By Daniel Greenfield@ Sultan Knish Blog
Did anyone ever really believe that men could become women? ‘Tipping Point’ author Malcolm Gladwell helped answer that question when he recently apologized for publicly asserting that men could change sex and fairly compete against women in sports because he was “cowed”.
No one bothered to follow up with the more interesting question, ‘What is Malcolm still too cowed to say in public’? It’s a question that also ought to be addressed to the various public figures, politicians, intellectuals and talkers, who have recanted the transgender heresy.
We know that they claimed to believe in one obviously wrong thing because of some combination of social pressure, manufactured consensus and intellectual incoherence.
What else do they hypocritically assert in public while privately doubting?
The intellectual crisis that led to Gladwell publicly asserting something that a small child, never mind a respected thinker, knew was wrong has its roots in the dual collapse of the western mind. Every preexisting moral and rational system, whether the Judeo-Christian ethos or the scientific method, is being dismantled as reactionary and is in the process of being replaced with the moral imperative of a revolutionary power shift from the oppressed to the oppressors.
This permanent state of moral emergency may not be questioned and its specific assertions are not subject to any of the religious or rational tests that once provided people with a consistent worldview based around clear principles rather than hysterical assertions that the crisis of the moment, ‘trans kids’, global warming, police shootings, Gaza or any of a grab bag of causes, is too grave to subject it to the rules of evidence in a search for the actual truth.
The Left claims that its various ideological flavors are rational and scientific, but they are nothing of the kind, instead they use ideology to pick and choose their science. That was why the Soviet Union could champion Lysenkoism and lock up actual scientists because the pseudoscience fit the Communist conception of how life should work. Not how it did work.
That is why skeptics are right to question environmentalist claims of human industry causing planetary destruction for matching all too closely with traditional leftist anti-capitalism, its luddite obsessions and the romanticization of the pre-industrial countryside, no matter how many PhDs assert that they represent expert opinion that just happens to match their politics.
The bizarre notion that men could become women by identifying as women fit a ‘Lysenkoist’ notion of human plasticity. There was and is nothing scientific to the entire thing. Doctors and researchers have brushed away past subjective claims of patient experiences with various medical conditions, even when those claims were later substantiated, chose to entirely discard basic biology here not because of any new data, but because ideology demanded it.
The transgender case rested on nothing more than special pleading, on long since discredited claims that ‘validating’ delusions about gender spectrums prevented suicides (and where else are doctors willing to prop up patient delusions, let alone perform highly risky unnecessary cosmetic procedures to validate those feelings) and its assertions about men being born with ‘female brains’ were the subject of feverish fantasies in online fetish groups, not research.
The ‘science’ of the transgender case lay not in its assertion of the positive, that men could become women, but in the negative, in its radical destruction of what (as part of this process) it dubbed the gender binary. The Left never really proves its points, rather it uses conspirational agitation, turning that which it seeks to destroy into a strawman, picks out-of-context pieces of information to poke holes in it, asserts conspiracy theories in which the strawman represents a broader systemic form of oppression and then politicizes the debate into a binary choice between supporting the victims or being one of the oppressors. That is what sucked Gladwell in and so many others liberals who fear being ‘on the wrong side of history’ more than a big lie.
Intellectuals and public figures who fell for an ideological case rather than a factual one and who confused ethics and morality with the tenets of leftist ideology rationalized the unreasonable and now that the case has collapsed have to rationalize why they did it.
Did anyone really believe that men could become women? It’s the same question as whether anyone really believed that redistribution of wealth by a centralized government could make society fair. They may not have believed that it was really true, but they believed that it was right. That is the tribute that liberals pay to leftists, agreeing to see the world not as it is, but as it can be made to be, and confusing their monstrous totalitarian delusions with idealism.
Modern liberals (rather than classical liberals) and leftists both share a belief in the overwhelming power of social transformation to make society ideal. The liberal border line used to be that the transformation had to be voluntary, rational and based on the realities of human nature. On the other side you had Marxism with its morass of conspiracy theories, hypothetical economics, tyrannical bureaucracies and grad student power fantasies. Liberals could accept socialism as long as its implementation was plausible and appeared to be voluntary.
The border line is long gone. As is for the most part any distinct liberal identity. The Democrats, a party of which liberals were once a fringe, base their plans for total social transformation on the same conspiracy theories, fantasy economics and power grabs that characterized Marxists. The only way such nonsense can hold up is with total ideological conformity. Shutting up opponents, whether timid liberals like Gladwell or vocal conservatives like Charlie Kirk, is the only way that any of what now passes for liberalism can continue to control the discourse.
Believing in a dozen impossible ideological things before breakfast is not a bug, it’s a test of the communications system. Extraordinary claims used to require extraordinary proof until it was reversed so that extraordinary claims like men can become women, there is no such thing as inflation unless companies choose to raise prices and the police are committing genocide against black people became overwhelmingly accepted by liberal institutions with no proof at all, only ideological emoting, while the existence of women, inflation and crime required extraordinary degrees of proof and were denounced as dangerous backward notions.
In 2024, Democrats lost an election built on all three of those arguments. The general public continued to believe in the existence of women, wanted police to protect them from criminals and refused to believe that inflation was a figment of their imagination or could be solved by blaming companies for raising prices. As consequential as each of these three issues are, encompassing economics, society and the rule of law, the lies are crucial for understanding the corruption of the intellectual class and their role in corrupting our discourse.
The nation’s intellectual class has been divided for the most part between radicals who will assert anything, such as that looting is a public good, that castrating children is best for them and that AI will soon bring us ‘fully-automated luxury communism’ so that no one will have to work, and timid liberals who will pretend to believe anything to keep their class and station.
Universities, publishing, nonprofits and the other venues for intellectuals have become echo chambers in which any ideologically correct absurdities, no matter how manifestly irrational, false and mad, can take hold, thrive and then be used as a purity test to purge heretics. They are venues where only liars, idiots and those who pretend to believe them can earn a living.
It can be hard to tell apart the liars from those only pretending to believe their lies, and both are easily confused with the idiots who may only be pretending to be idiots, but in the final analysis all three are members of a political class pretending to be an intellectual class. When a lie becomes sufficiently unpopular, the people who pretended to believe the liars apologize for that particular lie alone, rather than for the moral and intellectual failings that led to it.
