Friday, October 6, 2023

Federalism Is Working – Pushing Back Against Weaponization, The Potemkin Village in DC Is Not


As we rightly stop the cycle of Battered Conservative Syndrome, here’s a concrete reality we can all understand easily.

If the people who are weaponizing government really held any concern about the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government holding them accountable, they would not be expanding their weaponization operations.

The White House controls the actions of the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), through cabinet appointments and leadership staff. Each of these agencies are expanding their domestic targeting operations, not reducing them.

That expanded targeting is happening simultaneously with the House Subcommittee on Weaponization in place, presumably an oversight body. That reality tells us all we need to know about the intentions of the congressional subcommittee and the perspective of the government agencies toward accountability; there simply isn’t any.

The DC construct of that subcommittee is a Potemkin village, a false front, intended to give the illusion of something that is factually non-existent. That’s the bitter reality of the situation, and feel free to confront any representative of DC with that reality. It is a stark, demonstrable and self-evident reality.

There’s only one way that dynamic is going to change, and that can only come from the introduction of something that currently does not exist.

Donald J Trump – “I am running for President, have a 62 Point lead over Republicans, and am up on Crooked Joe Biden, despite the Democrat Party’s massive Law-fare, Weaponization, and Election Interference efforts, by 4 to 11 Points, but will do whatever is necessary to help with the Speaker of the House selection process, short term, until the final selection of a GREAT REPUBLICAN SPEAKER is made – A Speaker who will help a new, but highly experienced President, ME, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” [SOURCE]

On the optimistic side of that pill swallowing, federalism is working (somewhat) as a bulwark against the corrupt institutions. The state of Missouri has won key victories against the DC surveillance state with 5th Circuit Court rulings blocking the Biden administration from censoring the thoughts and speech of American citizens.

Additionally, in a key addition to the appellate court ruling, the 5th circuit has expanded their injunction to now cover CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. [SEE RULING HERE]

The court has stated that CISA “shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

.

The professionally Republican DC effort to stop the weaponization of government has been yet another exhibition in abject failure.

Personally, I believe that failure is a feature, not a flaw.

Perhaps President Trump meeting with Republican leadership on Tuesday can introduce something new that changes the dynamic. However, given the nature of how professionally Republican politicians like Jim Jordan operate in government, as one wing of a UniParty effort, I wouldn’t count on it.

Jim Jordan is the Chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government.


X22, And we Know, and more- Oct 6

 




Between The Old Right and New Right, There’s One Fault Line That Matters

Many ostensible disagreements between the Old Right and the New Right are rooted more in rhetoric and priorities than ideology.



The following is a transcript of remarks I delivered at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting on Sept. 1. Panelists were asked to review the “National Conservatism” and “Freedom Conservatism” statements of principles.

It’s true that both the National Conservative Statement of Principles — which I signed — and the Freedom Conservative Statement of Principles are useful distillations of the so-called New Right and the Old Right. I say that as someone with a foot in both camps, working for the organization founded by the Sharon Statement and a group founded by its author Stan Evans. FreeCons cite the statement as their inspiration. I’ve spoken at NatCon as well. Like Michael Brendan Dougherty, as a NatCon signer, I have quibbles with both statements but could basically sign both of them as well. 

That sentiment is certainly not shared by everyone on the right, new and old, but it reveals an essential point: The primary disagreement between NatCons and FreeCons is their priorities. This is not to minimize that disagreement. It is significant. With certain old conservative institutions run by stalwart defenders of the old agenda, it will be unworkable. But with Republican voters and average Americans, it will not. 

Take, for example, the tax bill Donald Trump signed in 2017. Here was a standard bearer of the New Right expending immense political capital behind fiscal conservatism. It became the legislative highlight of his entire presidency, and not merely because Democrats after 2018 declined to cooperate with his administration, but also because the president and people who staffed his administration genuinely wanted to do tax reform and pushed the reconciliation effort hard. 

Today, virtually no person in the national conservative camp will argue that was the right move. Importantly, though, virtually no person in the national conservative camp would in theory argue against a more competitive corporate tax rate that helps onshore jobs, or tax relief for overburdened American families increasingly getting less for their money.

