Third World Regime or Stalinist Re-Run?

Biden gets a pro-bono Vyshinsky for the Trump show trial

by Lloyd Billingsley for American Greatness

The FBI raid on Donald Trump’s residence, and the most recent indictment, have brought charges that the United States has become a Third World regime such as Cuba or Nicaragua.

The Marxist Sandinistas did persecute their political opposition and Cuba’s Fidel Castro subjected potential rivals such as Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa to a humiliating show trial, captured in Orlando Jimenez-Leal’s documentary “8A.” More relevant are the show trials staged by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the late 1930s.

“The news of the Moscow Trials burst like a bombshell,” recalled the late Sidney Hook. The principal defendants were all Bolsheviks, Lenin’s comrades-in-arms who had previously been glorified as heroes of the October Revolution. The accused included Trotsky, Bukharin, Yuri Piatakov, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukharin, Gregory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev, and “the charges were mind-boggling.”

These same Bolsheviks were accused of assassinating Sergei Kirov and planning the assassination of Stalin himself. They had also “allegedly conspired with the fascist powers, notably Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan, to dismember the Soviet Union.”

Stalin and his secret police controlled the trials from behind the scenes and the outcome was preordained. Stalin’s prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, referred to the defendants as “a foul-smelling heap of human garbage” and Bukharin as “the damnable cross of a fox and a swine.” The accused “must be shot like dirty dogs!” and they were, replaced by a corps faithful to Stalin.  As Hook recalled, the Moscow trials were also “a turning point in the history of American liberalism.”

High-profile liberals such as Corliss Lamont, Theodore Dreiser, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, Newton Arvin, Malcolm Cowley and Granville Hicks perceived the trials as models of justice. In some cases, notably Corliss Lamont, praise for the trials and the U.S.S.R. “went beyond anything the Kremlin itself ever claimed.”

Defenders of Trotsky organized a “Commission of Inquiry Into the Truth of the Moscow Trials,” but it got a chilly reception from prominent liberals such as Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Joseph Davies, U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R., took the trials at face value and Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who covered up Stalin’s planned famine in Ukraine, claimed it was all true.

In similar style, the establishment media was all-in with the charge that Donald Trump had colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election. Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe raised the possibility that Trump was a “Russian asset,” and Rep. Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee said Trump was “acting like a person who is compromised.”

As former FBI boss Robert Mueller confirmed, there was no collusion and Trump was not a Russian asset. Special Counsel John Durham has now confirmed that the Russia hoax was a product of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and fully abetted by the FBI. As this comes to light, Trump faces charges of mishandling classified information.

Biden’s DOJ alleges that Trump may have violated the Espionage Act by keeping classified documents at his residence. Hillary Clinton, and former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie have also harbored classified documents, without facing criminal charges.

Joe Biden has classified documents strewn about his garage, but the FBI never accused him of being “extremely careless” in handling “very sensitive, highly classified information,” in the style of Hillary Clinton. And of course, as James Comey explained, “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” As the people might note, the papers Biden donated to the University of Delaware have become inaccessible, even in the face of FOIA requests.

The Espionage Act criminalized dissent against U.S. involvement in World War I. Its invocation against Trump again raises the specter of conspiracy with “foreign powers,” the “Russian asset” charge, and so forth. This comes at a time when Donald Trump is the principal opponent of Joe Biden, not exactly tolerant of the opposition. As with the Moscow Trials, supporters reach for their bullhorn.

Adam Schiff, prime-time promoter of the Russia hoax, hailed the “stunning” detail of the indictment, showing that Trump had “malign intent.” The indictment was “another affirmation of the rule of law” and Trump “should be treated like any other lawbreaker.”

Democrat Stacey Plaskett, delegate from the Virgin Islands, said Trump “having the classified information for Americans and being able to put that out and share it in his resort with anyone and everything who comes through should be terrifying to all Americans.” According to Plaskett, Donald Trump “needs to be shot” which she quickly amended to “stopped.” That is hard to top but former Attorney General William Barr was up to the task.

“If even half of this is true, he’s toast,” Barr told reporters. Like police captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) in Casablanca, Barr claimed he was “shocked by the degree of the sensitivity of these documents, and how many there were.” The former president was peddling “big lies,” including his declassification authority, and claims that Trump is a victim are “ridiculous.”

