Rogan is rarely discussed in mainstream political and media circles, which raises its own questions. Why does someone who packs such a big punch in terms of audience size and influence receive so much less media attention than, say, cable news hosts with audience sizes far smaller than his? Presidential candidates certainly recognize Rogan’s importance: All of the major Democratic candidates, according to him, requested to appear on his show. (The only ones he invited on were Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang.)
Rogan was in the news this week after President Donald Trump favorably responded to a guest’s suggestion that Rogan host a four-hour, sit-down presidential debate between the two candidates. The mere suggestion that someone like Rogan could host as prestigious and high-minded an event as a presidential debate prompted condescending scorn from establishment media precincts.
Prior to that, one of the few times Rogan was discussed in mainstream political circles was when outrage among establishment Democrats ensued after Sanders touted a quasi-endorsement from Rogan. The argument was that Rogan’s views are so repellent, bigoted, and anathema to liberalism that no Democratic candidate should be associated with him (this anger was shared by some of Sanders’ own supporters including, reportedly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez).
What is it, by the standards of U.S. political and media orthodoxy, that makes Rogan so radioactive? In March, billionaire and former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg — who spoke at the 2004 GOP Convention in the middle of the Iraq War and war on terror to urge the reelection of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and who presided over and repeatedly defended the racially disparate “stop and frisk” police practice — endorsed Joe Biden for president, and Biden not only accepted but celebrated the endorsement, praising Bloomberg in the process…
What are the standards that make Michael Bloomberg an acceptable endorsement to tout but not Joe Rogan, given that the billionaire three-term mayor and former Republican has taken far worse positions and done far more damage to far more people than the podcaster could ever dream of doing?
Snip.
What makes all of this more confounding is that Rogan is a fairly basic political liberal on almost every issue: He believes in the need for greater social spending for the nation’s poor and working class, opposes war and militarism, favors drug legalization, is adamantly pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights, and generally adheres to liberal orthodoxies on standard political debates. That is why he was so fond of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, and why Andrew Yang — whose signature issue was the universal basic income — was one of the few candidates he deemed worth talking to.
The objections typically raised to Rogan concern his questioning of some of the very recent changes brought about by trans visibility and equality, particularly asking whether it is fair for trans women who have lived their entire lives and entered puberty as biological men to compete against cis women in professional sports (a question also asked — and even answered in the negative — by LGBT sports pioneer Martina Navratilova, among many others), and whether young children are emotionally and psychologically equipped to make permanent choices about gender reassignment therapies and gender dysphoria.
If embracing and never questioning the full panoply of trans advocacy is a prerequisite to being permitted in decent society, I seriously doubt many prominent Democratic politicians will pass that test (even Kamala Harris, from San Francisco and the very blue state of California, has a very mixed record on trans rights). Moreover, though polling data is sparse, the data that is available show that there is still much work to do in this area: Only a small minority of Americans believe it is fair to allow trans women to participate in female professional sports.
If the standard is that anyone who even entertains debates over the maximalist and most controversial questions in this very new and evolving social movement is to be cast out as radioactive, liberalism and the Democratic Party will be a very small group. It will also have to proceed without the vast majority of political leaders whom they currently follow. Even on this issue of trans rights, Rogan’s views are in accord with the standard Democratic Party view: He advocates full legal protection and dignity for the right of trans people to live with their gender respected.
The other critique centers on Rogan’s willingness to invite on his show various pundits with far-right views. That’s a bizarre criticism of someone who purposely hosts a program designed to foster dialogue with people across the political spectrum. After all, if one employs the blatantly irrational tactic of attributing to Rogan the views of all his guests, he would be simultaneously everything and nothing.
Snip.
While Rogan is politically liberal, he is — argues former Obama 2008 campaign strategist and Rogan listener Shant Mesrobian — culturally conservative, by which he does not mean that Rogan holds conservative views on social issues (again, he is pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights). He means that Rogan exudes culturally conservative signals: He likes MMA fighting, makes crude jokes, hunts, and just generally fails to speak in the lingo of the professional managerial class and coastal elites. And it is those cultural standards, rather than political ones, that make Rogan anathema to elite liberal culture because, Mesrobian argued in a viral Twitter thread, liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.
Lefty Greenwald is right in that Rogan isn’t a conservative, and in the general vicinity of the answers he’s looking for, but not quite on target. A few points:
Rogan isn’t just opposed to tranny madness, he’s critical of almost the entire Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Warrior agenda. That’s why he’s had people like James Lindsay and Bret Weinstein on his show.
The left (falsely) feels that their supposed ability to police the boundaries of acceptable speech gives them a huge political advantage, and Rogan’s willingness to engage in anti-PC speech and terminology enrages them.
When Glennwald says “That’s a bizarre criticism of someone who purposely hosts a program designed to foster dialogue with people across the political spectrum,” that’s the point. Social justice Warriors don’t want dialog across the political spectrum, they want monolithic conformity and unwavering surrender to their demands so that they can burn the entire system down.
Remember, Social Justice Warriors hate liberals far more than they hate conservatives, and not just for the fact they stand in the way of the more immediate and important goal of seizing control of the Party. Social Justice Warriors hate liberals the same way the Islamic State hated Shiites far more than they hated Christians. You and I may be infidels, but to Social Justice Warriors, regular liberals are heretics who must repent or be destroyed.
Rogan is also hated by the Democratic Party regulars for refusing to hew to the party line. Mainstream Democrats will never forgive him for giving Tusli Gabbard a platform after they deemed her beyond the pale, or for daring to point out that Joe Biden has dementia. Ditto his support of Bernie Sanders, who the Party’s corrupt wing regarded as their biggest threat to maintaining control of the Party.
It’s not just language that gives Rogan an air of cultural conservatism. Rogan doesn’t believe in gun control, one of the few issues (along with abortion and a fervent desire to increase the size and scope of the federal government) that still ties the Democratic Party’s increasingly disjointed factions together.
Finally, what standards make Michael Bloomberg acceptable to Democratic Party elites and not Joe Rogan? Simple: money. The corrupt wing running the DNC is always willing to chuck ideological purity over the side to do the bidding of its donor class, while the insane wing is happy to sell temporary indulgences for sufficient quantities of Danegeld.
But Greenwald is right about one thing: Much of the elites loathing of Rogan, like that of President Trump, is instinctive, visceral and cultural. How dare that uncouth man be so influential? He’s not one of us.
Time to zig while everyone else is zagging over the Supreme Court nomination fight, and once again offer up a roundup of Communist China’s ongoing perfidy:
Chances are that by the time you get to the end of this article, there will be news of another information operation targeting Donald Trump. There’s one a day now—each trumpeting a new mortal threat to the republic or some dastardly revelation based on sources that are usually anonymous. Whatever it is, it will serve the same purpose as the hundreds of similar sallies launched over the last four years—namely, to preserve and protect the position and privileges of America’s ruling elite.
Trump stories are rarely about Trump. The same stories, or versions of them, would have targeted anyone who threatened to sever the American political, corporate, and cultural elite’s economic lifeline to the Chinese Communist Party. It is largely because Trump sought to decouple the United States from the CCP that America’s China Class, which owns the platforms on which Americans communicate, has waged a relentless campaign of information warfare against him through its social media and prestige media brands.
Consider the last two anti-Trump info ops: He gratuitously denigrated the historical suffering of African Americans, and he expressed contempt for America’s war dead. These are the sort of false allegations that political operatives are tasked to manufacture and disseminate during election season. Their purpose is to reinforce a negative impression of the opposing party among whatever cohort is being addressed, and make the target spend resources—time and money and sometimes blood—on defense. That’s politics 101, since the time of the Romans.
What’s new is that this is now journalism too. Since the internet defunded the press at the end of the 20th century and social media became the dominant player in America’s information space, journalism has abandoned the traditional standards and practices that once defined reporting. For instance, the smear holding that Trump is contemptuous of the military was supposedly based on four anonymous sources recalling exchanges from three years ago, which have been contradicted by dozens of named sources, some of whom were physically present when the comments were supposedly made—and some of whom have been public Trump opponents. In traditional journalistic terms, that’s not a news story—that’s a failed attack line.
The press that existed in America from the end of the 19th century until the turn of this one was designed to inform, influence, and sometimes inspire or inflame fellow citizens. But for people under 30, the only kind of “journalism” they’ve ever known is more like Pravda in the old Soviet Union or the kinds of party media found throughout the Third World. Journalism is an insider’s game, in which the stories are often outlandish, but rarely true; their actual news value is the hints they may offer about shadowy maneuverings that affect people’s lives but take place out of public view, like the rise or fall of a particular colonel who is pictured standing closer to or farther away from El Caudillo or Al Rais. Stories aren’t about the realities they purport to depict; the real stories are always the stories about the story.
American journalists, who now draw their paychecks directly and indirectly from the country’s largest economic interest—technopolies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook—are now turning the public sphere into a phantasmagoria of conspiracy theories and hysteria to cement the politburo’s position and privilege.
Accordingly, the debate in Washington, D.C., over which great power is feeding more disinformation into the 2020 election cycle isn’t real—it’s not Russia, as collusion impresario and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff claims, nor, as Attorney General William Barr says, is it China, though he’s closer to the truth. The source of the purposeful disinformation pouring into the American public sphere like untreated sewage is the American elite, led by its tech oligarchs, who own the platforms on which information campaigns are staged and laundered to protect their core interests—foremost among them being cheap Chinese labor and access to Chinese markets.
Snip.
By the time the Clinton White House granted China most favored nation trade status in 2000, all of Washington knew that America was running a vast trade deficit that was destined to increase with accession to the World Trade Organization. The price for lifting tens of millions of rural Chinese peasants out of poverty through favorable trade arrangements would be tens of millions of American lives ruined, even as large American companies like Apple and Nike and bankers like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs got richer. The elite reasoned that they had no choice: The rise of China was inevitable. Why fight it?
American political and corporate elites didn’t choose decline. They chose to get rich. By shipping America’s manufacturing base off to China, they seized a business opportunity the likes of which had never been seen before—an enormous captive labor force controlled by an authoritarian regime that guaranteed the steady production of goods at a fraction of what it would cost at home. American cultural elites (Hollywood, sports, art, etc.) who exploited the increasingly large Chinese market for their products provided cover for the China Class cohort with messaging that dovetailed with CCP propaganda.
