They Mean to Incite Violence

posted by J. Robert Smith at American Thinker 

Democrats and corporate media keep getting away with it. What they’re getting away with is inciting violence -- against Donald Trump, first and foremost. Two assassination attempts didn’t happen in a void. Trump didn’t provoke Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh to try to kill him, despite Lester Holt’s spin. Holt’s broadside is predictable: project blame -- in this case, blame the victim. Democrats and their media watercarriers refuse to accept responsibility for wrongs, even when the proof is hiding in plain sight.

Wrote Buck Sexton, via X, September 16:

Problem the Democrats have run into – again -- is they cannot say “this person is as bad as Hitler” and then in the next breath say “I disavow violence against this person who is as bad as Hitler”

They want the political benefit of false demonization without the blowback of it

Other than spasms of outrage by conservative commentators, what blowback do Democrats and their media allies suffer? Nothing of any real consequence. Sure, they want the “political benefit of false demonization,” but not much stops them from pursuing it, and if that doesn’t work?

Demonization is meant to end Trump, regardless the means. The rhetoric is designed to paint Trump as not merely objectionable, but demonic. Should he recapture the presidency, his enemies say, apocalypse will ensue. Here’s a clip of Democrats speaking up for political violence aimed at the former president. Said an ex-FBI agent on CNN, Routh was “spurred on by much of the political diatribes that are going on these days talking about Trump, equating him to Hitler[.]”

Tarring Trump as Hitler didn’t just start. It’s a charge first made by Hillary Clinton on The View last year. That odd smear has been obediently picked up by others. Per Outkick, the day after the second assassination attempt against Trump, Howard Stern said:

"Hitler was perceived as a clown in Germany [like Trump in the US]. He was one of these buffoonish characters. Then he won an election. And that was the end of Germany."

Got that?

If Trump wins, the end of America is near.

Kamala Harris, in the debate, derided Trump for exchanging “love letters” with Kim Jong-un. Never mind that Trump established a rapport with Kim to avoid another bloody war on the Korean peninsula. Instead, Harris said that Trump likes consorting with dictators. More routinely, Democrats and talking heads drone that Trump intends to demolish democracy. Curious that Trump didn’t take a wrecking ball to it in his term as president. More curious still that Trump’s accusers are fine with lawfare, justify election-year protests riots as righteous (Kamala Harris), and offhandedly dismiss credible evidence of election rigging.

These aren’t stupid people as a rule. They aren’t all in the grips of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Many are calculating cynics. Knocking off Trump politically would satisfy, but if it takes a Crooks or Routh to pick up rifles and shoot him, well, that’s unfortunate, but Trump is a dire threat to democracy, after all. And if Trump is killed, you can bet that the media would throttle into full Lester Holt spin: Trump brought it on himself.

If you think that’s a stretch, did you notice the muted reactions by Democrats and corporate media to the attempts on Trump’s life? Had those attempts been made on Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, had the would-be assassins been MAGA identifiers, the eruption of outrage, the vilification of Trump and his supporters, and calls for the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to go after anyone wearing a red cap would have paled any red scare by comparison.

How else can we discern intentions? In the roughly sixty days between Crooks’ attempt on Trump’s life and Houth’s, the vitriol directed at Trump abated for just a few days only to kick up again. Yet, we’re expected to believe that cause and effect are mere correlation. We’re supposed to believe that the lies and slander directed at Trump have no impact on the minds of men twisted by hate. Or in Crooks’ case, perhaps he was driven by a perverse desire to be a hero. Unsparing attacks on Trump by notable Democrats and the media may have led Crooks’ to delude himself that laurels awaited.

No revelation that corporate media makes no serious effort to call out Democrats for the bile they spew at Trump. In fact, the media enables the hatred. Corporate media long ago abandoned its responsibility to journalism. They practice “advocacy journalism,” which is something Marxist professors started pushing at Columbia back in the 1960s. It’s just cover for the work of propagandists. If we had a media that made more than a pretense at impartiality and held Democrats and others to account for smearing Trump as Hitler, then much of the extreme rhetoric would stop. As is, that rhetoric serves as a siren to loons and extremists who are willing to try their hands at killing Trump.

