Fear and Trembling in the Deep State

posted by Clarice Feldman at American Thinker 

On Friday, we faced yet another black swan event. We’ve had an attempted Trump assassination, the surprise coup against President Biden, and now Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s, defection and joining up with Donald Trump. Before getting into this and a discussion of the DNC convention in Chicago, I want to expose the partisan perfidy of NPR’s Judy Woodruff and the ease with which she and the press are manipulated by the deep state.

Press Patsies

During the convention, Judy Woodruff reported (using the most authoritative voice and concerned visage she could muster) that Donald Trump had a telephone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during which he told him to reject the Biden ceasefire deal because accepting it would help Biden’s reelection. Both Netanyahu and Trump denied the claim upon which Trump was instantly being charged by the usual shills with a violation of the Logan Act. When pressed to substantiate her charge, Woodruff “clarified” her remarks and said she’d relied on accounts in Axios and Reuters and had done no independent verification. In fact, neither publication reported what she had said was the content of the conversation. More damaging to the credibility of her “clarification,” days before her assertion both accounts had reported the men denied having any phone conversation regarding the proposal. (I think it likely they got the same tip Woodruff did, but they fact checked it, discounted there had been any conversation, and then the tipster juiced it up some more and whispered it to Woodruff for a second shot at it.)

Did she misread the articles?  I think it obvious she repeated something someone in the administration told her, someone whose identity she dares not reveal for fear of losing valuable access. The claim was seen by many. How many know of her “clarification” is hard to know, but the claim advanced the Administration’s interests in providing a cover for a failed ceasefire deal while smearing both Trump and Netanyahu with prolonging the war for personal partisan interest.

In a similar though less egregious bit of malpractice, a number of press patsies ginned up viewers for the last day of the convention and Kamala’s appearance by stating there was going to be a surprise celebrity appearance that day -- most said Beyonce but some said Taylor Swift would also be there, and another added a third celeb -- George W. Bush. None of this was true, but I imagine the press lies were also sourced by Harris insiders and repeated without independent verification by a credulous media doing everything they can to aid Harris.

The DNC Convention

Fabulously wealthy speakers demonizing wealth -- pretending they are victims of racism and income inequality; pretending they are just folks -- a party that lives on credentialism, contending that a poor kid who made it to  Yale law School is not what we are; a candidate whose entire game plan is (a) to hide her policies (b) tout her experience while at the same time ignoring the fact that she’s been in office for 3 ½ years and had a big role in the dire consequences which (c) it is claimed she will definitely fix if only she gets elected; hiding the party’s agenda while peddling fluff and lies by the barrel; praising Biden who they just defenestrated and unpersoned.

Oprah

Oprah is nearly three times a billionaire so it’s a mystery why they called up her to whine that she was “on the receiving end of racism, sexism and income inequality.” Years before he switched parties, she urged Trump on her TV show to run for president and as she spoke against his candidacy, Trump released a letter she had written him wishing she was his presidential running mate. 

Michelle Obama, gussied up in about three grand worth of designer clothes and shoes and stepping away from her four mansions and almost 200 million dollars in assets, also played the race and class card, wagging her finger at the rich and saying her parents were “suspicious of folks who took more than they needed.” Ignoring the multi-millions the Obamas set aside for her own children, she talked about the fact that most “will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.” Translated, this means she’s still for reparations and redistribution of wealth -- though surely not from her. The Babylon Bee could not resist this dig at Michelle’s Eat the Rich speech. On the same roster as Mrs. Eat the Rich were Caroline Kennedy’s son Jack Schlossberg, due to inherit about $100 million; Governor J B. Pritzker, scion of a family worth over $3.6 billion, Doug Emhoff, worth about $10 million, and Senator Gary Peters, also a multi-millionaire. 

Barack Obama

As usual the world’s shuck and jive master put on an oleaginous performance, as the X account called Cynical Publius put it:

The best government is a LIMITED government, one where the government’s powers are carefully circumscribed and the powers that the government is not specifically granted belong instead to the People, and not the bureaucrats. I describe, of course, the American way of government -- a 235-year experiment in freedom that smooth-talking Marxist monsters like Barack Obama have sought to destroy for the past 100 years.

Obama’s speech last night was the seemingly compelling story of every totalitarian since Karl Marx first slithered out of his mother’s unholy womb. “Give us your freedoms, give us your wealth, put your trust in us and we will build a shining city on a hill.” This siren song is how Lenin came to power. And Mussolini. And Hitler. And Stalin. And Mao. And Pol Pot. And Kim il Sung. And Hugo Chavez. And the tyrants currently transforming the UK into a fascist hellscape. Every genocidal maniac in the past 120 years assured his followers that THIS TIME the government would be for the people, that a message of “Hope” and “Change” would FINALLY work and create a world of equity and joy. That promise that suckered so many well-meaning victims always ended the same -- in poverty, in oppression, in work camps, in famine, in genocide. The pattern has never not ended this way.