Who were Americans to judge a great and ancient civilization like China’s for jailing dissidents and enslaving the Uighur minority? Doesn’t America have its own history of slavery and political prisoners? It’s racist to protect American jobs. Those jobs aren’t coming back and there is nothing to be done about it, as Barack Obama famously said—unless you have a magic wand …
Calling out the American elite for betraying American interests in the service of their own personal and corporate bottom lines helped Donald Trump win the presidency. But it’s not clear that he truly understood how deeply entwined Beijing’s interests were with America’s China Class—and that trying to decouple the two would lead to an attempt at a permanent coup by the new techno-elite, targeting not just him and his supporters but the foundations of the republic, from our military to the media, and from our justice system to the institution of the presidency itself.
The American elite’s financial relationship with China is the key to understanding what’s been happening in America the past four years. Any president, Democrat or Republican, who took on China would have been targeted by the China Class. Because it was Trump flying the Republican banner who sided with America’s working men and women, the Democrats resorted to alliances with powers that now threaten the stability and security of the country.
Overstated? A bit. But there are several kernels of truth in there…
Related: Major U.S. media companies that have ties to China. It’s an extensive list…
Hong Kong-based virologist Yan Li-Meng, currently in hiding at an undisclosed location, claims that the COVID-19 coronavirus came from a People’s Liberation Army lab, and not from a Wuhan wet market as Beijing has claimed.
EconoTimes reports on Yan:
Speaking on a live stream interview on Taiwan’s News Agency Lude Press, she said, “At that time, I clearly assessed that the virus came from a Chinese Communist Party military lab. The Wuhan wet market was just used as a decoy.”
“I knew that once I spoke up, I could disappear at any time, just like all the brave protesters in Hong Kong. I could disappear at any time, even my name would no longer exist,” Yan said according to a translation.
Yan has been in hiding in the U.S. after fleeing Hong Kong in April. She last made waves in July after an interview with Fox News:
Yan told Fox News in an exclusive interview that she believes the Chinese government knew about the novel coronavirus well before it claimed it did. She says her supervisors, renowned as some of the top experts in the field, also ignored research she was doing at the onset of the pandemic that she believes could have saved lives.
She adds that they likely had an obligation to tell the world, given their status as a World Health Organization reference laboratory specializing in influenza viruses and pandemics, especially as the virus began spreading in the early days of 2020.
On July 30th, Chinese state media published details of the upcoming fifth plenary session. The Party’s leaders have traditionally used the conference to lay out their next five-year plan, but this time a new detail was included—a pointed reference to “targets for 2035.” The date may give us some indication of how long Xi Jinping intends to retain his position as president. China has reached a crucial stage of its development, with superpower status at last in sight, and Xi has decided that only one man can be trusted to guide the country through the final stages of its glorious journey. That man is himself, of course. He has assumed the role of Great Helmsman, famously ordering the removal of presidential term limits in 2018 to ensure that the inferior leaders of the future don’t botch the job.
In the years since becoming president, Xi has drawn state powers to himself like no other Chinese leader since Mao. Today he oversees all aspects of economic, political, cultural, social, and military reform, and at the same time he directs all aspects of national, internet, and information security.1 This dramatic fortification of his personal power requires him to focus on the silencing of dissent—again, to a greater degree than any of his predecessors since Mao. But dissent crops up in many and varied forms, even in China, and as a result we find that the president’s power base is built on countless personal tragedies.
Xi has authorised his secret police to kidnap, “interrogate” (torture), and detain for six months anyone charged with endangering state security, which means, in reality, anyone who has expressed heretical views. Tens of thousands have disappeared as a result. Others have been caught in his anti-corruption dragnet—a convenient cover for him to get rid of dissenting voices. And more than a million people have been locked in concentration camps, most of them guilty only of belonging to the wrong ethnic group. If Xi really does stay in power until 2035 then we can expect the casualties to keep piling up for another 15 years. We owe it to these victims to tell a few of their stories, and to remember some of their names.
Xi’s Gestapo thugs will sometimes come for TV newscasters just before they are due to go on air, but in 2018 they came for an elderly professor while he was actually on the air. Six or seven policemen turned up to drag Sun Wenguang, 83, away from his live interview with Voice of America. These are cynical terror tactics. It’s one thing to read a detached news report about someone having been arrested; it’s quite another to actually hear the panic in the old man’s voice as he shouts: “What are you doing? What are you doing? It’s illegal for you to come into my home!” That interview will not quickly be forgotten by Chinese listeners to Voice of America.
“Deng Xiaoping kept everyone together by promising to make them rich,” says Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia Director of Amnesty International. “What keeps things together under Xi is fear. Fear of the system, where no matter how high you are, from one day to the next you can disappear.” 243 Party officials are reported to have killed themselves during Xi’s first few years in office, apparently terrified at the prospect of investigation by his dreaded Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. It is not difficult to understand why they might have chosen this route. Both body and will are broken in the Party’s detention centres. Each of those officials knew that after just a few months in police custody, he would no longer be the same person.
Several sad examples of Chinese individuals broken by torture snipped.
Xi Jinping has more in common with an emperor of the ancient world than the chairman of a revolutionary vanguard party. Despite this, somewhat paradoxically, he has resurrected the language of Mao’s era. In the words of John Garnaut, one-time advisor to the Australian government, “Xi’s language of ‘party purity’; ‘criticism and self-criticism’; ‘the mass line’; his obsession with ‘unity’; his attacks on elements of ‘hostile Western liberalism,’ ‘constitutionalism,’ and other variants of ideological ‘subversion’—this is all Marxism-Leninism as interpreted by Stalin as interpreted by Mao.”
The Communist Party of the 21st century is a classic Chinese dynasty rather than the temporary guardian of a workers’ revolution. Its leaders are concerned with the Party itself, not with communism. But Xi is using elements of Marxism-Leninism as the glue to hold society together—like a religion, perhaps, or like Confucianism in earlier dynasties. “Our red nation will never change colour,” he tells the people. And with the return of the old phrases comes the return of the old practices. Xi knows that Western ideas are forever infecting the minds of his subjects; always perverting the purity of students, of lawyers, of government officials. Like Stalin and Mao, he knows that regular purges are necessary in order to preserve the spiritual health of the people.
Xi’s main legacy, however, is surely the Xinjiang nightmare. Over the past few years a million or more Uyghur Muslims (and smaller numbers of Kazakhs and Kyrgyz) have been shut in concentration camps scattered about the western province. This mass incarceration is a response to terrorist attacks carried out by Uyghur separatists in Kunming and Ürümqi in 2014—attacks that came at the end of decades of tension between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnicity.
The camps are designed to stamp out extremist thinking. Unfortunately, as with so many of Xi’s policies, there is no concern for collateral damage. Party leaders have been given instructions to round up anyone acting suspiciously, but this definition of “suspicious” appears to have been provided by a paranoid schizophrenic. Uyghurs have been interned for growing a beard; making plans to travel abroad; praying too much (or, on other occasions, not praying enough); setting clocks to two hours after Beijing time; even simply having been born in the 1990s. The wrong skin colour is itself cause for suspicion.
From the outset, Xi told his officials to show no mercy. They took him at his word, and now the personal tragedies are mounting.
— Color Revolutionary Poso (@JackPosobiec) August 3, 2020
China's planned route to the Arabian Sea is key for their Westward expansion – and strategically located next to the India-China border, not to mention their largest oil supplier Iran, and of course, Afghanistan.
The conventional wisdom has long been that, if there is to be a major war involving China and the U.S., it will be the result of either of a rising China initiating war to displace the failing U.S. hegemon, or a declining U.S. initiating a war to stymie a rising China. But this ignores the possibility that systemic or hegemonic war between China and the U.S. may not have anything to do with a rising power. It ignores the possibility that such a war might be initiated by what I will call a faltering contender, a once-rising power whose ascent is running out of steam and whose leaders believe that it must decisively reshape the global order now while it still can.
The logic linking a faltering bid for hegemony to systemic war is simple enough. Faced with the prospect that it is losing the demographic or developmental race with other potential challengers, or merely with non-hegemonic rivals, a faltering contender will sometimes launch what might be thought of as a war of desperation. In this kind of war, a faltering contender will initiate hostilities because, having realized that it has reached the peak of its relative power, it decides it must initiate war now, even under unfavorable circumstances, because if it doesn’t, it will not only fail to achieve predominance but will face the prospect of catastrophic defeat in the near future. Such wars are not caused by states leaping through open windows of opportunity created by the military advantage they enjoy over their potential rivals. Instead, they are caused by stalled rising powers, at a current or imminent military disadvantage, attacking despite this disadvantage because it is the least bad of several very bad options open to them.
Analogies to Germany in World War I and Japan in World War II snipped.
China’s explosive economic growth since the beginning of reform in 1979 is a unique success story, as is the concomitant growth of its military power and global influence. Few could have predicted that within one generation of Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, China would have risen to undisputed number two in the global pecking order. China now has the world’s second-largest economy, a world-class military with growing force projection capabilities, a worldwide network of ‘silk roads’ making it a central node in the global economy, and a diplomatic profile that makes it, if not an ‘indispensable nation,’ then something pretty close. And yet, at precisely the moment when its tide has reached heights not seen for centuries, the Chinese leadership has reason to believe that China’s star may not be in the ascendant much longer. President Xi’s failed One-Belt initiative, botched COVID-related ‘medical soft power’ play, abrogation of the ‘one-country, two-systems’ modus vivendi with Hong Kong, inconclusive border clashes with India, failure to sustain China’s economic momentum, policy-induced demographic time-bomb, and a growing sentiment that China is becoming less powerful and therefore less relevant player on the world stage suggest that China is no longer a rising power, but a faltering one. Viewed through this lens, the picture of the future that comes into focus is one of counterbalancing, containment, economic ‘decoupling,’ social turmoil, ethnic unrest, and general entropy culminating in collapse. Unless a forward-thinking Chinese leader might conclude, decisive steps are taken now to put things aright. And what might those steps be? Well, if history is any guide, they might include launching a war of desperation in the hope of securing the best geopolitical settlement possible before China is weakened to the point where it is simply condemned to another ‘hundred years of humiliation.’ What that war might look like – how it might erupt, whom it might involve, what course it might take – cannot be forecast with any certainty. But then neither could the war started by Germany in 1914 nor that by Japan in 1941. The point is that in those two earlier cases, the only rational course of action for the faltering challenger was the strategic Hail Mary pass. The question is, will a China whose rise is similarly stalling throw a comparably desperate strategic pass the early in the 21st century?