Granted, hot rhetoric isn’t anything new in American politics. But in modern times, there are lines that parties typically don’t cross. Exceptions occur, however, when the country is grappling with big troubles and/or historic choices about the country’s direction.

We’re most certainly at a crossroads today. The nation’s direction is up for grabs. Passions are running high.

The 1930s and 1960s were similar to now in that they were change times. Prior to Franklin Roosevelt taking office, there was an assassination attempt on his life. Chicago mayor Anton J. Cermak, who was with FDR, was the assassin’s unintended victim, not unlike Corey Comperatore in Butler, Pennsylvania. The would-be assassin actually “saw Roosevelt as the quintessential capitalist, an uber-capitalist.”

The 1960s really began with the Kennedy assassination. Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. The civil rights movement was met with violence. Race riots erupted in Watts, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. The counterculture was in full swing. LBJ escalated U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which turned unpopular. Antiwar protesters taunted Johnson with the chant: “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” When Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam war, much of the media followed.

So, Trump being targeted for attacks isn’t unprecedented. Haters aren’t new. Malicious souls and provocateurs there have been. And violent men -- mostly men -- aren’t new. Yet the alignment of powerful establishment interests, the Democrat Party, corporate media, and the administrative state to prevent Trump’s election make these times different -- and exceptionally perilous. Not even Lincoln faced so formidable an array of opponents.

Elites are playing for keeps, and that makes them dangerous. Transforming America isn’t hyperbole. They mean to fundamentally change the country, whether Americans believe it right and good or not. Their worldview is antithetical to the very principles that made a liberty revolution and founded this country. Above all, these elites mean to keep power in their hands. They’re deadly serious about it.

Donald Trump is right again. Said he: “In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you -- and I'm just standing in their way.”

And we Know, On the Fringe ,and more- Sept 20

 

Why Are the Nutjobs Trying to Kill Political Opponents All Left-Wingers?

posted by Josh Hammer at Townhall 

In Aug. 2012, a left-wing MSNBC afficionado named Floyd Lee Corkins armed himself with a handgun and extra magazines. He drove to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the socially conservative Family Research Council, planning to shoot it up. Corkins, who later cited the Southern Poverty Law Center for the proposition that the FRC is an "anti-gay" organization, was also carrying 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches, which he hoped to stuff in his dead victims' mouths. Corkins, who served as a volunteer at a local LGBT community center, was stopped by an unarmed security guard.

In June 2017, a left-wing MSNBC afficionado named James Hodgkinson armed himself with a rifle and handgun. He drove to Alexandria, Virginia, in hopes of assassinating the Republican team practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. He severely wounded then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who thankfully survived after receiving multiple blood transfusions and surgeries. Five others were also injured. Hodgkinson was a 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign volunteer who, in a Facebook post three weeks before the shooting, wrote: "Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co."

In June 2022, a young Californian named Nicholas Roske flew to the nation's capital. Roske attained a handgun, zip ties, a tactical knife, a hammer, a screwdriver, a crowbar, duct tape and other burglary tools. At 1:38 a.m. local time, about a half hour after a taxi dropped him off in front of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's Chevy Chase, Maryland, home, Roske had second thoughts and called 911. After his arrest, Roske told police he was angered by the leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization abortion case. Roske had written in a private chat: "Im gonna stop roe v wade from being overturned."

In March 2023, Audrey "Aiden" Hale, a transgender individual, slaughtered three children and three adults at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. A former pupil at the Christian school, Hale took precious time during the rampage to divert and unload seven rounds into a stained-glass depiction of the biblical character Adam in a church next door. As this column asked last year: Why, exactly, would a transgender former student of a Christian school return to that school to murder innocent Christian children and shoot up a stained-glass representation of no less symbolic a biblical figure than Adam? We don't necessarily need Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out. Leaked excerpts of the murderer's manifesto corroborate Hale's sinister, anti-Christian motive.