Anti-credentialists?

The party always made a big deal about Bill Clinton, the boy from Hope who made it to Yale Law School. Now J.D. Vance, who’s done the same, was derided by Harris’s running mate Tim Walz, ostensibly for abandoning his roots. He did this on a speakers roster which included these DNC mouthpieces who went to Ivy League schools: Cory Booker (Yale), Amy Klobuchar (Yale), Bill Clinton (Yale), Jared Polis (Princeton), Olivia Troye (Penn), Mindy Kaling (Dartmouth), Pete Buttigieg (Harvard), Amanda Gorman (Harvard), and John Legend (Penn).  Iowahawk had fun with this attempt to portray Walz and his party as hardscrabble Midwesterners:

“I can't tell you how hilarious I find all this sudden dueling Gravel Road Cred stuff…

There's only one way to determine who is the real Authentic Hardscrabble Midwesterner in this contest: drifting jacked up rusty Camaros in a snowy Kmart parking lot after a Loverboy concert.”

Lies by the Barrel

I can’t think of a thing Kamala and her backers said at the DNC which was not a bold-faced lie.  Kristine Christlieb writes in The Federalist:

A big part of that psy-op is to lie and mislead brazenly about everything. On the opening night of the convention, Biden repeated the infamous “very fine people on both sides” hoax and the “suckers and losers” hoax, both of which anyone can easily look up in 30 seconds. He also claimed that 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations have been created under his administration (the actual number is seven), among many other blatant falsehoods. 

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker repeated the “injecting bleach” line about Donald Trump and Covid. Former President Barack Obama lied about Trump’s tax cuts, claiming they only benefited the wealthy, and about how many jobs have been created under the Biden-Harris administration. 

Michelle Obama falsely claimed Trump wants to outlaw IVF. Tim Walz was introduced as a “Command Sergeant Major,” a rank he never achieved. Capitol Police Officer Aquilino Gonell claimed he “almost died” on January 6, when in fact he suffered no injuries. On and on, lie after lie -- and of the most lazy and obvious kind.

The biggest lie of all, though, is that President Biden wasn’t forced out of his reelection campaign in what amounted to a coup last month. A key part of that lie is to downplay the fact that Harris is currently the vice president and present her instead as a new entrant to the race who brings new ideas and energy. But she’s been in office for nearly four years now. Biden’s failed policies are her failed policies.

Democrats are caught in a bind here. If they tout Harris as an integral part of the Biden administration, a trusted advisor and partner to the president, who as VP was given real responsibilities, how can they claim she doesn’t then bear responsibility for what’s happened while she’s been in office? 

Harris taking the stage and proclaiming, “When I am president, I will bring down the cost of groceries,” elides the reality that she’s been in office since 2021. If she’s so committed to bringing down the cost of groceries, why hasn’t she done something about it? Why is everything so much more expensive than it was before Biden-Harris were in charge?

Same goes for immigration and the border, the economy, foreign policy, and everything else. At some point, Harris will have to explain why she shouldn’t be associated with Biden’s failed presidency. 

Or she won’t. She’ll just keep lying about Trump and deflecting tough questions about her role as Biden’s vice president. And the media will let her get away with it. In that case, her candidacy will be plagued by an air of unreality, which is why Democrats are relying on the psy-op. 

If Harris continues with her current strategy, we should expect the psy-op to get more intense. We should expect ever more shrill insistence that Harris and Walz are “normal” but Trump and running mate J.D. Vance are “weird” -- despite all evidence to the contrary. We should expect more frequent and heavy-handed claims about what a regular guy Walz is (Obama went out of his way to tell us Walz’s flannel shirts are real) and gosh darnit, look how joyful and relatable he is.

And of course we should expect a flood of lies, too many to correct, week over week, until the bitter end.

Victor Davis Hanson does a yeoman’s job at mopping up the outrageous, lengthy list of Harris lies.

Kamala’s lies about Israel and Gaza are well documented.

Bad Acting

The NY Post gave out Oscars for the phoniest actors at the convention. My favorites are these:

[Nancy Pelosi] We will not soon forget the way in which she said that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had “established one of the most successful presidencies of modern times.”

And then put such emotion into her voice while talking about infrastructure on rural broadband!

But the standout moment was her tribute to Joe Biden. Only a few weeks ago, Pelosi went to see Joe and brutally ended his career, reportedly telling him that he must either stop his run or get pushed out “the hard way.”

This week was always going to be a mountain for Nancy to climb. But she managed it.