The U.S. Justice Department this week indicted seven Chinese nationals for a decade-long hacking spree that targeted more than 100 high-tech and online gaming companies. The government alleges the men used malware-laced phishing emails and “supply chain” attacks to steal data from companies and their customers. One of the alleged hackers was first profiled here in 2012 as the owner of a Chinese antivirus firm.
Charging documents say the seven men are part of a hacking group known variously as “APT41,” “Barium,” “Winnti,” “Wicked Panda,” and “Wicked Spider.” Once inside of a target organization, the hackers stole source code, software code signing certificates, customer account data and other information they could use or resell.
APT41’s activities span from the mid-2000s to the present day. Earlier this year, for example, the group was tied to a particularly aggressive malware campaign that exploited recent vulnerabilities in widely-used networking products, including flaws in Cisco and D-Link routers, as well as Citrix and Pulse VPN appliances. Security firm FireEye dubbed that hacking blitz “one of the broadest campaigns by a Chinese cyber espionage actor we have observed in recent years.”
Snip.
One of the men indicted as part of APT41 — now 35-year-old Tan DaiLin — was the subject of a 2012 KrebsOnSecurity story that sought to shed light on a Chinese antivirus product marketed as Anvisoft. At the time, the product had been “whitelisted” or marked as safe by competing, more established antivirus vendors, although the company seemed unresponsive to user complaints and to questions about its leadership and origins.
Those charged also include Zhang Haoran, Jiang Lizhi, Qian Chuan and Fu Qiang.
The Trump administration plans to soon scrap a 2013 agreement between U.S. and Chinese auditing authorities, a senior State Department official said, a move that could foreshadow a broader crackdown on U.S.-listed Chinese firms under fire for sidestepping American disclosure rules.
The deal, which set up a process for a U.S. auditing watchdog to seek documents in enforcement cases against Chinese auditors, was initially welcomed as a breakthrough in U.S. efforts to gain access to closely guarded Chinese financial information and bestowed a mark of legitimacy on Chinese regulators.
But the watchdog, known as the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), has long complained of China’s failure to grant requests, meaning scant insight into audits of Chinese firms that trade on U.S. exchanges.
The lack of transparency has prompted administration officials to lay the groundwork to exit the deal soon, according to Keith Krach, undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment, in a sign the PCAOB will give up on efforts to secure information from the Chinese.
His doctorate research was about Chinese foreign policy and he was about to discover firsthand how the rising superpower seeks to attain influence.
After his presentation, Jun Wei, also known as Dickson, was, according to US court documents, approached by several people who said they worked for Chinese think tanks. They said they wanted to pay him to provide “political reports and information”. They would later specify exactly what they wanted: “scuttlebutt” – rumours and insider knowledge.
He soon realised they were Chinese intelligence agents but remained in contact with them, a sworn statement says. He was first asked to focus on countries in South East Asia but later, their interest turned to the US government.
That was how Dickson Yeo set off on a path to becoming a Chinese agent – one who would end up using the professional networking website LinkedIn, a fake consulting company and cover as a curious academic to lure in American targets.
Five years later, on Friday, amid deep tensions between the US and China and a determined crackdown from Washington on Beijing’s spies, Yeo pleaded guilty in a US court to being an “illegal agent of a foreign power”. The 39-year-old faces up to 10 years in prison.
Snip.
In 2017, Germany’s intelligence agency said Chinese agents had used LinkedIn to target at least 10,000 Germans. LinkedIn has not responded to a request for comment for this story but has previously said it takes a range of measures to stop nefarious activity.
Some of the targets that Yeo found by trawling through LinkedIn were commissioned to write reports for his “consultancy”, which had the same name as an already prominent firm. These were then sent to his Chinese contacts.
One of the individuals he contacted worked on the US Air Force’s F-35 fighter jet programme and admitted he had money problems. Another was a US army officer assigned to the Pentagon, who was paid at least $2,000 (£1,500) to write a report on how the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan would impact China.
In finding such contacts, Yeo, who was based in Washington DC for part of 2019, was aided by an invisible ally – the LinkedIn algorithm. Each time Yeo looked at someone’s profile it would suggest a new slate of contacts with similar experience that he might be interested in. Yeo described it as “relentless”.
According to the court documents, his handlers advised him to ask targets if they “were dissatisfied with work” or “were having financial troubles”.
When globalism’s obituary is finally written, and the mourners file past in their crisp suits and pantsuits, the cause of death will almost certainly read, the People’s Republic of China.
China is the most obvious offender. Even before the Wuhan virus cut off countries from each other, the communist oligarchy had abused the world economy with massive digital theft, even more massive counterfeiting, product dumping and every possible form of economic warfare.
That’s why any halfway serious adult on the other side supports Trump’s fight against China.
Last year, even George Soros, the uber-globalist, called Trump’s trade war with China his greatest achievement. This year, during the coronavirus crisis, Soros came out against working with the People’s Republic of China against the virus.
This certainly doesn’t buttress my theory that both Soros and China are backing antifa/#BlackLivesMatter, but it doesn’t entirely invalidate either.
China threatens to retaliate to restrict drug exports to America in retaliation for America restricting semiconductor exports. I keep saying that semiconductor equipment exports are a lot more critical and less replaceable. (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
Dozens of universities, including Columbia and Stanford, are hosting the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institute despite increasing scrutiny from the federal government.
Many elite universities with Confucius Institute programs appear to be unfazed by the Trump administration’s decision last week to designate the D.C-based headquarters of the program as a “foreign mission”—a label the U.S. government applies to entities it finds to be directly controlled by a foreign power. Despite the announcement, nearly 50 colleges and universities will continue their partnership with Confucius Institute programs, which comes with up to $1 million in Chinese government funding.
The cushy partnership between American universities and the Chinese regime has restricted academic freedom on campus, frequently forcing administrators and faculty members to self-censor to avoid Beijing’s wrath. While many universities rely on the organization to support Mandarin language classes and Chinese culture lessons, the program also bars its staff from discussing topics considered taboo by the Chinese Communist Party, such as the Xinjiang concentration camps or the Hong Kong protests.
Former deputy mayor of Jixi city in northeastern Heilongjiang Province flees to the U.S., “reveals the tight control of speech and information in China, the regime’s cover-up of COVID-19 cases, [and] Communist Party officials secretly taking medicine to prevent virus infection.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Ren Zhiqiang, former chairman of a state-owned real estate group who “openly criticized Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic was sentenced to 18 years in prison on corruption charges Tuesday, a court announced.”
Many who view the rise of China, and especially its growing technological competence, with a mixture of fear and awe should ask themselves why if emphasizing critical race theory and gender studies has not been a mistake.
Greetings regular readers! I’m so glad you survived yesterday’s tragic mass die-off! Plus Biden campaign troubles, fundraising updates, the “Harris Administration,” and the Burisma report looms. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Biden says 200 million people will die from the Wuhan coronavirus by the time he finishes his speech.
One of the lessons of 2016 was that the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had all kinds of internal reports of problems, signs of insufficient support and enthusiasm in key states, and ominous indicators that they were nowhere nearly as strong and effective as most of the coverage suggested.
The problem was that only a few reporters knew about those, and the ones that did had pledged to keep what they were seeing and hearing secret until after the election for their campaign narrative books. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, “over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred subjects, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly.” Florida Democratic political consultants warned the campaign they were in danger of losing the Sunshine State. Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking. The Service Employees International Union wanted to send more volunteers to Michigan and the Clinton campaign told them to keep their people to Iowa instead.
If you had really good Democratic Party or liberal activist-group sources, you heard these portentous stories that look like really key indicators in hindsight. If you didn’t, you were dependent upon the polls and the dominant narrative in the media that the Clinton campaign was an experienced, well-oiled machine while the Trump campaign was a bunch of amateur stumblebums constantly beset by infighting.
Fast-forward to today, and it feels like these kinds of, “hey, the Democratic nominee’s campaign may not be as strong as it looks” stories are leaking out into the general news coverage much more frequently.
Earlier this week, the New York Times wondered aloud about Democratic strength in Nevada:
Nevada’s Democratic political machine was held up as a model for other states where neither party has consistently dominated. But it was a machine built for another era.
Its success relied on hundreds of people knocking on thousands of doors for face-to-face conversations with voters. Now, there are fewer than half as many people canvassing for Democratic voters as there were in September 2016. And some Democratic strategists warn that Nevada could be in 2020 what Wisconsin was in 2016 — a state that the Democrats assume is safely in their column but that slips away.
The Washington Post reported that Latino Democrats are worried about Biden having lackluster numbers among this demographic:
Top Latino Democrats are voicing growing concern about Joe Biden’s campaign, warning that lackluster efforts to win the support of their community could have devastating consequences in the November election.
Recent polls showing President Trump’s inroads with Latinos have set off a fresh round of frustration and finger-pointing among Democrats, confirming problems some say have simmered for months. Many Latino activists and officials said Biden is now playing catch-up, particularly in the pivotal state of Florida, where he will campaign Tuesday — the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month — for the first time as the presidential nominee. Reaching out to Latino voters will be a key focus on the visit, according to a person with knowledge of the trip. Biden’s campaign said he will be in Tampa and Kissimmee, two areas with large Puerto Rican populations.
Plus concerns about the campaigns in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“I can’t even find a sign,” [Don] Sabbe says outside a Kroger’s in Sterling Heights, where surrounding cars fly massive Donald Trump flags that say “No More Bullsh-t” and fellow shoppers wear Trump T-shirts for their weekend grocery runs. “I’m looking for one of those storefronts. I’m looking for a campaign office for Biden. And I’m not finding one.”