What other lies do they only pretend to believe? We’ll never know until those lies become unpopular too. But transgender ideology offered the simplest possible common sense test to people who claim to be able to tackle the most challenging scientific, ethical and philosophical dilemmas. They failed. And the entire edifice of an intellectual class failed along with them.
After Charlie Kirk’s murder, two Muslim men in Utah were arrested for planting an incendiary device under a FOX affiliate’s news van. The most striking thing about their house, as Front Page Magazine had reported, was that it appeared to be covered in anti-Trump signage.
Including a black flag reading, “Is He Dead Yet?”
“Is He Dead Yet” merchandise also made a recent appearance when a New York City public school teacher posted a photo of himself wearing that t-shirt and celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death.
In a famously sensitive era, where do you go to buy a “Is he dead yet?” t-shirt or flag? Anywhere as it turns out. Especially from those retailers that have relentlessly censored conservatives.
Amazon had censored everything from books against transgenderism and BLM to banning the sale of the Confederate flag (and even at one point pulling episodes of the Dukes of Hazzard) but you can get a “Is He Dead Yet” flag which the Amazon description openly bills as “an anti-Trump flag” making it clear that it’s not a reference to any other memes with that line.
(The actual Amazon seller is in Eastern Europe, so Amazon is helping a foreign national sell materials to Americans calling for the death of the President of the United States. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post which spent a lot of time warning about foreign interference and foreign disinformation, but its owner actually profits nicely from it.)
Amazon also stocks mugs, t-shirts, stickers and bumper stickers with that phrase that specifically refer to Trump. One ‘Is He Dead Yet’ mug features various possible tombstones for President Trump including “Psycho”, “8647”, “Epstein’s Bestie” and “Rapist”. The same seller also sells Newsom memes including ‘Newsom Was Right About Everything’ merchandise.
Another seller features an orange toupee over the “He”. Others are mock MAGA hats. Some of the Chinese sellers pushing merchandise calling for Trump’s death also responded to Charlie Kirk’s murder by pushing merchandise commemorating his killing to conservatives. Nothing else could or should be expected from China, but it’s Amazon that bears the responsibility here.
So much so that Amazon appears to have paid for Google ads for “Is He Dead Yet”.
Amazon allowed all of this to proliferate on its platform even after two assassination attempts against President Trump and has taken no action to remove it and enforce its terms of service.
Etsy, which had relentlessly censored not only conservatives, but anything un-woke including Dr. Seuss merchandise (after he was deemed racist) and the slogan “I Love JK Rowling”, and recently once again rewrote its TOS to prohibit “degrading language” towards illegal aliens, is awash in every possible variety of Trump death merchandise including mock wine labels and a mug reading “Is He Dead Yet” with Trump’s signature as an EKG line from the ‘resistance’.
“RIP Trump postcards” feature a dead Trump with X’s over his eyes in clown makeup. “It won’t solve everything when he exits this mortal stage, but it will feel f*cking great,” the description reads. An ‘Anti-Trump’ wine label features a skull and the motto “open drink, dance on grave.” There are stickers with an orange toupee on a skull, a “we’ll be grateful when he’s dead” sticker of dancing skeletons, and a scented soy wax candle titled “Smells like his funeral”.
Unlike Amazon, which is dominated by Chinese third party seller spam, Etsy’s sellers are usually authentic American leftists and their products a genuine expression of partisan hatred.
Etsy knowingly allowed this climate of hate to proliferate on its platform in violation of its terms of service which ban “violent language” even while it was cracking down on anything that was in the slightest politically incorrect.
It’s not just Amazon and Etsy. “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise is commonplace on other giant online retail platforms like eBay, and across smaller merchandising sites.
While some of the “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise claims to come from America, the vast majority is being produced in Communist China.
The People’s Republic of China does not actually turn a blind eye toward what it mass produces. Merchandise critical of Xi or the PRC being produced in China is unthinkable and writers trying to get books critical of Communism printed in China have run into problems.
China’s mass production of merchandise calling for President Trump’s death or murder is a decision that would have been made at some point within the Communist Party bureaucracy which maintains extensive censorship over any kind of speech in the giant dictatorship.
And Chinese companies not only produce products celebrating Trump’s death for third parties, but Chinese companies are deeply immersed in the business of marketing these products on their largest retail platforms.
Temu, a Chinese Communist company, has a large selection of “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise specifically targeting Trump. Critics have pointed out that Temu “maintains documented connections to the Chinese Communist Party” meaning that the slogan is being promoted to Americans by a company linked to an enemy regime.
So this is not simply a decision by one Chinese retail platform to stock Trump death gear.
Shein, the second largest Chinese retail ‘fast fashion’ platform used by Americans, also lists “Is He Dead Yet” t-shirts explicitly referencing Trump. Alibaba, one of the world’s largest retailers, has “Is He Dead Yet” t-shirts listed on its AliExpress direct sales platform. “Is He Dead Yet” is not a Chinese information op, but China’s Communist system is happy to promote it.
As are Amazon, Etsy, eBay and other major retail giants that censor conservatives, but empower leftists to celebrate and call for the deaths of Trump and other conservatives.
Charlie Kirk’s murder was marinated in internet memes. These memes are promoted and enabled by a Big Tech system that practices two-tier content policing. The “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise is an example of the kinds of popular leftist memes that make the murder of conservatives into a knowingly hip joke that eventually leads to an assassin’s bullet.
The Left has traded debate and democracy for fantasizing about the deaths of its enemies.
And some leftists do more than fantasize. That is how a bullet clipped President Trump’s ear. It’s why Charlie Kirk is dead. Woke corporations pretend that they had nothing to do with it, but the moment you search their platforms, you find that they were actually profiting from the death cult.
Earlier this year, Front Page Magazine revealed that the
UK was estimated to have more political prisoners than Cuba with speech
interdictions totaling 1,000 arrests a month. Many of these arrests
involve speech critical of the presence of Muslims in the UK including
the mass arrests of anyone revealing that, contrary to the government’s
denials, a Muslim terrorist had stabbed 3 little girls to
death. Now it’s been learned that the British government ran a scheme
to smuggle thousands of Afghans into the UK and banned reporters from
speaking about it.
Over the last several years, UK governments
secretly brought in over 35,000 Afghans at a cost estimated to be as
high as $9 billion. The ‘operation’ went on even though the UK’s
Ministry of Defence estimated that at least 1 in 10 of the smuggled
Afghans would be homeless.
