Mainstream Media: The Enemy of the People

by Rajan Laad for American ThinkerGreatness 

They seldom mention any of the serious crises the nation is suffering due to the maladministration of Biden and Harris. If they talk about it, they either blame circumstance, call it unavoidable, or resort to their favorite -- you guessed it -- blame President Trump.

Joe Biden was 'elected' despite being non-compos mentis. During his 'Presidency,' he looked dazed, confused, and listless. But he did manage to win the Democrat Primary with roughly 15 million votes. But George Clooney and the Democrat bosses had enough of Joe and hence he was forced out of the race and replaced with Kamala Harris who hasn't won a single primary vote.

If Biden is unfit to campaign, he is unfit to be President. Many have wondered who is running the nation and who will make tough decisions should a crisis befall the country. This is an attack on the highest office and a mockery of Democracy.

How do they cover Biden?

If you were to follow the media, Biden was sharp, agile, and detail-oriented from January 2021 to 27th June 2024. 

From the June 28 debate to July 20, Biden was pronounced senile and cognitively compromised.

From the 21st of July following his withdrawal from the race, Biden was back to being capable, in addition to being selfless.

There is no consistency among the utterances from the media during these three periods Even worse, they don't care about how they sound or appear. They are like a PR agency hired to promote one product and then move to the next.

Their current product is Kamala Harris, upon whom they slobber shamelessly and relentlessly. 

It's so bad that even their Democrat base no longer takes them seriously.

We focus on CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, most notorious for being an obnoxious 'host' at a CNN Town Hall event for President Trump. Instead of allowing the audience to ask questions to President Trump, Collins tried to hijack the even by peddling Democrat propaganda. Her conduct and questions were so unbecoming that even her liberal CNN audience ridiculed her.

A few weeks ago during a conversation with Stephen Colbert, Collins, following CNN's tradition, engaged in baseless claims about the Trump campaign. At this point, Colbert, who is also a Democrat PR agent, incongruously claimed CNN was "objective" and reported "the news as it is."

Surprisingly, Colbert's audience members, who are likely to be overwhelmingly liberal, began to laugh.

Collins seemed baffled by the laughter and couldn't comprehend the obvious.

But that wasn't the only humiliation Collins suffered recently. A few days back Collins was on Real Time with Bill Maher. Maher, who is a liberal Democrat himself, challenged Collins about CNN's coverage of the news, he focused on their panel discussions on Kamala Harris' recent convention speech.

Maher mocked Collins and her panel for the "gushing" over Harris' speech. He noted that she wrapped her speech at 11:09 ET, but it wasn't until 11:23 that Collins had a conservative on the panel. The conservative in question is Scott Jennings, who may be a Republican but doesn't exactly represent or understand the MAGA agenda.

Maher said that if he was a conservative, he would have been turned off by the fawning. He called out CNN for engaging in tokenism by having a sole conservative panelist and giving him little time. He argued that they should dispel the pretense and be like ‘The View’ or MSNBC, i.e. blatantly biased.

Once again Collins didn't seem to comprehend the obvious and tried to defend herself, claiming she has Republicans on her show. What she didn't reveal or probably doesn't realize is that her conduct with Republicans is adversarial while she is cordial with Democrats.

This proves she is so deep in the echo chambers of the Democrat party that she genuinely cannot hear anything outside.

This could also be attributed to self-righteousness. She is so convinced of their moral superiority that she doesn't see their obvious folly. Collins and her colleagues at CNN view Trump and his MAGA movement as the enemy that has to be defeated rather than covered. 

CNN isn't the only propagandist; all 'news' channels, except possibly Fox News, are guilty. 

Every day these propaganda outfits host panelists who spout conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and hate without even a smidgen of challenge from the anchor of the show. The language is often coarse and even profane. The panelists are all Democrats or Trump-hating 'Republicans'. The level of argument isn't compelling either because the propagandists no longer care to convince those not in their echo chamber. It isn't even good propaganda, because propaganda that looks like propaganda is bad propaganda.

Once upon a time, parents compelled their children to watch the news to improve the quality of communication. Back then there were standards of conduct, language, and quality of content. Those days are over. Responsible parents probably place a parental lock on MSNBC just as they do for channels that broadcast pornographic content. The news with its ugly coarseness is not dissimilar to pornography.

When bad behavior is prolonged, it ceases to shock people and soon it's accepted as a norm.