The reason Sabbe can’t find a dedicated Biden campaign field office is because there aren’t any around here. Not in Macomb County, the swing region where Sabbe lives. It’s not even clear Biden has opened any new dedicated field offices in the state; because of the pandemic, they’ve moved their field organizing effort online. The Biden campaign in Michigan refused to confirm the location of any physical field offices despite repeated requests; they say they have “supply centers” for handing out signs, but would not confirm those locations. The campaign also declined to say how many of their Michigan staff were physically located here. Biden’s field operation in this all-important state is being run through the Michigan Democratic Party’s One Campaign, which is also not doing physical canvassing or events at the moment. When I ask Biden campaign staffers and Democratic Party officials how many people they have on the ground in Michigan, one reply stuck out: “What do you mean by ‘on the ground?’”
Among all Wisconsin voters, 56 percent say Biden hasn’t done enough to denounce the rioting versus just 31 percent who say he has. (Even among Democrats, 28 percent think he hasn’t done enough.) The numbers are similar in Minnesota at 54/35. Biden has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want to defund the police and he’s made several on-camera statements condemning the violence over the past few weeks, but that message isn’t getting through. And it’s helping to keep Trump close.
Democrats are concerned that a groundswell of support for President Trump outside of Minnesota’s Twin Cities may be enough to win him the state over 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Biden, the former two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator, visited carpenter apprentices and other union workers near Duluth on Friday, his first trip to Minnesota in more than 1,000 days, according to the Trump campaign.
Yet, despite his team releasing scant details about his itinerary, even to the local press, Republicans outnumbered Democrats at Hermantown’s Jerry Alander Carpenter Training Center, worrying those who are opposed to Trump clinching a second term on Nov. 3.
The Republican National Committee and the Minnesota GOP organized roughly 300 people to line Miller Trunk Highway for Biden’s stop. Democrats had less than half that number and told the Washington Examiner they didn’t know one another. Some, though, had traveled more than two hours from Minneapolis to see their party’s standard-bearer.
Tommy Moe, a retired miner from Virginia, Minnesota, predicted that the presidential race in his state would be close again after 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by only 1.5 percentage points (or 45,000 ballots). Moe, 65, based his prediction on the number of union workers he knew who felt “an affinity” for Trump because of the China trade deal and his unorthodox approach to politics.
“We didn’t have a very good turnout,” he said. “If the Democrats don’t get their act together and start getting as fired up as the Republican side is … we need a turnout. Democrats win if they turn out.”
“I focus on early primaries and the way the candidates perform in those early contests,” Norpoth said in the press release. “It’s a very good predictor, and a leading indicator of what’s going to happen in November.”
The professor said he was unsurprised at the model’s prediction this year, citing Trump’s performance in the primaries earlier in the winter.
“When I looked at New Hampshire and I saw that Donald Trump got 85 percent of the votes … I was pretty sure what the model was going to predict,” he said in the release.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, pulled down only 8.4% in New Hampshire, Norpoth said, a number that is “unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of being president,” he stated.
Enjoy some “Oh God, how I hate Trump, but Democrats are insane” hand-wringing from American Enterprise Institute wonk Danielle Pletka:
[Three paragraphs of pro-forma #OrangeManBad snipped]
I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues. I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses — almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November — would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy. That could include the abolition of the filibuster, creating an executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power; an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority; passage of devastating economic measures such as the Green New Deal; nationalized health care; the dismantling of U.S. borders and the introduction of socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown.
I fear the grip of Manhattan-San Francisco progressive mores that increasingly permeate my daily newspapers, my children’s curriculums and my local government. I fear the virtue-signaling bullies who increasingly try to dominate or silence public discourse — and encourage my children to think that their being White is intrinsically evil, that America’s founding is akin to original sin. I fear the growing self-censorship that guides many people’s every utterance, and the leftist vigilantes who view every personal choice — from recipes to hairdos — through their twisted prisms of politics and culture. An entirely Democratic-run Washington, urged on by progressives’ media allies, would no doubt only accelerate these trends.
Nor do Biden’s national-security positions reassure me. While he promises a welcome change in style and a renewed respect for U.S. alliances, Biden would, like Trump, pull our troops from the Middle East and South Asia. Worse yet, he would slash defense spending and likely renew the Obama administration’s misbegotten love affair with Iran’s tyrants. Then there is the Democratic Party’s hostility to the state of Israel. Biden supporters will clamor that the candidate’s history is very pro-Israel, but as president would he be strong enough to stand up to the new Democratic Party’s less-than-ardent support for the Jewish state?
To which I can only reply: What the hell took you so long to figure this out? (And then, to prove the extent of her Beltway Blinders, she turns out a paragraph on “execrable gun-toting racists.”)
“The former vice president’s campaign reported on Sunday that it and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) began September with $466 million in the bank – roughly $141 million more than the cash on hand for the president and the Republican National Committee (RNC).” Snip. “The infusion of cash allowed the Biden campaign to vastly outspend Trump’s team to run TV ads in August and September.” Big ad spends and no ground game? Sounds like Team Biden is trying to rerun the Jeb! strategy…
Republicans are preparing to release a report in a matter of days on their investigation focused on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, a move they hope will put fresh scrutiny on the Democratic nominee just weeks from the election.
The controversial probe, spearheaded by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is focused broadly on Obama-era policy and Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.
The GOP report, which is set to be released this week, is expected to argue that Hunter Biden’s work impacted Obama-era Ukraine policy and created a conflict of interest given then-Vice President Joe Biden’s work in the area.
Trump, Biden claims, “could not rally a single one of America’s closest allies” to support the extension of the [arms] embargo. What he neglects to mention is that the expiration date on the embargo was set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration and described by Biden as “a policy that was working to keep America safe.” That policy was, per Biden, discarded by Trump in favor of one “that has worsened the threat.” So which is it: Did the Obama-Biden Iran policy keep America safe? Or is the best argument against the Trump administration that they have failed to successfully roll back Obama-era policies?
Snip.
He fails entirely, in his op-ed ostensibly addressing the Iranian threat, to come even close to describing the full extent of how its regime has targeted U.S. forces in the Middle East, committed grievous human-rights violations against its own people, and funded terrorist organizations and plots around the globe. His failure to reckon fully with the evil of Ayatollah Khamenei seems indicative of not only his less serious estimation of the Iranian threat, but also the fact that he has made his peace with the current regime staying in power over the long term. He makes this belief explicit when he calls “Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’” strategy “a boon to the regime in Iran.” He again avoids explaining how, probably because this claim is untrue by every available metric.
Maximum pressure has effectively choked the Iranian economy. The JCPOA had helped Iran achieve GDP growth rates of 12.5 percent in 2016 and 3.7 percent in 2017. In 2018 — the same year the U.S. exited the deal — Iran’s economy contracted by 5.4 percent. 2019 was even worse, at -7.6 percent. Notably, this economic disaster has led to Iranians flooding into the streets many times over the last two years to protest not only pocketbook issues, but the regime’s restriction of basic freedoms. While Biden may be content to leave the ayatollahs in power, the Iranian people appear to be far less willing. Furthermore, Iran’s regional position has been undermined by the Trump administration’s successful efforts to strengthen Israel’s relationships with Arab nations, including the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.
Instead of backing maximum pressure, Biden supports what he calls a “smart way to be tough on Iran.” Ignoring Iran’s flagrant violations of the JCPOA even before the U.S.’s withdrawal, the sunset provisions on the agreement, and Israel’s discovery of documents detailing Iran’s nuclear program, Biden falsely asserts that the JCPOA had “verifiably block[ed] Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.”
College professors give seven times as much to Biden as Trump. That’s quite shocking. I would have expected the ratio to be more like 20-1 or 50-1. Biden must have remarkably poor fundraisers. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
” Democrats’ new strategy for winning the White House: Threaten riots if they lose.” The public doesn’t seem so hoit on the idea…
“CNN Forum Throws Nothing But Softballs and Pathetic Biden Strikes Out Anyway.” “A real low point came when the declining Biden couldn’t remember what to call the place where the mail goes.”
Segregation, what a blast from the past! I remember when I was already a full-grown man in the year 1960 and me and the boys would gather outside the soda shop to make sure only the white folks got in. Maybe those jeans and that jacket I wore are back in style again too. Jill? Where’s that trunk with all my old clothes?”
The Democratic Party establishment is having a full-bore freakout over President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell exercising their constitutionally enumerated powers to nominate and confirm a Supreme Court replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Furious Democrats are considering total war — profound changes to two branches of government, and even adding stars to the flag — if Republicans jam through a Supreme Court nominee then lose control of the Senate.
On the table: Adding Supreme Court justices … eliminating the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to end filibusters … and statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. “If he holds a vote in 2020, we pack the court in 2021,” Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.) tweeted.
Why it matters: Democrats are enraged by GOP hypocrisy of rushing through a new justice for President Trump after stalling President Obama’s final nominee.
Dems aren’t optimistic about blocking the nominee. But they have many ways of retaliating if they win Senate control — and are licking their chops about real movement on ideas that have been pushed futilely for decades.
For instance, the Constitution doesn’t fix the number of justices, which could be changed by an act of Congress and the president’s signature, according to the National Constitution Center.
Also, Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer said that if “Senate Republicans move forward with this, then nothing is off the table for next year.”
I don’t think Democrats have thought their cunning scheme all the way through.
If Democrats really want to contemplate total war*, then what’s to prevent Republicans from implementing those same measures next year if they win?
Eliminate the filibuster? Bring it on! Packing the court with two more justices? Why not four?
Democrats seem to be operating on the old Soviet doctrine of “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” We should take any “if we win, we’ll do X” proposal as a blueprint of our own (assuming it’s not outright unconstitutional; after all, Republicans, unlike Democrats, still respect the Constitution).
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
*Like pretty much all their rhetoric these days, “total war” is drama queen overstatement. In a real left-right no-hold-barred, actual honest-to-God shooting war, the right wins because we have all the guns.