Again, this is not true of everyone in the national conservative camp, because it includes a handful of integralist thinkers and heterodox voices who offer provocative dissents. Generally, though, national conservatism believes in free markets, just with the prioritization of families and communities as their moral end. Freedom Conservatives don’t disagree with that, perhaps with the exception of some hardcore libertarians. 

But this conflict over priorities amounts to a major gulf in policy and tone: When the market fails to provide a living wage for single moms, is the priority to go after government barriers that may burden businesses with costs that cut into wages? Is it to create new cash benefits for parents? Is it to do both?

What about tone? Should conservatives be extolling the virtues of the business whose CEO is pushing ESG and hiking his own salary beyond previously conceivable limits? Should they be supporting the union that might score a win for the single mom? (Even Ben Shapiro has made the conservative case for collective bargaining in the private sector, though critically it’s nobody’s pet issue.) Should they be focused on that mother’s inability to send her child to a public school that successfully educates kids, and does so without pushing politically charged policies on sex and race? 

Politics aside, what is the most moral way to prioritize family and freedom and flourishing under a set of economic and cultural conditions that threaten all those ideals? Do the free markets we all support need more or less intervention? Do families and individuals need more or less freedom? 

Here’s the NatCon statement on free markets, which some of us on the New Right might balk at in another context if it came from a FreeCon: “We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state.”

Here’s the FreeCon statement on the same: “Most individuals are happiest in loving families, and within stable and prosperous communities in which parents are free to engage in meaningful work, and to raise and educate their children according to their values. The free enterprise system is the foundation of prosperity. Americans can only prosper in an economy in which they can afford the basics of everyday life: food, shelter, health care, and energy. A corrosive combination of government intervention and private cronyism is making these basics unaffordable to many Americans.” 

Let’s turn to foreign affairs. There are few genuine doves in either the FreeCon or NatCon camp. Note most of the NatCon opposition to war policy in Ukraine is explicitly predicated on the need to prioritize China. Many, if not most, NatCons are willing to support a more militaristic approach to Mexican cartels as well. 

If we return to the issue of tax reform, most people on the New Right — myself included — would say Republicans who reeled at the cultural chaos of 2020 expended vast amounts of political capital on a lower priority (without even doing it very well), when they could have met the moment and tackled the corruption of higher education and K-12 or immigration reform, they could have dealt with cronyism in housing and health care, they could have seriously reigned in Big Tech. 

Many ostensible disagreements are rooted more in rhetoric and priority disagreements than ideology. Here’s a broad but not at all exhaustive list of basic, fundamental points of agreement:

  • Strong borders and the benefits of a sensible immigration system
  • Peace through strength 
  • Minimizing political censorship
  • Eliminating crony capitalism (explicit in both statements)
  • Free markets
  • Corruption and decline of the educational system
  • Corruption and decline of media
  • Corruption and growth of the administrative state 
  • Primacy of marriage and family
  • Federalism
  • Independent judiciary
  • The excesses of environmental extremism 
  • Nationalism (with some quibbles over the definition and application) 
  • Sanctity of unborn life
  • Importance of the Second Amendment 
  • National debt

There are some genuine divides among many members of both camps, including:

  • Free trade
  • Domestic spying
  • Public religion
  • Civil rights law (although this is unclear as the FreeCons haven’t fully reckoned with it in recent years)

This question of priorities is the biggest development to conservative political thought because it does change the calculus when decisions have to be made on policies like the tax code, labor, trade, education, and then rhetoric.

The Sharon Statement was a perfect articulation of conservative priorities for 1960. That really has not changed. If anything, contra the FreeCons, it should be used to unite these disparate factions, not as a wedge. The central threat is an ever-expanding federal bureaucracy that seeks, in cooperation with global institutions, to impose progressive ideological ends on individuals, families, schools, and employers by encroaching on personal and corporate freedoms.

These disagreements on rhetoric and priority are not to be minimized. They are significant. Still, it’s worth considering when internecine squabbles on the right boil over if the apparent divide — which often looks and feels very bitter — puts the two camps in different ballparks or different sections of the same one. The most important development in conservative thought — to continue torturing this metaphor — is that people on the right now realize where their tickets are. 