Here we have a former Attorney General who suspends the presumption of innocence and judges a case before the trial. Barr also backed the unprecedented FBI raid on Trump’s residence, proclaiming “it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay?” And in Barr’s view it was the government that was being “jerked around.”

As he explained in One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, Barr started his career with the CIA. The author praises Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who appointed Robert Mueller to investigate Trump.

“Few can appreciate the complexities Rod faced during that tumultuous time,” writes Barr, “and even fewer will know the important contributions he made to the administration and the country.” Barr also “made it clear that neither President Obama nor vice president Biden were in [John] Durham’s crosshairs.”

The people have a right to wonder if William Barr regards the current president and vice president as above the law. Jack Smith may be handling the case against Trump, but in William Barr, Joe Biden has a volunteer Vyshinsky.

For some, the proceedings evoke banana republics and Third World regimes. Stand a little closer and that Stalinist stank is wafting strong.

GOP Field Braces for Tucker Carlson Iowa Inquisition

by Philip Wegman for American Greatness 

More than one Republican presidential campaign expressed surprise, even trepidation, when RealClearPolitics broke the news in March that Tucker Carlson would moderate a presidential forum hosted by the Family Leader.

In the spring, several candidates accepted Bob Vander Plaats’s invitation to address his influential group of social and religious conservatives. None knew Carlson would be waiting for them on stage in the summer. “This isn’t prepping for an interview,” said a senior aide to one presidential candidate. “It’s an interrogation.”

Carlson is out at Fox News, half a dozen candidates have entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination since his exit, and whether they like it or not, six White House hopefuls will sit down Friday with the opinionated commentator described by one GOP campaign official as a “fast-talking, new age populist.”

Granted anonymity to speak freely, the aide wasn’t offering an endearing assessment. RealClearPolitics spoke to multiple campaigns scheduled to attend the Des Moines forum. Some love Carlson and see the sit-down as a friendly media opportunity. Others loathe him and still remember how he laid waste to numerous pols on his primetime show.

One by one, Carlson will grill Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

Regardless of any private hesitation they may harbor, each of the campaigns who spoke with RCP ahead of the event say they take Carlson seriously. Most have spent considerable time preparing. And for good reason.

In Carlson, the candidates will confront a firebrand with a loyal audience but without sympathy for old-guard GOP orthodoxies. Campaigns have scoured his old Fox News monologues, read his private text messages made public because of litigation, and reviewed clips from his new Twitter show. “Am I preparing for this differently than I would for other interviews?” asked a senior operative, scouring the material. “Yeah, of course. I’d be f______ stupid not to. I’d get fired if I didn’t.”

Other candidates who have made appearances on Carlson’s program aren’t as worried. “No special prepping,” an official from a third campaign said of their candidate before adding, “One of the many things that differentiates him from plastic career politicians. Our base can sniff out phony.”

An aide to a fourth campaign also claimed to be unconcerned. “I was worried about this last week,” the official admitted. “I’m not worried now.” While preparing for the sit-down, the aide told his candidate, “Tucker is going to come at you from his worldview.” The advice? “Understand his worldview.”

According to Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the fact that Carlson is hosting and candidates are furiously cramming is “tremendous.” In an interview with RCP, Roberts likened Carlson to “this generation’s Rush Limbaugh,” adding that the Fox anchorman turned Twitter personage understands “fissures in the economic consensus, fissures in foreign policy, and most important to me, as some conservatives like to say, ‘what time it is.’”

A favorite phrase of the so-called New Right, that aphorism refers to an emerging sense of urgency and appetite for sweeping action, not dragging and dull academic debates, among more populist-minded conservatives. From his primetime slot, Carlson pioneered much of that effort.

He blasted a business-friendly GOP for cozying up to corporations that outsourced manufacturing jobs. He made mainstream the conservative critique of gender transition surgeries for minors. On social and fiscal policy, Carlson went where more traditional conservatives would not. And his influence was unquestionable.

“The key thing,” Roberts said, “is that Tucker sees himself as having a moral obligation on behalf of the average conservative.” Each of the presidential candidates is like a suitor. Carlson is the protective parent asking their intentions, he said before likening him to a “dad for the conservative movement – we can rest assured that he’s going to ask all the right questions.”

Campaigns are preparing for a universe of questions Carlson could ask. “You have to have rebuttals for almost everything,” one aide groaned about questions that could broadly range from Jan. 6 to agriculture policy. “You have to prepare for the worst,” another official suggested. “My sense is this probably is not going to be over the top on some of the more divisive issues.”

