W³P Lives: 03/15/24

Friday, March 15, 2024

The Path to Victory for Trump

posted by Josh Hammer at Townhall

Following this week's primaries, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have both attained enough delegates to be their respective parties' presidential nominees this fall. Barring some sort of unforeseen event -- a debilitating hospitalization, an ultra-expedited criminal prosecution, or a convention floor revolt -- we will thus get a rematch of the 2020 presidential election.

For the many Americans who are neither Trump enthusiasts nor card-carrying Democratic partisans, this choice at the ballot box may be less than fully enticing. But for those patriots who still love this country, warts and all, and in spite of our ruinous current trajectory and decadence, Trump must secure a second presidential term. It really is that simple.

You may admire Trump's willingness to challenge conventional orthodoxies and his instinctual nationalism; or maybe you think he is an unprincipled politician and an obnoxious boor, to boot. Perhaps you believe a weaponized prosecutorial apparatus are now persecuting Trump; or you might have deep qualms about voting for someone found guilty of a crime by a jury of his peers.

But whatever it is you think about the polarizing 45th president of the United States, it doesn't really matter. The reality is the Democratic Party in its fetid current form is wholly unfit to govern the local assisted living facility -- to say nothing of the greatest country in the world. And whoever once said American elections don't present a binary choice is a moron; that is precisely what they do.

Patriots of all stripes must therefore band together to get Trump across the finish line this November. Trump can certainly make that task easier (or harder) based on how he runs his campaign this year. Here is what he should do.

Since Trump is the first former president to run for a non-consecutive additional term since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, his campaign is somewhat anomalous. Most challengers to an incumbent president seeking reelection can only talk about what they will do once they are in office and how that agenda differs from the incumbent's record. But Trump already served a full term; he has a record. What's more, that term was just a few years ago; most voters remember it well.

The key to Trump's reelection this fall, then, is to make the straightforward case that his term was demonstrably better for the median American citizen than Biden's term has been.

On the economy, Biden has presided over the worst inflation in four decades, declining real wages, a formal recession, and a historic supply chain crisis. Trump, by contrast, oversaw a generally flourishing pre-COVID economy: The stock market soared, inflation was generally subdued, America became a net exporter of oil and natural gas for the first time, and the Black unemployment rate even reached the lowest it has been since that statistic was first measured.

On the border, Biden has presided over the worst crisis in American history: Endless streams of unknown illegal aliens have flooded over, leading to a massive strain on municipalities' resources, skyrocketing violent crime, depressed wages for working-class Americans, and the mass importation of terrorism-implicating "special interest aliens." Trump, by contrast, may not have finished construction of the border wall, but illegal immigration was orders of magnitude lower than it is today due in no small part to the prudent measures he implemented, such as Remain in Mexico.

On the world stage, Vladimir Putin did not march into Ukraine under Trump (indeed, it is curious that Putin invaded Crimea during the Obama presidency in 2014 and then waited patiently until the next Democratic president to invade again). Under Trump, Hamas did not infiltrate Israel and kill the most Jews in a single day since the defeat of Nazi Germany. Iran was on the brink of economic catastrophe by the end of Trump's term due to his administration's "maximum pressure" campaign; under Biden, the Islamic Republic has been "maximally emboldened" to sow the seeds of jihad all over the Middle East. For all the talk of Trump's "chaos," there was not a single major war abroad during his presidency.

The 2024 presidential campaign is going to get ugly. Democrats have barely commenced the advertising onslaught that is to come, wherein they will depict Trump as a Mafia-like thug and shamelessly compare Jan. 6, 2021, to 9/11. Trump's best chance this fall is to ignore the noise and prove, contrary to the smear campaigns, that he is the superior candidate in terms of competence, stability, and sanity. He has the record to prove it.

JUST IN: Kari Lake and Mark Finchem Take Lawsuit to Ban Voting Machines to The US Supreme Court with New Allegations of Illegal Machine Certification

Kari Lake and Mark Finchem appealed their lawsuit to ban the use of electronic voting machines to the United States Supreme Court on Thursday.

This comes after the 2022 election, where 60% of the voting machines were reportedly programmed to fail on election day, causing mass voter disenfranchisement and up to four-hour-long lines for Republican in-person voters.