This is exactly what has happened to the media, people paying attention expect them to be PR agents of the Democrats and no longer are enraged by their corruption.

The damage done by these PR agencies is immeasurable.

In a democracy, the people lend power to an individual and a party to govern. The individual governing doesn't own power but is a temporary custodian. Since the people cannot always monitor those to whom they have lent their most powerful asset to, they rely on the media to be watchdogs.

The media is supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, by asking tough questions of the powerful in the interest of the public

Alas, the watchdogs have devolved into lapdogs, who wag their tales servilely around their Democrat masters and leap when a bone is tossed in their direction.

This means all the various crises due to Democrats are either spun or not reported while President Trump is the target of myriad vicious fabrications. The result is a misinformed voter who makes a choice based on misinformation. 

This also means that the Democrats continue with their corruption, maladministration, and policies that have caused havoc because they face no challenge or backlash. 

We had a glimpse of how it would look if the media did its job. 

The Biden administration struggled following the debate when the Democrats decided to oust Biden from the race. That was a rare occasion when members of the media asked tough questions and challenged claims made by the Biden campaign, alas that was merely an act. 

President Trump was right to call the fake news media the enemy of the people, their corruption is one of the reasons America finds itself struggling on many fronts.

The only choice fair people have is to abandon these vile propagandists. The risk is you may be uninformed, but that is infinitely better than being misinformed.

X22, Red Pill news, and more- August 31

 

Team Harris Policy: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Policy

The goal of the Democrat domestic policy framework is to buy votes in order to retain and gain power.

by Jeffrey Keltz for American Greatness

Conservative politicians and pundits and even some mainstream media news reports have noted that while the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz ticket has its candidates, communication specialists, organizers, volunteers, funding, and media support, it is missing the most important feature in a Constitutional Republic’s presidential contest: a policy statement.

The Democrat Policy Statement, however, may not be all that important. The Democrat domestic policy framework, which dictates policy, can be summed up succinctly, accurately, and clearly in the absence of a policy statement, since with few exceptions it has not changed in thirty years. The policy details change as circumstances and opportunities change but the framework does not vary. The policies do not need to work and negative, unintended consequences are either irrelevant or an unplanned feature so revision is never required. This policy framework divides the US into four groups:

Democrats: The Democrat Party

Givers: Working, Striving, and Largely Successful Americans and Businesses

Receivers: Young People, Minorities, Immigrants, the Poor and Preferred Businesses

The Noble Ones: Wealthy Democrat Non-Politicians

The Framework enables Democrats to create “policies” that increase their power through vote-buying. The details change but the approach does not.

The Democrat Domestic Policy Framework

The goal of the framework is to buy votes in order to retain and gain power. Democrats do this by taxing and intimidating the groups that can provide the resources that Democrats use to reward other groups in exchange for their votes.

Democrats lead and grow Big Government. Big Government is benevolent and has an accurate view of the future to which it will faithfully lead us. Its members are devoid of all common human negative traits, such as self-interest. It is a monopoly and that is a feature, not a bug, despite the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness that tend to plague it as well as most other monopolies. Even worse, Big Government is a monopoly that is legally permitted to use coercion and force.

Givers include middle-class and wealthy individuals and families, as well as small and medium-sized businesses and large corporations. Democrats malign Givers as “Millionaires and Billionaires.” The individuals support their families through hard work and they pay taxes and support charities. The businesses compete for market share as they develop innovative products that improve quality of life while creating jobs, lowering prices, and improving quality while paying taxes and supporting charitable foundations. If they fail to solve problems and provide products that consumers want, they exit the marketplace.

Democrats frequently cite two sub-groups for special disparagement: Big Pharma and Big Oil, the former for selling their products at inflated prices, thereby depriving the poor and elderly of much-needed drugs, and the latter for forcing Americans and others to burn fossil fuels, thereby altering the earth’s climate from its optimal, pristine state to something else.

Interestingly, Democrats neglect to mention that Big Pharma doesn’t just sell these life-saving and life-enhancing medicines; they must first risk millions of dollars to develop them, often while battling government agencies that add layers of regulation that may not always be necessary. (To be fair, Republicans sometimes join in these attacks.)