“We’ve done many town halls and events across the early states answering unscripted questions from everyday Americans,” yet another candidate’s spokesman shrugged. “We’re used to answering tough questions and looking forward to a great event.”

Others say regardless of the questions asked or the answers offered, the problem is that Carlson is there at all.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- July 14

 

Am I entirely anti union? No, I only support unions that actually intend to look out for their workers and not get insanely greedy.

Am I actually on the studios side? Not entirely. They're bad as well. But, they do have some fair points regarding this whole strike tomfoolery. The demands they were told about are very unreasonable, and they more then likely can't be delivered, they tried to tell the WGA and SAG to listen to reason, but they refused to listen.

I will never support this strike, it's all idiocy put on by boneheads who refuse to tolerate the very idea of possibly getting the kind of paychecks that the 'lower class' get every week and are entirely convinced that AI will replace them all in the very near future. If I ran a studio, and all the union workers all foolishly walked out because they were convinced I would 1 day replace them all by a robot, I'd just hire all non union workers to replace all of them. They are all replaceable, and they are just too stupid to see that because A, they clearly don't care about their jobs and their fellow team mates that they work with on set, and B, they have no idea what actual solidarity really means, Their version of 'solidarity is 100% coercion and outright bullying.

They can play martyr all they want with the studios while being totally blind to the fact that the studios have them by the balls (and always have), and take allll the hundreds of HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY photos of them acting like they're at a summer camp or at a red carpet event instead of what is supposed to be a 'SERIOUS' picket line, but they will only have themselves to blame when the donation money runs dry and the real shit hits the fan. (or when strikers start passing out due to heatstroke, heat exhaustion or dehydration. LA and NY heat waves are no joke)

Mutiny isn't pretty, but I have a feeling that's exactly what will eventually end up happening here.

Is America Losing The Battle For Naval Superiority To Red China?

The U.S.’ ongoing naval challenges give Red China an opportunity to accumulate more power throughout the Indo-Pacific.

Shawn Fleetwood reporting for The Federalist

It’s no secret Red China has spent the past several decades heavily investing in its armed forces. In a matter of decades, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has evolved into the largest military in the world, retrofitted with some of the latest and most advanced weapons systems.

Such developments have prompted Beijing to take more aggressive actions throughout the Indo-Pacific region in recent years. Just last month, a U.S. destroyer was abruptly cut off by a People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) vessel during a transit through the Taiwan Strait. The incident occurred a few weeks after a Chinese fighter jet came within 400 feet of a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft while the latter was conducting a patrol of the South China Sea. 

China has also made it a habit of conducting regular intrusions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone and has, at times, carried out naval operations in the Taiwan Strait. Beijing has furthermore issued numerous threats to invade Taiwan if the island refuses to abdicate its sovereignty to the Chinese government. Taken collectively, these actions demonstrate growing confidence among Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party in their nation’s military capabilities.

While the U.S. currently maintains its status as global hegemon, its ongoing naval challenges give Red China an opportunity to accumulate more power throughout the Indo-Pacific. Persistent failure to maintain a sizeable fleet and meet recruiting targets is hampering the Navy’s ability to fulfill its operations, which are necessary for upholding U.S. national security and peace throughout the world.

China’s Military Build-Up

Among the more alarming trends in China’s military rise is the rapid pace at which it has expanded its maritime fleet. On Tuesday, The Warzone published data from the Office of U.S. Naval Intelligence documenting how the growing disparity between the U.S. and Chinese fleet sizes is “being helped by China’s shipbuilders being more than 200 times more capable of producing surface warships and submarines.”

According to a May Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, Chinese efforts to modernize its navy have been underway for the past 30 years. As a result of such investments, the PLAN has evolved into a “much more modern and capable force,” giving it the ability to regularly operate throughout regional waters and expand its operations in the “the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and waters around Europe.” 

To date, the PLAN is the largest navy in the world, boasting approximately 340 ships compared to the U.S.’ 300. This disparity is only expected to grow in the coming years.

Meanwhile, the U.S. shipbuilding industry has been in freefall for decades, with ship retirements outpacing the production of new vessels. The Navy’s struggle to grow its fleet centers around a variety of factors, including a lack of a long-term vision, inconsistent budgeting, and manpower deficiencies. Naval experts warn that failure to address these issues will continue America’s atrophy as a leading maritime power.