The filing includes “new allegations,” some of which were previously mentioned in Kari Lake’s lawsuit to overturn the stolen election, including:

First, Maricopa did not conduct the required L&A testing, on which the district court relied to find the risk of election interference speculative.
Second, Maricopa did not use certified software, on which the district court relied to find the risk of election interference speculative.
Third, Maricopa used software that made all passwords needed to control Maricopa elections available to anyone with physical or remote access, which supports petitioners’ allegations and evidence that past elections were manipulated.

Fourth, altering election software without the Arizona Secretary of State’s approval is criminal act under Arizona law, A.R.S. §§16-449(A), 16- 452(C), 16-1009, 16-1004(B), 16-1010, thereby evaporating presumptions in their favor under Arizona law. See note 5, infra (Arizona’s “bursting bubble” theory of nonstatutory presumptions).

Fifth, Maricopa’s officials misrepresented their compliance with Arizona election law (e.g., L&A testing, certified software), which negates any presumptions in their favor under Arizona law. See note 5, infra (Arizona’s “bursting bubble” theory of nonstatutory presumptions).
Sixth, Maricopa officials abdicated control over the complex election systems to embedded private Dominion employees who lack any presumption of regularity under Arizona law. See note 4, infra.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported on these claims and video evidence that Maricopa County conducted secret reprogramming of the machines on October 14 through 18 after the Secretary of State’s October 11 Logic and Accuracy testing without notifying the Secretary of State for required additional testing.

“This litigation offers the opportunity to address critical faults in election infrastructure before the 2024 election,” the attorneys write in the 38-page filing to the Nation’s highest court.

Kari Lake is the Trump-Endorsed US Senate Candidate in the GOP Primary, where she leads by far and is on course to face Democrat Ruben Gallego in November.

Mark Finchem is running for Arizona State Senate in Arizona’s Legislative District 1 with President Trump’s Endorsement.

District 1 voters can sign Finchem’s candidate petition here:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed Lake and Finchem’s lawsuit on October 16, 2023, claiming that Lake and Finchem did not have standing and that they “failed to establish that a future injury was either imminent or substantially likely to occur.”

Attorneys for Lake and Finchem argue to the Supreme Court that “Petitioners have suffered and still suffer particularized, concrete injuries from Maricopa’s unlawful election policies and execution. Moreover, because petitioners suffer these concrete injuries, they also have standing to challenge procedural injuries from procedural violations of election law. See Summers, 555 U.S. at 496; Section I.A.2, infra. Significantly, these injuries persist as to future elections, even if this case became moot as to the 2022 election.”

Previously, Ninth District Judge John Tuchi, the same federal judge who ruled that Maricopa County was justified in discriminating against TGP reporter Jordan Conradson and thwarting his First Amendment rights as a reporter to access the County’s press room after the 2022 election disaster, sanctioned Lake and Finchem’s attorneys over their effort to ban voting machines before the 2022 election. This was even after 60% of voting machines failed to tabulate Republican in-person votes on election day in 2022. In fact, Tuchi waited months from July 18, 2022, until December 1, 2022–after the rigged midterm election–to sanction Lake and Finchem and deter any election challenges.

Tuchi even admitted in his ruling that sanctions were intended to “send a message to those who might file similarly baseless suits in the future.”

Lake and Finchem’s attorneys separately appealed these sanctions to the Ninth Circuit for further review.

X22, And we Know, and more- March 15

Trump warned his 'hostile takeover' of the RNC will blow up in his face

Trump warned his 'hostile takeover' of the RNC will blow up in his face (msn.com)

Setting aside for the moment his contempt for Donald Trump, former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele claimed the former president will come to regret his "hostile takeover" of the RNC because it will lead to his loss in the 2024 presidential election.

In a column for MSNBC, the co-host of the network's "The Weekend" suggested sticking the RNC with loyalists will lead to a bevy of yes-men giving a thumbs up to anything he wants whether it makes sense or not.

