their own inept nominees for electoral offices. 

Supposedly Republicans lost in the Georgia senatorial race because Herschel Walker was inferior as a candidate to the mouthy Black Lives Matter-admirer Raphael Warnock. Had Georgia Democrats been the party running Walker rather than Warnock, however, it’s very unlikely he would have lost. Their ideologically driven voters would have walked barefoot over burning coals to cast votes for this former football hero, and anyone who noted his tongue-tied responses to questions would have been attacked nonstop by the media as racists. 

For the Democrats, those they elect to office are there to vote with the party, so it doesn’t really matter if their candidates’ brains are still functioning. The Left elects those who will vote for an agenda. As long as that agenda is advanced, the mental and physical condition of the officeholder is insignificant. Democratic voters are also on board with what their party does to radicalize the country and sow confusion. This includes, among other things, opening our borders to drug cartels and unrestricted immigration, and punishing those who deny that men can become pregnant.

The question is how to launch a successful opposition against this ideological block that is unlikely to change political direction. One possibility is having the Right form a national counter-block, combining, for example, those whom the woke Left has impoverished with the bearers of traditional social principles. Rather than trying to be inoffensive, this counter-block should offer a stark contrast to its opponents. Waffling on social issues won’t work, as Dr. Mehmet Oz’s failed campaign against Fetterman in Pennsylvania showed. 

But it is equally important to present one’s positions cogently, while underscoring the other side’s descent into lunacy. And while it would be unwise for members of the counter-block to run in Nassau County, New York with exactly the same positions as someone seeking office in Georgia’s hill country, the Right should aim at showing the same degree of ideological conformity as the Left. 

And it should be as divisive as its adversaries. Our counter-block should ridicule mercilessly the celebration of transgender women that took place at the White House last week. It should highlight whenever possible grotesque displays of wokeness as the social and cultural face of the Democratic Party. It should also pounce on such Democratic enormities as distributing government jobs as a victimological spoils system (aka equity). Our confrontational political Right should also continue to point out that Biden’s higher taxes on “the rich” will be taken out of the pockets of working-class consumers, who will be forced to pay higher prices for essential goods.   

This Right should heed Trump’s advice at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference:  Republican governors and Republican legislators must insist that all ballots be cast on Election Day in designated precincts by voters who can properly identify themselves. Democratic dominance cannot be ended unless we can hold honest elections, without vote harvesting, early voting, and other means of dragging out elections for months in circumstances that allow for massive fraud.

Finally, our right-wing block should treat with utter contempt media accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. These attacks from the Left’s kept opposition should not be allowed to influence the attitudes and programs of the Right. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was perfectly justified, for example, when he refused an invitation from the rabidly leftist women on “The View” to appear on their program. Why would any self-respecting governor expose himself needlessly to insults?

The Right must pursue an electoral strategy that is comparable to that of its adversaries. It must feature a national agenda that distinguishes it morally and socially from the other side, and it must mobilize Americans to support its anti-woke, conservative program. And it must stop hiding behind gibberish about “common ground.” Democrats don’t win by seeking consensus. They win elections by denouncing the other side as homophobic and racist.

And we Know, On the Fringe, and more- March 14

 

I'm tired of winter.

Yes, the Latest Bank Bailout Is Really a Bailout, and You Are Paying for It.

Yes, the Latest Bank Bailout Is Really a Bailout, and You Are Paying for It.

Ryan McMaken for Mises.org

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed on Friday and was shut down by regulators. It was the second-largest failure in US history and the first since the global financial crisis. Almost immediately, the calls for bailouts started to come in. (Since Friday, First Republic Bank has failed, and many other banks are facing collapse.)

In fact, on March 9, even before SVB failed, billionaire investor Bill Ackman took to Twitter to insist a federal “bailout should be considered” if the private sector could not save the bank. Hours after SVB officially failed, Ackman was still at it, and in a 646-word panicky screed, he demanded that the federal government “guarantee SVB deposits” and essentially backstop the entire banking industry to keep failing, inefficient, and poorly managed banks afloat.