[Kamala Harris] Finally we are being told that someone who has been vice president for the past four years was both in charge and not in charge, knows what to do but hasn’t done it so far, and can both claim credit for the economy and yet insist that it needs fixing.

In the process the Democrats have managed to create a whole new candidate.

[Cardinal Cupich] Cupich deserves a mention for his hilarious performance as a “Catholic Cardinal.” [snip]

Cardinal Blase Joseph Cupich delivered an invocation at the DNC -- despite the abortion trucks stationed outside the arena. [snip]

The Cardinal had clearly not toured the abortion and vasectomy trucks which were doing big business outside the convention. Nor the huge, 20-foot inflatable IUD that was also hovering around. 

(Incidentally, in a bid for the low-information women, the party keeps lying about Trump’s stand on abortion and the Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs and on that they are showing success, if we are to believe the polls. Trump always said leave the issue to the states, and the very forces who complained about abortion policy being set by nine unelected mostly white men on the Court are in a twit because the court agreed with them and said voters should decide.)

Another Black Swan

In any event, for all the media fluffing, the blatant hypocrisy, all the fancy lies and bad acting, the appeals to racism and classism and sexism, the hundreds of millions the DNC spent on this shindig, the decision of Robert F Kennedy Jr. to align himself with Trump and withdraw from the race punctured their hot air balloon. Roseanne Barr said it most succinctly:

“I haven’t seen Democrats this upset since Lincoln outlawed slavery”

Kennedy was polling 3-5 % in a number of critical states before he withdrew, but his criticism of the party’s antidemocratic censorship, media control, and weaponization of the federal agencies seems to have struck a chord appealing to some Democrats and independents which would add to Trump’s already committed base. The evening he announced he was warmly greeted by a crowd of over 20,000 in Arizona at an overflow Trump rally.

The best-laid plans of the party Michael Walsh calls “a criminal organization masquerading as a political party” seem to have gone astray.

X22, And we Know, and more- August 26

 

Democrats Have Fired Their Best Shots, And Trump Is Still Standing

posted by Scott Morefield at Townhall 

After Democrats did their job of burying Weekend at Bernie’s and the media did its job of memory-holing Trump’s heroic response to the assassination attempt against him, one would have been completely reasonable to have expected clear sailing ahead for the system’s newly chosen candidate, Kamala Harris. What was then largely considered a great GOP convention had effectively been rendered moot, not just ancient history, but totally irrelevant ancient history and Republicans still had to face the barrage of Harris’ honeymoon period, a running mate selection, and the bad guys batting at the bottom of the inning with a Democratic convention and the inevitable fawning media coverage taking place a mere two months before the election.

To their credit, Donald Trump and his team knew they would take some incoming fire and that there wasn’t much they could do then about the Harris polling bounce that would inevitably occur because of it. That’s just the nature of politics. The party in power gets to have their convention last, and replacing a walking corpse with someone with a pulse is obviously going to have its merits. To their detriment, Trump and his team should have known or at least strongly suspected that they would never face Biden in general, and the messaging, especially during the GOP convention, should have reflected that. It was also a strategic mistake to agree to debate Biden so far from the election. Sure, it was easy pickings, but it also gave Democrats the political cover they needed to finally rid themselves of their albatross.

So I guess it’s over, right? Time to prepare ourselves for President Mamala and the inevitable next step towards being forced to live in the leftist hellscape they’re hellbent on creating? I’ll answer that question by quoting the great Lee Corso: “Not so fast!” We may not be in the best position, but the good news is like a bloodied boxer who has taken a few punches yet isn’t finished yet, we’re still standing, and now it’s time for our side to launch a few of our own haymakers. At this point in an election cycle like this, that’s the best we can ask for.

Much of the reason this race is still close is due to typical Democrat ineptitude, of course. The Tim Waltz pick may have seemed smart to some at first, but as has already been somewhat reflected in the narrowing gap between his favorability and unfavorability numbers, the more Americans learn about this leftist lunatic, the more they aren’t going to like. If you like the direction of that trend, you’ll love it when JD Vance - a pick that is aging like fine wine - gets done making mincemeat of him in the upcoming vice presidential debate. It’s going to be glorious.

And despite the fawning media doing everything possible to pretend otherwise, the Democratic National Convention was just as much of a snoozefest as Kamala Harris’ closing speech was. Sure, it moved the needle some, but not as much as Democrats hoped and Republicans feared. As of now, Harris’ polling lead average stands at 1.5%, much smaller than Biden’s almost 8% lead this time four years ago. I’ve stated it before, but it bears repeating that 2020 was still razor thin, meaning that Trump likely only needs to enter November behind by four points or less to have a shot. And as of now, when Democrats have fired most of the bullets they have left to fire, he’s still in the race.

