The Hysterical Left Goes to War With Trump

There is no way out of our contemporary crisis without struggle, pain, and sacrifice

by Josiah Lippincott for American Greatness

Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General, announced in July that she is pursuing felony charges against the individuals who claimed to be Trump electors from the state in the 2020 election. 

Among those charged is the head of the Republican National Committee’s chapter in Michigan, Kathy Berden, as well as the former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, Meshawn Maddock, and Shelby Township Clerk Stan Grot. 

On average, these electors are in their early 70s. Each is being charged with eight felonies which range from a maximum of five to 14 years in prison. If convicted, many of these individuals are likely to die in prison. Their alleged crime? Claiming that they were electors from the state of Michigan in documents sent to Congress and the National Archives after the 2020 election. For this, they are being charged with multiple counts of election fraud, forgery, and conspiracy.

This is an utterly absurd and vicious political prosecution. The pro-Trump slate of electors was ignored by Congress. There was no fraud perpetrated. These patriotic Michigan citizens argued, correctly, that Trump won the state of Michigan, in part, because in 2020, Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, illegally sent absentee ballot applications to every voter in Michigan. 

The relevant statute, MCL 168.759(3), states clearly that only the voter is allowed to ask for a mail-in ballot application. Benson ignored the law and thereby cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the election. Mail-in ballots on this scale are not trustworthy. There is no way to ensure that the person who is supposed to fill out the ballot in fact did so. Shotgunning mail-in ballots across the state destabilized Michigan elections beyond the tipping point. 

The 16 Michigan citizens being prosecuted are patriots. It is Jocelyn Benson and Dana Nessel who should be charged with fraud and conspiracy.

Unfortunately, however, we live in clown world. Leftists get away with accusing their enemies of doing what they, in fact, are guilty of doing. They love to rub it in their political opponents’ faces. The ritual humiliation is part of the fetish. 

I know Meshawn Maddock, one of the accused. Her husband, Matt, is a member of the state legislature and a vocal member of the pro-Trump wing. America has two standards of justice: one for members of favored groups—like the Democratic Party’s communist paramilitaries—and another for ordinary Americans. Political repression isn’t some far off fear to me. It is already happening to people I know and care about. It will only get worse. 

The Left dominates every prominent institution in American life. Every Fortune 500 company, every government agency (including the military), every major religious domination—all of them are on the same team. 

These prosecutions are only the beginning of the political repression in store for the American Right. How many times will Joe Biden say he will fight his domestic enemies with nuclear weapons before people understand that he isn’t joking? In the minds of those who are in power, if you voted for Trump, you are an extremist and a fascist.

In the words of Joe Biden, those who do not support transgender surgery for minors are anti-semites. During World War II, the American government fire-bombed women and children for having a fascist and anti-semitic government. Do you really think that kind of rhetoric would be deployed if they wouldn’t be willing to do it again?

If the federal government charged me with multiple made-up felonies, no one in power would come to my defense. If the feds sent in SWAT to murder me in my sleep, no mainstream Republican would bat an eye. All Joe Biden and his minions need to do is invoke the magic words “white supremacist/racist/Nazi/etc.” and the conservative cowards would shut their mouths and turn away.

At this point, I am preparing myself for the possibility that Donald Trump goes to prison. Our rulers have crossed the Rubicon. They are hysterical and vicious. The 91 felony counts against Trump are a symbol of the Biden regime’s all out assault on its greatest political threat.

I expect the Michigan 16 and so many others who have been persecuted because of their support for Trump to be prosecuted and convicted. This regime is out for blood, and right now, it seems likely they will get it. 

Too many conservatives still believe that politics can still be about winning arguments in the “marketplace of ideas.” The Left, by contrast, correctly understands our public square as a battlefield. They are at war with the American people and do not pretend otherwise.

Since 1933 and the rise to prominence of FDR, America has been an occupied country, governed by a ruling class that hates the nation’s older way of life and wants to see America on the side of the global revolutionary Left. This is why FDR’s administration was filled with communists and the American government gave $300 billion to the USSR in its existential war of survival against the fascists. America did not remain neutral in that conflict because the American ruling class was explicitly on the side of the communists.