Now, many readers might be saying to themselves, “I thought bank deposits were insured!” That, of course, is correct, but deposits are only legislatively insured up to $250,000 by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Given that most normal people keep less than this in their bank accounts, that means the majority of bank users are not going to lose any of their money should their banks fail. Moreover, it is extremely easy to acquire deposit insurance on much more than $250,000 by simply keeping money at more than one bank. That $250,000 limit applies to the deposits at each bank where a depositor keeps funds. For customers with high liquidity needs, the financial sector offers tools for dealing with the risk of exceeding FDIC limits.

In an illustration of the laziness and arrogance that so characterizes our modern financial class, however, many of the wealthiest depositors at Silicon Valley Bank couldn’t be bothered with managing their deposits, and they essentially ignored the deposit-insurance rules that even a ten-year-old understands when opening his first bank account.

As a result, many venture capitalists and other wealthy SVB customers stand to a lot of money. At least, they stood to lose a lot of money before Sunday evening, when the Federal Reserve announced its new “Bank Term Funding Program” (BTFP), which promises to flood the banking system with new money and shore up the personal finances of wealthy depositors. 

This is part of a two-pronged effort to both make banks appear more financially sound, and to greatly expand FDIC payouts to depositors who have their funds in these banks. 

The official propaganda coming out of the administration, and from the usual Fed fanboys, is that none of this is a bailout. That’s a lie. The new steps being taken by the Fed and by the Treasury Department's FDIC are indeed ultimately bailouts for billionaires and other wealthy depositors. Moreover, this new program will require at least a partial return of quantitative easing. There’s no way to guarantee such huge sums of money without having to fall back on inflationary monetary policy yet again. This also means price inflation won’t be going away. Here is why.

Propping Up Asset Prices with New Money

The first prong of the bailout plan is to use extremely low-cost loans to shovel more money at banks in order to make them look more financially sound. The idea here is to head off depositor panics over uninsured deposits before they start.  The  first indication that this scheme is a bailout comes from the text of the press release on the creation of the BTFP. It states that the new program will be

offering loans of up to one year in length to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other eligible depository institutions pledging U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities [MBS], and other qualifying assets as collateral. These assets will be valued at par. The BTFP will be an additional source of liquidity against high-quality securities, eliminating an institution’s need to quickly sell those securities in times of stress.

The key phrase is “These assets will be valued at par.” That’s important because these banks are facing huge unrealized losses, many stemming from losses on assets whose market prices plummeted as interest rates rose. Part of the reason these banks are in trouble is because their assets are no longer worth anywhere near par value in the marketplace:

Yet, the Fed has decided to simply declare that banks' assets sit at par value and thus far more valuable than is really the case. It will let banks use these assets as collateral at the imaginary (higher) prices.

Moreover, the terms of the BTFP loans reiterate how these are loans designed to hand money to banks for little in return. According to the Fed, “there are no fees associated with the Programs” and there is no penalty for prepayment. Foreign banks are also eligible, by the way. And, of course, “the Department of the Treasury . . . [will] provide $25 billion as credit protection.” If history is any guide, we can expect that Treasury backstop to get a lot bigger. If and when some of these banks default on the loans, the collateral won’t come close to covering the value of the loans. The banks are essentially getting free money.

[Read More: "Why the Fed Is Bankrupt and Why That Means More Inflation" by Ryan McMaken]

Where will the money to provide these loans come from? It will be printed, of course. The Fed is already bankrupt and has no extra money lying around. The Fed can’t just start selling off its $8.5 trillion hoard of Treasurys and MBS to get cash. That would drive down the prices of those assets even further, and this would make balance sheets at banks—who also own Treasurys and MBS—even worse. So, new loans and guarantees will have to come from new money. Another phrase for that is "monetary inflation."

The FDIC Will Need a Bailout

The second prong of the bailout is the FDIC's promise to cover all depositors at troubled banks, rather than just those with deposits up to the usual limit. The not-a-bailout narrative claims that the new promised expansion of insurance will all be funded by FDIC fees and imposes no costs on taxpayers. "The banks will pay for it," we are told.

That’s not how it will actually work. In this three-minute video, Peter St. Onge explains the real problem:

St. Onge notes that the FDIC fund available for backstopping deposits is less than $130 billion. Yet deposits in US banks total approximately $22 trillion. The FDIC fund is equal to about 0.6 percent of all the deposits. And it appears that even at the banks with the highest proportion of FDIC-covered accounts, only 42 percent of deposits are covered by insurance. So, clearly, extending FDIC coverage to all deposits means the FDIC will have nowhere near the funds it needs to cover potential depositor losses. The FDIC was never intended to insure rich people with deposits well in excess of FDIC insurance maximums. Yet that is exactly what is now happening.