Obviously, and this is the wild card, Trump has got to do his part. Eliminate the unforced errors, keep on message, keep the attention on Kamala and her loony policies, use the RFK Jr. endorsement to court voters who might not otherwise consider him, and focus on the swing states upon which this election will hinge. He also needs to decisively win the debate (or debates). Despite what’s really going on between her ears, her handlers will have Harris fully prepped and ready to roll, and it won’t be the easy pickings it was against Biden. Defeating a female candidate who has suddenly risen from an obscure, inept vice present nobody liked to a feminist icon and savior of the planet will take a different approach, and Trump had better be ready with facts instead of bluster. It’s going to take some tact and skill, not a steamroller.

The bottom line is that Trump survived an assassination attempt, has thus far managed to dance through raindrops and avoid multiple attempts to use lawfare to imprison him, and, despite Kamala’s honeymoon, running mate selection, and fawning media coverage of the DNC Convention, is still very much in what is still a winnable presidential race. Let’s hope he can finish things off in what promises to be an entertaining final two months.

Everyone Hates Fascism Except the Government

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

One of the few interesting things about America’s highly choreographed political conventions is the gathering of people outside these events.  Supporters and protesters show up to yell at the top of their lungs for days.  What kinds of taunts do these opposing groups scream at each other?  Remarkably, they accuse each other of similar transgressions.  Probably the most common insults being lobbed from each side of the political spectrum are accusations that the other side is full of “fascists,” “Nazis,” and “racists.”  

It’s enough to make an observer wonder whether an awkward kumbaya truce could spontaneously break out, in which antagonistic foes raise a curious eyebrow and timidly ask, “You mean, you’re against fascism and racism, too?” before taking off their masks, throwing down their cardboard signs, and apprehensively shaking hands.  Of course, that never happens, so very angry Americans continue to denounce one another in nearly identical terms.

The whole thing would be funny if it were not so serious.  And it’s serious because the resulting confusion leaves Americans who might otherwise agree about an awful lot instead reaching for one another’s throats.  The more time they waste fighting, the easier it is for their real enemies to get away with all kinds of mischief without anyone noticing.  Who are their “real enemies”?  Well, regardless of any American’s particular ideological beliefs, those who most affect their lives (outside their families and friends) are almost certainly people with wealth and power — and not the vast majority of their working-class neighbors just trying to earn a living.  Because wealth and power remain in the hands of a small collection of political and financial “elites,” they benefit when citizens with neither wealth nor power choose to attack one another.  

Another way to think of this is to ask a simple question: what is the greatest threat to any political system?  Is it the threat of foreign invasion?  Economic depression?  Disease?  Of course not.  It is the possibility that those controlled by the system will overthrow those doing the controlling.  Every government in the world — communist dictatorship, theocratic regime, or so-called constitutional republic — claims to be working for the people.  But when the “elites” of those governments speak behind closed doors, their efforts are directed toward subduing the people.  Governments invest in the illusion that their power is limitless and that the people have no other choice but to obey.  Whenever common people recognize that they are the ones with inherent power, the government’s illusion of control is shattered, the system is upended, and a new era with novel organizing principles arrives.  

Seen through this lens, it is easy to understand why governments have a vested interest in stirring up domestic conflict.  A peaceful and well mannered society might engage in respectful debate and start asking serious questions, such as: why should private central banks be allowed to print money and devalue personal savings?  Why should America be financially squeezed by a bunch of multinational corporations that use cheap labor overseas and bully small businesses into bankruptcy here at home?  Why should foreign investment houses own so much land and property in America when fewer Americans than ever before can afford to own a home?  When government authorities use outside companies to censor Americans’ speech and spy on their private activities, do such workarounds really trump the Bill of Rights?  When corporations work hand in glove with government bureaucrats to track and police citizens, hasn’t our system of government transformed into something we would have once recognized as classically fascist?  

These important questions and others might lead common citizens to think more clearly about their government’s priorities before arriving at another uncomfortable question: does the government really represent the people’s interests, or does it represent the interests of its corporate partners?  Such discussions threaten to shatter any government’s well-guarded illusion of control. 

The political system can’t have that, so the corporate news media blast out daily reminders that “racism” and “extremism” are the real threats to peace and prosperity.  On television and on social media sites, the message is clear: trust the government but distrust your neighbors.  If everybody is more worried about Donald Trump’s personality or Taylor Swift’s political endorsements, nobody has time to wonder how we’ve reached the point when the federal government’s fiscal burden consumes 93% of America’s total accumulated wealth since its founding or how global debt now exceeds $315 trillion.  The wealthiest and most powerful people in the West take from everyone else and then set society on fire with engineered division and hate.  They are civil arsonists committed to destroying the evidence of all the damage they’ve wrought.