Joe Biden Picks Hunter Biden’s Former Co-Worker for Government Office Investigating… Hunter Biden


Jerry Wilson reporting for RedState 

Yes, you read that headline correctly.

The President of the United States, Joe Biden, has nominated Hampton Dellinger to be the head of the Office of the Special Counsel. Dellinger, who from October 2021 until June 2023 worked in Biden's Justice Department under the job title Assistant Attorney General overseeing the Office of Legal Policy, has on his résumé a stint at the Boies Schiller Flexner LLP law firm, where he worked with Biden’s son Hunter.

First, some background. The United States Office of Special Counsel, as per its website, is:

… an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency. Our basic authorities come from four federal statutes: the Civil Service Reform Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, the Hatch Act, and the Uniformed Services Employment & Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA).

OSC's primary mission is to safeguard the merit system by protecting federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices, especially reprisal for whistleblowing.

Now, flashback to May 2023, when an entire IRS team investigating Hunter Biden for possible tax evasion related to payments made by foreign entities, including governments, was removed from its investigation by the Justice Department. At and subsequent to that time, accusations came that the move was in retaliation for its subject matter, namely the president’s son and possible channeling of funds directly to Joe Biden in exchange for political favors. Or, as Democrats call it, fatherly love.

The allegations of foreign money entering Hunter Biden’s hands, from there split three ways — hookersblow, and Joe — include said activities transpiring during his time at Boies Schiller Flexner when he was working with Dellinger. As reported in June 2021:

Hampton Dellinger, who President Biden nominated on Friday to lead the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, worked on the Crisis Management and Government Response team at Boies Schiller Flexner, an international law firm where Biden served as counsel. Emails from Biden’s laptop show he worked closely with lawyers on Boies Schiller Flexner’s crisis management team. He referred Burisma Holdings to the crisis unit as a client in April 2014. Biden’s laptop emails also indicate he attended a private dinner party with Dellinger and several other Boies Schiller Flexner lawyers in March 2014.

To refresh the memory, it is alleged (quote unquote) that during his tenure as vice president under Barack Obama, Joe Biden demanded the Ukrainian government fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma Holdings for corruption, including payouts in exchange for favors to foreign individuals and entities. Further allegations state that Joe Biden, through Hunter Biden, was one of the recipients of said payouts.

If it were any conglomeration other than the Biden Administration, it would be utterly astonishing that an individual with at the bare minimum ancillary, and at most direct, involvement with an ongoing investigation be nominated to an office charged with, among other things, overseeing the protection of whistleblowers bringing the investigation to light. The conflict of interest is embarrassingly plain. This duly noted, should Dellinger’s nomination come before committee, doubtless the Democrats on said committee will completely ignore all this in favor of such incisive and brutal questioning lines as what is his favorite color. The guarantee is also that the mainstream media will either ignore the nomination altogether or, at most, coddle Dellinger while hurling maximum bile at those dastardly Republicans who dare question the man’s integrity, total independence, and utter worthiness of the position for which he is nominated. Yet Washington, D.C. and its Democratic press release … er, independent press corps wonder why we hate them. Go figure, eh?



10 Ways Democrats Are Already Rigging The 2024 Election

Democrats are once again putting their feet on the electoral scale to rig the 2024 election in their favor.



It’s no secret by now that Democrats love rigging elections in their favor.

During the 2016 contest, agencies such as the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI willingly partook in a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded operation to convince the American public that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russian government to steal the election. The FBI didn’t just launch an investigation into Trump based on “uncorroborated intelligence”; it used the Clinton-funded Steele dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on his campaign.

These kinds of nefarious activities continued into the 2020 election, in which these agencies (along with the CIA) worked overtime to discredit damaging reporting about then-candidate Joe Biden. These departments even went so far as to pressure Big Tech platforms in the months leading up to the election to censor information like the Hunter Biden laptop story when it became public. Like clockwork, these companies acquiesced.

And who could forget Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose “Zuckbucks” flooded local election offices in key battleground states to change how elections were administered and effectively fund a Democrat get-out-the-vote operation?