Noting that Trump put in place daughter-in-law Lara Trump to lead the way as co-chairman, he wrote, "An army of Trump-installed loyalists are replacing senior staffers to run the Republican National Committee. With the general election just eight months away, don’t expect this to look anything like a typical operation focused on getting out the vote, reaching out to undecided voters, standardizing messaging across campaigns, and doing other normal tasks. Instead, this will be a group solely devoted to the glorification of Trump. "

And that, he suggested, will be their — and the party's — downfall because it will lead to "groupthink."

"Staffers [will] make bad strategic moves because they can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t think like they do. It will lead to self-censoring, as staffers who have ideas that might rub Trump the wrong way will keep their heads down. And it will set the party up for another string of defeats, all the way up the ballot to Trump himself," he predicted.

Citing what he called the "decapitation of the RNC," Steele explained the dismantling of much-needed voter outreach programs are already underway that will cripple the party in November, particularly when it comes to roping in so-called swing voters.

"The RNC's extreme makeover undermines this goal of attracting swing voters," he writes. "This slice of the electorate has repeatedly rejected candidates who talk like Trump, act like Trump, and back Trump’s 'Big Lie.' Yet far-right election deniers now have their hands on the organization’s levers of power," he explained before pointing the finger at Lara Trump over her lack of qualifications for her new job.

"Lara Trump does not have the skills or training needed to craft an effective get-out-the-vote machine. Instead, she will serve as her father-in-law’s mouthpiece," he wrote before summing up, "Since Trump turns off some Republicans and independents, he would benefit from a strategic investment in down-ballot races. Strong support for a GOP Senate or gubernatorial candidate in battleground states could help Trump, creating a kind of reverse coattails effect. A rising tide lifts all boats — unless you blow them up first and burn down the marina while you’re at it."

Elite Heaven or Real Hell on Earth? ~ VDH

Anytime ideology and dogma trump merit, logic, and safety, the result is predictably dangerous. America needs to recalibrate its priorities to protect the lives and aspirations of its citizens.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

The horrific murder of Laken Riley by a repeated felony offender and illegal alien Jose Ibarra, 26, a Venezuelan citizen, was preventable—had federal immigration laws simply been enforced by the Biden administration.

When called out in his recent State of the Union address, President Biden referenced the deceased Ms. Riley. But Biden misidentified her as “Lincoln Riley”—the USC football coach!

Biden only accurately noted that she “was killed by an “illegal.””

True—but almost immediately the left was infuriated over Biden’s accurate use of the supposedly insensitive “illegal” for the murderer Ibarra.

Biden soon apologized for correctly identifying her killer as an illegal alien—but not for misidentifying the victim.

He left the callous impression that he was more upset about offending his open-borders base than about the savage beating of a young 22-year-old American nursing student.

Biden’s woke open-borders agenda supersedes any worry over the subsequent mounting number of Americans who have fallen victim to foreign gangs and criminals. He seems oblivious to the nearly 100,000 Americans who die from fentanyl imported across open borders.

The same idea of abstract humanity juxtaposed with concrete callousness towards humans characterizes much of the current leftist agenda.

The Biden administration envisions mandating the use of electric vehicles and banning natural gas appliances. These measures will supposedly help “save” the planet—even as they make life far more expensive and dangerous for the middle class and poor in the here and now.

We are told that biologically born males who transition to females have a civil right to compete in female sports.

Such transgender activism may sound compassionate in the abstract. Yet in the concrete, thousands of women are put in danger by competing against the much larger musculoskeletal frames and natural strength of transitioning males.

Moreover, tens of thousands of young female athletes are losing opportunities to excel and set records—thus destroying over a half-century of women’s efforts to reach parity with men’s sports.

In 2021, United Airlines president Scott Kirby bragged that his company was now devoted to ensuring that fifty percent of all trained pilots would be either people of color or women.

The Federal Aviation Administration had similar diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates for hiring air traffic controllers.

In 2023, Boeing bragged that it was using “inclusion” as a criterion for executive compensation. Pay from now on would be calibrated in large part on the success of hiring new employees on the basis of their race, gender, and sexual orientation.

In the abstract, ensuring that air travel “looks like America” is no doubt a noble goal.

But if such subordination of meritocracy is canonized without proper attention to the only criterion that really matters—the safety of the nearly 3 million American airline passengers who take 45,000 flights per day—lives will be needlessly lost.