Differences in Capabilities and Readiness

While the size of a nation’s naval fleet is significant, it isn’t the only factor used when comparing competing maritime forces.

According to Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow for The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, analyses of any state’s navy should also consider overall capabilities (i.e., sensors and weapon systems) and readiness, which includes the ability to maintain and sustain its ships and aircraft and train its crew. 

“When you set two fleets, side by side,” it’s important to understand “their missions are different,” Sadler told The Federalist.

“[The U.S.] play[s] a deep-ocean, away game, and we need to have the ability to run strikes from [a] long range away,” he said. “We don’t have capabilities like that … We don’t have the long-range air-to-air missiles that we need … [and] don’t have the capability where we need it against the China threat.”

A series of war games conducted by the Center for Strategic & International Studies earlier this year found in the event of a military engagement with China, the U.S. would “likely” run out of key weaponry such as “long-range, precision-guided munitions — in less than one week in a Taiwan Strait conflict.” The simulation further concluded the U.S. is “not adequately prepared” for the current, global “security environment.”

In his remarks, Sadler described how China — while aspiring to become a dominant, global maritime power — has naval capabilities more suited for military conflicts near its coasts, adding that Beijing’s navy is “integrated with [its] air force and rocket forces [designed for] a near-sea campaign.” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, echoed similar sentiments, noting how the PLAN’s goal of maintaining dominance over regional waters has led to the development of a force more suited for local operations. 

“The PLA Navy is much more weighted towards frigates, corvettes, and diesel submarines … than it is towards larger platforms like cruisers … aircraft carriers, or large amphibious ships,” Clark told The Federalist. “And that’s because they largely haven’t had a significant power projection mission. They’ve been mostly focused on defending [local] waters from outside forces.”

While such circumstances would present difficulty for U.S. naval forces seeking to breach the area in the event of a military conflict with Beijing, it also means the PLAN is not necessarily equipped to handle long, drawn-out sea campaigns far from its coastline. Unlike conflicts in the open ocean, nearby naval campaigns give the PLAN protection from land-based, surface-to-surface missile systems, according to Clark. 

China’s fleet composition “creates these asymmetries where the PLAN is pretty strong if it’s at home [and] pretty weak if it deploys even beyond the first island chain, but certainly beyond the second island chain,” Clark added.

Regarding overall readiness, the U.S.’ dwindling fleet size and ongoing recruiting problems threaten to hamper its ability to respond to urgent crises. With fewer ships available, the Navy is forced to overuse its existing vessels, which means ships in need of regular maintenance are unable to acquire such repairs until another is available to take its place. Meanwhile, a lack of manpower necessary to maintain and run these ships means sailors are forced to work extra, leading to fatigue and potential accidents.

“Unfortunately, [this has] been the legacy of decades of atrophy in the U.S. Navy,” Sadler said.

Twitter Hands Out Eye-Popping Checks to Accounts via New Monetization Policy

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

Thursday provided some big news for people who have built large followings on Twitter. Elon Musk teased months prior that his social media site would begin sharing ad revenue with “content creators.”

What does that mean? It means that certain accounts that meet certain baselines are now effectively being paid to tweet.

If you are wondering if you should run to sign up, there are some big caveats. For one, you must get at least 5,000,000 impressions a month. How difficult is that to achieve? To give you some idea, I got 7,870,000 impressions in the last 28 days and I have 47,900 followers on the site. In other words, that’s a stipulation that is going to cut off almost all smaller accounts from being eligible.

Further, you must be a subscriber of Twitter Blue, which is the site’s monthly subscription service (the cost is $8 per month). That’s where there’s a bit of cynicism to be had here. Is this being done as a way to push people into signing up for Twitter Blue with the false hope that they’ll be able to monetize their accounts?

Anecdotally, I’ve heard from several acquaintances on the site who met the baselines to be paid that they tried to sign up for monetization months ago and their applications are still pending. So the question becomes just how likely someone is to be approved even if they sign up for Twitter Blue and meet the minimum engagement requirements. Twitter should probably be more open about that.

As to what kind of money you can theoretically make, that’s difficult to pin down. Right now, given that impressions are used as a baseline for qualifying, most are assuming that impressions are the equivalent of views on YouTube as far as calculating how much you make. If that’s true, then it takes about 46,000 impressions to make $1.00 on Twitter.