Now, as the country hurtles towards another intense presidential election, Democrats are once again putting their feet on the electoral scale to rig the 2024 contest in their favor.

1. FBI Targeting of Conservatives

Another facet of so-called “law enforcement” agencies’ election interference is their blatant targeting of conservatives. Within the past few years, the FBI has been caught directing its fire at parents attending school board meetingsCatholics who attend Latin Mass, and innocent pro-lifers, to name a few.

Given these actions, it wasn’t shocking when Newsweek reported on Wednesday that the agency is gearing up to single out supporters of former President Donald Trump as “domestic terrorists” ahead of the 2024 contest. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported, “Testimony from more than a ‘dozen current or former government officials who specialize in terrorism’ to Newsweek confirmed that this increase in targeting was born out of the FBI’s decision to lump Trump supporters into its expanded definition of ‘domestic extremism.'”

2. Protecting Joe Biden

Former business associates, IRS and FBI whistleblowers, bank recordstext messagesemails, reporting from a “highly credible” informant, and even President Joe Biden himself have all corroborated different aspects of the latter’s involvement in his family’s corrupt foreign business ventures. But according to Democrats and their legacy media allies, this is just evidence of a father’s love for his son.

From the moment mountains of evidence began piling up, implicating Biden in playing a major role in his family’s international influence-peddling scheme, Democrats have done all they can to hide, excuse, and obfuscate the massive scandal surrounding the sitting president. With help from the DOJ — which almost got away with offering Biden’s son, Hunter, a sweetheart plea agreement to evade future criminal charges and has routinely hindered investigative efforts into the Bidens — these acts represent a clear attempt by Democrats to hide damning information about the sitting president from the American public ahead of the 2024 election.

3. Trump Indictments

Who needs free and fair elections when you can just throw your political opponents behind bars ahead of a major election? Spanning four separate cases and 91 felony counts, the DOJ and leftist prosecutors’ seemingly coordinated efforts to imprison Trump could not represent a more obvious attempt to interfere in the election process.

4. Zuckbucks 2.0

While 25 states passed legislation banning or restricting the use of “Zuckbucks” in elections, that hasn’t stopped nonprofits like the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) — one of the Zuckerberg-funded groups that meddled in the 2020 election — from attempting to replicate their 2020 strategy for future elections.

Last year, CTCL and other left-wing groups launched the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, an $80 million venture designed to “systematically influence every aspect of election administration” and advance Democrat-backed voting policies in local election offices. Through the use of “scholarships” and low entrance fees, the coalition seeks to make the 2020 private hijacking of election offices look like child’s play.

5. Big Tech Censorship

It’s not surprising the same agencies that pushed Big Tech platforms to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election would continue their censorship practices years later. As indicated in several federal court rulings, the Biden administration has been actively colluding with social media giants like Facebook to suppress commentary and facts posted online that it claims are examples of “misinformation.” Equally alarming is that in spite of these rulings barring such authoritarian behavior, the administration has continued to appeal the decisions to regain the power to stifle speech online.

And these actions don’t even include the efforts undertaken by left-wing groups such as Vote.org, which have pressured Big Tech platforms to adopt plans to combat so-called “election disinformation.”

6. Passing Lax Election Laws

Sometimes the only way to win the game is to change the rules in your favor — and that’s exactly what Democrats have been doing to America’s election laws.

After expanding insecure voting practices such as mass unsupervised mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes during the 2020 election, Democrat-controlled state legislatures have sought to enshrine these policies into law across the country. States such as New Mexico, Minnesota, and Michigan have all adopted sloppy election procedures under the guise of “democracy” and so-called “voting rights.”

7. Lawfare Against Election Integrity Laws

Meanwhile, in states where Democrats don’t hold power, the DOJ and leftist lawyers have stepped in to launch dishonest lawsuits against Republican-backed election integrity laws. For example, the DOJ launched a lawsuit against a Georgia election integrity law requiring voter ID in June 2021, in which the agency parroted the lie that Georgia’s law was designed to “deny[] or abridg[e]” nonwhite Americans’ right to vote.