But what happened next was even more
shocking. After a data breach leaked information about the operation,
the British government, claiming that it was trying to protect the
Afghans it was smuggling into the UK, demanded an ‘injunction’ that
banned anyone from reporting on it.
A leftist judge who had
previously intervened for migrants then went further with a ‘super
injunction’ aimed “against the world” that threatened reporters with
huge fines and prison time if they even discussed the news with each
other. Senior members of the government were unable to disclose to the
public where the money was going because of this ‘super injunction’.
Year
after year, governments colluded to maintain the ban and the censorship
even as more Afghans poured into the UK. And no one in the UK was
allowed to discuss what was going on.
The authorities claimed
that they needed mass censorship to prevent the names of the Afghans
they were smuggling from being leaked to the Taliban, but it’s likely
that the Taliban already knew the names, the injunction certainly did
not limit the Taliban and the ‘super injunction’ could have banned the
release of any identifying information from the data breach without
concealing the existence of the Afghan smuggling scheme which the
Taliban were certainly aware of.
The Afghans weren’t being smuggled past the Taliban, but past the eyes of the British people.
The
‘super-injunction’ appears to have led British governments to provide
distorted figures of Afghans entering the UK and misleading budget
figures because both the Labour and Conservative governments did not
want the public to know where their money was going.
The secrecy
and the censorship has made it difficult for the British people to
learn the truth about the destructive scale of the operation. Various
figures have been provided for the cost of the Afghan smuggling scheme
ranging from $1 billion to $9 billion (figures have been converted from
pounds to dollars) and the number of those brought over from 4,000 to
35,000.
Afghans have already been invading the UK by boat,
certain that if they can just land, they will be allowed to stay. With
asylum approval rates peaking as high as 98%, Afghans poured in to take
advantage of a ‘streamlined asylum process’ reserved nearly entirely for
migrants from Muslim countries.
Former PM Rishi Sunak had
promised the nation that he would fight illegal migration by
accelerating asylum requests so that their claims would be processed “in
days or weeks, not months or years” with “shorter guidance, fewer
interviews, less paperwork”. And rather than cleaning up mass migration,
Sunak turbocharged it for Afghans and migrants from other Muslim
terrorist states. The “fewer interviews” allowed Afghan Muslims to apply
for asylum without an interview, without paperwork and with even less
vetting than there had been before.
This was not a response to
public outrage over mass migration and it certainly did nothing to deter
it or expel migrants from the UK, rather it provided cover for secret
smuggling schemes that were intended to continue the fundamental
transformation of Britain.
PM Sunak, like PM Starmer, lied to
the public, pretended to care about mass migration all the while
speeding it up and leading a relentless campaign to suppress any mention
of the harm being caused by Muslim mass migration through a wave of
social media speech arrests and a censorship scheme aimed at the public
and the media to protect the smuggling of Afghans.
What was the ‘super injunction’ really protecting? A future wave of Islamic terrorists.
The
recent independent review of the ‘super injunction’ that finally lifted
it concluded that “there is little evidence of intent by the Taliban to
conduct a campaign of retribution”. If the thousands and tens of
thousands of Afghans being smuggled into the UK were really opponents of
the Taliban who had loyally aided the UK, why wouldn’t the Taliban want
to come after them?
The reason the Taliban don’t is because these ‘refugees’ are really enemy invaders.
Americans
were sold the same phony bill of goods about the urgent need to take in
Afghans in order to save them from the Taliban. But the tens of
thousands of Afghans brought here illegally by Biden were waved through
by the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s Haqqani Network who controlled access to
Kabul Airport. The Afghans coming here weren’t fleeing the Taliban, they
were vetted by the Taliban. And since then there’s been a wave of
Afghan violence in the United States.
Those are the same Afghans
that the Biden administration and a number of Senate members working on
a bipartisan deal to ‘secure the border’ urgently tried to legalize. As
Front Page Magazine reported at the time, the legalization scheme was
necessary because the Afghans had no basis for filing legitimate refugee
asylum requests. Much like the UK’s ‘streamlined’ scheme for Afghans,
the Biden administration pushed to cut refugee resettlement and vetting
times from years to days. At that speed, no one noticed (or pretended
not to notice) that 36,400 Afghans carried an unidentified document and at least 11,110 had fake birthdays. 659 of the Afghans were either missing a first or a last name. So much for the “gold standard” vetting.
Five years ago, Front Page Magazine exposed the fraudulent ‘interpreter’
visa program that had been used as the basis for bringing tens of
thousands of Afghans and Iraqis to America. 70,000 Iraqis and Afghans
came here on the so-called translator/interpreter visas from 2007 to
2017. And 48,601
of those SIVs went to Afghans. At its peak, under Obama, there were
100,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan. That’s an “interpreter” to
every 2 soldiers.
By March 2021, 100,000
Afghans and Iraqis had been approved for SIVs. The number of
‘interpreter’ visas kept on growing even as the number of U.S. troops
dwindled to nothing.
The British and American governments lied
to the public to force the mass invasion of Muslim migrants into their
respective countries. The only difference was that the lack of free
speech in the UK allowed its government to back up those lies with mass
censorship.
To quantify this bipartisan profligacy, here’s a chart based on the IMF’s data. As you can see, the burden of government spending has grown much faster than GDP or inflation since 2019.
Pandemic spending caused the initial jolt in the wrong direction, but British politicians did the same thing as their D.C. counterparts by never bringing spending back down to the pre-COVID trend line.
At the risk of understatement, Brits are not complying with my Golden Rule.
As one might suspect, bigger government has not been good for
prosperity. I also put together a chart showing that there has been no
growth in inflation-adjusted per-capita GDP between 2019 and 2025.
To be fair, real per-capita GDP did increase by a tiny amount (about £58), so it has not been totally flat.
But it is safe to say that the country has been suffering economic stagnation. Not as bad as Finland, where the economy has been flat for 18 years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the U.K. reached that point in 2036.
Free speech vs hate speech – where does one draw the line? Washington and London are currently negotiating a tariff
agreement, and the administration of US President Donald Trump wants
the UK government to repeal hate speech laws in order to secure a trade
deal between the two nations, the Independent reported on Wednesday, citing claims by sources close to US Vice President JD Vance.