That means, had I signed up and gotten accepted, I would have made a grand total of $170 over the last month. But for the larger accounts, this appears to be very lucrative, with one user even being paid over $100,000 for his engagement going back to February when monetization went live and started adding up.

With that said, is this a good thing for Twitter over the long haul? I’m not so sure. Yes, it will keep some of the larger content creators in the fold and drive people to Twitter Blue with the hope of cashing in. Yet, most of the accounts I’m seeing that made out like bandits under this new system are clickbait accounts, some of which are notorious for stealing others’ work and reposting it for impressions. Monetization only encourages more of that style of posting, and is that kind of content really valuable for anyone using Twitter? Is that what’s going to keep people coming back year after year? I’ll leave you to decide.

✝ Passion sequel could be 2 films

 

Source: https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/07/14/watch-jim-caviezel-says-the-passion-of-the-christ-resurrection-might-be-two-films/

A full 20 years after Mel Gibson brought The Passion of the Christ to movie theaters, a sequel is coming and it might end up being in two parts.

Actor Jim Caviezel, who rose to global stardom playing Jesus in the smash hit film, says there may be more than one sequel to the blockbuster.

The news came as the actor appeared on “The Shawn Ryan Show” with Caviezel sharing the potential existed for two films.

“(Gibson’s) been on this for a long, long time… it will be the biggest film in history. It might be two films. Could be three, but I think it’s two,” he said.

Caviezel would play Jesus again in the upcoming The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection.

WATCH — Jim Caviezel Talks About ‘The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection’

A sequel has been rumored to be in the works since June 2016 when writer Randall Wallace told the Hollywood Reporter he and Gibson were working on a script.

In 2018, Caviezel told Breitbart that he’d seen the draft for The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection, and believed it would be “the biggest film in world history.”

The original 2004 epic biblical drama film was produced, directed, and co-written by Mel Gibson.

It remains the highest-grossing Christian film of all time, as well as being the highest grossing independent film of all time.

It received three nominations at the 77th Academy Awards in 2005, for Best Makeup, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score.

Comer promises next hearing reveals identity of Whistleblower X

Heather Hamilton reporting for Washington Examiner 

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said next week’s IRS whistleblower hearing will raise “questions that Joe Biden will have to answer” while revealing a witness’s identity.

“The American people are going to get to watch live both whistleblowers, including ‘Whistleblower X,’ who has never revealed his identity. He’ll do that the day of our hearing, and everyone can see,” Comer told Hannity.

“We have specific substantive questions about many of these wires, about many of these shell companies, about potential money laundering, about potential racketeering, and I believe that these two witnesses are going to be able to anchor those questions,” he added.

Comer said he expects the whistleblowers’ testimony will make for a “very productive” step forward in the Oversight Committee’s investigation into the alleged “criminal bribery scheme” between Hunter Biden, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and “foreign national” Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma.

“I think next week has the potential to be a very productive week with respect to our investigation,” Comer said. “There will be a lot of questions that Joe Biden will have to answer.”

“I don’t know how much longer the mainstream media can turn a blind eye to this because the evidence is overwhelming that many crimes were committed, and obviously Joe Biden had to be front and center in this,” he added.

The IRS whistleblower hearing is scheduled for July 19 at 1 p.m.

WATCH: New 'Ultra Right' Beer Blisters Embattled Bud Light in Hilarious Parody Ad

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

First of all, Ultra Right Beer is a real thing. The beer hit the ground running in April in response to Bud Light‘s historically ill-advised marketing hook-up with TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a 26-year-old man who pretends he’s a teenage girl as he rakes in cash in the disgusting process.

Ex-Donald Trump campaign manager for the state of Georgia, Seth Weathers, CEO of Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer, has cashed in on the Bud Light disaster, which shows no sign of slowing down.

The upstart company’s latest ad — shared first with Fox Business on Wednesday — features Weathers in a parody of the Burt Reynolds classic 1970s comedy “Smokey and the Bandit,” replete with an iconic black Pontiac Trans Am, and an impressive job by an actor portraying Jackie Gleason’s Sherriff Buford T. Justice.