Democrats also never praise Big Oil for delivering abundant, inexpensive energy that has enabled billions of earthlings to escape the poverty that has plagued mankind for millennia and for enabling the creation of products that have led nations such as India to transition from a food-importing to a food-exporting nation, all while substantially reducing the impact of drilling and mining on the environment. (In India’s case, transitioning from socialism to capitalism has also helped.)

One would expect that the Givers would be praised for their contributions to American society since they create life-saving drugs, enable individuals to carry computers in their pockets, and drive cars with multiple safety devices that use less fuel than cars produced just a few years ago and keep shelves stocked with food and other necessities as well as luxury goods. Democrats “ask” Givers to pay more in taxes while concurrently demonizing them for not willingly paying more.

Receivers are unionized government workers, working and non-working poor, illegal immigrants, and favored large businesses. They are the “beneficiaries” of the grift and are encouraged to think that it is the benevolent, selfless Democrats that pay for the goodies and not the actual taxpayers. Receivers are America’s heroic victims and deserve to be rewarded with other people’s money as long as they vote for Democrats (otherwise they are apostates). The Democrat goal is to create a permanent and growing dependent class—yes, one that includes large businesses that benefit from subsidies and regulations that they write themselves in order to restrict competition.

The sub-group that the Democrats most favor is “Big Teachers,” aka Teachers Unions. This class of government workers is consistently portrayed as caring only for the well-being and education of students. Big Teacher always needs better benefits, higher pay, and more paid leave in order to improve educational outcomes. Based on test scores, Big Teacher-run public schools are failing. Union leadership encourages the use of ineffective teaching methods such as Whole Language, discourages honest teaching of American history, and enables gender confusion in minors. No matter how much class sizes shrink and school budgets grow, Democrats are always calling for more spending on “education.”

Noble Ones are financially secure Americans that are eager to “pay their fair share.” They don’t need government handouts. They value the praise Democrats heap on them for their generosity. Having this, they enjoy their wealth (including their use of private jets and yachts in this time of climate change hysteria) without guilt, as did their Noblemen forebears, who received indulgences from the Church in the Middle Ages for their self-indulgent behavior. They also get to appear with Democrat leadership at high-profile events, including White House visits. Actors and pop musicians are especially so honored.

While it is obvious how this works, I will summarize here.

Democrats take wealth from Givers in order to bribe Receivers for their votes. While taking others’ wealth, they claim to be benevolent individuals (in contrast to the evil, selfish Republicans) and they “invest” that wealth in “programs.” The specific programs in which they invest change over time (e.g., health care, climate change, student loan debt, college costs, housing costs, living wage, etc.). The constant is that Democrat programs are always benevolent, progressive, and forward-looking and if they don’t work, at least the purveyors’ “hearts are in the right place.” The Givers are always selfish, unkind, backward, and deserving of scorn, despite the fact that without them there would be substantially less to give to others. The Receivers are innocent victims and deserve the unearned gifts. They are encouraged to despise the selfish Givers. The programs often damage Receivers by creating dependency, raising prices, and reducing the availability of necessities such as housing. The Noble Ones remain unscathed as they continue to fly and sail and engage in legal tax avoidance.

The policy details are not very important because the policies are not intended to work (success would reduce their raison d’être) and they don’t need to be paid for through cost-cutting and efficiency. The policies must, however, have uplifting names such as The Affordable Care Act and The Inflation Reduction Act in order to create a need and an image. At least as far back as FDR and certainly LBJ, the Democrat Party has aimed to use government to eliminate poverty. The goal, however, is not to eliminate poverty; it is to create dependence on Big Government to capture votes. The policies do not need to be cost-effective because, unlike businesses in a competitive marketplace that need to keep costs down in order to compete, the Democrats, when in the majority, can tax “the rich” or increase government debt. When market prices rise, Democrats “reduce costs” for Receivers by shifting costs to Givers. No economic theory is required and there is no incentive to hold down costs. Inefficient policies benefit Receivers in the short term and Democrats in the long term as they expand the Democrat voting base.

Do the policy specifics matter? Don’t we know what they plan to give us?

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If Donald Trump’s Sex Life Is Fair Game For The Election, So Is Kamala Harris’

You don’t get to insist Donald Trump’s private peccadilloes are a criminal matter while being silent about the corrupt relationships of Kamala, the Clintons, and so many others.