You can tell that financial and political “elites” are becoming desperate in their attempts to maintain power because they resort to little more than childish name-calling these days.  The great bugbear this decade is the “far right.”  Nobody explains why the “far right” should be feared more than the “far left,” when the theft and mass murder perpetrated by communist regimes over the last century dwarf the atrocities committed by all other ideologies in human history.  Nobody explains how the “far right” socialists of Hitler’s Germany can be distinguished from Venezuela’s “far left” socialists today.  Rather inexplicably, corporate news organs and academic institutions lump everyone who believes in limited government, national borders, self-determination, and personal liberty into the same category of WWII fascists who promoted totalitarianism, empire, dictatorship, and subjugation to the State.  Most citizens who are mislabeled “far right” distrust government and despise the notion of corporate control over society.  How that makes them “fascist” is a linguistic mystery.

What makes more sense is that Western governments fear the emergence of liberty movements not because they will one day be marching under the Arc de Triomphe, but rather because they represent a renewed public rejection of centralized power.  The more centralized the governing authority (e.g., the U.S. federal government, the E.U., and the U.N.), the more worried it has become that common people will reclaim sovereignty over their personal lives.  Consequently, the mouthpieces for the axis of corporate and government power in Western capitals — which is socialist in spirit and fascist in principle — slander citizens who are opposed to Big Government as somehow being the ideological descendants of Hitler’s Nazi Party.  It’s horse pucky.

Those who are nonsensically labeled as “far right” do have all too frequent encounters with fascism.  It’s just that those experiences come in the form of corporate-government beatings from the same people and institutions claiming to “protect democracy.”  During the Reign of COVID Terror, social media companies threatened and censored citizens who questioned the government’s monopoly on scientific debate, the need for school closures and economic lockdowns, or the efficacy of the pharmaceutical industry’s experimental “vaccines.”  Fascist tyrants such as Justin Trudeau used his partnership with banking institutions to seize citizens’ savings and mortgaged properties when they protested against his COVID authoritarianism.  Cellular companies kept track of citizens’ movements and reported those violating house arrest to the police.

This kind of corporate-government fascism has become commonplace.  European governments dedicate enormous resources to monitoring citizens’ online speech and punishing those who express unapproved opinions, and tech companies are quick to assist these bureaucratic bullies in their hunt for “offensive speech.”  A UK man was recently arrested for engaging in “anti-Establishment rhetoric” in a social media post.  Google openly admits to manipulating search results in ways that promote the talking points of their government partners while hiding dissenting voices.  Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Pharma don’t operate independently of Big Government.  They are one and the same.

It turns out that everyone hates fascism except for Western governments and their corporate friends.  That’s why they demonize citizens who cherish liberty.

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Elon and Tucker Speak Up for Pavel Durov and the Present Danger to Free Speech

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

On Saturday, we reported on the CEO of messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, getting taken into custody at a French airport by government officials, on an arrest warrant accusing the website of failing to moderate content that was allegedly used in criminal activity.

This is a concerning threat to free speech when a government will do something like that and it's a threat to any social media platform. If they can do it to Telegram they can to it to X. We've already seen various efforts to go after Elon Musk. But this type of move is especially troubling when a CEO is arrested like this. 

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French Officials Nab Founder of Telegram App, Pavel Durov, at Airport on Arrest Warrant; Elon Weighs In

EU Warns Elon Musk to Behave Ahead of His Donald Trump Interview and Musk Is Not Having It

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X CEO Elon Musk spoke out against the arrest, tweeting "Free Pavel" and posting some of what Durov talking about the changes on X and the importance of being pro-freedom of speech from a Tucker Carlson interview in April. 

Tucker Carlson also spoke out on Durov's behalf. 

Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech. It was a western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member, that locked him away. Pavel Durov sits in a French jail tonight, a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies. Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world. Here’s our interview with Durov from several months ago:

One of the things that Durov told Carlson during the interview seems to foreshadow what was to come. Durov revealed what happened with the FBI with a Telegram engineer. He said they wanted the engineer to work for them to be able to put a backdoor into the system to allow people/governments/intelligence agencies to be able to access users' data. He said the FBI even showed up at his house. 

So that's already concerning. 

But Musk also pointed out the troubling comments from the Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz, who had no understanding what free speech was about saying that there was "no guarantee to free speech for misinformation or hate speech."  

We already know that the Biden-Harris has had no compunctions against censorship. What Tim Walz says in that clip and the ignorance he shows makes things even more concerning when he doesn't even know the first thing, and thinks you can crush free speech if it is "misinformation or hate speech." 

That's incredibly dangerous seeing what we are now seeing afoot in this world. It's a present danger to our free speech, one that Harris-Walz would likely make so much worse. 