The ad begins with Weathers crushing a Bud Light can with a baseball bat and saying:

That’s me, Conservative Dad. You’re probably wondering how I got here. This is an unlikely story of a fed-up American who had enough of the woke beer companies and decided to do something about it. I’m on a mission, and I won’t stop until all Americans have a 100 percent woke-free American beer company they can be proud of again.

Weathers’s Ultra Right Beer is off to a terrific start. According to Fox Business, “After only being in business for less than 15 days, Ultra Right was expected to surpass $1 million in sales, gaining over 10,000 customers and selling 20,000 six-packs at $20 a pop since the April launch. But those statistics have since changed as sales soar for the company.”

Weathers says in the ad that he hopes Ultra Right’s success will help “overthrow the blue-haired, woke school board members and replace them with normal people like us,” adding: “Never underestimate conservative dads on a mission.” To that end, Ultra Right is donating a portion of its revenue to the 1776 Project, a Trump-founded PAC that supports “patriotic education.”

Meanwhile, the disaster for Bud Light continues.

As we reported on Tuesday, images are circulating on social media indicating that the embattled brand has been hit with Costco’s “Death Star” in some locations — an asterisk in the upper right corner of price cards. The “Death Star” is used to inform customers that a product won’t be restocked.

And as we reported on Wednesday, Podcaster Joe Rogan tag-teamed with rapper O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson Sr. on The Joe Rogan Experience to burn Bud Light to a charcoal briquette. Rogan said, “People are sick of this s–t. They’re sick of social things like that, that are controversial getting stuffed in your face, where you have to accept. People are like, ‘I don’t want to accept it.’” Ice Cube added: “Politics really shouldn’t be in someone’s beer mug.”

The boycott of Bud Light is likely the most successful product boycott in history, principally because of two factors at play. First, and let’s be honest, people don’t drink light beer because of the taste. Hence, multiple easily-obtainable alternatives are available to former Bud Light drinkers. Second, successful boycotts produce demonstrable negative financial consequences for boycotted companies.

In the nearly three-and-a-half months since the Dylan Mulvaney disaster began, Anheuser-Busch InBev’s market capitalization value has continued to fall like a rock. The corporation’s market cap, which stood at $134.55 billion on March 31, stands at 100.38 billion, as I write, a decline of more than 25 percent.

Moreover, industry analysts suggest the company has permanently lost 15-20 percent of its market cap, which is the best example ever of “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

In celebration of Bud Light’s epic fall, I’m going to end this article here and crack open an icy-cold can of Ultra Right, even though I loathe light beer. Call it beer karma.

10 Abnormal Things Biden’s ‘Return To Normalcy’ Brought Americans

Out of a campaign that was built on a ‘return to normalcy,’ 

the American people have received a very abnormal 

few years under Joe Biden.

Samuel Boehlke reporting for The Federalist

As they worked tirelessly to oust Donald Trump from the White House in 2020, a chorus of corporate media, Never Trumpers, establishment Democrats, and Joe Biden himself promised Americans a Biden presidency would usher in a “return to normalcy.”

Two and a half years later, normalcy has yet to appear. Biden’s tenure has cemented a new “normal” of men pretending to be women, a march toward global conflict, and synthetic drugs in the White House. Decency and decorum? Not exactly. As the 2024 election season heats up, now is as good a time as ever to take stock of our cultural and political status quo and remind ourselves that the self-proclaimed unifier-in-chief and his administration’s lackeys have done everything in their power to upend our norms, not return to them. Here are 10 examples.

1. Obscene LGBT Activism

In exchange for Trump’s mean tweets, Biden’s normal includes men showing off their prosthetic breasts on the White House lawn. As LGBT extremists enforced pride month on the rest of the country, the Biden family saw fit to host a pride party at the symbolic residence. Three of their guests proudly stripped off their tops to flaunt their mutilated “true” selves.

After immediate backlash, the Biden administration noted the behavior was “inappropriate” and disinvited the three people involved — but there was nothing “normal” about nude White House party guests.

Speaking of indecent exposure, LGBT activism under the Biden administration has taken an obscene turn and not just during “pride month.” The White House’s gay and trans agenda has no limiting principle, with the president going out of his way to promote irreversible medical interventions for confused youths. This radicalism trickles down into defending pornographic books for children, explicit “education,” public nudity, and graphic sexual depictions in family-friendly public environments. 