This Sunday, former President Donald Trump survived an attempted assassination for the second time in a span of roughly two months. The first would-be assassin, the mysterious Thomas Crooks, donated $15 to ActBlue, the well-known Democratic fundraising platform. The second would-be assassin, the considerably less mysterious Ryan Routh, has a prolific public record. Routh, a convicted felon and supporter of Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, had an over-the-top, creepy obsession with Ukraine -- one of the defining causes of the contemporary Left. Routh's social media accounts were rife with de rigueur left-wing platitudes about the alleged unprecedented threat posed by Trump to America's democracy and constitutional order.

Murderous political violence in the United States today is not an all-of-the-above phenomenon. Yes, such violence must be condemned by all responsible political and civic actors, as we inch ever closer to an irrecoverable national abyss. But MSNBC's daily on-air histrionics to the contrary notwithstanding, all sides are not equally culpable for the terrible situation America finds itself in today.

Trump may not always be the most circumspect rhetorician, but he has never actively called for his supporters to physically assault their political opponents -- including on Jan. 6, when he called for his throng of supporters gathered at the Ellipse to "peacefully and patriotically" demonstrate at the Capitol. The same cannot be said for Trump's opposition, such as when Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) said earlier this year on MSNBC that Trump is "unfit," "destructive to our democracy," and "has to be eliminated." According to a poll released on Wednesday, a whopping 28% of Democrats said America would be better off if Trump were assassinated -- and another 24% of Democrats confessed uncertainty.

This is unconscionable.

The Left has had a violent streak going back at least as far as Karl Marx's calls for a global revolution of the proletariat -- and the French Revolution even before that. And in today's post-truth world, an expedient narrative often trumps cold facts. But Trump is not a "fascist" or "dictator." On the contrary, Trump's first term was, if anything, marred by excessive deference and an unwillingness to fire insubordinate bureaucrats.

If MSNBC talking heads and their left-wing confreres fail to tone down the rhetoric, reasonable observers will conclude they agree with the 28% of Democrats who want Trump dead.

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Can You Understand the Fed’s Nearly $200 Billion in Losses?

Can You Understand the Fed’s Nearly $200 Billion in Losses?

Alex J. Pollock for Mises.org 

Can you understand how it can be that the Federal Reserve, the world’s greatest and by far most important central bank, has now lost the astounding sum of $193 billion? If not, you are surely not alone. Since September 2022, the Fed has lost money every month. These unprecedented losses continue, and this fall they will in the aggregate pass $200 billion.

The Fed has a powerful mystique, which it works hard at cultivating. It intensely wants to be credible—that is, for you to believe in it (“credo” = I believe), and perhaps you do. The people’s belief is an important source of the Fed’s power, and its power is a key source of the government’s power. We can accurately say that the Fed prints power by printing money. The Fed does not want little things like $200 billion in losses to shake your belief—like the Wizard of Oz, it tells you, “Pay no attention to that man, or those losses, behind the curtain!” It puts its losses behind an accounting curtain that pretends that losses are an asset.

These operating losses are not, as is sometimes mistakenly said, mere “paper” losses. They are real, cash losses. The Fed is suffering negative net interest income because its cost of funds is much greater than the income on its investments. The $193 billion in operating losses exceeds the Fed’s $43 billion in total capital by more than four times. Thus at present, it has no earnings, no retained earnings, and no capital. Inaddition to that, it had a mark to market loss of over $1 trillion as of its June 30 financial statements.

How can this be? How can the bank with the hugely profitable monopoly of issuing the world’s dominant reserve currency, be losing a fortune?

To understand the Fed, or any central bank, you have to divide it analytically into two different parts, and account for the functions and the profits of the two parts separately. The Fed does not do this, although the logic is classic and was already required for the Bank of England by the Bank Charter Act of 1844, also called “Peel’s Bank Act,” after Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister who promoted it. The Bank of England was at that point the greatest and by far the most important central bank in the world.