When the FDIC runs out of money, what happens? The FDIC runs to the US Treasury to get a bailout. Where does the money to bail out the FDIC come from? It comes either from current tax revenues or from borrowed money. Either way, the taxpayers are on the hook. Moreover, if the Fed intervenes to buy up some of that new government debt—to keep federal interest obligations low, of course—then taxpayers will also pay via the inflation tax.

[Read More: "How the Fed Is Enabling Congress's Trillion-Dollar Deficits" by Ryan McMaken]

When we consider all this, we can see how the grift works: the Fed or the Treasury Department creates a “fund” and claims that it will be financed by fees and other nontax revenue sources. Thus, when the FDIC or the Fed rush to bail out banks, the politicians can claim the taxpayers will pay nothing. That is only true if the programs themselves receive no backstopping from the Treasury or from monetary inflation. But if we’ve learned anything since 2008, it’s that these programs all enjoy implicit guarantees of taxpayer backing, and that any “caps” on these amounts can be increased at any time.

Expect More Price Inflation

In any case, the ordinary taxpayer will certainly feel the pain in terms of ongoing price inflation. Current bailout efforts are inflationary and are thoroughly opposed to the Federal Reserve’s recent attempts at “quantitative tightening.” The whole point of the bailouts, after all, is toloosen financial conditions for banks. So the Fed will almost certainly be backing off whatever it had planned in terms of raising the target interest rate and reducing its portfolio at the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting. Now the Fed will be looking at whatever strategy it can find to increase the flow of dollars to banks, and that will mean more money creation, even if the Fed’s official position remains ostensibly hawkish. Put another way, get ready for more entrenched price inflation. But don’t forget that the primary focus of all of this is to bail out wealthy depositors and bankers. On top of it all, there’s no guarantee that it will even work. There’s a reason the financial technocrats are in panic mode. They don’t know what will happen next.

Fighting against Hollywood's seemingly never ending 2020 bubble

 

Source: https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/03/14/tilda-swinton-is-latest-hollywood-star-to-rebel-against-covid-protocols-i-was-told-to-wear-a-mask-and-im-not/

Tilda Swinton is the latest Hollywood start to rebel against COVID protocols, saying she will refuse to wear a mask on her next movie shoot.

Speaking this week at the SXSW Festival in Austin, the Scottish actress said she doesn’t intend comply with film industry standards on masks, adding that she is “very healthy” even after multiple COVID-19 infections in the past three years.

“I’m about to shoot a picture in Ireland, and I was told to wear a mask at all times, and I’m not,” she said, according to multiple reports.

Swinton’s refusal comes after actor Woody Harrelson recently blasted Hollywood COVID protocols in an interview with the New York Times.

“I don’t think that anybody should have the right to demand that you’re forced to do the testing, forced to wear the mask and forced to get vaccinated three years on. I’m just like, Let’s be done with this nonsense,” he said.

“It’s not fair to the crews. I don’t have to wear the mask. Why should they? Why should they have to be vaccinated? How’s that not up to the individual?”

Actor Tim Robbins later voiced his support for Harrelson.

“Woody is right. Time to end this charade,” Robbins tweeted last week.

SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher has repeatedly called for an end to COVID vaccine mandates, calling them an infringement on basic liberties.

The Ukraine War Made Me a Hippie, Not a Putin Stooge

Billions in U.S. aid to Ukraine would be better spent here at home. The time for our country to be involved in regional conflicts that do not impact our own security is over.

by Jim Nelles for American Greatness

I am a former naval officer and I have always believed that the United States should never hesitate to flex its military muscle around the globe in pursuit of our national interests. I was, in fact, a war hawk. 

The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan made me question my reflexive hawkishness. The United States’ support of Ukraine in its struggle with Russia further drove me to question our nation’s foreign policy. Why, for example, are we spending billions of dollars to help Ukraine defend its borders when we do not protect our own?

Ukraine has been invaded and occupied since antiquity. Its borders have continuously changed and its occupiers have influenced its culture for thousands of years. In fact, the shared heritage between Russia and Ukraine “goes back more than a thousand years to a time with Kyiv, now Ukraine’s capital, was at the center of the first Slavic state, Kyivan Rus, the birthplace of both Ukraine and Russia,” per National Geographic.

Upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Joe Biden announced, “President Putin has chosen a premeditated war . . . Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States and its allies and partners will respond in a united and decisive way. The world will hold Russia accountable.”

But the world is not holding Russia accountable; that burden has fallen primarily on the United States. As recently as September 2022, the European Union was “still the biggest market for Russian crude,” according to the International Energy Agency.

In addition, 2022 saw the United States give Ukraine about $67 billion in defense aid, approximately $46 billion to meet financial and humanitarian needs such as “general Ukrainian government aid, economic support, and aid for refugee resettlement”—much more than we offer to any other nation. This is at a time when the U.S. national debt grew to $31.42 trillion. The United States is paying for the Ukrainian government to exist and function when we cannot pay our own bills.

Yet U.S. involvement with Ukraine is poised to deepen in the coming months. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who never met a war he didn’t like, has recently called for the United States to provide Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets and the training to fly them, representing a major escalation in a potential direct conflict with Russia.

Even liberal Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is calling for the continuation of military and emergency aid to Ukraine, making this one of the only bipartisan initiatives in recent years.

The reality is, the United States has more debt than it can ever repay. So why are we spending billions involving ourselves in a Slavic border dispute? Could it be money? Could it be that the military-industrial complex is alive and well and looking to fill its coffers now that we are no longer in Afghanistan? 

CBS News reports Ukraine’s use of artillery shells exceeds the Pentagon’s capacity to make them, “using in a month as much as (the U.S.) produced in the year.” Lockheed Martin is “gearing up to turn out one new rocket every 10 minutes at its plant in Arkansas.” This, as the defense budget approaches $1 trillion.

Is this an attempt to further push Europe away from Russia and deepen Europe’s dependence on energy from the United States? Now, Europe is the largest consumer of American oil for the first time in six years.

The war in Ukraine is also having some negative consequences for America’s geostrategic interests. Russia has improved its relations with both China and India, as India—never a U.S. ally—has moved further away from the United States. 

China is threatening Taiwan and recent war games show that “the United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers” in any attempt to defend the island nation.

So now I am a hippie, not a Putin stooge. I would like to see the United States end its aid to Ukraine and use that money here. The time for our country to be involved in regional conflicts that do not impact our own security is over.

The Biden Economy Is Falling Apart, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

The Biden Economy Is Falling Apart, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Stephen Green for PJ Media.com

(AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)

The Biden Economy — hailed Monday morning by Presidentish Joe Biden as “strong” — seems like it’s falling apart, everything, everywhere all at once. NYSE halted trading of Charles Schwab, whose shares fell by more than 20%, and even a few Etsy sellers have been impacted by the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse.

Schwab’s fall was the firm’s “most ever on an intraday-basis,” even as company execs assured investors in a press release that “Schwab’s long-standing reputation as a safe port in a storm remains intact.”

Overall, trading of shares in over 30 banks was halted on Wall Street Monday morning, as the entire sector suddenly looks like a risk investors aren’t willing to take. Almost everything banking was down, down, down in pre-market trades, which MarketWatch described as “panic-like activity.”

“Among some of those that have already been halted at least twice,” MarketWatch reported, “shares of Western Alliance Bancorp WAL, -51.05% plummeted 78.2%, Regions Financial Corp. RF, -5.33% sank 15.6%, First Republic Bank FRC, -64.05% plunged 65.5%, Comerica Inc. CMA, -21.24% tumbled 39.4% and PacWest Bancorp. PACW, -25.18% took a 47.7% dive.”

Signature Bank, “a key financial institution for the cryptocurrency industry,” according to the New York Post, was shut down on Sunday over “similar systemic risk” to SVB.

SVB and Signature are the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, respectively, with combined assets in excess of $300 billion. Depositors will be made whole, even deposits greater than the $250,000covered by FDIC insurance. “Federal Reserve also said it is creating a new Bank Term Funding Program aimed at safeguarding institutions affected by the market instability of the SVB failure,” according to CNBC.

Investment holdings at SVB, however, are wiped out. “When the risk didn’t pay off, investors lose their money. That’s how capitalism works,” Biden said in his national address on Monday.