In a recent interview, Vance spoke of his admiration for the
UK and expressed optimism about the negotiations. Good chance of
agreement, says the VP – but supporters say his concerns over Britain’s
hate speech laws “are still a red line.” However, the sources reportedly
claimed to the Independent that Vance’s optimism on a trade deal “is a
way of putting further pressure on the UK over free speech.”
The UK’s hate speech laws have led to a significant number of
arrests. In 2023, UK police detained over 12,000 people – approximately
33 per day – for online messages deemed offensive or distressing under
the legislation, according to The Times.
Critics among civil liberties groups argue that these laws are vague
and infringe on free speech. Mr. Vance’s recent address to the
politically conservative Heritage Foundation think tank was cited as an
example of his views on Western culture and free speech being linked to
securing an agreement. “No free speech, no deal. It is as simple as
that,” the Washington source told the outlet.
The UK has been spared the worst of the massive wave of levies
imposed by Trump earlier this month. The country faces a 10% tariff on
all goods and 25% on steel, aluminum and automotive imports. It is
understood that Britain has already offered to drop its proposed digital
services tax as a means of getting a trade deal through. But the US
wants to see laws on hate speech repealed as well as plans for a new
online safety law dropped. These two issues seem to be the main sticking
points from the White House’s perspective.
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The problems between the US and the UK have a history. Prime Minister
Keir Starmer visited the White House for the first time since Mr.
Trump’s return and clashed with Mr. Vance in front of the TV cameras in
the Oval Office. The vice-president claimed that free speech was being undermined in the UK and that laws being brought in for online safety were an attack on US tech giants.
Most recently, the trial of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce for silently
praying outside an abortion clinic has become another cause celebre in
the US, with Mr. Vance criticizing the UK legal system over the case.
Free Speech, Hate Speech, and Human Rights
What is the law on free speech?
Under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act of 1998, “everyone has the
right to freedom of expression” in the UK. But the law states that this
freedom may be subject to formalities, conditions, restrictions or
penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic
society.
What is the law on hate speech?
A number of different UK laws outlaw hate speech. Among them is
Section 4 of the Public Order Act 1986 (POA), which makes it an offence
for a person to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior
that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or
distress.” This law has been revised over the years to include language
that is deemed to incite “racial and religious hatred,” as well as
“hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation” and language that
“encourages terrorism.”
The Terrorism Act 2006 criminalizes “encouragement of terrorism” which includes making statements that glorify terrorist acts.
Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it illegal to send a
message via a public electronic communications network that is
considered grossly offensive, or of an indecent, obscene or menacing
character.
“This offense is incredibly broad and has been used to address
jovial, albeit misjudged communications – it carries huge implications
for freedom of expression,” says justice and freedom campaign group
Liberty.
Why is the debate so controversial?
Criminalizing the incitement of violence or threats “can be seen to
be a justifiable limit on freedom of expression,” says Liberty. What is
controversial “is the criminalization of language (or behavior) which
may be unpleasant, may cause offense but which is not inciting violence,
criminality etc,” the organization adds.
Your News – How You Like It!
Writing for Prospect magazine, Hugh Tomlinson QC argues that
the problem lies with the lack of a UK constitution. “Free speech does
not, historically, have the same primacy under English law [as the US],”
he explains.
“A proper ‘written’ constitution sets limits on the powers of the
institutions of government, but the loose and flexible set of rules that
is described as Britain’s unwritten constitution sets no such limits.”
Writing in The Spectator, Lionel Shriver says the UK should follow the US lead.
“Because the alternative is what the UK has now, and it will only get
worse: government systematically legislating not just what we say but
what we may believe.
~
Andrew Wolf, Jr. is director of The Fulcrum Institute, an
organization of scholars dedicated to the classical liberal tradition.
He has also been published stateside in American Spectator, The Thinking Conservative, and American Thinker, as well as abroad in International Policy Digest, Times of Israel, and The Daily Philosophy, among others.
~
Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.
So according to the Times, this is not just some ordinary, every day, run-of-the-mill political corruption. Rather, it is corruption that has “eviscerated” boundaries between business and government, and is “without precedented in modern American history.”
Is there any substance to these charges?
As readers here know, my view has long been that the game of politics is inherently corrupt. Politicians are in a position to use the powers of their offices in a thousand ways, large and small, to benefit themselves and their friends and supporters, and to disadvantage adversaries. Almost no human being is immune from the temptation to use those powers for such purposes at least a little. And thus there is no such thing as a politician against whom at least some charge of corruption cannot credibly be alleged.
And it is far worse with today’s massive and intrusive federal administrative state. Essentially every business is under the thumb of federal regulation — and even if a business is not currently regulated, it could be. Every business is also taxed, and the taxes for any given business could be either increased or decreased at any time. So if a President is involved in changing regulation in any way, or in changing taxation in any way, or even in not changing regulation or taxation when some people say that he should, did he do that to benefit the financial interests of himself or his family, or did he do it because he thought it was good public policy? And don’t forget, it could be both!
Because every politician does things that can credibly be charged as corruption, I think that by far the most important question about any allegation of political corruption is whether the action in question is at least arguably illegal, and if so, what is the theory of illegality? Beyond that, it is also completely fair to ask whether something might not be right or good, even if legal. Just because something isn’t even arguably illegal doesn’t make it immune from criticism. All allegations of self-dealing are fair game for criticism of a politician, and for the voters to take into account.
With that background, let’s give the Times their best shot to make their case. The subject of the big May 1 article is a crypto start-up by the name of World Liberty Financial. WLF was launched in September 2024, shortly before the recent election. The majority owner of WLF is The Trump Organization (which the Times calls a “Trump family corporate entity”). Since taking office for his second term, President Trump has significantly eased the federal regulation of the crypto industry, including ending SEC investigations and disbanding a Justice Department task force focused on the industry. The Times calls this a “broad unwinding of Biden-era scrutiny of the industry.” From the Times:
Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has opened lucrative new pathways for him to cash in on his power, whether through his social media company or new overseas real estate deals. But none of the Trump family’s other business endeavors pose conflicts of interest that compare to those that have emerged since the birth of World Liberty. The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.
Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.
The gist of the Times’s claims against Trump in the piece is summarized as a “range of conflicts of interest trailing the company.” Here is their list:
World Liberty has directly benefited from Mr. Trump’s official actions, such as his announcement of a federal crypto stockpile that would include a digital currency the firm has invested in. The president’s announcement caused a temporary jump in the value of World Liberty’s holdings.