This is a tough pill to swallow. Most Americans would prefer to indulge in speculation about their 401(k), fantasy football league, and cable television than face the truth. NFL.com and pornhub, after all, are always a click away. 

To those with ears to hear and eyes to see, the COVID lockdowns, the transgender insanity, BLM riots, and the 2020 coup against President Trump reveal the truth. The planetary communist revolution didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin War. Instead, the revolution came here in a new guise. 

The American occupational class was not fighting for freedom and democracy in the Cold War. That struggle was instead a conflict between two factions of the global Left, over which one would exert planetary dominance. The feminist, anti-racist, homosexual faction won out over the Marxist-Leninists. We got trans pride flags instead of the hammer and sickle, not that there is much difference between the two.

In reality, there has been no real American right-wing since 1941, when the America First movement–with its platform of protectionism and non-intervention–imploded. Trump was the first real attempt to return to the pre-war conservative orientation since at least Nixon and look how the Left hates him! Trump’s pro-America message on the border, the economy, and crime was, as we see now, effectively illegal. America is not allowed to be a real nation. That is why the ruling caste had to coup Trump out of office—because he had the audacity to suggest America should once again be a real country that defends her real interests.

There is no way out of this mess but to push through it. Anyone who aspires to higher office on the Right needs to understand the stakes involved. If you fail, you will go to prison. Period. The odds of successfully prevailing against the planetary consensus in favor of the rule of scum are tough

The time to prepare is now. 

People ask me all the time what they can do in response to the troubles ahead. I answer: steel yourself. Prepare to suffer. Harden your heart. Harden your body. You aren’t going to make it if you believe that this regime will let you cash out your retirement account in peace. 

As for those who would lead the American Right of the future: If you aren’t ready to risk everything, up to your very life, you have no business in the fight. You must be ready to roll the dice at the moment of decision. Nothing else will suffice. 

The global Left is not all powerful. There is a possibility of victory. The global rule of scum is not inevitable, nor can it be permanent. But there is no way out of our contemporary crisis without struggle, without pain, and without sacrifice. 

Prepare yourself now while you still have time.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- Sept 19

 

How Biden Will Circle the Wagons ~ VDH

As impeachment becomes inevitable, the President's defense schemes are predictable

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

The strategies of saving the Biden presidency from an impeachment and a Senate trial despite overwhelming evidence of his corruption are starting to emerge.

The Family is confronted with damning evidence from the laptop, from the testimonies of Hunter’s business associates Bobulinksi and Archer, from Ukrainian oligarchs and Viktor Shokin, from IRS whistleblowers, from FBI writs, from a likely pseudonymous Biden trove of 4,000 emails to his son and associates, and from the absolute paranoia of a White House that must constantly change its narrative of denials to adjust to a growing portrait of utter corruption, bribery, and perhaps even the treason of warping U.S. policy to fit Biden family interests.

The Defense in Depth 

One of their strategies is to deny, then hedge, then ignore, then grow silent—and repeat the wash/rinse/spin cycle of stonewalling as many times as necessary to evade the mounting truth.

Insidiously Joe Biden has retreated from his once loud protestations that he supposedly had no idea of what Hunter and his associates were doing. Such a patently dishonest denial set the model that the President would have no compunction about lying to the American people until the evidence of his wrongdoing becomes overwhelming.

But this first line of defense did not crumble for years—only to be replaced by a second line of denial: Biden may have known of Hunter’s shenanigans, but he had no business interests with him. That was another blatant untruth.

And that additional stalling also allowed Biden to ignore the closing walls of incrimination for even more months. When these two forward lines of defense collapsed, as the Biden consortium knew they eventually would, a retreat to a third line of defense followed: yes, Joe knew, after all, of Hunter’s miscreant shakedowns; and, yes, Joe, after all, conceded that from time to time he did meet Hunter’s business associates, and upon requests made phone calls to Hunter’s clientele. But he did not profit from such knowledge and associations. Instead an upright old Joe from Scranton was playing along with the “illusion” of influence peddling: Scranton naiveté is not D.C. criminality.