The Bank of England was divided by Peel’s Act into an Issue Department and a Banking Department. The idea at the time was to tie the paper currency firmly to gold. That has disappeared in both theory and practice, but the Bank of England still keeps its books according to this fundamental division of functions. So should the Fed. 

The Issue Function of the Fed exploits its government-granted monopoly of issuing the U.S. currency. Its liabilities are the $2.3 trillion in currency outstanding, the paper dollars held not only in the U.S., but all over the world. From a profitability point of view, these are wonderful liabilities for the central bank. The currency is a non-interest bearing, perpetual, non-redeemable source of funds. 

The Issue Function’s assets are the $2.3 trillion in investments financed by the currency issued. These investments are typically government bonds.

Why is issuing currency so profitable? If in 2023, the Issue Function of the Fed had used its $2.3 trillion simply to buy Treasury bills, it would have received about a 5% yield. The result would have been interest expense = zero and interest income = $115 billion. If operating expenses were $1 billion (a guess), the net profit would have been $114 billion. But it looks like the Issue Function unwisely, or perhaps foolishly, invested its funds in long-term bonds at 2%, at the bottom of interest rates. Even so, it still had a profit of $45 billion in 2023.

The Federal Reserve as a whole lost $114 billion in 2023, the profits of the Issue Function notwithstanding. That means that the Banking Function—i.e. the rest of the Fed, with its QE investments, mortgage securities, deposits, loans, expenses, and a lot of risk—actually lost the $114 billion plus the entire $45 billion profit from the Issue Function’s currency monopoly. Thus the Fed’s Banking Function for 2023 lost $159 billion--and that’s only for one year. For the two years ending this September 30, I estimate the Fed’s Banking Function will have lost about $290 billion. Quite a number, and the losses continue.

The Fed should adopt the two-department approach to help the Congress and the public understand what it is doing, with a hat tip to Sir Robert Peel.

Originally published in the New York Sun. Reprinted with the author’s permission. 

• As of August 28, 2024 per the Federal Reserve H.4.1 Release.

DOJ’s Russia Indictment Exists To Associate Conservative Media With Putin

Instead of addressing Americans’ concerns, the DOJ has weaponized the criminal justice system to censor views it doesn’t like. 

T.J. Harker reporting for The Federalist

In Sept. 4, the Department of Justice indicted Russian nationals Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva for their covert funding of domestic media outlet Tenet Media. The media outlet deployed $10 million of Russian money, according to the indictment, which was reportedly used by right-leaning talent to create content for an American audience. The talent included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin, among others, who all appear to have been unaware of the funding source. 

The indictment is odd for several reasons. First, prosecutors would have known early in their investigation that the defendants would never set foot in an American courtroom, with extradition from Russia being impossible. This raises the question: Why investigate and prosecute a case that will never be tried? Second, the DOJ announced the indictment with an unusual amount of fanfare, going so far as to coordinate the announcement with simultaneous press releases from the Treasury Department and State Department. In my career as a federal prosecutor, I never once saw that happen. That’s not to say it never happened, but it’s rare. 

Predictably, the usual cohort of regime propaganda outlets breathlessly hailed the indictment, never failing to capitalize on an opportunity to paint their opponents as Russian agents, regardless of the truth of such claims. The New York Times (“Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative Media”) and MSNBC (“MAGA Influencers Are Scrambling After the DOJ’s Russia Indictment”) are just two examples. Other regime mandarins acted accordingly. YouTube, for example, removed hundreds of Tenet Media videos.

The widespread and immediate media coverage of a case that was dead on arrival (from a prosecution perspective) strongly suggests that smearing right-wing news sources was the DOJ’s goal. This was accomplished by inundating the country with the regime-friendly narrative that Johnson, Rubin, and Pool were associated with Russian intelligence. They’re not, and the DOJ knows it. 