World Liberty has sold its cryptocurrency to investors abroad, including in Israel and Hong Kong, according to interviews and data obtained by The Times, establishing a new avenue for foreign businesses to try to curry favor with Mr. Trump.
Several investors in World Liberty’s coin managed firms that the federal government accused of wrongdoing. They include an executive whose fraud case was suspended after he invested millions of dollars in World Liberty. Other investors and business partners, some of whom haven’t been publicly identified before, are looking to expand in ways that will require the Trump administration’s approval.
World Liberty proposed swapping cryptocurrencies with at least five start-ups, and often used the Trump name to solicit steep payments as part of the deals. Even in an industry with a disreputable history, the deals raised alarm among veteran executives.
My reaction is, is that the best you’ve got? The most serious of the allegations is the first one, that “World Liberty has directly benefited from Mr. Trump’s official actions.” And so have hundreds and hundreds of other businesses benefited from the broad de-regulatory agenda of the second Trump administration. Trump himself may be benefiting from the de-regulation of crypto, but everyone else also has the opportunity to do the same. And any gains could be undone by a crackdown in a subsequent administration. Meanwhile, despite the frequently over-heated language of the Times piece, it never makes any suggestion of illegality. If there is any basis under which this may be illegal, I am unaware of it. Perhaps some readers may have a theory.
Looking at this situation at a more general level, our recent Presidents (and other prominent politicians) can be divided into three big categories from the perspective of exposure to corruption. In Category One, we have people, like Trump, who have come to office with substantial business interests that they have retained while in office. In Category Two are the politicians who have served in public office for their entire careers, and have never held a significant private sector job or business interest.
Category Three consists of those who had a career in the private sector, but substantially cashed out before entering public service, and now just have investment portfolios. Examples from Category One include Lyndon Johnson and Jimmie Carter. Also, if I might take one non-presidential example, Nancy Pelosi. Examples from Category Two include Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. Examples from Category Three include Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes.
From the point of view of potential corruption, it might be best to have all politicians come from Category Three. However, nothing in the Constitution requires that. And nothing about Category Three makes it completely free from temptation to corruption either. Plenty of political decisions affect the value of investment portfolios, even diversified ones.
As between Categories One and Two, I’ll take politicians from Category One any day. Someone from Category Two who advances to the high office of the Presidency has tremendous temptation to develop personal wealth by accepting large payments from third parties to influence government policy.
Both Clinton and Biden are clear examples of this.
Bill Clinton created the Clinton Foundation in 2001 after leaving office, and the Foundation then raised more than $2 billion over the next 15 years, during much of which time his wife was widely expected to become the next President. Large donors included foreign actors with clear interests in influencing U.S. policy. The overhead of the Foundation provided hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the Clintons’ lifestyles and staff.
This enterprise skirted extremely close to the edge of quid pro quo bribery. In the case of Biden, between 2019 and 2023 I wrote an entire eleven-part series titled “Biden’s — Stone Cold Crooked,” explaining why the publicly available facts about the Bidens’ conduct in Ukraine and China made for a lay-down case of quid pro quo bribery. Somehow the Biden Justice Department was never interested in pursuing the case.
As Mr. Johnson rose through the ranks in the House, and later the Senate, Robert Caro observed, there was a "twenty-year-long string of strikingly favorable rulings by the Federal Communications Commission" for KTBC. Caro at 286. Coincidentally, Austin was "one of the few metropolitan areas with only a single commercial television station."
When Johnson became President, he purported to put his holdings, including the broadcast stations, in a “blind trust”; but Blackman notes that the trustees were close personal friends and the trust would never meet the technical requirements for a true “blind trust.” Similarly, Jimmie Carter retained his heavily regulated (and subsidized) peanut farm business while President, while also creating a half-baked “blind trust.”
According to Reuters here on January 10, Trump has not created a “blind trust,” but has withdrawn from “daily management” of his business interests, and has turned that over to his sons. Reuters quotes a supposed “ethics expert” as saying that Trump’s arrangements are “not good enough.” Did that ethics expert ever criticize the arrangements of Johnson or Carter?
Is the insubstantial distinction between Trump’s arrangements and the Johnson/Carter “blind trusts” what the Times is referring to as “eviscerating the boundaries between business and government” and something “without precedent in modern American history”?
And then there’s Nancy Pelosi. Critics have noted multiple times over the years where Pelosi or her husband seemed to have done a profitable stock trade just before some Congressional action. This piece from Yahoo Finance on January 8 notes that Pelosi’s stock portfolio was up 54% in 2024, which beat the performance of every hedge fund in the country. At the same time, a bill to restrict stock trading by congresspeople somehow never advanced while Pelosi was Speaker.
Anyway, if you ask for my view of the biggest political corruption incidents of the past few years, numbers one and two would be:
) the multi-hundreds of billions of dollars of funding for the institutions of the Left from the government, and
) the Censorship Industrial Complex put together by the Biden administration to suppress conservative speech.
Those things don’t seem to draw big front-page articles from the Times.
Ten days ago, I wrote about
the effort by a few so-called conservatives to get Trump and
congressional Republicans to acquiesce to an increase in the top income
tax rate.
I explained that higher tax burdens were a bad idea in general, and I explained that class-warfare tax increases were a bad idea in particular.
Since it recycled points I’ve made many times, there was nothing
special about the column. Indeed, the only reason I wrote it was because
Trump has expressed interest in copying Joe Biden’s tax policy.
And I did what I do with every column, posting it on Facebook,
LinkedIn, and X (Twitter). All things considered, nothing remarkable.
So imagine my surprise when I get this notice from LinkedIn.
Needless to say, I was very surprised. What is hateful, after all, about arguing against tax increases?
And what triggered the removal? Did a couple of leftists make a complaint? Or maybe a couple of pro-tax pretend conservatives?
Was it a leftist employee at LinkedIn? Or maybe no people were involved and my column was removed by a computer algorithm?
I don’t even know if the removal was caused by my column or the
introductory comment I put on LinkedIn about Republicans being the “Stupid Party.”
So I ticked all the boxes and submitted an appeal.
But that appeal was unsuccessful, as you can see from this next visual.