Mark Hemingway reporting for The Federalist

Pundit and talk radio host Erick Erickson recently went on a rant about how “both parties have nominated terrible candidates whose supporters have decided to behave terribly to bully people into supporting their terrible candidate.” Erickson makes it known he’s still inclined to vote for Trump, but you’d think any prominent right-wing pundit who publicly expresses doubt about Donald Trump two months before the election would be chalked up as a win for Kamala supporters.

But then there’s the Leninist wing of Never Trump. Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, a site largely run by fraudulent conservatives who are funded by left-wing billionaires to help Democrats win elections, really didn’t like Erickson’s tone:

Someone sent me a radio rant by @EWErickson about my disagreement with some at the Dispatch in which he said: ‘Kamala Harris has done nothing but climb the ladder of power since the moment she got up off her knees in front of Willie Brown to put it bluntly to you.’ Swell guy.

Setting aside Erickson’s crude imagery, I’ve covered Kamala Harris’ relationship history more extensively before, but here’s a summary of the facts as we know them: When Harris was a subordinate in the San Francisco DA’s office, she started dating Willie Brown, the most powerful man in California politics, who was 31 years older and married. After the current DA passed over Kamala Harris, a woman who failed the bar exam and is not exactly known for her mastery of the law, Brown was instrumental in alienating the existing DA, and was personally involved in raising money and running Harris’ successful campaign to get elected district attorney. Once in office, Harris let a number of Willie Brown’s friends off the hook when they were facing serious charges — including an egregious case where she let a city contractor and Willie Brown donor skate after endangering people’s lives after defrauding taxpayers by using cheaper, structurally unsound recycled concrete to build bridges and other important structures. This was all reported on in detail by local San Francisco media when it happened, who aren’t exactly in the business of pushing right-wing smears.

And yet, Sarah Longwell thinks Erickson is a bad person because he rather bluntly states the fact that Kamala Harris abased herself personally and engaged in political corruption at the behest of a man who demonstrably advanced her political career. I would have been more circumspect than Erickson, but 26 years after Bill Clinton’s “dalliance with an intern,” I’m supposed to believe Longwell and her colleagues are on their fainting couches because a pundit made a reference to oral sex?

In addition to all of his well-known mistreatment of women as governor and president, one of Clinton’s top aides told Vanity Fair he made a trip Epstein’s notorious island and he spent extensive amounts of time with the notorious pedophile. Decades after the fact, several major liberal pundits finally got around to denouncing his treatment of women in The New York Times and other publications.

Not that any of this made a difference. Bill Clinton was a primetime speaker at the DNC last week, campaigning on behalf of a woman who by all reasonable appearances engaged in political corruption on behalf of a dirty politician she was having a transactional sexual affair with. Weird how these same people were not outraged by that.

At the same time, Trump’s sex life, which however disdainful, was never a matter of public corruption. And yet the whole reason they’re running around saying Trump is a Convicted Felon™ is that the Democratic Party engaged in an all-hands-on-deck effort to try and turn Trump’s attempt to keep an entirely private affair with an onscreen prostitute from becoming public knowledge. By presenting an entirely novel legal theory into a courtroom presided over by a corrupt judge who had donated money, in violation of judicial ethics rules, to Trump’s political opponent, they got a partisan New York jury to buy it.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to argue this incident merits more legal scrutiny than what Harris did in San Francisco. Even the former Democrat governor and attorney general of New York Andrew Cuomo — another politician laid low by a sex scandal less problematic than what Harris got away with in San Francisco — has said, “If his name was not Donald Trump and if he wasn’t running for president … I’m telling you that case would’ve never been brought.”

Now then some people will say, “what about Trump being convicted of sexual assault in New York?” Well, the heavily Democratic New York legislature passed a special law to undo the statute of limitations to make the case possible, and in any event, Trump’s accuser doesn’t even remember what year the assault took place. And while being wary of attacking the credibility of sexual assault accusers might be a good practice, E. Jean Carroll’s various public appearances strongly suggest she had questionable motivations and is a little crazy.

In any event, it’s also worth noting that Carroll’s lawsuit was cooked up by two regular contributors to Longwell’s Bulwark publication, George Conway and Molly Jong-Fast. Ultimately, the lawsuit was bankrolled by megadonor Reid Hoffman, who’s one of the most influential figures in the Democrat Party. Who is Reid Hoffman? Well, he’s the billionaire founder of LinkedIn who has admitted to funding Facebook misinformation modeled after Russian propaganda. Oh and he’s yet another guy who’s taken the Lolita express to pedophile island.