That’s what happened with Lehman Brothers, too, in 2008, before bigger faults were discovered and Washington went into Bailout All the Things Mode. This new crisis might just be getting started.

What went wrong? In a word: Inflation. In a few more words: The higher interest rates needed to combat inflation smashed the cheap-money expectations that SVB’s bond portfolios required. Other sectors of the economy that have become addicted to historically low interest rates include high-tech, particularly startup firms, and the housing market.

“I would be surprised if there weren’t other things that break. Maybe not directly related to the problems of SVB, but to some degree we’re already seeing breakage in terms of things like weakness in the housing market, other areas that are clearly in recession in the economy, even if we’re not in an overall recession,” warned Schwab’s chief investment strategist, Liz Ann Sonders, on Monday.

It’s been one helluva morning, and that’s just in the banking sector. Looks like it’s time to haul out the Chart of Doom that surfaced on the internet back in 2008.

Laugh. It beats crying — unless you’re one of those Etsy sellers who hasn’t been paid in days.

On Sunday, Etsy reported that “a small group of sellers… had their payments delayed on Friday” due to impacts from SVB’s implosion. “We expect we will be able to begin processing these payments as soon as tomorrow, March 13,” but as of this writing, there haven’t been any updates. Some sellers have been forced to put their stores in “vacation mode” because, without any money coming in, they can’t afford to pay for shipping on wares going out to customers.

So it isn’t just the big players getting hurt in the Biden economy, but there could be worse to come.

Inflation remains stubbornly high, due in large part to the Fed being both slow and timid in its rate hikes. We have a dismal 1981 inflation rate (properly figured) and a good-times 1995 Federal funds rate. Something’s gotta give.

Nevertheless, Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in an investor’s letter on Sunday that “we no longer expect the FOMC to deliver a rate hike at its March 22 meeting with considerable uncertainty about the path beyond March.” If the problems we’re seeing in the banking system take a toll on consumer and investor confidence, then the Fed will do what it always does in that situation: easy money, baby!

But easy money during an inflationary period just adds fuel to the fire.

“We’ve made strong economic progress in the past two years,” Biden said Monday. The RNC Twitter account responded with a few inconvenient truths: “When Biden took office, inflation was at 1.4% and gas was $2.39/gal. Today, inflation is at 6.4% and gas is $3.47/gal.”

And that was before the big bills starting coming due for three years spent shutting down and re-regulating the economy while printing up trillions in funny money.

I could say “I told you so,” gentle reader, but you were telling me, too.

Chaos, Chaos Everywhere

posted by Kira Davis at RedStateVIP 

Lately I’ve found myself binging a show on the Paramount Network called ‘Air Disasters.’

As the name implies, this docuseries explores numerous airplane crashes over the decades, some well-known, others not so much. It documents tragedies as they unfolded, putting together eye witness testimonies, data recovered from the crash sites, and commentary from aviation experts. Most interestingly, it catalogs the sequence of events that led to each individual disaster.

Those closest to me know I used to have a terrible fear of flying. It wasn’t always that way. I’ve flown, mostly alone, since I was five-years-old, a child with family scattered across the continent and a single mother who needed a break once in a while. Adulthood can sap us of our adventurous spirits, mostly because we suddenly become aware of our mortality and how much we have to lose. At some point, I can’t remember when, flying became a nerve-wracking experience. For years I avoided it when possible, and drank heavily when I had to fly.

I say all this to point out that it might seem absurd for someone with a fear of flying to binge a show about plane crashes. On the surface it might, but I find great comfort in the detective work the show chronicles. Knowledge is power, and knowing the science behind flight and the science and procedure behind flight disasters makes me feel more confident about the entire process.

What I find most interesting about the cases highlighted in the show is that while weather occasionally plays a factor in these accidents, nearly all of them boil down to human error, and typically not just one human error, but a series of errors. A dangerous but solvable problem will emerge, the crew makes one bad or poorly timed decision which leads to the next bad decision which leads to the next bad response and suddenly all hell breaks loose. What could have been simply a scary situation turns into a fatal one. Every disaster is imbued with the same quality…chaos. At some point, problems turn into complete and utter chaos and the flight crew can no longer make good decisions. Once chaos enters the equation, the freefall begins. It plays out time and time again.