Some data and recent anecdotal evidence suggest that something has now gone dangerously wrong with the entire airline industry.

In January 2023, thousands of domestic flights were cancelled or delayed because of a series of Federal Aviation Administration computer failures. Over the last ten years, near-crashes and collisions of commercial places have more than doubled.

Even scarier, in the last two weeks alone, United Airlines suffered numerous near-catastrophic events that may have involved crew lapses, air traffic controller errors, or problems with Boeing jet construction or maintenance—or all three. Specific details have mysteriously been kept from the public.

A United flight from San Francisco to Mexico had to make an emergency landing due to failing hydraulics. Another United flight bound for San Francisco from Sydney, Australia, had to return around due to a “maintenance issue.” Yet another flight out of Chicago O’Hare International Airport likewise suffered undisclosed “maintenance issues” and returned home.

At Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, a United plane simply taxied off the runway and got stuck in the grass. Another United flight from San Francisco lost a wheel while taking off!

Yet another United flight from Houston to Florida was forced to make an emergency landing after one of its engines caught fire. At about the same time, a United flight bound for San Francisco from Hawaii experienced an engine failure in mid-flight.

Dozens were injured on a Boeing jet during a Chilean airline flight from Australia to New Zealand due to what officials called “a technical event during the flight which caused a strong movement.”

Anytime ideology and dogma trump merit, logic, and safety, the result is predictably scary and dangerous.

America needs to recalibrate its priorities to protect the lives and aspirations of all its citizens, regardless of their race and gender.

If our elites do not stop playing god and mandating their visions of heaven on earth, then they will surely ensure hell for us all.

Our Fake, Fake, Fake World

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker

Will our historical era be remembered as the “Age of Fakes”? We have fake news, fake meat, fake elections, fake genders, fake vaccines, fake budgets, fake democracy, fake truths, fake hate, fake Russian collusion, fake insurrections, fake climate emergencies, fake freedoms, fake outrage, fake speech crimes, fake money, fake justice, fake intellects, fake women, fake borders, fake wars, and even a fake president. In some ways, it is a very silly time to be alive.

So much of our fake world has been built on two monstrously fake foundations: fake progress and fake liberalism. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson redefined progress as something that only Big Government can provide. Instead of celebrating human innovation, artistic achievement, work ethic, and private entrepreneurship as the essential ingredients for any prosperous future, progressivism insists that nothing of value can be achieved without a strong centralized government and a bloated administrative Deep State. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt then picked up the Big Government cudgel by redefining liberalism as a collection of freedoms that only government can provide. Instead of recognizing human liberty as diametrically opposed to coercive State power, FDR’s “New Deal” style of liberalism insists that only new laws, new social programs, new regulatory agencies, and newly discovered rights can ever make people free. In the last century of perverse word games, progressivism and liberalism promised progress and liberty and instead burdened Americans with the heavy weight of the government’s chains.

America’s commitment to individual liberty, private property, and free speech once distinguished it from all other countries in the world. When it began betraying those commitments and exporting a brand of “rules-based international order” scarcely different from those devised under monarchical empires of the past, it became a global ambassador for fake freedom. And in a world where freedom is fake everywhere, happiness appears to be fake, too.

Polls from countries around the world continue to show that humans are dreadfully unhappy. With new gadgets, pop stars, and trending hashtags being constantly unveiled, shouldn’t the global population be sufficiently entertained? With a never-ending string of celebrities advocating for the “most important” causes in our lifetimes, shouldn’t lonely people be inundated with purpose? Or could it be that we humans — regardless of race, religion, or nationality — are wired to seek something more than the shiny knockoffs, fleeting pleasures, and engineered emergencies that devilishly vie for our attention? Maybe somewhere beyond the ill-used brain of every social media addict is a lonely soul desperate for authentic truth. Perhaps a growing share of the population sees this glittery globalist cage as disappointingly fake. What happens when the world is driven mad by frauds, hoaxes, and shams?