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died at age 87 “from complications related to metastatic pancreatic cancer.” Appointed to the Supreme Court by Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg famously maintained a strong friendship with fellow Justice Antonin Scalia despite fierce ideological differences. She is survived by her daughter Jane Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia, and James Ginsburg, founder and president of classical music label Cedille Records.
BattleSwarm Blog sends condolences to her friends and family.
A fighter to the end, Justice Ginsburg defeated cancer and the odds numerous times — all while continuing to serve on the Court. Her commitment to the law and her fearlessness in the face of death inspired countless “RBG” fans, and she continues to serve as a role model to countless women lawyers. Her legacy and contribution to American history will never be forgotten.
He also ordered flags on federal buildings to be flown at half-staff.
Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution gives the President authority to nominate Judges of the Supreme Court with the “Advise and Consent” of the Senate. President Trump has announced that Senate Republicans have an “obligation” to fill the vacancy “without delay,” and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced that he will hold a floor vote on any nominee.
“The Senate and the nation mourn the sudden passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the conclusion of her extraordinary American life,” McConnell said in a statement.
“In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise,” McConnell continued. “Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.”
McConell added that “by contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary.”
“Once again, we will keep our promise,” he said. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”
Democrats are, of course, screaming that the vacancy should be held over for the next Administration to nominate a replacement. History is not on their side:
History supports Republicans filling the seat. Doing so would not be in any way inconsistent with Senate Republicans’ holding open the seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. The reason is simple, and was explained by Mitch McConnell at the time. Historically, throughout American history, when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies at any time — even in a presidential election year, even in a lame-duck session after the election, even after defeat. Historically, when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees sent up in a presidential election year, and hold the seat open for the winner. Both of those precedents are settled by experience as old as the republic. Republicans should not create a brand-new precedent to deviate from them.
There are two types of rules in Washington: laws that allocate power, and norms that reflect how power has traditionally, historically been used. Laws that allocate power are paramount, and particularly dangerous to violate, but there is no such law at issue here. A president can always make a nomination for a Supreme Court vacancy, no matter how late in his term or how many times he has been turned down; the only thing in his way is the Senate.
Twenty-nine times in American history there has been an open Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, or in a lame-duck session before the next presidential inauguration. (This counts vacancies created by new seats on the Court, but not vacancies for which there was a nomination already pending when the year began, such as happened in 1835–36 and 1987–88.) The president made a nomination in all twenty-nine cases. George Washington did it three times. John Adams did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ulysses S. Grant did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. Barack Obama, of course, did it. Twenty-two of the 44 men to hold the office faced this situation, and all twenty-two made the decision to send up a nomination, whether or not they had the votes in the Senate.
Snip.
So what does history say about this situation, where a president is in his last year in office, his party controls the Senate, and the branches are not in conflict? Once again, historical practice and tradition provides a clear and definitive answer: In the absence of divided government, election-year nominees get confirmed.
This is a Dan McLaughlin piece, so you get one of his dense, colorful spreadsheet charts:
Ted Cruz has pointed out how disasterous it might be if there’s a crisis during the 2020 Presidential Election and the court is split 4-4.
Out in the wilds of Twitter, there were two very different reactions to Ginsburg’s death: Conservatives offered praise for her abilities and extended condolences on her death:
Tonight, we mourn the passing of a historic Justice and a legendary advocate. pic.twitter.com/2ZQ8eD9C3D
My thoughts and prayers are with the family of Ruth Bader Ginsburg tonight. She leaves a legacy of thoughtful public service, a dedication to the law, and a life of great accomplishment. May she Rest In Peace.
Conservatives have noted Ginsberg’s ill health many times in the last few years, and were yelled at for “gas-lighting” or “being ghoulish.” And here we are.
One of the leading contenders to be Trump’s nominee is 48-year old judge Amy Coney Barrett. If Barrett were confirmed to the court and stayed in office until she was Ginsburg’s age, she would be on the court through 2059.
Democrats are behaving badly (as usual), peace is breaking out in the Middle East (not as usual), how Soros and company are funding violent unrest, some Wuhan coronavirus shenanigans, and some unexpected stealth fighter news. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
The Elite has stiffed Bernie (twice), alienating his supporters.
The Elite has sent their (white) radical street muscle into Black neighborhoods, burning and looting black businesses.
The Elite hasn’t really done anything at all for the hispanic community. Their support for communists has hurt them in Florida where Donald Trump is outpolling Joe Biden among hispanics (!).
The Elite has pushed outsourcing (most recently the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty which Trump killed). Private sector unions have noticed.
The Elite has pushed the virus lockdown which has thrown millions of restaurant employees out of work. Many of these folks belong to SEIU. Now that emergency unemployment benefits have run out – and restaurants are going out of business because of the continuing lockdown – you have to wonder if these people will start to wonder why they support the Democrats.
Public Sector employees have done well, but the areas that locked down hardest are the areas where the government budgets are most in trouble. New York City is going to lay off 40,000 employees. The Elite has hoped that Biden will win and bail out the states and cities. Good luck with that.
Lastly, suburban women are hit with a Democratic Party double whammy: schools remain closed in many (especially Blue) areas. Women see their family lifestyles massively disrupted, and potentially are forced to consider giving up their own job to home school their kids. At the same time they see radical rioters entering suburban towns. Rioters are filmed telling people to get out of their homes which will be taken as “reparations”.
From The Department of Duh: “Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter.” Further: “The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The point person for the Fight Back Table, a coalition of liberal organizations planning for a “post-Election Day political apocalypse scenario,” leads a progressive coalition that is part of a massive liberal dark money network.
Deirdre Schifeling, who leads the Fight Back Table’s efforts to prepare for “mass public unrest” following the Nov. 3 election, founded and is campaign director for Democracy for All 2021 Action, a project of Arabella Advisors’ Sixteen Thirty Fund. The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a dark money network that provides wealthy donors anonymity as they push large sums into the left’s organizational efforts.
The connections suggest that post-election mobilization isn’t just the project of a liberal fringe, but that powerful Democratic Party interest groups are also involved.
Created in 2019, Democracy for All 2021 Action includes more than 20 labor union, think tank, racial justice, and environmental groups that push for automatic and same-day voter registration, prohibiting voter ID laws, and removing “barriers” to naturalization, among other initiatives. While the Sixteen Thirty Fund does not report Democracy for All 2021 Action in its D.C. business records, the group acknowledges that it is a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund at the bottom of its website. The Sixteen Thirty Fund has been used as an avenue for donors to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to state-based and national groups in recent years. In 2018 alone, $141 million was passed through the fund to liberal endeavors.
A complete list of groups that make up the Fight Back Table is not publicly available, but Schifeling’s group appears to be an integral part of its efforts. Beyond being the point person for the Fight Back Table’s election war games, Schifeling has ties to two of the Fight Back Table’s founding groups, Demos and Color of Change, which are part of Democracy for All 2021 Action. Schifeling’s group is also a part of Protect the Results, a separate coalition that is collaborating with the Fight Back Table on mass mobilization to “protect the results of the 2020 elections” in more than 1,000 locations across the United States.
The post-Election Day prep follows other doomsday planning scenarios by liberal activists. The Transition Integrity Project released a 22-page document that mentioned “violence” 15 times, “chaos” 9 times, “unrest” 3 times, and “crisis” 12 times. The Fight Back Table, likewise, is preparing for extreme outcomes, including violence and mass mobilization efforts following the elections.
Snip.
Schifeling’s group is just one of dozens that fall under funds affiliated with Arabella Advisors. The funds have facilitated more than $1 billion in anonymous funding since President Donald Trump took office.
Funds affiliated with Arabella Advisors act as a “fiscal sponsor” to liberal nonprofits by providing tax and legal status to the groups. This setup means that the nonprofits do not have to file individual tax forms to the IRS, which include information such as board members and overall financials.
Some of the most prominent groups on the left fall under these funds, including Demand Justice, which fights Trump’s judicial nominations, and numerous prominent state-based groups. Funds at Arabella are also used to push grants to outside groups not contained within their network, including David Brock’s American Bridge, John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, the Center for Popular Democracy, and America Votes.
Three new George Soros campaigns to further advance the left’s radical agenda have been uncovered in separate news reports published this week. Keep in mind that the U.S. government subsidizes the Hungarian billionaire’s deeply politicized Open Society Foundations (OSF) that work to destabilize legitimate governments, erase national borders, target conservative politicians, finance civil unrest, subvert institutions of higher education and orchestrate refugee crises for political gain. Details of the financial and staffing nexus between OSF and the U.S. government are available in a Judicial Watch investigative report.
With the help of American taxpayer dollars, Soros bolsters a radical leftwing agenda that in the United States has included: promoting an open border with Mexico and fighting immigration enforcement efforts; fomenting racial disharmony by funding anti-capitalist racialist organizations; financing the Black Lives Matter movement and other organizations involved in the riots in Ferguson, Missouri; weakening the integrity of our electoral systems; promoting taxpayer funded abortion-on-demand; advocating a government-run health care system; opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts; promoting dubious transnational climate change agreements that threaten American sovereignty and working to advance gun control and erode Second Amendment protections.
The list extends even further, with Soros tentacles—money—reaching previously unknown domestic and foreign causes that promote a broad leftwing agenda at various levels. It turns out Soros donated $408,000 to a Political Action Committee (PAC) that supported Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, whose office just dropped felony charges against the actor who fabricated a hate crime earlier this year. The actor, Jussie Smollett, claimed he was attacked in Chicago on his way home from a sandwich shop at 2 a.m. He said two masked men shouted racial and homophobic slurs, beat him, poured bleach on him and tied a rope around his neck. Smollett blamed the crime on white Trump supporters. When the hoax was uncovered, prosecutors charged him with 16 felonies but Foxx dropped all the charges this week. Illinois campaign records provided in the news report show that Soros personally contributed $333,000 to Foxx’s super PAC before the March 15, 2016 primary was over and an additional $75,000 after she became Cook County’s top prosecutor. “Soros has been intervening in local races for prosecutor, state’s attorney, and district attorney — often backing left-wing Democrats against other Democrats in doing so,” according to the article.