This is how it feels to live in America these days. It feels like we are in a constant state of chaos. It feels like we are reeling out of control in nearly every sector. Every day we are treated to a new collapse, a new insanity, a new mind-boggling disintegration of old norms.

The banking sector is on the verge of collapse.

Higher education is actively banning discussion and disagreement.

Government schools are teaching girls they can be boys, and vice versa.

School board meetings are turning into battlefields.

The airline industry is falling apart.

The railroad industry is falling apart.

The border is being overrun.

Fentanyl is killing our sons and daughters at an alarming rate.

The supply chain is broken and getting worse.

Our cities are melting into crime-ridden drug dens that are pushing out business, both big and small, and driving away families in droves.

Our national air space is being violated by the Chinese with impunity.

Our cultural norms are in freefall and the effect is dizzying. If you feel like everything is chaotic right now, that’s because it is. This isn’t just a matter of politics as usual based on who’s in the White House at what time. Things are genuinely awful and no one seems to be in charge. The pilot has lost control of the plane.

Like the accidents I watch unfold on that docuseries, what is happening to us now is the result of a million tiny decisions, and a few big ones. Every time we’ve had the ability to pull out of this barrel roll, the political class and their sycophant voters make another ill-fated decision that just makes the problem worse.

Our first bad decision was handing the White House to Joe Biden. Everything fanned out from there. Every person who is “in charge” of something in the Biden administration is making terrible, perplexing decisions, as are their private sector counterparts. We’re picking leaders based on how they look and who they say they are inside, rather than their qualifications. We’re letting children make irreversible decisions about their bodies while we deny the same choice to adults who prefer not to take an experimental vaccine. We’re letting fragile young adults push away knowledge and learning on their college campuses in favor of emotion. We are literally dumbing down the future with each new “trigger warning” and every new diversity, equity and inclusion demand.

One weak decision after another is rendering the fuselage of America vulnerable. One weak leader after another is thrusting us headfirst toward disaster.

Chaos is everywhere right now. The helpless sense of weightlessness in this descent is excruciating.

But we are not completely done for. Many of those air disasters I watched could have been prevented with just a little more time, a couple of more seconds, a few thousand more feet. Believe it or not, sometimes the solution to a crashing plane is to point the nose directly downward before pulling out. It takes a brave man to do such a thing, as it defies logic in a moment of panic.

Our nation is in desperate need of men who can make the hard choices that need to happen to pull us out of this descent. We need voters with the stomach to withstand the process of finding those men. The primary season has already begun, but so many voters fall to pieces along the way. Can we keep it together long enough to elect someone who is not the crash test dummy known as Joe Biden? Are there yet a few good men willing to take the controls and muscle us out of sure disaster?

Does America have a few thousand feet left in the journey to pull it out?

What do think? I’d love to hear your thoughts…and your encouragement, if you have any to give, because this turbulence is killing me.

Is It Any Wonder? America's Average IQ Declines for First Time in Nearly 100 Years

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

And there it is. A new study has found that the intelligence quotient (IQ) of the average American citizen is now on the decline for the first time in nearly 100 years. Again, is it any wonder?

Of course, there’s no wonder. We can start with the left’s insidious drive to dumb down public school education, curricula standards, and elimination of minimum graduation requirements, all in the name of promoting so-called equity and inclusion.

Or, as it was called in saner times, the soft bigotry of low expectations.

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the study, published in the psychology journal Intelligence, Analyzed the time period between 2006 and 2018. Unsurprisingly, the study’s authors noted that the greatest decline in IQ occurred among Americans between the ages of 18 and 22, and “may” be due to poor quality education. I know — try to control your shock and amazement.

Look, when you “teach” (indoctrinate) students to believe that getting the right answers in math is “racist” — rather than the process used to get to the wrong answer — it’s just a matter of time.

According to the report, the findings could indicate “that either the caliber of education has decreased across this study’s sample and/or that there has been a shift in the perceived value of certain cognitive skills,” according to the report.

Why not both?

So we must ask ourselves, what’s changed? Did teenagers and young adults simply just get dumber for no apparent reason, or can we point with specificity to the dumbing down of public education — and the declining educational quality of teachers who first believed that mixing their personal politics into their classroom “instruction” was reasonable and that finally full-blown woke was a “moral” requirement.