2. Corruption

When Biden talked about normalcy, did he mean multimillion-dollar bribery schemes? Thanks to astute lawmakers like Sen. Chuck Grassley and brave whistleblowers within the Internal Revenue Service and FBI, Americans are finally seeing past the Biden-protection racket to the corrupt family business.  

Biden and his DOJ will pretend the sins are littler misdemeanor tax crimes limited to his poor addict son Hunter, but whistleblower testimony about a damning FBI document suggests “the big guy’s” hands are dirty — and the Justice Department has been covering it up.

3. Cocaine at the White House

The same administration that tracked down grandmas who happened to be in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, claims it won’t be able to figure out who brought cocaine into the high-security White House, complete with Secret Service agents, cameras, and records of every guest’s name, date of birth, and social security number, among other things.

Whether the synthetic drug belongs to Hunter Biden, an obvious suspect who is believed to be living in the White House right now, or someone else, Colombian bam-bam turning up at the president’s house isn’t normal.

4. Federal Weaponization and Censorship

To suppress its ideological and political opponents, the Biden administration found convenient ways to silence social media users. As recent House reports have shown, Biden’s agencies regularly engaged in collusion with the largest Big Tech companies to suppress free speech. Not only did they push for the censorship of speech that was factually wrong — speech that is still protected by the First Amendment — but they labeled information critical of the Democrat regime as “disinformation” and “misinformation” to justify stripping it from the public square. Worse, the Biden administration devised a category of speech that’s true but inconvenient, called “malinformation” — and worked to silence that too. 

5. Bidenomics

Despite recovering some of the jobs the government forced workers out of during Covid lockdowns, Biden’s economy overall has been disastrous for the American people. Inflation in particular has been a steady theme, with prices for essentials from groceries to gasoline soaring throughout the early years of Biden’s term. Prices are still high and many Americans are still suffering in 2023, but in January the president had the audacity to claim a high inflation rate was a good thing because it had “cooled” from the 40-year record Biden broke the previous year.

6. The Edge of World War

Aggressive support for Ukraine in its war with Russia has been a constant theme of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, this support edges us closer to a global war. With escalation as the apparent goal of this conflict, depleted stockpiles put the U.S. at increased risk of war with insufficient supplies to fight it. NATO’s recent shortening of Ukraine’s membership application process could threaten to drag NATO member countries, and America in particular, into a great power conflict once again.

Of course, this is in addition to rising threats from China and at America’s southern border, with foreign threats growing under the noses of a distracted national security apparatus.

7. Science-Denying HHS Assistant Secretary

How’s this for normal? Biden appointed a science-denying man as the first “female” four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The president selected Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender-identifying person and motivated LGBT ideologue, as the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. 

Levine previously promoted the most extreme policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during Covid and was responsible for thousands of excess deaths in Pennsylvania during his tenure as the head of the Pennsylvania Health Department. In his position as Assistant Secretary, Levine has consistently fought to deny biological realities and promote the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children.

8. Pop Star as a Medical Expert

In keeping with Biden’s elevation of the unqualified, his administration turned to celebrities such as Olivia Rodrigo to persuade Americans to fawn over a flailing Anthony Fauci. In 2021, Rodrigo partnered with Fauci and Biden to produce videos encouraging youth vaccination. Her fans, along with the rest of the world, realized her expertise in healing hearts through music did not extend to medicine; her vaccination video remains one of her least-liked social media posts. 

9. Senility and Lying

Probably the easiest return to normal would have been the election of a younger, coherent president who maintained some semblance of accountability to Americans. Instead, Biden offers regular doses of verbal incoherence, sleepiness, gaffes, uncomfortable whispers and shouts, and tumbles. These are all bad looks, but not as bad as the lies that spill out of the president on the daily, which The Federalist has tracked since his first day in office. Lying may be normal for Biden, but it shouldn’t be normal for the presidency, and neither should perceived physical and cognitive weakness on the world stage. 

10. War on SCOTUS

It’s no surprise attacks on the Supreme Court have ramped up under the Biden administration. After all, this president evidently believes he’s above the law, and the court has disagreed, smacking down his administration on everything from student loans to Covid jab mandates. Not to mention other blows to the left during Biden’s tenure, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 303 Creative decision, and a university affirmative action takedown.

With the help of the media, the Biden administration has gotten bold about its plans to undercut and circumvent the court wherever it can. And the president is not alone; private universities will also be doing their best to dodge the law to keep supporting racial discrimination.