US Navy Is Facing Massive Manpower Shortage Under Biden, Harris Admin

Sarah Arnold reporting for Townhall 

The United States Navy faces an unprecedented manpower shortage, making it challenging to operate vessels, resulting in a "force generation reset" plan. 

According to the U.S. Naval Institute News, the Merchant Marines organization was forced to sideline 17 support ships because it could not “properly crew and operate ships across the fleet.” Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation for the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, said the Merchant Marines are essential to keeping the Navy running. However, it is desperately short of experienced people to crew the ships. 

“This is really a clear danger to national security," Montgomery said. 

A fleet oiler, a dozen Spearhead-class expeditionary fast transports, and two forward-deployed Navy expeditionary sea bases are slated to enter an extended maintenance period during which their crews will be sent to other fleet ships. 

“The sailors tend to man our warships, the merchant mariners man something that’s equally important, which is the logistics backbone of the Navy — oilers, ammo ships, transports ships that move the Army and Marine Corps across the water,” Montgomery continued. 

“Just like 90 percent of trade is done by ships and not aircrafts, the same thing applies at sea: It’s too difficult, too expensive — it’s not sufficient to move all that stuff by aircraft, so it’s moved by ships.”

The U.S. military has faced the most significant recruit shortage in years. It is struggling to reach recruitment goals to refill its ranks, and the shortfalls are affecting the readiness of the nation’s defense teams. According to a Pew Research Center report, only 23 percent of young adults qualify for the military. 2024 represents the smallest active-duty force since 1940. 

In 2023, military shortfalls reached around 41,000 recruits, with the Marines and the sixth Armed Forces branch, the United States Space Force—former President Donald Trump created— being the only branch to reach its recruitment goals. 

Under the Trump Administration, the former president rebuilt the U.S. military after eight years of decline and neglect with $2.2 trillion in defense spending. He strengthened the country’s defense industrial base and secured the largest pay raise for U.S. troops in over a decade. 

Dems Say Goodbye to Biden, but We're Stuck With Him

posted by Andrew Malcolm at RedState 

When my elderly mother was fading, she endured a lengthy hospital stay. They discovered her virulent lung cancer had returned. So, I moved her to a nice nursing home where I visited for dinner.

She was always tiny, but now stooped, in her familiar dressing gown because she wasn’t going anywhere. Mom was not happy to be eating with a large crowd of noisy strangers. She gave them her side-eye. That didn’t work anymore.

I tried to make a joke about our reversed roles. “Eat your beans,” I said, “they’re good for you.” She didn’t get it. She ate them.

In her private room, I was determined to bring up the subject I’d been dreading since the doctor’s meeting. “Mom,” I said….

But she interrupted. “Shhh, ‘Jeopardy’s’ on.” 

After, I took a deep breath to talk about the beloved apartment she and Dad selected together years before, the one overlooking the ocean, the beach, the whales, and sunsets, the cozy perch packed with family paintings and antiques she’d collected over decades. She would never be going back there. And I had to tell her.

“Mom,” I said sadly, “we have to talk about the apartment.”

She looked at me like Joe Biden, her mouth open, her eyes glazed. And she said, “What apartment?”

I relived those sad moments of relief this past week as we watched Biden’s lifelong party pack him and his immense family syndicate off into the sunset, literally, to the West to another billionaire’s borrowed mansion in California. 

With his government earnings and pensions, his large professor’s salary for not teaching a class, earnings on books that listed him as author, and the 10 percent from Hunter’s international influence-peddling business, Joe could buy his own pair of mansions. As the Obamas have while fretting over people who have too much.

Virgin Islands, Southern California, Biden prefers to borrow vacation housing for his extended family, however. Wonder if he reports them as in-kind donations?

He often takes family abroad. In 2013, for an official VP trip to Beijing, Biden gave Hunter a free ride there on Air Force Two so the son could seal a multi-million-dollar Chinese deal for his business. We were assured father and son never discussed such things. Biden family honor.

On another trip as vice president, Biden ran up a $500K hotel bill for his entourage in Paris for one night and another $600K the next night in London. That’s a lot of mini-bar and Room Service. But don’t worry; taxpayers covered it all for him.

Politics, they say in Chicago, is not beanbag. And the way an unashamed Joe Biden treated people not in position to help him defines cold SOB. Asked about scores of desperate Afghans falling to their death off departing U.S. planes during his lethally botched withdrawal, Biden answered, “That was four days ago.”

So, karma bit his wrinkled butt last week at Democrats’ national convention. To get him out of the way early, Biden’s farewell speech was scheduled for prime time the first night. 