Biden’s tripartite lines of defense always got shorter and shallower as evidence mounted. But so far Biden has managed to consume 31 months of his presidency through these strategic retreats. His fourth and final line of defense will likely be that he was involved, that he had rather than feigned contact, but that he did nothing other than what scores of other high-ranking politicians do who rub shoulders with would-be miscreants, sycophants, and crooks—and so did not knowingly take “loans” and “gifts” that had strings attached.

To breach this fourth defense line, House Republicans will have to break through the labyrinth of Biden paywalls and find how much money was rerouted into Biden coffers. And then they must additionally compare what came into the Biden hands with a) what the family reported on their respective income tax returns, and b) whether their various properties and lifestyles were remotely possible without such massive hidden income. And getting bank records from the Bidens will be near impossible.

The Ukraine Factor 

Joe Biden has successfully profited by using American foreign aid to stop prosecutorial inquiries into his son’s and, indirectly per the laptop admissions, his own quid pro quo payments from corrupt Ukrainians.

The firing of Viktor Shokin who knew of Hunter Biden’s corruption was one of the most blatantly corrupt and self-interested acts of a Vice President since the career of Spiro Agnew. Still, there is no reason why Biden would now give up such a proven successful strategy.

Yet there are important issues for Biden at stake. One, Viktor Shokin is convinced that the Bidens were recipients of Ukrainian bribes intended to win U.S. foreign aid and influence over American foreign policy in Eastern Europe and vis a vis Russia.

And two, an FBI confidential source has sworn that “a foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them — 17 such recordings.” And three, to corroborate testimonies from these Ukrainian players or to subpoena the purported 17 recordings would now translate into risking the wrath of Joe Biden the giver of massive Ukrainian military aid—now likely over $100 billion—and formerly on record of being perfectly willing to cancel Ukrainian aid unless Kyiv bent to his personal agenda.

Now in an existential war, Ukrainians will likely not wish either Viktor Shokin or Mykola Zlochevsky, former head of Burisma and said to be in possession of the 17 recordings (including two that purportedly involve Joe Biden directly), to embarrass much less help to remove Biden by producing evidence confirming their charges.

So we should assume the Ukrainian government will do its best to protect Biden from fellow Ukrainian accusers, mostly by silencing any Ukrainian who would dare endanger their stream of arms and money. For Kyiv, the ongoing Biden exemption from impeachment and conviction is likely seen as a matter of life and death.

The Big Lie

A third defense has been outright lying, the bolder and more absurd, all the better. Here Joe Biden has prepped the lying battlefield, whether deliberately or inadvertently, both through his pathological fabrications about his autobiography and the events of our time, and by the collapse of his cognitive facilities.

Either way, his lies are contextualized by the media as “that’s just ole Joe spinning his tales.” In Biden’s fantasy world, he visited Ground Zero the day after the September 11 attacks, he taught a course on “political theory” at the University of Pennsylvania, his son Beau came home from Iraq in a coffin, and a catastrophic fire nearly consumed the Biden residence.

All these were not only lies, but callous lies that played on the emotions of those in crisis and suffering—to the purported empathetic advantage of Joe Biden himself. So Biden has no compunction of lying ad infinitum.

Remember, for years he lied that he fired Shokin because he was corrupt, that his government knew that, that the Europeans agreed, and that he did not leverage U.S. aid to ensure Shokin did not pursue Hunter’s Burisma nefariousness.

All that was a total lie, but a media-protected lie nonetheless that served Biden well for at least five years.

So we should expect the Left to embrace the full Biden lie and claim his serial contact with Hunter was the natural concern of a dutiful father, one who has suffered family tragedies and merely periodically called and emailed to cement family solidarity with other equally aggrieved Bidens.

And when evidence mounts that Biden really did receive funds via Hunter’s dummy companies we will be told that these were loans, or Joe was gifting them to grandchildren—or, most likely, Joe was completely unaware that such funds eventually found their way into his bank accounts and were used to buy and rent his various sumptuous residences.

Trump 24/7

At each stage of the walls closing around Joe Biden, a commensurate “Trump did it” news bulletin emerged. Collate the indictments or the leaks about impending indictments from the supposedly uncoordinated work of Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis both with iconic primary election dates ahead, and periodic revelations about the depth of Biden family corruption—and the synchronized distraction is quite stunning.