For what it’s worth, the 1st Amendment applies to government, not the
private sector. LinkedIn is a private company and they have the right
to censor me, just as I have the right to delete comments on my site
that I think are inappropriate.
That being said, I’m nonetheless baffled that LinkedIn decided that a wonky column about tax policy was “hateful.”
Today I posted two articles about the UK's economic and social realities, here, and here, and how if these conflicts continue, they will destroy the UK, and western civilization.
You can almost hear the fake surprise in Westminster. “Oh no!” they gasp. “The government has to raise taxes again!” The BBC pretends it’s all part of a grand balancing act,
necessary to fund schools, hospitals, and “essential services.” In
reality, it’s a protection racket—an ongoing campaign to shovel more of
your money into the hands of a parasitic elite. Let’s be clear about what this week’s news actually means. Every
increase in National Insurance, every fiddled threshold in income tax,
every surcharge slapped onto fuel or tobacco or flights is not about
“the public good.” It’s about enriching people who already own
everything. It’s about sustaining a bloated and unreformable state, and
about funnelling more cash into corporations that are joined to that
state like tapeworms in a colon. Bryan Mercadente
As you read what's going on in the UK, and Europe for that matter, one has to wonder if they're sane, do they really believe their nations can continue to exist with their obviously destructive policies?
"I
don't know if you guys in the UK understand how sad it is for us in
Canada, and in the US, to watch what you're doing to yourselves."......
"We owe the UK such an immense debt. And to watch you guys spiral
yourselves into the ground for... political correctness... you can allow
your working class women to be raped en masse statistically and say
nothing about it and gaslight people who are telling the truth.".....
"It's so sickening, it's so demoralising. It's almost unspeakable."
........"We all hope and pray... that you get your act together, and grow some
spine again, and put your country back together, and stand up to these
bloody psychopathic bullies and the woke green mob, because it would be a
dreadful shame to lose you."- Jordan Peterson
On March 5th Andrea Widburg posted this article, The UK’s race toward Islam continues as now England, and King Charles, a rumored convert to Islam, and the official head of the Church of England, is putting the month long Muslim celebration of Ramadan on the same level as holidays traditionally celebrated by Christians. All in order to appease a Muslim population that overwhelmingly identify as Muslims first over being British, and their goal for the UK is to be governed by Islamic law.
The abuses the UK government is heaping on their citizens is shocking. There's been a request for an openly, and official, two tier system for criminal sentencing. One of you're white and Christian, and another " if you are an ethnic minority, you might avoid jail altogether. It amounts to bias against white men and Christians. "The opposition minister Robert Jenrick said that there is a “blatant bias against Christians and straight white men”. While the UK Sentencing Council has rejected this plan, but the radicals never give up, as the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has urged the Sentencing Council to review the guidance.
And if they refuse, Mahmood has threatened to legislate to give the government powers to overrule the council, and she's getting support from the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer saying he was “disappointed” with the
Sentencing Council’s refusal to change guidance and that “all options
are on the table” over how the government might respond. The question one has to ask is what has caused the British elite to hate their own people and their nation so?
Freedom of speech, it's gone! If you dare express an opinion that doesn't conform to the destructive direction these misfits are taking the nation, they police will come and arrest you, as one parent who faced this called it ‘Kafkaesque’.
U.K. man fired for saying terrorists who murdered 1,200 Israelis are 'violent and disgusting' - Speaking of 'disgusting'. Damon Joshua, an employee of Severn Trent Water Supply in the U.K.,
has been fired from his job due to a social media post he put up in
observance of the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack on innocent
Israelis.......and
characterized those who raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered 1,200
Israelis as a “group of violent and disgusting terrorists.” For mildly — one might say, timidly — stating an obvious truth, he was let go within hours.
No Free Speech, No Free Trade - England is losing its cultural roots and the determination to safeguard the God-given right to free speech.
The newest hate crime in England: ‘Speak English’ - The Mother Country of Great Britain gave the American colonists the idea
that free speech is a good thing....... we’ve just learned that the newest “hate crime” in
England, a country determined to control its citizens’ speech, is asking
someone to speak English.In one of the great historical ironies, America is why the British don’t have free speech and are subject to this insanity. .........British police warn an elderly man that it could be a "hate crime" because he asked someone to speak in English in England..........
William Shakespeare has long been considered one of England’s great
men because of his extraordinary output of timeless plays and sonnets.
They that shaped the English language as well as exporting ideas about
British culture...not because the Brits foisted his works on others, but
because others recognized their beauty and universality. Now, though, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, as part of the nation’s
push for national suicide, which is the premier Shakespeare
organization in England, has decided that Shakespeare is just
too...English, and that’s bad. In answer to Hamlet’s question (“to be or
not to be”), the Trust has determined that Shakespeare is not to be.
The far left lunacy of the UK Govt against free speech even includes an effort to prevent foreign companies to end free speech or face penalties, with their Online Safety Act, which has nothing to do with safety, except to keep them safe from being exposed for their corruption and insanity. Censorship is being practiced all across Europe, and people are being punished for daring to speak up, and they want this to be the standard in the U.S. also. Safety is the red herring, tyranny is the the reality.
Today, women, and especially children, are raped and branded
in broad daylight in many English towns. The vast majority of the
perpetrators are young Muslim immigrant men. Despicably, the
‘authorities’ cannot yet be roused to do anything
about it. London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has essentially stated, “Well,
that’s just part of living in a large, vibrant and diverse world city.”
Excuse me?! Islam directs that infidels are to be either converted,
enslaved, or killed! And so, the British have a choice: stiffen up or go
down. Salvage
their Christian heritage or become part of a new Muslim caliphate.
When Europe fell in love with the scientifically fraudulent insanity of global warming they set a course for economic collapse for themselves, and they must openly acknowledge the Paris Climate Agreement was doomed from the start, which Trump understood during his first term and dumped it, and did it again this term.
It's being reported the Brits are desperate for their own Donald Trump, and many think Farage is the man, as he's launching his campaign based on deportations, DOGE, and tax cuts. Will it happen? Or will the UK elite decide lawfare the left attempted against Trump is in order to get Farage arrested as has been done in Brazil,Turkey, and now in France preventing LePen from running in 2027.
First of all, Blogger owns all the Blogger sites. Secondly, Its been clear for some time I've managed to pickup my own personal censor at Blogger, going back a few years, but it's getting worse. Since October someone there has been trashing posts, and in times past you wouldn't know unless you checked the "trash" file, although they now send a notice when a post has been trashed allowing for a protest.