But wouldn’t you know, other speakers ran long. Then there was important music. And no one ever heard of adjusting a schedule for a president. So, the addled guy who was captain of the sinking campaign until the Pelosi Mutiny had to wait around for hours backstage. He didn’t get to speak until 11:27 p.m. Eastern. 

In those remarks, Biden actually plagiarized himself from speeches five months and two years ago. Not that many were listening anyway.

Because by then, millions of voters across the country had gone to bed. So, they weren't reminded of the lost soul who every elected Democrat and media outlet knowingly lied was sharp as a tack until that June debate in front of 55 million viewers when the truth came out. 

What Is Happening In The Ukraine War Should Scare The Hell Out Of Us

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

There is a lot to criticize about America’s current military – and I’ve criticized it– but there’s another problem no one seems to want to talk about. It’s scary as hell. The United States is not ready for the kind of war we are seeing played out in Ukraine, a peer-to-peer conventional fight that is rewriting the rules of what we thought war was supposed to be. And, with leadership in the White House sitting in a rocker staring slack-jawed at Matlock reruns, we are not in a position to fix what will mean defeat in our next real war.

This is not solely about wokeness and how the officer corps has embraced the ridiculous shibboleths of the progressive left regarding race, gender, and the climate scam, but wokeness relates to the problem that the Ukraine War has revealed. When the leadership is focused on ridiculous frivolities like “white nationalism” and trans idiocy, it is not integrating the massive changes to how we fight that we need to compete on a modern battlefield.

And we do need massive changes. The old wisdom is that the military always fights the last war. Now, we’re trying to fight the last two wars. We are trying to refight the conventional Cold War model that won the Gulf War while also fighting the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. What we are not preparing to fight is the kind of war we are seeing in Ukraine.

The Russo-Ukraine War is a test bed for new technologies overlaid over old styles of warfare, particularly the static, dug-in trench warfare of World War I. What is different? A lot. For one thing, electronic warfare (EW) is an enormous new factor. You know all those awesome precision-guided munitions we saw America use in Iraq and Afghanistan? We gave many of them to Ukraine. According to open source reports – I do not know anything secret and would not write about it if I did – the Russians, who are very good at this sort of thing, have figured out how to use EW to defeat them. Remember, GPS is based on radio waves, which can be jammed, spoofed, or otherwise messed with. A missile that misses is useless. Imagine America going into a fight with its limited or completely defeated precision strike capabilities. Yeah, scary, right?

That assumes we have the precision ammunition. We don’t necessarily. We are giving away much of it to Ukraine and Israel, as well as blowing it off slap-fighting the Houthis. There is not an endless supply of this stuff. It’s slow to build and expensive, and hey, those many millions of Third World peasants the Democrats invited into America are the Democrats’ priority. And how fast will we burn through them if we do get into a fight? For that matter, how fast will we burn through our dumb bombs and dumb artillery shells? Everyone wants our 155mm shells; how many do we have? It better be a lot, because that stuff goes fast. People have no conception of how fast we would burn down our ammo stocks in a real war. Think days, not weeks or months.

Here’s what no one talks about because it’s not exciting or cool – America fights with logistics. We overwhelm the enemy with stuff, including stuff that goes “Boom!” In the Gulf War, we moved a city to the middle of the desert, then moved it forward in an attack. But we can’t do that today. Our military-industrial base has withered. The arsenal of democracy has become the gun-safe of democracy. We cannot just spin up to rearm once the next war – which is coming – starts. That goes for artillery tubes, tanks, planes, and ships – the Chinese Navy is now bigger than ours and growing exponentially faster. Maybe their stuff is not as good as ours ship-to-ship – though with the Chinese spies here in America running rampant stealing our secrets because the FBI is busy arresting grandmas for praying at abortion mills, their ships probably are our ships – but the enemy has something we do not have. It’s “quantity.”

The fighting in Ukraine diverges massively from how we train to fight. Look at the drone factor. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are using drones as precision weapons – the web is full of videos of drones taking out tanks, fortifications, and individual soldiers. Our enemies know about it. Hamas used drones to take out IDF defenses on October 7th. Our bases in the Middle East are getting hit with cheap drones; we have taken dead and wounded from them. We’re not droning up like the enemy; we’re not prepared to defend against the swarms of them that are coming.

The Ukrainian and Russians are innovating, adapting, and improvising, finding new solutions to new problems. Our ossified military, which once relied on American ingenuity to win, cannot do that. At the procurement level, our methods of buying new weapons are guaranteed to provide the wrong system for too much money far too late. At the soldier level, innovation will be discouraged by a risk-averse officer corps with warfighting as its last priority. Do you think US troops are going to be able to obtain a bunch of cheap drones and make them into tank killers themselves without going through some arduous process? They innovated in Ukraine, though. Our future foe will be nimble, agile, and run circles around our bureaucracy.