Expect in the next year for each new incriminating document released, each new witness that comes forward with a tale of Biden corruption, almost immediately the headlines will blare about a new Trump gag order, a new scheduled Trump court appearance, a new flipped witness cooperating with a prosecutor, and a new leak about a “certain” conviction and jail time. The new media war will make its old Russian collusion’s “all-star,” “hunter-killer team,” and “dream team” prosecutors and the “bombshell” and “walls are closing in” revelations seem like child’s play.

A Hit-bottom Media

After being utterly discredited by fixating for years on the Russian “collusion” hoax, and hyping the laptop Russian “disinformation” fable, any professional media would by now have apologized, conducted mass firings, and pledged to report the news rather than massage and invent it.

But no sooner does one media embarrassment end than the media ventures onto another, on the theory that it is so discredited and has hit bottom that it no longer has any reputation to defend. So a now liberated but bankrupt media feels it matters nothing whether its mythologies have a grain of truth.

The Biden family corruption and the exemptions given Hunter Biden by a corrupt Biden department of Justice have been contextualized by the media as a prelude to what we can expect of the impeachment inquiry.

In the modern American media, a Trump phone call threatening to delay offensive military aid until the Ukraine government could guarantee that its operatives were not empowering the Biden quid pro quo clan was an impeachable offense. A self-confessed Biden effort to alter US policy to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor, dutifully investigating the Hunter Biden/Biden family corruption, by threatening to cancel all U.S. aid to Kyiv was mere “familial” concern. Where incidentally is the outrage from current vehement supporters of blank-check, on-to-Moscow support for Ukraine over Joe Biden’s prior threats to cut critical military aid to Ukraine in efforts to ensure uninterrupted money streams to his own family treasure chest

In sum, the media is more tarnished than ever, and therefore more dangerous because it accepts it has no reputation left to defend and now is entirely unbound to invent, to fabricate, and to smear.

The Deep State 

In 2017 under media and Democratic pressure, the Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions was bullied into recusing himself. He appointed in his place Robert Mueller as special counsel, empowered by an unlimited budget and a blank-check concerning time and resources to find “collusion.”

In contrast, in 2023 the Biden-appointed AG Merrick Garland, under fierce criticism for delaying the Hunter Biden investigation in order to run out of the clock on the statute of limitations on tax fraud, appointed David Weiss as special counsel. He was the prior chief culprit in providing cover for Hunter from indictments. So the proverbial fox is now in charge of the hen house.

In 2019 the “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella was considered a sacrosanct patriot, even though he had no firsthand knowledge of the supposed crimes he was accusing the president of committing. Instead, the whistleblower was selectively being spoon-fed information from Alexander Vindman, the expatriate U.S. Lt. Colonel, who, in the midst of his accusations, admitted he was offered the Ministry of Defense by the Ukrainian government. Vindman, currently in the second round of his careerist Ukrainian melodrama, is self-appointed CEO of his middleman company, seeking to profit from the war by facilitating the transfer and service of arms from the U.S. government to Ukraine.

Note the difference: in 2023 whistle blowers are now considered rogues, whether they be honest IRS investigators sickened by the corruption of their own DOJ prosecutorial counterparts, or FBI agents tired of the warping of their agency to facilitate the Biden coverups.

The net result will be a near impossible congressional task in forcing any federal agency to honor a congressional subpoena, as most will follow the Eric Holder model of a cocky snub of Congress with certainty of exemption.

The “Do You Really Want Kamala?” Factor

If the evidence trumps the Biden reliance on administrative state suppression, media bias and character assassination, there is one ace in the Biden hole—Kamala Harris. She is, as has been widely remarked upon, the Spiro Agnew of our age. (Yet the latter, in fact, on the stump was a Cicero in comparison to Harris’s 500-word vocabulary.)

In other words, the country is more scared of a not corrupt Harris than it is a senile and crooked Biden. And Biden has done nothing to dispel those impressions given that such a Nixonian fear of his Vice President is his last ticket to finishing out his term.

Not just Biden but millions in the country are anxious that the president is one fall, one new email disclosure from oblivion. His ensuing removal would not just give Harris the presidency in the next year and a half, but also the advantage of incumbency going into the 2024 election year and beyond.