Despite this, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco claimed that RT “co-opted online commentators by funneling them nearly $10 million to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences.” In the same press release, Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed that Tenet Media was “creat[ing] and distribut[ing] content … with hidden Russian government messaging.” One wonders how Garland could discern the “hidden” nature of the messaging while the American public could not.

Both of these statements are, at best, only partly true. The indictment contains no allegation that Tenet Media pumped pro-Russia disinformation to U.S. audiences. The word “disinformation” appears only twice, both times in the section entitled “background on Russian influence operations,” which have no bearing on the present matter. Further, there is no allegation that Tenet Media’s content was false, a prerequisite for “disinformation,” according to the regime’s definition. 

Indeed, the only substantive crime charged was a failure to file registration paperwork under a law that makes no distinction between true and false information (money laundering was also charged but only “in furtherance of” the failure to register; in other words, if there were no failure to register there would have been no money laundering).

These facts reveal that the DOJ didn’t bring the indictment to convict Kalashnikov or Afanasyeva (they’ll never set foot in the United States) nor to impede disinformation (there wasn’t any). Despite this, the DOJ announced the prosecutions to a global media frenzy in press releases choreographed with other major cabinet-level agencies that were amplified by the usual legacy media institutions. The association between conservative commentators and Russian intelligence was complete. 

This “guilt by association” smear tactic is an ancient form of propaganda, one which Democrats have deployed with great success in recent decades. What’s relatively new is the DOJ’s use of the criminal justice system to seed an association in the minds of normal Americans: Russia is bad, right-wing commentators are connected with Russia, therefore right-wing messages are “bad.” Put another way, the coordinated press releases were the purpose of the indictment. The criminal justice system was merely the vehicle, albeit one that imbued those press releases with more authority than they would otherwise possess. 

This mental association trick is the left’s go-to tactic when it comes to information warfare. It consists of smearing political opponents by inducing a false mental association with Adolf Hitler, racism, or Vladimir Putin. The regime’s incessant lies from 2016 through the present are sufficient proof: such as Russiagate, Crossfire Hurricane, the Mueller report, Hamilton 68, and the “51 former intelligence officials” scandal in which dozens of former intelligence community personnel lied to Americans that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation — a fact that our three-letter agencies knew to be false at the time. And it’s election season, so all that Russia, Russia, Russia nonsense is being rehashed again by has-beens who haven’t updated their world model since the Berlin wall fell. 

‘Disinformation’ DOJ Style

Though the Kalashnikov indictment doesn’t allege that any Tenet Media content was false, recall that Deputy Attorney General Monaco called it “disinformation” and “propaganda” while Garland called it “hidden Russian government messaging.” Plainly, DOJ wants you to believe that conservative commentators were Russian dupes but doesn’t want you to inquire whether Tenet Media’s content was true. 

Here’s where it gets interesting. On the same day DOJ unsealed the Kalashnikov indictment, it also unsealed a warrant to seize various websites designed as part of a Russian intelligence operation called Doppelganger. According to DOJ’s affidavit of probable cause, Russian state-sponsored entities created spoofs of well-known media sources, including websites for The Washington Post, Fox News, Der Spiegel, and other foreign and domestic outlets. They then planted stories on those spoofed website that were designed, according to the affidavit, to advance Russian interests. 

Though not part of the Kalashnikov indictment, the Doppelganger affidavit provides insight into what DOJ considers to be “disinformation.” Of its 277 pages, nearly 190 are documents obtained by the FBI. These documents were created by Russian intelligence entities for Russian intelligence consumption. They describe a multifaceted influence operation by which Russian intelligence would prepare stories for American and European audiences. 

If you assumed that Russia’s intelligence services prepared false stories to advance their interests at our expense you’d be mistaken. Instead, Russian intelligence specified that their goals included convincing Americans to focus on creating jobs, reducing crime, and reducing illegal immigration at home instead of spending money overseas. They realized that “[i]n order for this to be effective you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information.” And they observe that the Democrat Party consists of “far-left globalists who advocate for perversion of traditional moral and religious values” as compared with Trump supporters, “whose priority is to preserve traditions of the American way of life.” No wonder DOJ doesn’t want you to hear about this. 