Another report published this week reveals that a Soros foundation gave $1 million to a nonprofit that favors choosing the president by popular vote. The group, National Popular Vote Inc., gets millions from leftist groups to push its purported agenda of ensuring that “every vote in every state” matters. Another group, Tides Foundation, that raises money for leftwing causes, also contributed to the popular vote nonprofit. Soros’ OSF’s have given millions of dollars to the Tides Foundation, according to records provided in the story. Based in San Francisco, the group envisions a world of shared prosperity and social justice founded on equality, human rights, healthy communities and a sustainable environment. The nonprofit strives to accelerate the pace of social change by, among other things, working with “marginalized communities.”
The last article documents what Judicial Watch has reported for years—Soros’ huge influence in the U.S. government, specifically the State Department. The agency pressured Ukraine officials to drop an investigation of a Soros group during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Barack Obama’s U.S. ambassador actually gave Ukraine’s prosecutor general a list of people who should not be prosecuted. “The U.S.-Soros collaboration was visible in Kiev,” the article states. “Several senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials and FBI agents appeared in pictures as participants or attendees at Soros-sponsored events and conferences.” The piece further reveals that internal memos from Soros’ foundations describe a concerted strategy of creating friendships inside key U.S. government agencies such as the departments of Justice and State.
Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber: “Woe is to us! We’re a racist institution! We repent of our white privilege!” Department of Education: “Well, if you’re a racist institution, I guess we’re going to have to investigate you for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and possibly pull your federal funding.”
If you want to know why the vast majority of initially Trump-skeptical conservatives have embraced the president, one reason is that he’s actually willing to name the enemy and take the fight to them:
The president is denouncing critical race theory on national television—and elevating this intellectual fight into a major campaign theme.
The battle-lines are drawn: we can embrace the principles of 1776 or the principles of 1619.https://t.co/rAfKQXX9ma
You may not have noticed, since the media tried desperately to bury the story, but the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, formally recognizing Israel. If Obama had done this, it would be the leading MSM story for weeks, with our ruling class insisting he deserved another Nobel Prize.
Speaking of the Obama Administration’s incompetence:
So many Obama-era "heard realities" turned out to be so much wishcasting, or else covering up for the multitudinous failures engendered by their own manifest incompetence. https://t.co/Fyzo1YZfHW
Other Arab nations are in talks to follow suit. “Those in advanced talks with the US over Israeli relations are though to include Oman, Sudan and Morocco.” And possibly Saudi Arabia.
A recent sermon from one of Saudi Arabia’s leading clerics called for Muslims to avoid, quote “passionate emotions and fiery enthusiasm” towards Jews.
It’s a marked change in tone from Imam Abdulrahman al-Sudais, compared to previous emotional statements he’s made about the plight of the Palestinian people.
In the past the cleric had prayed for Palestinians to have victory over what he called “invader and aggressor” Jews — a nod to Israel.
However, Sudais’ new remarks referenced a relationship between them and the Prophet Mohammad.
“He treated the Jews of Khaybar equally and treated his Jewish neighbor well.”
All by itself, the softening of the hard-line stance against Israel among leading Wahhbist clerics in “The Land of the Two Holy Cities” is huge, arguably a bigger shift in Muslim thought than all the Arab-Israeli peace treaties combined.
The late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir summed up the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East decades ago when she said: “Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us. We can forgive them for killing our children. We cannot forgive them from forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with them when they love their children more than they hate us.”
Prime Minister Meir’s sentiments 50 years ago were the result of numerous occasions where Arab leaders rejected very favorable territorial agreements and other peace settlements and opted for war instead. The very clear message was, and has always been, that the Arabs would rather die fighting the Jews than thrive while living alongside them. Just think about the seething hatred an entire group needs to have to sustain such a disastrous outlook. It truly boggles the mind.
Are today’s Democrats much different? Their single-minded hatred of President Trump and his supporters knows no bounds. They oppose every policy he puts forth, contradict his every statement, and try to undermine his very humanity just like Islamic radicals regularly attempt to dehumanize Jews in Israel and all over the world,
They don’t even like to refer to him as “President Trump,” as they immaturely prance around on TV and social media calling him “45” as if referring to him solely as the 45th president is some kind of serious insult. Palestinians and other Israel-haters pull a similar move when they refuse to call the land “Israel.” They instead opt for nasty Orwellian terms like “Zionist entity.”
And now they are running a presidential campaign with the sole message of “get Trump.” There’s not one person really planning to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden; they’re all just Trump-haters. None of those voters can truly articulate the slightest argument for Biden without talking mostly or all about Trump. It’s the most hateful campaign against an incumbent since the pro-slavery Democrats tried to unseat Abe Lincoln in 1864, and that’s saying something.
All of this hate has been in place of what could have been four years of deal making with Trump, who came into office with no real orthodoxies to maintain and without a long political career filled with masters to oblige.
Like the wasted 72 years of Palestinian stubbornness in the face of so much Israeli success since 1948, Democrats have chosen a scorched earth policy rather than acknowledge their defeat in the last election or take advantage of any policies they could have pursued with this president on infrastructure, health coverage, and ending U.S. involvement in unending wars.
It has been called to our attention that this article is not satire. We regret the error. Those responsible have been sent to our state-of-the-art re-education camp. pic.twitter.com/02RtE6tO1f
Rosie and Ellen shows featured toxic work environments where staffers were required to work 80-90 weeks.
Alan Dershowitz sues CNN For $300,000,000 in defamation lawsuit. “The Harvard Law professor emeritus is demanding $300,000,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from CNN for misrepresenting his legal arguments in the Trump impeachment trial.”
“New Netflix Movie Actually Murders Puppies To Teach That Murdering Puppies Is Bad.”
“Following California’s Plagues Of Darkness And Fire, Pacific Ocean Turns To Blood.” “I figured it was just a murdered hobo, but there was way too much blood. You’d have to have killed at least a thousand hobos, and that hasn’t happened out here since the ’90s.”
The CPA was founded in San Francisco in 1972 during the heady days of the Marxist-oriented Asian American Movement, and today it also has a very active chapter in Boston. From its start, it has been a promoter of the People’s Republic of China.
According to an authoritative 2009 Stanford University paper tracing its early days to the present, and which can be found on Marxist.org, “The CPA began as a Leftist, pro-People’s Republic of China organization, promoting awareness of mainland China’s revolutionary thought and workers’ rights, and dedicated to self-determination, community control, and ‘serving the people.’”
The CPA, continued the paper, “worked with other pro-PRC groups within the U.S. and San Francisco Bay Area … Support for the PRC was based on the inspiration the members drew from what they saw as a successful grassroots model that presented a viable alternative to Western capitalism.”
One of the ways it did this was by holding “film screenings that were open to the public, sometimes showing Chinese films as well to facilitate understanding of the country’s revolutionary ideas. … CPA also took the lead with groups such as the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Organization to celebrate China’s National Day on Oct. 1”.
To this day, the CPA continues to be a partner of the PRC in the United States. Three years ago, the Boston chapter teamed up with China’s Consulate General in New York to offer Chinese nationals the opportunity to renew their passports, getting praise from China’s official mouthpiece, China Daily.
Last year, the CPA sponsored the raising of the PRC’s flag for the first time ever over Boston’s City Hall to honor the takeover of China by the Chinese Communist Party, just as the Stanford paper says has been its practice from the beginning, but this time drawing protesters. The event was organized, again, with the Chinese Consulate. Consul General Sun Guoxiang was on hand to say that, “The common interests are far more important than differences between U.S. and China.”
CPA co-founder Lydia Lowe also spoke at the event, reminding her audience that “McCarthyism is behind us. The Cold War is behind us.” In an essay she authored with other people on the Marxist revolutionary site LeftRoots last year, Lowe sounded as though she wanted to start another Cold War, writing that she wanted Asians to play a role in creating a “revolutionary strategy” that would achieve a “fundamentally different society.”
And CPA drew praise from China’s mouthpiece China Daily just a few weeks ago, for taking part again in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in San Francisco.
It is clear, then, that CPA works with China’s communist government, pushes its agenda here in the United States, and is regularly praised by China’s state-owned mouthpieces. It is clear, too, from, this perspective, why the CPA would sponsor a new enterprise by BLM founder Alicia Garza: they espouse the same desire for world communism.
Garza sits atop a worldwide revolutionary empire, starting with the Black Lives Matter Global Network she founded, which now has 15 chapters in the U.S. and several more all over Canada, Australia, and Europe. As Foreign Affairs wrote in its September/October issue, “Today, BLM has a global network of dozens of chapters. This number will likely grow exponentially in the coming years.”
Garza is also behind the Movement for Black Lives, with its 50 domestic organizations. In July she said, “We helped to also pull together an ecosystem that was much broader than the organization that we founded, and that ecosystem is called the Movement for Black Lives and it is taking the world by storm.”
Movement for Black Lives is unabashedly anti-capitalist, saying on its website, “we are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.”
Since protests erupted after George Floyd, an African American, died in police custody on May 25 in the U.S. state of Minnesota, the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn international headlines for its push to address systemic racism in America.
Chinese officials have also championed the movement, seeing it as a way to criticize the United States for its track record on human rights issues after months of scrutiny over Beijing’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
“Racial discrimination is a long-lasting problem in the United States,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian in June. “Black lives matter and their human rights should be guaranteed.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted “I can’t breathe,” a reference to George Floyd’s last words, as her response to U.S. State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus’ criticism of Beijing’s Hong Kong policy.
Xinhua, the state-backed media outlet, claimed in a report that “the United States is in pain, anger and the widest unrest for decades over racial injustice,” adding African Americans have suffered disproportionately high death rates from the COVID-19 outbreak.
Chinese media have heavily covered the protests and unrest in American cities, painting them as a failure of the country’s democratic system.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Chinese media paid more attention to the riots in Portland and Seattle than America’s own “mainstream” media.
According to Asia analyst Gordon Chang, the Chinese consulate in Houston, recently ordered closed by the state department, may have been clandestinely supporting various protest groups in the United States with the goal of stoking racial violence.
Chinese consulates across the country have come under renewed scrutiny in recent months as several high-profile hacking jobs targeting Americans were exposed. Just recently, two college-age hackers were arrested by the FBI and charged with several cybercrimes.