Finally, the disaster in Ukraine is also highlighting another problem – casualties. Right now, we have the worst recruiting crisis in half a century, largely because the military has wholeheartedly allied itself with the enemies of the traditional Americans who once made up our military. Straight, white, Christian – you are the problem, and it is no secret that you are unwanted and that you will be actively discriminated against in favor of people with approved immutable characteristics. Of course, the potential recruits know it – we vets are warning them away from military service. They refuse to enlist. Why would they? To protect “allies” who lock people up for speaking freely? Die protecting Europe’s dictatorships that arrest people for dissent from the Russian dictatorship that arrests people for dissent? Serve under a leadership that hates you and hasn’t unequivocally won a major war in 30 years?

No thanks. Hard pass. That’s what happens when you have a military that is less General George Patton than Command Sergeant Major (sic) Tim Walz.

But, beyond the fact that the current administrations’ flunkies have made it perfectly clear that traditional recruits are unwanted and that their lives will be squandered, is what is happening in Ukraine. Those casualties are astonishing, and if we get into a real war, ours will be too. Think dozens or hundreds of dead a week, every week. Maybe more – a US Navy aircraft carrier has 5,000 sailors, and the Chinese plan to take ours out. Who wants to die in another poorly thought-out and unnecessary adventure pushed by people whose commitment to the fight is not blood but a Ukrainian flag in their username? After Kabul – for which no one was ever fired – does anyone imagine that potential troops do not understand that to the progressive ruling elite, their lives are meaningless?

We have learned nothing from the Ukrainian-Russian War and apparently nothing from any of the other conflicts and potential conflicts going on around the globe. Unless we change course it will catch up with us, but do you think Kamala Harris will do that? Do you think the thought of being commander-in-chief has ever crossed her Chardonnay-addled mind? Did her joy speech about how half of Americans are racist monsters who hate democracy and must be suppressed give you confidence? She’s there for the communism and the bratness. 

When our enemies strike, taking advantage of the lessons of Ukraine  – and her weakness and incompetence will make that inevitable – our failed military is going to lose hard. You should be scared, but there is no way you are scared enough.

Trump, Smelling a Setup, Refusing National Security Briefings

Ward Clark reporting for RedState 

I ran a trapline when I was a kid and managed to get reasonably proficient at snagging clever critters like raccoons and even foxes. The key to trapping a clever animal is to present a situation where they feel comfortable - and to use a bait that they can't resist. You want to entice them in - a safe, normal surrounding, and a bait that smells good enough that they don't smell the steel beneath.

Donald Trump is pretty clever himself, and when the subject of national security briefings came up after his Asheville, North Carolina rally on Monday, he indicated that he smelled the bait and, evidently, the steel beneath the bait, because he's declining the briefings. 

U.S. spy agencies offer briefings to presidential candidates once they have secured their party's nomination to prepare them for life as commander in chief.

But after the F.B.I. recovered government documents including classified papers at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, critics questioned whether Trump could be trusted with sensitive information.

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, the former president said he could now get the briefings if he wanted them but sensed a trap.

'I don't want them, because, number one, I know what's happening. It's very easy to see what's happening,' he said before attacking President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his newly installed election opponent.

At this point, that's probably a smart outlook. But it's a hell of a pass we've come to as a nation, when a presidential candidate, one of the nominees of a major political party, feels he needs to forgo national security briefings because he's worried - justifiably - about Democrats trying to trip him up somehow.

'So the best way to handle that situation is, I don't need that briefing. They come in, they give you a briefing, and then two days later, they leak it, and then they say You leaked it. 

'So the only way to solve that problem is not to take it I don't want it understood. I'll have plenty of them when I get in.'

In essence, former President Trump is saying he doesn't trust the Democrats in charge of the national security apparatus to not try some shenanigans. We can sure see they've thrown everything else but the kitchen sink at him, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see some kitchen porcelain being chucked his way in the next few weeks. Nothing else they have tried has worked, after all, so why not?

The level of seething hatred so many on the left show towards Donald Trump is shocking, but it shouldn't be a surprise. This kind of irrational hatred began, at least, during the Reagan years, and has grown steadily worse. I remember during the two terms of George W. Bush, when the internet was still kind of a new thing, seeing him referred to on message boards with such epithets as "Chimpy" and "George W. Hitler." 

The internet, frankly, has made this a lot more visible, with people being able to hide behind a degree of anonymity. But something about Trump has tossed the left off the deep end. It's not just the internet; it's crap like Nancy Pelosi tearing up Trump's State of the Union speech, like a petulant child having a tantrum.

The internet makes it more visible. But the hate is there. Donald Trump knows this, he accepts it and pushes forward - but obviously, he's not going to hand them any sticks to beat him with.