So expect that the more the proverbial noose tightens around Biden, all the more his West Wing will leak daily stories about Harris’s puerility, her lightness of being, and her abject incompetence, and the dangers she would pose to the republic.

The DEFCON 1 Option

There is a final nihilist gambit. If Biden is confronted with his own email evidence of corruption, tapes of his agreement to financial exchanges, bank accounts with large foreign deposits, and direct testimonies that he received cash, he has one last refuge: the “Hunter did it all!” ruse.

Hunter is all too aware of his own danger. Collate his mischievous recent grifting artistic career, the Malibu-renting Hunter trying to plead poverty to reduce child-support payments, the mysterious cocaine that turns up in a West Wing cubicle, his laptop anger at his Mr. Big Guy’s and Mr. 10 Percent’s underappreciation of Hunter’s bagman role, and Hunter’s threat to call the President of the United States to testify that a now trapped Hunter is innocent of everything.

The resulting picture that emerges is an out-of-control Hunter—who lost a laptop, a crack pipe, and an illegally registered handgun—now very worried that he will become Joe’s scapegoat.

Hunter still believes he is a Samson that can pull down the Biden temple upon them all—if the alternative is that he is the only Biden to stew for years in jail.

Remember, Hunter also knows his father all too well—Joe’s long resume of plagiarism, greed, arrogance, corruption, lying, and fantasies—and so rightly believes at some point Joe might easily shrug, and in one of his “senile” moments, utter, “Well, no Joke, man—it was all Hunter’s stuff, not mine.”

Biden Regime Takes First Amendment Assassination Attempt to the Supreme Court

On Sept. 14, the Department of Justice made an emergency Supreme Court appeal to keep the feds controlling what Americans read and see online.

Joy Pullman reporting for The Federalist

By Wednesday, Missouri v. Biden plaintiffs must respond in the Supreme Court to Biden administration claims that federal bureaucrats should get to filter everything Americans say via the internet for the sake of “national security.”

On Sept. 14, the Department of Justice (DOJ) made an emergency Supreme Court appeal to avoid lower court injunctions preventing the White House and federal agencies including the FBI from telling internet speech monopolies which keywords, posts, and accounts to suffocate. The court granted the appeal the same day, pausing lower-court injunctions stopping the federal government from holding a gun to internet monopolies’ heads to tell them what ideas to choke from the online public square.

The Biden administration didn’t contest any of the more than 20,000 pages of court documents showing essentially every major federal agency pressuring social media monopolies to take down ideas powerful Democrats don’t like or face federal lawsuits, investigations, and the removal of their monopoly powers.

Instead, it argued that obeying the First Amendment “imposed unprecedented limits on the ability of the President’s closest aides to use the bully pulpit to address matters of public concern, on the FBI’s ability to address threats to the Nation’s security, and on the CDC’s ability to relay public health information at platforms’ request.”

Every President But Biden Could Respect Speech and Still Fight Wars

As independent reporter Matt Taibbi noted Friday, the position of Biden’s Department of Justice is essentially that the First Amendment endangers national security: “only government action against protected free speech remained barred by this injunction. The Biden administration just told the world ‘grave and irreparable harm’ would result from such limitations.”

That would be news to Presidents Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Reagan, to name a few wartime presidents who were limited by that same Bill of Rights the Biden administration can’t seem to fathom how to function within. If shutting down Americans’ ideas online is necessary to protect national security, government can do literally anything in the name of national security. This kind of argument is in the same category as New Mexico’s governor claiming that because she declared a public emergency, people don’t get Second Amendment rights.

Taibbi also notes that the DOJ flat-out lies to the Supreme Court, apparently attempting to obfuscate the law and the government’s constitutional duties with hysterical falsehoods.

In oral arguments in August, the government complained about activities they claimed were threatened, despite the fact that those activities — communications about ‘criminal activity or criminal conspiracies’ or posts that ‘threaten the public safety’ — were exempted by [Judge Terry] Doughty’s injunction. This argument visibly irritated appelate judges. In this application now, they’re complaining to Supreme Court judges about things they’re already allowed to do.