To be clear, this is not about defending Trump’s private life, which is in many ways indefensible. This is about being honest about the state of American politics. If you want to understand why someone as allegedly immoral as Donald Trump wasn’t immediately kicked off the political stage because of his supposedly outrageous character flaws, you merely have to recognize that the American public rightly understands that the Democrat Party is itself fully in the thrall of figures whose personal dealings and sex lives are in many ways worse than Trump’s peccadilloes.

Eight years later, people are still in total denial about this, and maybe you shouldn’t feign outrage over a talk radio guy being cruder about the truth than your sensitive ears can handle. Especially when you’re silent about Kamala Harris’ past, the Clintons’ continued influence, and your friends and allies cashing checks from Reid Hoffman. But other than that, I’m sure Longwell is a swell gal.

How Patriotic Are Dems? This Video Says It All.

Leah Barkoukis reporting for Townhall 

During a campaign stop in Kentwood, Michigan, second gentleman Doug Emhoff tried to get the crowd to chant "USA!" But to his surprise, it didn't go as planned. 

Emhoff said the chant a couple times, with the audience reluctantly joining him, but they abruptly stopped when he began his speech again. 

The sudden end appeared to surprise Emhoff, who reassured the crowd, “You can say it!” 

It's night and day with Republicans, which is consistent with polling from Gallup showing a 25-point gap between the left and right when it comes to extreme American pride. 

Conrad Black: The Charter is dead — Jordan Peterson's forced re-education proves it

 The monster of the administrative state must be brought to heel.

The US administrative state is just as woke and corrupted !

The refusal of the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the appeal of Jordan Peterson against the outrageous aggregation of injustices that have been inflicted upon him by academic and professional authorities and the lower courts neatly completes the self-exposure of the bankruptcy of our system of protection of civil rights — everyone’s civil rights. This treatment of Professor Peterson, Canada’s leading public intellectual and probably the most famous and esteemed Canadian in the world, is extremely important for what his case reveals and its implications for all Canadians.

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To summarize the facts in his case, he was accused of violating the group rights of militant gender activists at the University of Toronto, where he was a distinguished professor in 2016. They demanded that he address them in newly devised terminology recognizing their non-binary gender self-identifications. He emphasized that he intended no offence but that his constitutionally and academically guarantied freedom of expression was being violated by their attempted dictation of his duty to address them in newly devised language that has no philological legitimacy. The administration of the university wavered and waffled, declined to support the professor, and warned him he risked facing the rigours of a Human Rights inquisition. His employers effectively put all academic traditions of liberty of expression over the side and valued the claim of activist students to be offended by their inability to dictate novel forms of address over Professor Peterson’s right to enjoy freedom of expression as guarantied by our Constitution in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Following that precedent, the College of Psychologists of Ontario that is the governing body of licensed psychologists in Ontario, responded to receiving a handful of complaints about utterances expressed by Peterson on the Internet, two of them from foreigners who do not live in Canada, none of them having ever had any personal contact with Peterson, and not objecting to his language or professional competence, but merely to his opinions on some gender issues, on Justin Trudeau and his compatriots, and on the issue of climate change. Notwithstanding the extremely tenuous nature of the objections to his comments, the association ordered Peterson, under pain of suspension of his license to practice as a psychologist in Ontario, to submit to an indefinite course of counselling on public relations and communication. The governing body of the psychological profession is putting the nonsensical complaints of a miniscule number of people, out of the hundreds of millions who have heard Peterson, ahead of his same constitutionally entrenched but in fact worthless and meaningless right of self-expression. One may ransack the works of George Orwell, Franz Kafka, and Arthur Koestler in vain to find a more preposterous example of what Shakespeare called “the insolence of office.”

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Jordan Peterson is so renowned in his profession that he has already been offered membership in several other psychological associations and has received generous offers from the United States and elsewhere to relocate. This fact alone indicates how deficient Canada has become in the protection of the rights of its citizens. Because of his immense international success, and unlike all but a handful of other professionals, he was able to pay the more than $1 million in legal fees that his unsuccessful resistance to this official persecution has cost him. The Charter is obviously now inoperative, and no one in this country should be under the slightest illusion that their rights of self-expression will be defended against any collective faddish or fringe opinion.