I’ve written previously about the decline in honors programs across America. In one recent example, the Culver City School District in Los Angeles eliminated honors curricula from high schools in the name of racial equity. The district rightly faced a backlash from parents of honor students who lost opportunities to enroll in accelerated programs. One parent observed:

It’s not working and we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

The hateful parent is obviously a racist. [sarc]

In August 2021, then-Oregon Gov. Kate Brown eliminated statewide math, reading, and writing proficiency standards for high school graduates. A Brown spokesman at the time offered this lame excuse: “SB 744 gives us an opportunity to review our graduation requirements and make sure our assessments can truly assess all students’ learning.”

Translation: Eliminating basic requirements makes high school graduation more equitable for people of color.

Colleges and universities across the country, from Harvard to Princeton to Columbia University, and of course Berkeley in California have lowered their admission standards and eliminated entrance exam requirements.

In the case of Harvard, three entrance exam minimum requirements exist, with the top requirement for Asians, followed by white applicants, then applicants of color. In addition, Harvard says that biases arising from subjective criteria such as “likability” could be eliminated by emphasizing objective measures over exam scores. That doesn’t even make sense, and it’s utterly insane.

Meanwhile, real-life Dumb and Dumber continues to play out across America — compliments of the Age of Woke.

Senator Mark Kelly Called For Social Media Censorship To Prevent Bank Runs

Senator Mark Kelly Called For Social Media Censorship To Prevent Bank Runs

Democrats are demanding ever-more censorship in a widening social media panic.

During a conference call about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout yesterday, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) asked representatives from the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC) if they had a way to censor information on social media to prevent a run on the banks, according to Republican members of the House of Representatives who were on the call.

The members said there were roughly 200 people on the Zoom call, including Senators, House members, and staff members from both parties. “On our conference call, led by [Senate President Chuck] Schumer, with Fed, FDIC, and Treasury, a democrat senator asked the three agencies if there was a program underway on social media to censor information that would lead to a bank run,” Rep. Thomas Massie told Public.

“I believe he couched it in a concern that foreign actors would be doing this,” said Massie, “but he didn’t suggest the censorship should be limited to foreigners or to things that were untrue. The people from the three agencies couldn’t answer him and just sort of took a pass on the question.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert tweeted, “On a briefing with Biden Under Secretary of the Treasury Nellie Liang regarding the SVB [Silicon Valley Bank] BAILOUT they are working towards and a member asked if they were reaching out to Facebook and Twitter to monitor misinformation and ‘bad actors.’”

Rep. Dan Bishop, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability, confirmed the accounts of Massie and Boebert, and a representative for Boebert’s office confirmed that the “member” she was referring to was a Democratic Senator.

“I have confirmed with [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy that it was Sen. Mark Kelley who asked on last night’s zoom call whether the call hosts (at Treasury, FDIC, etc) were interacting with SM platforms and on the lookout for foreign influence that might promote bank runs,” Rep. Bishop told Public.

Democrats say Republicans are also calling for censorship.

A spokesperson for the Senate Banking Committee pointed Public to a statement by House Banking Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) as the only one they knew about that mentions social media.

“This was the first Twitter-fueled bank run,” said McHenry. “At this time, it is important to remain levelheaded and look at the facts—not speculation—when assessing the right path forward.”

But McHenry did not call for censorship, and his spokesperson told Public that he “in no way is advocating social media be muzzled.”

What’s more, Kelly’s call for censorship comes at a time of growing demands from Democrats for more censorship by social media companies:

— Last June, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) subcommitee on “protecting “Critical Infrastructure From Mis/Disinformation” proposed adding "financial misinformation" to the portfolio of social media categories within CISA’s purview to work with outside partners to censor;

— In December, the Federal Trade Commission demanded that Twitter owner Elon Musk “IDENTIFY ALL JOURNALISTS” who had access to the Twitter Files showing government agents demanding censorship;

— Last Wednesday, Senate President Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded that Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch stop reporting on video footage of January 6;

 — Last Thursday, Congressional Democrats demanded that journalist Matt Taibbi reveal his sources to them;

— And now, Democrats are opposing the “Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act,” which was introduced last Thursday by Republican House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer, which prevents government employees from “using their official authority to influence . . . a third party . . . to censor speech.”

Why is that? Why are Democrats suddenly at war with the First Amendment? What exactly is going on?