Lying to courts and the public seems to be a part of the administration’s strategy in this case. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, part of the plaintiffs’ legal team in Missouri v. Biden, pointed out the irony in an interview last week with Tracy Beanz: “It’s dripping with irony that the people who claim to be protecting us from misinformation are promulgating misinformation. I mean, that speaks to the dystopian, Orwellian nature of this vast censorship enterprise.”

Lawsuit documents found federal officials not just muting specific ideas and persons online but also influencing platforms’ algorithms and content moderation policies. That means anyone using Facebook, Google, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and the like today is limited in his or her communication by government officials’ behind-the-scenes pressure. Even if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs, that will continue.

Government Doesn’t Have Speech Rights; Citizens Do

The Biden DOJ’s Supreme Court application claims that stopping government officials from censoring Americans online restricts officials’ freedom of speech. This is ridiculous, because government officials have no freedom of speech in their official capacities. Their official acts are constrained by multiple things, chief of which is the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution bans the federal government — acting through its multitudinous employees — from “abridging the freedom of speech.”

The president may of course use the bully pulpit, but he may not actually bully Americans. He cannot threaten companies or individuals with government harm if they disagree with him. He can speak, but he cannot compel. If his or any other government employees’ speech pressures companies or individuals, it violates the Constitution.

This is in fact one of the reasons the First Amendment exists: to protect Americans from the abuse of government power. There is a massive power imbalance between the government and the average citizen — even between the government and powerful companies! — and the First Amendment exists to help tip that balance toward the individual. It secures the rights of citizens against government officials, not vice versa.

The Biden administration has this so far backward that one wonders whether they’re making this Con Law 101 mistake on purpose to confuse the public, if not the court.

Anger a Bureaucrat, Lose Everything

Given the size of the federal government and its many means of making life miserable for those whose use of their freedoms conflicts with bureaucrats’ desires, in many cases a government official merely speaking in his official capacity carries an implied threat. Court precedents have recognized this.

Not only that, but throughout the emails and texts this case surfaced in discovery is not just implied but direct coercion. The president literally claimed social media companies’ initial refusal to implement all his demanded speech codes was “killing people.” He threatened to hold Mark Zuckerberg criminally liable.

The White House press secretary threatened to erase the companies’ entire business model and cost them billions by “revisiting Section 230.” Myriad emails show the companies’ leaders experienced federal demands as coercion.

People aren’t stupid. They see thousands of prominent examples of government flexing its power over noncompliant individuals, like the Federal Trade Commission deciding to investigate Elon Musk for a tweet after he bought Twitter and then more recently the Justice Department going after another of his companies for allegedly not hiring enough foreigners. Those are ridiculous lawfare exercises, and they will cost Musk millions.

The Administrative State Supercharges Government’s Coercive Power

Smart people and companies without the millions to withstand unhinged bureaucrats’ fury — or the desire to waste millions on such an effort — keep their heads down and their mouths shut. One could mention many more shock-and-awe efforts by federal agencies that have similar effects.

Those include the FBI’s surveillance of conservative Christians — about which its director lied to Congress — and its raids on peaceful pro-lifers in front of their kids. They also include the U.S. Department of Education opening a “civil rights” investigation into journalist Chris Rufo in August for allegedly using an accurate pronoun.

There are more than 185,000 pages in the Federal Register. It’s impossible for normal Americans to comply with effective laws that voluminous. That makes every American guilty before being proven innocent at great expense, a de facto criminal whose crimes are just waiting to be found by a motivated government official. Bureaucrats have the power to unilaterally charge, investigate, prosecute, and declare guilty anyone they decide to target, all before the matter reaches a court of law.

This gives federal officials coercion power simply through “asking” for something. A person with the power to ruin your life because you made some non-PC remark a bureaucrat thinks could violate Title VII is asking for a favor. You wouldn’t want him to get mad and start looking for all the felonies and thought crimes you’re surely guilty of, would you? Better to just comply.

My Thoughts Don’t Belong to the Government

This is how Democrats are using the incredible power of government to silence their political opponents. So if we needed strong, large, nearly unlimited First Amendment protections centuries before we accrued a massive government able to crucify anyone it sets its sights on over something as little as a non-PC opinion, today’s Americans need huge speech protections even more now that our government has so much more power than when the First Amendment was enacted.