8. Partisan Registration Paid for by Taxpayers

Shortly after taking office, Biden took the unprecedented step of ordering hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration. Executive Order 14019 mandated all departments use U.S. taxpayer money to boost voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities. Agencies were also instructed to develop “a strategic plan” explaining how they intended to fulfill this directive.

While the Biden administration has routinely stonewalled efforts by good government groups to acquire these plans, available information reveals an apparently partisan venture aimed at registering voters who are likely to support Democrats. Recent reporting from The Daily Signal indicates agencies such as the Indian Health Service are collaborating with leftist groups like Demos and the ACLU to “register and turn out voters” under Executive Order 14019.

9. Media Attacks on Election Oversight

The Biden bribery scandal isn’t the only subject legacy media continue to lie about. In the months leading up to and after the 2022 midterms, media propagandists launched a full-scale attack on GOP voters seeking to legally observe the elections process. Despite their repeated insistence of a widespread conspiracy of Republicans threatening election officials, there is no evidence to suggest such an assertion is true. In fact, Biden’s own DOJ all but admitted as much last year.

The corporate press’s goals in regurgitating this false narrative are to both cast their political opponents as extremists and dissuade conservatives who have legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in legal forms of electoral oversight (such as poll watching).

10. Leftist Nonprofit Voter Registration Ops

While federal law prohibits tax-exempt 501(c)(3) groups from engaging in partisan voter registration, that hasn’t stopped left-wing nonprofits from skirting the legal system by targeting voting demographics favorable to Democrats.

Organizations such as Restoration of America and Capital Research Center have issued reports in recent months detailing how leftist billionaires bankroll nonprofit groups to register likely-Democrat voters. Instead of explicitly stating they’re registering voters for the Democrat Party, groups like the Voter Registration Project target “people of color,” women, and young people. In other words, they specifically aim to register demographics likely to vote for Democrats.



Here’s What Democrats Had to Say About the Border Wall When Trump Was President



After two and a half years of having millions of illegal immigrants pour across America’s southern border, the Biden administration finally decided to resume construction of former President Donald Trump’s border wall on Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security’s announcement that it plans to “rebuild a portion of the fortification” in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas came as quite a surprise, given that Biden pledged during his presidential run that there would “not be another foot of wall constructed [under his] administration.” Then again, the Delaware Democrat has never been known as someone who tells the truth.

Aside from failed presidential candidates like Robert Francis O’Rourke, very few Democrats have openly criticized Biden for authorizing continued construction of the border wall. Given Democrat politicos’ knack for conveniently forgetting what side of an issue they held two minutes ago, it seems only fair to remind them — and the rest of the country — what they had to say about the issue when Trump was president.

Nancy Pelosi

Ahead of the 2019 government shutdown over border security, the then-House speaker didn’t mince words when criticizing Trump amid his insistence that Congress fund new wall construction along the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, Pelosi called the wall “an immorality” and claimed it is “the least effective way to protect the border and the most costly.”

“I can’t think of any reason why anyone would think it’s a good idea — unless this has something to do with something else,” she said.

Karine Jean-Pierre

The infamous KJP had some choice words for Trump’s wall before becoming Biden’s White House press secretary.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Amid the 2020 Covid outbreak, the Leninist girl scout from New York claimed the wall was a “xenophobic campaign stunt … that falls down in the wind.”

Elizabeth Warren

America’s favorite fake Indian referred to Trump’s wall as “racist” during a 2020 CNN town hall and introduced legislation to redirect funds allocated for the project towards the government’s Covid response.

Chuck Schumer

Schumer has repeatedly referred to the border wall as “expensive” and “ineffective.”

Ilhan Omar

The Democrat Minnesota congresswoman — who routinely espouses her hatred for Jewish people — had something to say about racism in May 2020.

Bernie Sanders

Much like his fellow socialists in Congress, the Vermont senator called Trump’s wall “racist” and accused the former president of “ripping babies from their mothers” and instituting a “Muslim ban.”

Kamala Harris

Before she became vice president and Biden’s “border czar,” then Sen. Kamala Harris called Trump’s wall “wasteful” and a “vanity” project several times throughout the 2019 government shutdown. She additionally referred to it as “stupid” and “useless.”