The Chinese consulates in America have become nests of spies and saboteurs, so it shouldn’t surprise us that they are carrying out directives of the Chinese Communist government to weaken and divide America by stirring the pot of racial division.
zthe goal of the Cultural Revolution was to eliminate what Mao called the “Four Olds.” The four olds were Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas—everything that pre-dated communism in China. Mao saw them as a threat to his communist rule, so he unleashed the Red Guards to eliminate them. The Four Olds had to be replaced with new customs, new culture, new habits and new ideas—communist customs, communist culture, communist habits and communist ideas.
The Red Guards didn’t start out by killing people and destroying property. They started out with intimidation to back up Mao’s cultural revolution to change place names, especially street names. People even changed their own names so as to break with any association with the Four Olds.
The movement escalated from there. Anyone who seemed to cling to any of the Four Olds was harassed and intimidated. Property damage was next. Examples of old Chinese architecture began to be targeted for destruction by Red Guard mobs. Chinese literature books were seized by the Red Guard and burned. Artwork was destroyed by gangs of thugs who would go into homes to search for anything considered Old. The Red Guards ransacked homes of those who were not considered reliable supporters of the communist party. Ancient, sacred Chinese temples were destroyed. Cemeteries were desecrated and corpses were even dug up and torn apart. Monuments were taken down.
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
I’m sure it does. And that’s not surprising.
Former FBI assistant director of intelligence Kevin R. Brock thinks antifa and #BlackLivesMatter are tools for both China and Russia to undermine the superpower status of the United States:
Here’s what years of intelligence collection by the FBI and other parts of the intelligence community have long determined: China and Russia know they cannot defeat the United States militarily or economically. Yet, the elimination of the U.S. as a superpower that impedes their communist vision remains their goal.
Both China, which has thieved its way to faux prosperity, and Russia, with its perpetual inferiority complex fueling its tiresome resentments, have pinned their hopes on dividing Americans, on pitting us against each other as a means of breaking a unified national will and rendering us dispirited, unable or unwilling to respond to their future hegemonies. And disinformation campaigns accentuating America’s faults historically have been a favored strategy, particularly by Russia.
Both of those countries are well aware that the most convenient way to divide Americans is along racial lines, since the United States is orders of magnitude more racially diverse than any nation on earth. Americans are hyper-sensitized to charges of racism because ours has been a long struggle to create a country where an unprecedented collision of races, creeds and cultures could coexist under an ideal of individual liberty. Given mankind’s history, it’s a miracle we’ve had any success at all.
And so, accusations of racism in our country are a damning cudgel, an effective wedge to both arouse suspicions and chill dissent. There is no greater shame today than to stand accused of committing the mortal sin of racism.
That is why we are seeing an expansion of the definition of racism and “hate speech” by a class of accusers who really don’t have racial justice as their primary goal. Charges of racism have become the most effective way to eliminate resistance and to censor or cancel voices opposed to a totalitarian worldview.
Accordingly, racism now ostensibly exists in the packaging of products, in tweets about the national anthem, and in how images of Jesus are depicted. The Smithsonian Institution recently asserted that evidence of racism is found in traditional values, such as delayed gratification and the nuclear family. If that’s true, then, yes, racism is surely systemic — it’s in the very air we breathe. But it is not true. It is a lie told by those who want us to believe that America is broken and needs to be replaced.
Who are these people who have wrested away legitimate racial justice narratives in order to advance their own agenda? They are the discredited remnants of failed economic Marxism who have pivoted to a vision of cultural Marxism that no less subjugates the rights and freedoms of individuals to control by the state. They have scurried from the wreckage of pure communist ideology into academia and various media, powerful platforms to indoctrinate minds and control narratives.
Their young proxies are the radical or anarchist interlopers such as antifa, surfing on the backs of actual racial justice protesters. These black-clad, masked marauders of the far left showed up to suck media attention from legitimate protesters by starting fires, destroying businesses and attacking police. Their demographics are readily noticeable: young, mostly white, many from privileged suburban families and fresh from college campuses that filled their minds with false tales of totalitarian nirvana. After exercising their destruction, they Uber back to their own safe neighborhoods, far from the ones they just helped destroy.
None of this is conclusive proof that China created antifa/#BlackLivesMatter, or that China is the only backer of it (George Soros’ financial backing is well-documented), or even the only foreign backer, but the fact that a hostile foreign Communist government is backing a hostile, violent Communist movement in America would seem to be important news.
But as usual, Rogan is interesting because he says what he actually thinks without caring about toning it down due to fear of condemnation from the Social Justice Warrior set. And he thinks (not without evidence) that Biden is suffering from dementia:
He also says you shouldn’t base your political decisions on him, because he’s just a comedian. Yeah, but Jerry Seinfeld hasn’t interviewed Bret Weinstein and Ben Shapiro.
Arm’s specialty is licensing it chip design IP to other manufacturers to incorporate into their own designs. Arm has a well-earned reputation for producing designs that squeezes the most performance per watt out of a given die sized. Think of it as an all-purpose CPU mix-and-match design kit, allowing companies to quickly design custom chips incorporating their own special sauce without reinventing the wheel for every JTAG port and ring oscillator. Arm-derived designs have come to completely dominate mobile devices, and Apple, who had previously used custom cores incorporating Arm IP into their iPhone and iPad lines, just this year announced that they’re moving from Intel to an Arm-based custom chip for their Macintosh PC line.
The great thing about Arm is that all they make is money. They license their IP at (for most customers) relatively modest per-chip cost, and most (possibly all) the major chip foundries have licensed their IP for one thing or another. So have most Integrated Device Manufacturers (i.e., chip companies that still run their own wafer fabs, an increasingly pricey proposition), including rival Intel, which has dominated PC CPUs for about an eon of Internet time.
Nvidia currently uses both TSMC and Samsung for foundry partners, both of which have Arm licenses.
A lot of the microwave instant-analysis of “Oh, now Nvidia gets more of that sweet Apple business” is probably greatly overstated, and is at best a minor consideration. The sort of highly parallelized vector processing that Nvidia specializes in is increasingly being used in IT centers and high performance computing for a wide variety of tasks, their GPUs either supplementing or entirely replacing traditional CPUs. Nvidia continues to cram an ever-higher number of CUDA cores (designed for highly parallelized tasks) into its chips. Fully integrating Arm’s renowned power-savings techniques into each of those cores, and being the first to take advantage of that technology, is potentially huge.
All mergers are fought with peril, but if Nvidia pulls off the integration, Intel could be facing the biggest challenge to its dominance since PowerPC and DEC Alpha were pushing it in the late 1990s.
Biden loses Hispanic voters to Trump in Florida (and elsewhere), prompting Bloomberg to promise to airdrop money into the state on his behalf, how Biden has screwed up everything he’s ever tried, and proof positive Slow Joe needs a teleprompter for even the most friendly basement interviews. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
The sun may be setting on Democrats’ hopes of picking up Florida.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has seemingly lost his advantage over President Trump in the crucial swing state of Florida, an NBC News/Marist poll released Tuesday found. A lot of that shift seemingly stems from Florida’s Latino voters, who have gone from resoundingly supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to actually tipping in Trump’s favor this time around, the poll showed.
Less than two months before election day, Biden and Trump are tied in Florida with 48 percent support among likely Florida voters. Biden had previously pulled as much as a 13-point lead over Trump in Florida. That dip comes as a majority of Latino respondents say they’re voting for Trump over Biden, 50-46 percent; Latino voters went for Clinton 62-35 in 2016.
A poll from the Miami Herald and Bendixen & Amandi International backed up NBC News’ findings, at least in Miami-Dade County. Biden still has a strong advantage, 55-38 percent, in the heavily Democratic part of the state, the Tuesday poll found. But it’s not the best news considering Clinton won that county by 30 points in 2016 and still lost the state by 1.2 points. In addition, the Miami Herald poll found Trump and Biden are splitting Hispanic voters, 47-46.
Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg plans to spend at least $100 million in Florida to help elect Democrat Joe Biden, a massive late-stage infusion of cash that could reshape the presidential contest in a costly toss-up state central to President Trump’s reelection hopes.
Bloomberg made the decision to focus his final election spending on Florida last week, after news reports that Trump had considered spending as much as $100 million of his own money in the final weeks of the campaign, Bloomberg’s advisers said. Presented with several options on how to make good on an earlier promise to help elect Biden, Bloomberg decided that a narrow focus on Florida was the best use of his money.
The president’s campaign has long treated the state, which Trump now calls home, as a top priority, and his advisers remain confident in his chances given strong turnout in 2016 and 2018 that gave Republicans narrow winning margins in statewide contests.
“Voting starts on Sept. 24 in Florida so the need to inject real capital in that state quickly is an urgent need,” said Bloomberg adviser Kevin Sheekey. “Mike believes that by investing in Florida it will allow campaign resources and other Democratic resources to be used in other states, in particular the state of Pennsylvania.”
Further down: “The spending will focus mostly on television and digital ads, in both English and Spanish.”
I question whether you can even spend $100 million in Florida between now and election day. There’s only X amount of TV ad time available between now and the election, and much of it is already paid for. Also, Bloomberg’s spending on his own Presidential campaign was hardly an unqualified success, unless the real goal was to stop Bernie and boost Biden all along. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
The portrait of Joe Biden that emerges from What It Takes (1992), Richard Ben Cramer’s thousand-page New Journalism–style report on the 1988 presidential race, in which Biden ran for a few steps until he stumbled over his own shoelaces, is a familiar one. Biden is the grinning, overconfident oaf, a strutting salesman who keeps selling himself loads of bull manure even as everyone around him becomes alarmed by his obliviousness to facts. Or to cite another figure for comparison: He’s the lord of Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp. But I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp . . .” The story of Joe Biden is where staggering incompetence meets irrepressible self-confidence. The more he fails, the more convinced he becomes that he’s right.
Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Biden, managerial visionary. We turn to page 248 of Cramer’s tombstone-sized book. A couple of years into his Senate career, Biden has a dream of living grandly by buying on the cheap a former du Pont manse, together with a huge chunk of land, for $200,000. The house was boarded up and soon, probably, to be torn down. But Biden saw something in it. Sure, it needed some fixing up. Never fear, Joe is here! Joe is a can-do fellow. The first winter he and Jill spent in the house, it used up 3,000 gallons of fuel oil. It turned out the third floor was wide open, to the stars. Squirrels were living up there. Oops. The judgment on display here is not great.
Next year, Biden starting selling off bits of the land for development to pay for improvements such as storm windows. Small problem here: One of the lots he sold off was his own driveway, and the new owner blocked it off so he couldn’t pass through it. So Joe built a second driveway, which turned into a swamp in winter. He sold off another piece of property that, it turned out, included the front of that second driveway, so he couldn’t use that one anymore either. So I built a third. He hated that one for being a dumpy little thing. Eight years went by, and he made a deal to buy back the original driveway, the one he sold off when he first bought the house. Which cost him a fortune in landscaping to reshape.
Meanwhile Biden was struggling with the upkeep of the grounds; he’d let the grass get three feet high, then attack it with a riding mower. Mysteriously, year after year, the mowers kept breaking down. He’d go buy a new one, and wreck that one too. “These damn things aren’t built right,” he’d mutter. The mower was always the problem, you see. And the next one. And the next one.
To pare down costs, Biden figured he’d rearrange the floor plan a bit. At one point he decided to have the entire third story removed; at another he figured he’d have the ballroom and a bunch of other rooms, plus the carved staircase, taken apart and reassembled on a smaller footprint. It turned out this idea was kind of expensive, so he didn’t follow through. Then he got to work on the trees. Privacy was what Joe wanted, a screen of hemlocks and rhododendron bushes to form a green wall around the property. Joe even drove a 40-foot flatbed full of trees an hour and a half from Wilmington, dug himself a 45-foot trench three feet deep. He was out there in hiking boots and shorts doing the work himself. Then he started in with the yews. Glorious. He ringed the swimming pool with them. Finally, he had his privacy!
So how’d all this end? “Two years, of course, they’re all dead.”
In 2016, then-candidate Trump won 28 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to exit polls. Now, recent surveys by Pew and Emerson College show the president nationally at 35 percent and 37 percent, respectively, among Hispanics. Either one would be the highest Hispanic vote total for a Republican presidential candidate since 2004.
A similar pattern has emerged in states with large Hispanic populations. In Florida, a survey by Democratic polling firm Equis Research found Biden running 11 points behind Hillary Clinton’s Hispanic vote margin over Trump in a state that she lost. According to a new NBC/Marist poll released this week, among Latino voters, Trump is leading in the Sunshine State with 50 percent compared to Biden’s 46.
A recent Rice University and Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation poll found Biden trailing Clinton’s Hispanic vote margin over Trump by a whopping 18 points. Meanwhile, a new Bendixen & Amandi poll found Trump crushing Biden by 38 points among Cuban Americans, which had been previously trending Democratic.
GOP presidential candidates have averaged 31 percent of the Hispanic vote since 1980, placing Trump’s current public polling levels right above the historical mean. The president’s performance is even more noteworthy in the context of Democrats and Spanish-language media routinely using immigration policy as a cudgel against conservatives.
Once again, Sleepy Joe told the press they could go home at 9 A.M. Meanwhile, your Favorite President, me, will go to Reno, Nevada tonight, three stops in Las Vegas tomorrow, with California and Arizona on schedule Monday. Don’t worry, we won’t be taking off Tuesday, either!
Only 16 days to the first presidential debate, and Dementia Joe Biden is resting up this weekend after a hard week of hitting the road, Jack.
Only one problem for Joe: Whenever he ventures outside his basement, he often loses stuff — his mind, his train of thought or at least his notes.
All dialogue guaranteed verbatim:
“I carry with me — I don’t have it. I gave it, I gave it to my staff. I carry it with me in my pocket a — do I have that around anyone? Where’s my staff? I gave it away anyway …”
He must have found something, because soon he began reading — or trying to read — some statistics. Numbers are not Dementia Joe’s forte, to put it mildly.
This day, he kept repeating the word “military.” But the actual virus numbers were for Michigan, the state he was in, in addition to his perpetual state of confusion.
Perhaps his handlers wrote “MI,” assuming that even someone as simple as Joe Biden could put two and two together. If so, they were misinformed.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Black voters are not excited about Slow Joe. “Do you remember how viral Obama was as a candidate in 2008, particularly among black voters? He was treated like a celebrity everywhere he went, every video of him had hundreds of thousands of views, if not millions. The excitement was electric. There is none of that for Biden.”
For months now, people have been wondering whether all of Biden’s appearances, including the easy ones, are scripted. Now we know the truth.
For the Biden campaign, the Wuhan virus has been a benefit. It’s allowed Biden to conduct his interviews from the safety of his own home. Because there are no public appearances, his campaign can keep secret whether Biden relies on a teleprompter for even friendly, casual interviews. Videos of Biden’s slip-ups suggested that he was using a teleprompter, but the campaign wasn’t talking. Now, though, a sharp-eyed viewer looking at footage of Biden talking to James Corden believes he’s exposed Biden’s secret: Even for friendly, inconsequential interviews, Biden and his interlocutors have a script.
Check out the teleprompter in the reflection. Biden blatantly read from a script for most of the interview with James Corden.
I bet his handlers weren’t too happy with him going off script. He probably got reprimanded. pic.twitter.com/BPK2FGB8cz
Yes, this "Interview" was scripted. Note different colors for teleprompter text. They are two sides to the "conversation". I've worked with TV teleprompters before. This is what they are.
Hey folks, it’s me, your friendly neighborhood antifa ringleader. You may recognize me from such news clips as ‘Small group of troublemakers seen smashing windows’ and ‘ANTIFA dude on fire in Portland’. That’s me in the black hoodie.
I’m enjoying a bit of downtime ahead of another largely peaceful weekend (weather permitting!). Right now I’m changing flights — who knew there were flight changes in business class? — but I figured I’d take a break from my busy schedule of scheming to give you all an important message: vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on November 3.
I know what you’re thinking: isn’t antifa a series of anarchist groups with little to do with center-left mainstream politics? What does a radical collective like that want with a career politician like Joe Biden? And doesn’t Kamala Harris love cracking down on crime?
Questions like those are missing the point. As you know, young people are big policy wonks. And really that’s what all the summer of unrest has been about: policy, particularly those agreed on by Joe, Kamala and the DNC.
When I spark up my joint on the way down to the organized mayhem, I’m dreaming of a day when it’s decriminalized but not fully legalized. When I light a Molotov cocktail and fling it through the window of an AutoZone, that’s my way of saying ‘I want a slightly expanded version of the insubstantial existing Medicare coverage.’ And when I roll my commemorative edition of the 1619 Project up into an improvised club with which to strike a passing policeman, it’s a cheeky gesture that tells the officer: ‘hello old friend — like my chosen candidate Joe Biden, I want to add $300 million to your budget.’ I always make a point to wink knowingly before screaming ‘ACAB’ in their faces — just so they’re in on the bit.
Joe admitted that President Trump’s USMCA trade pact is better than NAFTA. Plus Ann Althouse thinks he’s still sharp in at least one area: “He can evade. He’s very evasive. You’ve got to give him that. He’s old and often seems confused, but when cornered, he’s quick to evade.”
“Biden Says We Need a President Who Tells the Truth? Then Here Are 8 Big Whoppers That Disqualify Him.” The Fine People Hoax doesn’t make the list, but the plagiarism and college lies do.
Dispatches from Planet Cognitive Dissonance: “Joe Biden: Trump ‘Accidentally’ Making Peace Between Israel and Arab States.” It must have been by accident, because tazpayers aren;t paying billions of dollars for Democrats to rake off in graft for the plan to fail…
“And now we’ll just pass the microphone back to Kamala to answers some questions from the pres-” Staffer: “Nowe’regoodseeya!”
DLA Piper, a multinational law firm, boasts nearly 30 years of experience in China and over 140 lawyers dedicated to its “China Investment Services” branch.
Harris’s links to the company are found with her husband, Douglas Emhoff, who has served as a Partner in the firm’s Intellectual Property and Technology practice and its Media, Sport, and Entertainment sector since 2017.
DLA Piper boasts of having “long-established and embedded “China Desks” in both the U.S. and Europe” to assist their China-focused consulting, prompting questions about the firm’s potential proximity to the White House could be leveraged by DLA Piper, exploited by the Chinese Communist Party, or represent a financial conflict of interest for the Vice Presidential candidate.
To facilitate DLA Piper’s China practice – which has received countless prestigious awards from the China Business Law Journal and China Law and Practice – the company employs a host of former Chinese Communist Party officials.
Ernest Yang, who serves as the firm’s Head of Litigation & Regulatory department and Co-Head of International Arbitration, was appointed to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in 2013. The CPPCC serves as the top advisory board for the Chinese Communist Party, and Yang was promoted to the body’s Standing Committee in 2019.
Jessica Zhao, a Senior Advisor, served as the Deputy Secretary General of the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC), a government-owned body established by the Chinese Communist Party in 1956. It was developed under the auspices of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, “a governmental body for the furtherance of Chinese trade promotion.”
Other high-level employees, such as Gloria Liu who serves as Partner, have “represented lead investors” in deals with Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, a controversial app is set to be banned by President Trump for its compromising links to the Chinese Communist Party.
A look at the competing spending by state for the two campaigns reveals some curious choices by Team Biden:
I’d like to look at the source these were pulled from. But the big money Team Trump is spending in Minnesota is a smart play. I know the Trump campaign is spending at least money in Texas, as I’ve seen billboards. And I would think Colorado isn’t yet so deep blue it isn’t worth fighting for.
“Inside Joe’s bubble: How Biden’s campaign is trying to avoid the virus. The former vice president’s team goes to extraordinary lengths to keep him safe.” I assume this is a campaign-planted story and that the “extraordinary lengths” will eventually include not allowing him to debate. “Sure, Joe really wants to debate,” they’ll say, “but the extraordinary lengths we’re going to to protect his health just won’t permit it,” and everyone will nod their head and pretend like it’s not a cowardly cop-out.