Imagine if Donald Trump had used his presidential power to erase from the internet claims the 2020 election was fair and accurately tabulated. Suppose his justifications for this were the same as the Biden administration’s are now: protecting the nation’s “cognitive infrastructure,” “national security,” and “election integrity” from “foreign interference,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.”

Not only would every single legacy news corporation lose their lids over this kind of totalitarian behavior, but Trump would have been sued to the moon and back and lost in every court at least as fast as his 2020 election cases were tossed. Biden deserves no less from not just the Supreme Court, but from every American and institution in this country.

Versailles Palace Celebrates 400th Anniversary; Hosts King Charles III

 

English cheese on the menu at Versailles banquet for King Charles  

PARIS, Sept 19 (Reuters) - France, a country that prides itself on its many fine cheeses, has honoured a British blue cheese by placing it on the menu for a banquet for Britain's King Charles at the Palace of Versailles on Wednesday.

French President Emmanuel Macron will host Charles and his wife Queen Camilla during their three-day visit to France, with the state dinner in the famed Hall of Mirrors at the former French royal palace a particular highlight.

The menu will feature blue lobster, Bresse French poultry with mushroom gratin, and a selection of French and English cheeses, including Comte from France, and Stichelton from Britain, according to Macron's office.

"Contrary to the often-held view that you can't find any decent food in England, it's totally untrue, you can find great products there and especially great cheese," Alsatian cheesemonger Bernard Antony, who picked the cheese selection for the royal dinner, told L'Alsace newspaper.  

Stichelton is a blue cheese similar to Stilton, except that it does not use pasteurised milk. The name comes from an ancient form of the name of Stilton village in Cambridgeshire, England.

It was named one of the world's top five cheeses by French chef Anne-Sophie Pic, who is in charge of the lobster and crab starters at the state dinner.

"I love this cheese. I think it's a beauty. It's very English, you only find it there," Pic told Reuters.  

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/english-cheese-menu-versailles-banquet-king-charles-2023-09-19/   

Leftists’ Open-Border and Defund-Police Policies Have Come Home to Roost

The left’s compassion was always 

meant to be costless — to them.

posted by J.T. Young at The Federalist

Until the economic cost of an action is understood, you do not truly understand the action itself.  So, it is with today’s left. Nowhere has this lack of understanding become clearer than in the left’s actions to defund the police and open America’s borders. And nowhere has the price of ignorance been greater.  

In June 2020, Shivanthi Sathanandan, the second vice chairwoman of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party posted on Facebook: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE. The. Minneapolis. Police. Department…MPD has systematically failed the Black Community, they have failed ALL OF US. It’s time to build a new infrastructure that works for ALL communities. If you are still disagreeing with that BASIC FACT, I’m not sure what to say to you.” 

So, enough people agreed with Sathanandan, and the city built a “new infrastructure.”  The only problem is that it does not “work for ALL communities,” most notably Sathanandan and her family. Tragically, Sathanandan said she was beaten bloody during a carjacking in her driveway in broad daylight as her children watched.  

On Sept. 8, Sathanandan again posted on Facebook, but this time the message was very different from the one three years earlier. Describing being “violently carjacked” by “four very young men, all carrying guns,” she said: “These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers…With no hesitation and no remorse…catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM. PERIOD.”

On the East Coast, 1,500 miles away, though still in a deep-blue area, Woburn, Massachusetts’ Democrat Mayor Scott Galvin was lamenting the surge in migrants that were pouring into his small town of 40,000. “We’re going above and beyond, while some communities around us are not being impacted, and we don’t have endless capacity in our schools. The benefits that are bestowed on migrants make the state a very attractive destination, and without some changes, this challenge is not going to abate.” Succinctly put, it is unsustainable.  

Woburn’s plight is the result of President Joe Biden’s open border policy and Massachusetts’ unique right-to-shelter law. The New York Times said the law “guarantees every family with children a place to stay.” Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has helpfully decided to address the effect rather than the cause, declaring a state of emergency and calling out the National Guard. This is at least more than the Biden administration has done. 

Anyone interested in looking can see that the Biden administration’s “Vacancy” sign hung out on our southern border is disastrous. And in the case of Woburn, when the disaster comes to your door — instead of the door of, say, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Florida — you have no choice but to look. But even before the crisis came, it was foreseeable. Free goods (in this case a plethora of U.S. taxpayer-funded benefits) will be consumed freely — as Woburn is learning.  