As for the news stories DOJ calls “disinformation,” here are a few headlines and subheadlines: “[the U.S.] national debt has already surpassed $33 trillion,” “Young Americans Face a Poverty-Stricken Old Age,” and “Migration Crisis Will Bury [Biden’s] Future with Ukraine.” Do these seem false to you?

When viewed together, the Kalashnikov indictment and Doppelganger affidavit reveal that DOJ’s definition of disinformation is something like: “true and reliable information that is unacceptable to prevailing left-wing orthodoxy.” Thus, while we do have massive problems with debt, illegal immigration, crime, and job creation for citizens, and while I have never heard a compelling and succinct explanation for why we should spend a dime in Ukraine, our government doesn’t want us to receive information that might validate these concerns.

Instead of addressing these concerns, the DOJ has weaponized the criminal justice system to censor views it doesn’t like. 

Trump Targeted Again Amidst Rising Tide of Political Violence

Trump Targeted Again Amidst Rising Tide of Political Violence

Politicians and partisan fanatics spur each other to extremes in what they see as a struggle against evil.

J.D. Tuccille for reason.com

(EyePress/Newscom)

If politicians loudly and publicly insist their opponents are existential threats to democracy who seek to impose a dictatorship, they run the risk that people will take them seriously. Particularly unhinged or hate-filled followers may choose to lash out at what they've been warned are dangerous political enemies—even to the point of attempting to assassinate opposition leaders like Donald Trump. Twice.

Trump is guilty of his own overheated rhetoric, of course. But so far, he's been the one on the receiving end of those who take such language seriously. Well, Trump and regular people caught up in political tensions and a rising tide of violence have been on the receiving end. The very real risk is that people who perceive a need for bloody action against candidates and movements who might win the upcoming election will feel more desperately motivated to action once the ballots have been counted.

The Rattler is a weekly newsletter from J.D. Tuccille. If you care about government overreach and tangible threats to everyday liberty, this is for you.

Familiar Apocalyptic Rhetoric

"@POTUS Your campaign should be called something like KADAF. Keep America democratic and free. Trumps should be MASA …make Americans slaves again master. DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose," Ryan Routh, the more recent of the two would-be assassins who targeted Trump, posted on X earlier this year.

Democracy is on the ballot? That sounds familiar.

"We must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to — to destroying American democracy," President Joe Biden insisted in a September 2022 speech ostensibly intended to challenge Trump's demagoguery, but which ended up just offering a different brand of authoritarianism.

That came after he accused Trump supporters of "semi-fascism."

"Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms," Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential candidate, charged in March. She's since repeated such language.

Democrats will respond that Trump started it, and they have a point. Trump is famously nasty. Among his statements are a claim in March that if he doesn't win the election, "we're not going to have a country anymore."

When Harris took over from Biden as their party's standard-bearer, Trump warned that "she will destroy our country in a year," which he followed during his debate with his opponent by warning, "they're the threat to democracy."

But it was Trump who was wounded by one assassin's bullet and targeted by another.

Politics as a Struggle of Good vs. Evil

None of this vicious verbiage is an overt call to violence. But talk of saving democracy or preserving our country presents the normal business of electoral politics as struggles between good and evil. If we take this language seriously, we're not debating taxes and healthcare, we're engaged in Manichean struggle.

"Seekers have mistaken Leviathan for God, the will to power for the state of grace—and, by exalting political action almost literally to heaven, they have succumbed to what might be called the transcendental temptation," former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, recently wrote. "Only politics, they believe, can save the earth."

While everybody is susceptible to the unhealthy desire to search for deeper meaning in political activism, Gurri thinks the "progressive political class" has been especially effective at turning it into "a potent weapon of control." That means particular success in wielding apocalyptic language as a spur to fanatics who imagine themselves as holy warriors against evil. Ryan Routh, who appears to have been unbalanced from the beginning, would have been a likely convert to such a mission.