One in October, one in January, and two now in February. Why? Because I fail to meet some ethereal community standards, none of which they explain. It's simply a corrupt ploy at censorship by the hired help, and I'm guessing with values that are antithetical to everything that's sound for America. I keep protesting their decisions for trashing these pieces, all of which now appear below. So, tell me what possible community standard could I be violating? Is it possible some at Blogger hates the concept of truth, justice and the American way?
Interestingly I republished some of these in a different Blogger account and no one seemed to think there were an violations of their sacrosanct "Community Standards". So, it appears I have a personal censor for P&D at Blogger, and Blogger needs to give someone there a serious attitude adjustment.
October 12, 2024 P&D and the Week That Was
Truth is the Sublime Convergence of History and Reality
De Omnibus Dubitandum, (Everything is to be questioned!)
By Rich Kozlovich
Normally I don't add video's to my P&D monologues but I really
consider this "one of the essentials", because all we know Kamala's
"rise to the middle" in California wasn't through her competence. But
this video entitled, "The Shocking Origin Story of Kamala Harris and All
the Crimes She’s Committed", not only shows she's incompetent, she's
lazy, she's corrupt, is one nasty human being, and has been so her entire career. In point of
fact, according to this video, she's violated California law in her
actions. In short...she's also a criminal. But hey, this is California,
is there any politician in California who hasn't? Probably not. This
is what she would bring to the Presidency.
Kamala’s long history of lousy leadership is revealed in a 2002 evaluationOctober 12, 2024 by
Andrea Widburg Whether as Vice
President, Attorney General of California, or a lawyer long ago in San
Francisco, Kamala consistently fails Leadership 101.......In
other words, on every management attribute a leader needs—say, for
example, the leader of the most powerful nation in the world—Kamala was a
failing student.......Kamala was profane, abusive, unfriendly, and
demanded that she be treated like royalty......Employee reviews about
Kamala’s leadership style in the Vice-President’s office have been
equally awful.......
Why do people keep saying, "everything will turn out for the best"?
Let's stop being delusional, everything does not always turn out for the
best, and we have untold thousands of years of history to show that to be true.
>
Biden was elected through voter fraud, and what we ended up with
was levels of corruption and incompetence America's never seen in all
the nation's history. More of which Kamala intends to double down on. How's all that working out for you?
In John Mauldin's Thoughts From the Frontline he states:
A challenge in writing a weekly letter like this is that the economy
never stops. Important data keeps accumulating, whether I write about it
or not. A lot happened
in the last four weeks: an FOMC meeting with major policy changes, a
surprising jobs report, important shifts in the bond market and yield
curve, hurricanes, China, some geopolitical events, and a political
race, just to start. I haven't mentioned them because I was on other,
also important topics. Now it's catch-up time....... Normality is always a
moving target......We do know one
thing, however. The effects of 2020, 2023, the pandemic, the Fed, the
inflation, everything else grow more distant with each passing day.
The runway metaphor is overused but it fits: Planes can't stay in the
air forever. This one will land. The question is whether we passengers
will feel a hard or soft landing.
Make
no mistake, there's a massive international economic downturn coming,
Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, that axis of evil are all broke. I'll
have more on this in my next geopolitical issue.
Now all the "conspiracy
theories", and "misinformation" about covid are coming home to roost, as
the only misinformation was from the CDC, Pfizer, WHO, and the Biden
administration, and as I predicted long ago, the long term consequences
for their lies will impact humanity for decades. The false vaccines increased the risk of myocarditis in children, but somehow they felt the public didn't need to know that, and now, WHO, another vile corrupt international organization, admits monkeypox is a "side effect" of the covid vaccine. Even I didn't see that coming, and someone needs to go to jail for all of this.
Western civilization has gone completely insane. In order to protect abortionists (like
those Baal worshiping priests who sacrificed babies into burning pits,
they make their living by murdering the innocent unborn) Scotland has made it illegal to pray at home,
declaring private residences must be considered "abortion safe zones".
So now putting people in jail for silently praying outside an abortion
clinic isn't sufficient, all thoughts against abortion must now be a
crime, and don't you dare discuss your feelings with God over this.
Scotland has forbidden it.
I do hope more people start reading the book 1984, because the only thing Eric Arthur Blair, aka, George Orwell got wrong was the time frame.
Because
of the Democrat's policy of open borders, a violent criminal gang from
Venezuela, all here illegally, Tren De Aragua, has been allowed to
become out of control here in America by these leftist nitwits, and
Kamala intends to double down on that and end all border controls.
Trump on the other hand has announced “Operation Aurora” in massive move to oust foreign gangs like Tren De Aragua. And yet, if polls are to be believed, there still are Americans who are confused as to who they support?
The left hates, and wants to unleash their hate violently. That's all they have. If your a man who won't vote for Kamala, one professor wants you shot. Your outraged a the cost of food? Then your outrage is misplaced as that's nothing more than false information, and price gouging, but under no circumstances is it the fault of Biden's polices. Democrats openly despise Catholics, and according to Obama if your a man who won't vote for Kamala, you're a
racist, even it you're black, and a misogynist. It turns out the real
racist is Obama!
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you! A far left wing alien resident who illegally became president
stirring up racial hatred in America, and no one asks what his motives
are? Well, it turns out not everyone in black America is all that
enthused about Obama, including C. J. Pearson.
Former President Barack Obama is urging black men to
support Kamala Harris, suggesting that our allegiance should be based on
the color of her skin and the chance to “make history.” But I have a
simple response to that: my ancestors fought too hard for my right to
vote for me to be reduced to a racial checkbox in a political game. I
won’t support someone just because they look remotely like me—especially
when that person has shown no regard for the real issues facing black
communities.......... But here’s the thing: we’ve been “taking one for the team” when it comes
to supporting the Democratic Party for decades. And what has it gotten
us? Our inner cities are struggling, violent crime is on the rise, and too many of our communities remain trapped in a cycle of poverty. That’s the reality of progressive
policies, not just in a few cities but across the country. We don’t
need more of the same—we need leadership that actually delivers.