Pierre Trudeau told me as he championed the Charter of Rights that the addiction of the French to abstractions and particularly comprehensive assertions of truths, would make it much more difficult for the Quebec nationalists to undermine federalism in Canada with what he described as a squalid dispute between official echelons of politicians over which of them will have what rights when the real issue was to assure full rights to all citizens. We would proclaim and be precise about rights and proclaim the great achievement of that proclamation over the self-interested haggling of politicians. He acknowledged that this could lead to some unrigorous findings by individual judges, but believed that if the quality of judicial appointments was maintained, that would all be sorted out eventually, if necessary by legislation. It was an astute political tactic for defeating the separatists, the reason for Trudeau entering political life, but his optimism about our courts was misplaced.

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There has been, as every informed Canadians knows, an avalanche of ludicrous judicial decisions, and the Supreme Court of Canada, because of inappropriate appointments to it from successive prime ministers, has become an almost constant source of absurd judgments. In one case a few years ago, the high court determined that the Charter’s right of assembly guaranteed the right of employees of the government of Saskatchewan performing essential work to strike. The upper courts have allowed judges to make an incoherent smorgasbord of our laws, with a shrinking number of reliable precedents and highly idiosyncratic lower court interpretations that pay no attention to the normal meaning of the language or intention of the legislators. This means that when the courts have finished, the legislators haven’t been legislating at all-just putting forth thoughts for the delectation of the bench. But even more sinister, the courts as a whole have followed the legislators into complete abdication in allowing the administrative state to function as it wishes without any apparent reference whatever to the text of law. In the case of Jordan Peterson, his freedom of expression counts for nothing in the face of churlish and self-righteous students or even a few frequenters of the Internet.

Jordan Peterson has already rendered great service to this country; not least in declining to follow the well-traveled road to other generally more mature jurisdictions. Canada is at a crossroads. If we do not act now on our rights and duties as citizens, to install legislators who will assert the liberties that we understood to have been our birthright and to have been guaranteed to us, and to elevate responsible judges who put the fascist monster of the administrative state back under the jurisdiction of the legislators and competent jurists, we will cease to be a functioning democracy at approximately the same speed as our decline in comparative prosperity. More than four centuries of Canadians have believed that our destiny was more distinguished than this. The time is coming soon when we must prove that they were right.

https://archive.is/2024.08.17-110528/https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-the-charter-is-dead-jordan-petersons-forced-re-education-proves-it#selection-2801.0-2937.836

 

Prospect of low-priced Chinese EVs reaching US from Mexico poses threat to automakers

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s a scenario that terrifies America’s auto industry.

Chinese carmakers set up shop in Mexico to exploit North American trade rules. Once in place, they send ultra-low-priced electric vehicles streaming into the United States.

As the Chinese EVs go on sale across the country, America’s homegrown EVs — costing an average of $55,000, roughly double the price of their Chinese counterparts — struggle to compete. Factories close. Workers lose jobs across America’s industrial heartland.

Ultimately, it could all become a painful replay of how government-subsidized Chinese competition devastated American industries from steel to solar equipment over the past quarter-century. This time, it would be electric vehicles, which America’s automakers envision as the core of their business in the coming decades.

“Time and again, we have seen the Chinese government dump highly subsidized goods into markets for the purpose of undermining domestic manufacturing,’’ Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, wrote in an April letter to President Joe Biden that called for an outright ban on Chinese electric vehicles in the U.S. “We cannot let the same occur when it comes to EVs.’’

Low-priced Chinese EVs pose a potentially “extinction-level event’’ for America’s auto industry, the Alliance for American Manufacturing has warned.

The trade deal that Beijing could potentially exploit — the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement — was negotiated by the Trump administration and enacted in 2020. Its rules could let Chinese autos assembled in Mexico enter the United States, either duty-free or at a nominal 2.5% tariff rate. Either way, China could sell its EVs well below typical U.S. prices.

To defuse the threat, the U.S. does have options. Customs officials could rule that Chinese EVs don’t qualify for the low-duty or duty-free benefits of being assembled in Mexico. U.S. policymakers could also pressure Mexico to keep Chinese vehicles out of that country. Or they could bar Chinese EVs from the U.S. on the grounds that they would threaten America’s national security.

For his part, Donald Trump told Time magazine in April: “I will tariff them at 100%. Because I’m not going to allow them to steal the rest of our business.’’

Whatever steps the U.S. government might take, though, would likely face legal challenges from companies that want to import the Chinese EVs.