Political Violence Hurts Regular People

But prominent politicians aren't the only victims. Schools in Springfield, Ohio have been inundated with bomb threats amidst the controversy over the city's sizeable population of Haitian immigrants. In July, an 80-year old man putting up a Trump campaign sign was run over by a politically motivated attacker who later killed himself. Arsonists have targeted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), the offices of conservative organizations in Minnesota, and an Ohio church that hosted a drag event, among others.

"Threats against public officials have steadily risen during the last decade," according to a May data review from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "Indeed, in the last six years, the number of individuals who have been arrested at the federal level for making threats has nearly doubled from the previous four years."

We have until November before ballots are finally counted in this election. But that's unlikely to settle matters. Americans live in a state of permanent political campaigning now, forever staring-down the "immoral" and "dishonest" people (as they describe them) across the political divide whom they increasingly despise and would, in many cases, resort to extreme measures to keep out of power.

"One in 5 U.S. adults believe Americans may have to resort to violence to get their own country back on track," PBS reported in April of the results of a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll.

More Violence To Come

That's not nearly a majority. But it only takes a few nuts with grudges to set things on fire. And that's exactly what a lot of Americans expect to happen. A January CBS News poll found that "half the country expects there to be violence from the side that loses in future elections." That share rose to three-quarters regarding this year's vote in an August Deseret News/Harris X poll.

Elections should never be so important that people anticipate literally warring with their neighbors over the outcomes. If those who are drawn to political power are so dangerous that they threaten "our democracy and fundamental freedoms" or "will destroy our country in a year" and are poised to win on waves of popular support, then far too much power has been concentrated in government. In a free society, you can't guarantee that only angels will run for election. So, government and all of its offices should be stripped of the ability to do so much damage in the hands of the unfit.

Until that happens, mutually loathing factions, prompted by their leaders, will fear and plot against each other's rise to power. That threatens more political violence in the weeks, months, and years to come.

The Democrats’ War on America, Part Two: An Economy That Serves Nobody Except Those in Charge

 The worst thing about corruption as a system of government is that it works so well.

As we outlined in Part One, here in California, we have an economy that would be the fifth largest in the world if it were to be separated as a standing nation. Home to Silicon Valley, Hollywood, world-class agriculture, and medical schools, California is an economic powerhouse.

Yet we, in California, have the highest poverty rate in the nation. We have a majority of the nation’s homeless people. We have the highest overall tax rates in the nation. Our energy costs are double that of the national average. Our per-student spending in schools is well above the national average, yet our students consistently have below-average grade-level test scores. Our major cities are crime-ridden, our power grid is woefully vulnerable, and our beaches are regularly closed due to raw sewage contamination.

We are a one-party state. Democrats have a supermajority hold in California politics, meaning that there is no Congressional opposition to whatever they wish to do. They are in charge.

California’s economy serves every Democrat’s whim and desire. High-speed rail boondoggles? The line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, originally expected to cost around $40 billion, was expected to more than double in cost to at least $95 billion. Then the project’s scope changed after abandoning plans for dedicated high-speed tracks at both ends of the line, reducing costs to nearly $70 billion. This will make the mandated 2-hour and 40-minute trip virtually impossible. It might never be completed at all.

Unworkable EV mandates and banning of gas-powered cars? On September 23, 2024, Governor Hair Gel, Gavin Newsom, signed an executive order to ban the sale of new internal combustion engine (ICE) cars in the People’s Republic of Kalifornia by 2035. This insane executive order, which is not likely to stand up to judicial review, would ban all ICE vehicles from California’s roads by 2040. That is never likely to happen. What are the state’s poor people expected to drive?

Over-regulating oil and gas companies out of the state? In another effort to cripple oil drilling and production in California, Governor Hair Gel issued an executive order in 2021 to stop hydraulic fracking. While it is claimed that fracking in California represents just 2% of production—a statistic that is disputed by the industry—it’s the long-term threat to the oil and gas industry that contributes to the exodus of almost 100 energy companies from the state (many to Texas). This contributes to the fact that residents of this state pay some of the highest prices for gas in the nation, much of it due to onerous state taxes (60¢ per gallon on top of state and federal sales taxes on the sale of gas at the pump).