Karl Marx’s hollow rhetoric — “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” — has always foundered on harsh economic reality. Recipients’ wants inevitably and quickly become needs, and equally quickly the abilities of providers diminish. Demand for free stuff in short order outstrips the supply. As Galvin observed, the state’s right-to-shelter law was “passed at a different time and was not meant to cover what we’re seeing now,” i.e., it was not meant to be put into practice in any meaningful way.  

In the sad case of the Minnesota carjacking, economists had predicted the outcome of defunding the police even as the sanctimonious chants were still ringing out. Crime does pay. Everyone knows it is cheaper to steal others’ work than to do it yourself. Only by raising the cost of crime through enforcement does society make the cost of lawlessness prohibitive. Reduce the cost of crime and you get a greater demand for it.  

Undoubtedly, many in America’s left are pillorying their sister in Minnesota and brother in Massachusetts for their temerity to speak the truth — their audacity to see the obvious. The left does not canonize the world’s Mother Teresas, those paragons of self-sacrifice who lead by example. Instead, the left’s saints call for your sacrifice and lead by expropriation. The reality of their position was always clear in the moniker “limousine liberals”: riding up for the photo and then driving away from the consequences. 

The left’s compassion was always meant to be costless — to them. And they pursue it only so long as it remains costless to them. It is NIMBY politics, tokensim, and virtue-signaling at their most hypocritical. The left is often upfront about this, like when they call for taxing the rich and wealthy corporations to supposedly make their policies costless. But things are only rhetorically costless; economically, everything has a cost. And as America is now seeing, the left has no intention of paying it. Instead, they intend for you to pay in blood and dollars.  

President Trump Will Give Speech in Detroit on Night of Second GOPe Debate for First Losers

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

A smart and strategic move by President Trump, the MAGA warrior of the middle and working-class.

On the night of the second GOPe ‘first loser’ debate, President Donald Trump will be in Detroit giving remarks to striking union workers, pipefitters and various trade workers.

The core of the MAGA coalition is the working and forgotten men and women who keep this nation functioning; a constituency that extends far beyond all races, colors, creeds and affiliations.

(New York Times) – Former President Donald J. Trump is planning to travel to Detroit on the day of the next Republican primary debate, according to two Trump advisers with knowledge of the plans, injecting himself into the labor dispute between striking autoworkers and the nation’s leading auto manufacturers.

The trip, which will include a prime-time speech before current and former union members, is the second consecutive primary debate that Mr. Trump is skipping to instead hold his own counterprogramming. He sat for an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that posted online during the first G.O.P. presidential debate in August.

The decision to go to Michigan just days after the United Auto Workers went on strike shows the extent to which Mr. Trump wants to be seen as looking past his primary rivals — and the reality that both he and his political apparatus are already focused on the possibility of a rematch with President Biden.

So instead of attending the next G.O.P. debate — on Sept. 27 in California at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum — Mr. Trump intends to speak to over 500 workers, with his campaign planning to fill the room with plumbers, pipefitters, electricians, as well as autoworkers, according to one of the Trump advisers familiar with the planning. Mr. Trump has not directly addressed the wage demands of striking workers and has attacked the union leadership, but he has tried to more broadly cast himself on the side of autoworkers. (read more)

As a businessman and Main Street builder, President Trump knows the value of labor and is well known for treating his employees and staff exceptionally well.  As a builder in many metropolitan areas, for decades Donald Trump has maintained a good working relationship with labor unions and trade workers.

One of the distinctions that separated Donald Trump from the professional Republican field in 2016, was his support for organized labor and his belief that all deals and business enterprises should start with a common respect for the people who do the work.  Many stories have been told about President Trump just listening to the people closest to the work to find optimal solutions for the organization; it has been a very effective style of leadership.

While the politics of labor leadership often align with the Democrat Party, sometimes against the wishes of the members, Donald Trump has a unique way of winning the hearts of the workers, while drawing a respectful distinction with union leadership.  Quite simply, Trump knows the game and uses his own personal style to authentically connect to the workforce.