The threat from Beijing is emerging just as U.S. automakers face slowing EV sales even while investing billions to produce them in a high-priced bet that Americans will embrace battery-powered autos in the coming decades. Comparatively high prices, despite federal tax incentives for buyers, have weakened EV sales in the United States. So has public anxiety about a scarcity of charging stations, potentially made worse by rising thefts of cables at charging stations.

Optimists suggest that an influx of ultra-low-priced Chinese EVs could accelerate U.S. electric vehicle purchases, speed up investment in charging stations and force down prices.

“It would be cheaper just to let the Chinese cars come in, forget all the tariffs and subsidies, let the market figure it out,’’ said Christine McDaniel, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center who was a trade official in the George W. Bush administration. “Yes, it would be disruptive. But EVs would get on the road in the U.S. a lot faster.”

At stake is an enormously consequential question: Who stands to dominate the manufacture and sale of zero-emissions electric vehicles?

China has so far taken a daunting lead. It accounted for nearly 62% of the 10.4 million battery-powered EVs that were produced worldwide last year. The United States, at No. 2, made about 1 million — less than 10% of the total, according to the consulting and analysis firm GlobalData.

In achieving technological breakthroughs while holding down costs, Chinese automakers have made remarkable strides. China’s BYD last year introduced a small EV called the Seagull that sells for just $12,000 in China ($21,000 for a version sold in some Latin American countries). Considered a marvel of engineering efficiency, its lightweight design allows the Seagull to go farther per charge on a smaller battery. BYD has said it’s considering building a factory in Mexico — but only for the Mexican market.

U.S. policymakers and auto companies are less than reassured.

“Just look at China — look at how big their market share is in EVs,’’ John Lawler, Ford Motor’s chief financial officer, said at this month’s Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry Conference. “Those are significant competitive threats we need to deal with. They have a development process that is much faster — 24 months.’’ (By contrast, U.S. vehicles have typically undergone development for four to five years, though that’s been reduced to three years or less for EVs.)

Critics note that BYD and other Chinese EV makers have achieved their cost efficiencies thanks to heavy government subsidies. Beijing spent 953 billion Chinese renminbi (more than $130 billion at current exchange rates) on EVs and other green vehicles from 2009 through 2021, according to researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s not competition,’’ Biden asserted last month. “It’s cheating.’’

Last month, Biden drastically raised the tariff on Chinese EVs, from the 27.5% established under Trump to 102.5%. It’s meant to price even the bargain-priced BYD Seagull out of the U.S. market. (Europeans are worried, too: The European Union says it plans to impose tariffs of up to 38.1% on Chinese EVs for four months starting in July.)

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, though, potentially lets vehicles assembled in Mexico — even if made by European or Asian automakers — enter the U.S. at a much lower tariff or none at all. If made-in-Mexico cars met the USMCA’s requirements, they could enter the United States duty-free. At least 75% of a car and its parts would have to come from North America. And at least 40% of it must originate in places where workers earn at least $16 an hour.

Still, for a Chinese EV maker like BYD, qualifying for duty-free treatment under the USMCA might be difficult even if it tried to source parts in North America.

“Even North American automakers have a challenging time reaching those thresholds,” said Daniel Ujczo, senior counsel at the Thompson Hine law firm in Columbus, Ohio.

But there’s an easier way that Chinese EV makers could use Mexico to try to dodge Biden’s killer 102.5% import tax: They would have to pay only 2.5% — the tax imposed on most cars imported to the United States — if they could show that assembling their EVs in Mexico involved a “substantial transformation’’ that essentially turned them from Chinese into Mexican cars.

U.S. officials could reject the notion that a substantial transformation occurred during the assembly process. But the U.S. would struggle to prevail if that decision were challenged in the U.S. Court of International Trade, “given the substantial changes that typically take place in automotive assembly factories,’’ David Gantz, a trade lawyer and a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, has written.

Still, Gantz said by email: “My takeaway is that using one or more of the available trade and national security mechanisms available to the U.S. government, the U.S. will be successful in excluding Mexican/Chinese EVs.’’

The “most effective and quickest’’ way to keep out Chinese EVs, Gantz argues, would be to block them on national security grounds. Today’s EVs, after all, are loaded with cameras, sensors and other technological gizmos that could collect images from the autos’ surroundings and sensitive personal information from drivers. And China isn’t merely an economic competitor. It’s a geopolitical adversary — and potentially a military one, too.