Mandating solar panels on all new construction? While on the surface this seems like a reasonably good idea, in reality, it is not. Why? Because the state does not have the electric energy infrastructure in place to support such a mandate. As increased loads are placed on the antiquated power grid, every summer, we suffer from rolling blackouts whenever temperatures climb over 100 degrees across the state. As the grid strains under the prospect of more EVs on our roads, this is a recipe for disaster.

Issuing insane minimum wage rules and closing hundreds of small businesses? No better place to see the law of unintended consequences rearing its ugly head is California’s 2024 law mandating a $20/hour minimum wage for fast food workers. This small-business-unfriendly law has put pressure on the economy in a destructive manner. It has put upward pressure on wages paid for many entry-level jobs, pricing many first-time workers out of a job and raising costs beyond what the market will bear. Why would you work for $12/hour for a landscaping job (cutting grass in the hot sun) when you can flip burgers in air-conditioned comfort at In-N-Out for $20/hour? With labor being an important component in fast food costs, California’s residents have rebelled at paying $20 for a Big Mac combo meal at McDonald’s, crippling many small businesses in the fast food and casual dining sectors.

Emptying and then closing prisons? California has a rampant violent crime problem and laws that have basically decriminalized retail theft up to $950 for a single theft. When you don’t have crimes being prosecuted by left-wing, George Soros-funded-and-supported district attorneys, you have less of a need for jail cells. While Governor Hair Gel has approved the closure of three prisons, he’s resisting closing more. Could the optics of closing more prisons be affecting his future political plans? We’ve noted the impact on local communities, many in rural areas, when prisons are closed and good-paying, not-easily-replaced jobs are made redundant.

Offering zero-interest home loans exclusively to illegal aliens at the expense of actual California citizens? This one we can’t blame on Governor Hair Gel. As Newsom wants to burnish his prospects for his expected 2028 run for the presidency (should Kamala Harris lose in November), he smartly vetoed this insane legislation proposed by the California State Legislature. We think that at some point, long-time California residents will see the folly in such idiotic policies and make Democrats pay at the polls.

These policies are simply crazy.

California’s economy and the vast amounts of revenue generated by millions of citizens and their businesses allow for every bad left-wing idea to be realized, tried, failed, and then tried again. In this economy, taxpayer money is not used to provide a better quality of life to its population; it is a tool to be squandered repeatedly in pursuit of a leftist utopia while lining the pockets of favored industries, activist groups, and entrenched political players. Nancy Pelosi is the poster child for the power of the elite political class.

It does not matter if these programs fail. There is no accountability for failure, only praise for intentions. In California, those in power wield it aggressively while demanding to be worshipped for their generosity with taxpayer dollars. In essence, they’re control freaks with unlimited funding.

When Democrats are in charge, the quality of life for ordinary citizens plummets. Almost every major city in America is under Democrat control and are disasters—Chicago, Baltimore, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Detroit, Seattle, Portland (we could go on and on)—all due to far-left control freaks using taxpayer funds to use as they see fit.

News of Democrat public officials directing tax dollars to friends and family is so common that, unless it is too egregious to cover up, the legacy media doesn’t qualify it as news anymore. The California news media considers this graft and corruption as business as usual. There’s a reason why many of the state’s more fiscally responsible residents have long called it the “People’s Republic of Kalifornia.”

The worst thing about corruption as a system of government is that it works so well. With so much consolidation of power and personal enrichment at stake, it’s no wonder why politicians work so hard to stay in office. It’s the cottage industry of the so-called Golden State and the power-intoxicated elites that have run the state into the ground over the last 50 years.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/20/the-democrats-war-on-america-part-two-an-economy-that-serves-nobody-except-those-in-charge/