Social revolutions begin. In search of meaningful lives, people will reject the fake authorities that control them. One of the first things to go will be today’s fake academic institutions because they no longer serve any purpose. Consider how far the state of Western education has fallen. During the time of our Founding Fathers, education was seen as the silver bullet against social inequality. It was widely understood that providing Americans with the foundations of civilizational knowledge equipped them with the tools to build better lives. Benjamin Franklin started the first lending library in the colonies. Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia on a farm once owned by James Monroe, and both James Madison and the Marquis de Lafayette were present for the school’s inaugural banquet. Their dedication toward creating an educated and self-sufficient society stood in stark contrast to the European colleges that catered to an entrenched aristocracy. The men who changed the course of human history with the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights understood that the promotion of learning across all social classes simultaneously promotes individual liberty over government tyranny. Destroying a ruling class’s monopoly on knowledge destroys its monopoly on power.

Note that knowledge is the key here — not the mere obtainment of some fancy degree. Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Thomas Edison had much in the way of formal education, but both were highly educated men who profoundly shaped this country. Mark Twain’s humorous wit is not less remarkable because he never attended high school, nor is the prose of John Steinbeck or William Faulkner less incisive because neither finished college. Degrees mean nothing if the knowledge that they represent is fake.

Yet what does a conferred degree mean today? Does it mean that a student has proven mastery in the arts and sciences, or does it mean that he has been deemed a politically correct cog for a world suffering from groupthink? Do universities still reward genius, hard work, and merit, or are they factories for producing intellectual mediocrity? The thing about a real education is that nobody can give it to you; it has to be pursued and earned. As colleges transitioned toward treating degrees like one of FDR’s government-bestowed rights, they stopped producing genuine thinkers. Fake educations and fake degrees have instead produced a society ill-equipped to fight for individual liberty against the threats of resurgent government tyranny. Fake experts maintain authority only when citizens lack the intellectual discernment to object. It’s as if the government’s funding of fake intellectuals has been part of the “progressive” plan all along.

So social revolution will begin in the schools — or away from the schools, that is. Interest in homeschooling will continue to grow. Young minds that bristle at the rigid and dogmatic worldviews currently being inculcated inside overpriced colleges will discover that there are better ways to learn. Real thinkers will rebel against intellectual prisons that prioritize “woke” nonsense over the rich record of Western scholarship. Parents will refuse to subject their children to the racist and sexualized curricula of Marxist indoctrination camps disguised as classrooms. Degrees that are earned without rigor will be understood as expensive fakes. Then one day, some entrepreneur will decide that it is more important to hire people who can actually keep planes from falling out of the sky than to staff up with politically correct fools who know only how to protest against hydrocarbon energy and for Hamas terrorists. Because academic institutions have betrayed their purpose, employer-administered entrance exams and other merit-based tests might even replace the usefulness of college degrees. The government’s stranglehold over thinking people is already crumbling.

Vladimir Lenin ominously boasted, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” John D. Rockefeller selfishly insisted, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” These sentiments have destroyed American genius and resiliency for the last century, and the harm that they have caused cannot be undone overnight. A nation taught not to think for itself is a nation that knows no other course of action than to obey.

However, when government artifice and manipulation become so outlandish that everything appears fake, traditional control mechanisms fall apart. Long-slumbering populations awaken from their State-induced hypnotic trance much like a hungry bear does from hibernation — shaky at first but ferocious in short order. Just as Central European countries trapped behind the Iron Curtain rebelled against the fake premises of Soviet communism, freedom-minded peoples of the West are already rebelling against the fake premises of the World Economic Forum’s “climate change” communism and “build back better” buffoonery. They will not eat the bugs or censor their own speech. They are not willing to let Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and other fake experts control their lives with CBDCs and digital IDs. They are not willing to live in a national security surveillance State that provides their children with fake futures.

This fake “new world order” is not making anybody happy, and as people begin thinking for themselves, they are learning to disobey.

President Trump Talks About Personnel Changes for Term 2 and General Election Nuance

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse

President Donald Trump provided a lengthy interview to Newsmax host Greg Kelly. The interview is in two segments as below and gives some keen insight into the current outlook and perspective of President Trump.

I am presenting the interview segments in reverse; in part because the second half of the second segment hits upon an aspect that is discussed often amid supporters of President Trump and the MAGA movement he represents. Beginning at 02:37, President Trump discusses the personnel challenges of T1 and how he looks to overcome those challenges in T2. WATCH:

The second segment is below, which was actually the first segment as broadcast.