“U.S. fears regarding possible use of connected vehicles to spy on military installations or powerplants are not irrational,’’ Gantz wrote.

Biden has even warned that the EVs “could be remotely accessed or disabled.’’ In February, he ordered his Commerce Department to investigate the technology in Chinese “smart cars,’ ' a potential prelude to blocking Chinese EVs on national security grounds.

McDaniel of the Mercatus Center argues that the United States has significant leeway to do what it wants — especially given Mexico’s dependence on the U.S., its No. 1 export market.

“You could imagine a scenario where the U.S. tells Mexico: ‘Don’t even think about allowing this (Chinese EV) investment into Mexico,’ ” she said. ” 'We will not allow those cars into the U.S.’ ’’

“What’s stopping the White House,” McDaniel said, “whether it’s right now or the next administration, from just releasing a new document, an executive order, saying, ‘We will no longer recognize products from our USMCA partners if they have more than X percent content from foreign entities of concern, including China’ ”?

The U.S. has additional leverage because the USMCA comes up for review in 2026. If it seeks to alter the agreement — perhaps adding a provision to ban or limit Chinese EVs from Mexico — but fails to prevail after negotiating with Canada and Mexico, it could let the USMCA expire.

McDaniel noted that the World Trade Organization, which was established to enforce global trade rules, has become largely toothless. The WTO’s Appellate Body — its supreme court — effectively stopped functioning in December 2019 because the U.S. blocked the appointment of new judges to the panel. Trade cases now go unresolved indefinitely.

“We’re not in a WTO world anymore,’’ McDaniel said. “It’s ‘might makes right’ — that’s the sort of world we’re in.’’

____

Jim Jordan Starts Inquiry Into Jack Smith's New Trump Indictment, Calls It 'Election Interference'

Bob Hoge reporting for RedState 

As we reported, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment in his election interference against Donald Trump, “slimming down the allegations against the 2024 presidential nominee in light of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.”

On Friday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding answers and accusing the Department of Justice of violating” longstanding” DOJ policy concerning legal actions during the height of a presidential contest.

Jordan wants information, documents, and communications between the DOJ and Smith’s office regarding the new indictment. In a social media post, he flat-out accused the Special Counsel of meddling: “Jack Smith. Election interference.”

Smith’s case took a big hit when the Supreme Court ruled in July that a president enjoys substantial immunity from prosecution regarding acts he took in an “official capacity.” But Smith, in his never-ending quest to “get” the former president, appears to be trying to slither his way around that ruling with his latest move.

Jordan thinks it’s unscrupulous:

Smith’s new indictment includes the original four charges he brought against Trump in July but leaves out allegations related to Trump’s “attempt to leverage” the DOJ. Language has also been changed pertaining to claims that Trump acted outside his official duties.

“On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an opinion in Trump v. United States, explaining the parameters of presidential immunity and rebuking Special Counsel Jack Smith for violating this Constitutional principle in his political prosecution of President Donald J. Trump. On August 27, 2024, Special Counsel Smith obtained a superseding indictment against President Trump in an attempt to fix the constitutional defects inherent in his initial indictment,” Jordan wrote in the letter.

“In doing so, however, Special Counsel Smith appears to have violated longstanding Department policy intended to protect our democratic processes. The Committee must therefore understand whether you approved Special Counsel Smith’s indictment in advance or whether Special Counsel Smith continues to exercise prosecutorial authority without your ‘meaningful direction or supervision,’ he continued.

Jordan requested the information be provided to the committee no later than 5:00 p.m. on Sept. 13.

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DISMISSED!' Trump Responds to Jack Smith's Superseding Indictment

Jack Smith Files Superseding Indictment Against Donald Trump in 2020 Election Case

Trump Celebrates SCOTUS Immunity Ruling: 'Should End All of Crooked Joe Biden's Witch Hunts Against Me'

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As we’ve discussed in previous similar stories, there’s only so much strongly worded letters can do, and it can be frustrating to watch these House GOP committees issue statement after statement condemning the DOJ but being unable to stop their tyrannical ways. However, I appreciate Jordan’s investigations, as well as those of his colleague, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY). At least they’re calling out the malfeasance of the Biden Harris administration and keeping receipts.

There will be no true accountability, of course, while those folks still hold the reins of power.