Jack
Smith, the federal prosecutor who isn't a federal prosecutor, has
decided the Supreme Court didn't understand his persecution of Donald
Trump with their presidential immunity ruling, so he's made some changes
and refiled, apparently to help them understand the error of their
ways. Jack Cashill likens all this to the prosecutorial misconduct of Mike Nifong saying:
.....who
notoriously hid exculpatory evidence and distorted the sequence of
events to prosecute three Duke lacrosse players on a rape charge. Once
exposed, Nifong was disbarred and arrested. The difference between
Nifong and special counsel Jack Smith, Donald Trump’s Javert, is that
Smith is still practicing law.
Nifong was disbarred, but Smith's conduct has been even worse.
As
the political climate clears it seems clear to many Democrats that
Trump will be elected, and to the point even the voter fraud schemes
they have in place may not be sufficient to prevent it, so, they've decided to become election deniers.
Imagine that. Doing what they demanded Pence not to, and did so with
profound outrage claiming that would be an attempt to destroy "our"
democracy.
You know that voice in your head that keeps you from saying the things you shouldn't say? Yeah, well, I don't have that! We need to question everything because everything we're told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality! Much of what we're told does not!
January 7, 2024 P&D and the Week That Was
Truth is the Sublime Convergence of History and Reality
De Omnibus Dubitandum, (Everything is to be questioned!)
So much for the credibility of the FBI...
but then again.... they gave
that up years ago, and will soon be facing the consequences. However,
this pandering to Muslims by all the governments of western civilization
is suicidal. Muslims are destroying western civilization, and the
leaders of these governments are helping them do it. You have to
wonder what's wrong with these people's minds.
I read yesterday
that China is experiencing an outbreak of human metapneumovirus
(HMPV). Wow! Metapneumovirus....now that's really scary....Right?
The symptoms include coughing, fever, nasal congestion, sore throat and
shortness of breath. Okay, so maybe I missed something. Let's see if I
have this right. They have a flu outbreak and so there's now a
worldwide announcement?
Well, a couple of weeks ago I had the
most painful sore throat I ever had in my life, with a lot of coughing
to boot, and I'm still coughing a bit, and I was really hazy for over a
week. The world didn't even send me a get well card. Imagine that.
I
wrote what I considered a very credible article on this H-1B Visa
issue, and then yesterday I found out Bernie Sanders and I are in
agreement, with him saying:
“Elon Musk is wrong,.......The
main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the
brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with
low-wage indentured servants from abroad,” ......“The cheaper the
labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”
I almost broke out in hives, but .... hey.... even a blind coconut can find a squirll occasionally, even if that coconut is "squirrely", and a blatantly corrupt lying hypocrite. And then it got even worse. I found out Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD),
for whom I have nothing but contempt, agrees with me about these visas,
but having gotten one thing right for once in his life doesn't give
this misfit a pass on the rest of life.
When SCOTUS shot down the Chevron ruling
I knew that was just the beginning since these agencies were not just
going to role over and say.... okay... we were out of control, and we're
really sorry, so we're repealing all those illegal regulations. It was
going to take lawsuits, and a Federal Appeals Court Strikes Down FCC Net Neutrality Rules,
saying the "Communications Commission did not have the authority to
adopt the regulations." I like it! As a result of the Loper Bright
ruling that overturned Chevron so much information has come out (stuff I
and many others have been saying for years) people are now far more
aware, and it's going to get better at many levels. (More here.)
Voters Balked on Natural Gas
Bans, but Climate Advocates Are Hoping to Withstand Court Challenges - by Kevin Killough - When a Consumer Project Safety commissioner suggested in 2023 that the federal government would consider banning gas stoves over
safety concerns, it set off fierce nationwide backlash. While the
Energy Department finalized stove efficiency standards, they were
watered down from the original proposal and no outright ban ever
materialized. No federal ban on gas stoves materialized, but climate
advocates seeking to stop consumers from accessing natural gas have
tried a number of state and local efforts to achieve their goals – all
with similar results as that on the federal level. Despite more recent
losses, they’re looking at trying some other strategies
The left is like rust, it never sleeps, and it never gives up, and it doesn't have to because they're funded to the tune of billions of dollars of dark money.
The central tenet of this secular religious movement is lying, ergo,
eternal vigilance, aligned with uncompromising resistance must be
absolute. There's no substitute for victory, and the left's lies and
machinations must be attacked and destroyed intellectually as well as
legally. And much of that must start with making their funding sources
transparent, and ending their tax free status.
On the international stage, America first is going to be the foundation principle of the Trump Doctrine, which will replace the Truman Doctrine
of unending intervention in the affairs of other nations, which was
really an extension of Woodrow Wilson's vision, which dragged America
into the WWI meat grinder that killed 40 million people, and not one
person then or now can say what that war was all about that justifying
all that blood and destruction. Well, ending that doctrine is long
overdue. No more shedding thousands of gallons of American blood and
trillions of American dollars fighting wars for irresponsible and
illogical reasons, and getting nothing in return, except wasted lives.
Let
me say this, I don't care what happens to Europe. Since WWI the
US/Europe relationship has been akin to an adult holding a little kid's
hand to keep him from falling,
but at some point you're not holding that kid up, he's dragging you
down, and that's what Europe has been doing to America for over 100
years, and they've been arrogant and ungrateful about it.
They
brought all their problems on themselves, and should have been left to
fix those problems on their own. It's long overdue for America to let
them deal with the catastrophe they've created including their energy
crisis, their economic crisis, their immigration crisis, and that
includes Ukraine. We have no skin in that game, and the players have
been corrupt and
stupid. That's not our fault, and it's not our problem to solve, let
Europe fix it or not, we don't need NATO, and the UN is a vile wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Victor
Davis Hanson, who I think is America's premiere historian. I've read a
number of really great historians who just can't seem to tell a good
story, and reading their books is a bit of a task. Hanson not only
gets the history right, he turns that history into a great story, here's
one of them.
Commentary: Devin Nunes Reemerges, by Victor Davis Hanson - 2024 proved to be the year of the reemergence of
many once and unfairly pilloried public figures..............After
January 6, 2021, the media swore that Donald Trump was
supposedly washed up. He left office with a 34 percent approval rating.
Over nearly the next four years, Trump would face 91 felony indictments
and be liable for over $400 million in assorted fines. Now he is a
reelected president. Former oppositional world leaders
traipse to Mar-a-Lago to seek his approval even before his tenure
begins. His erstwhile critics at home are scurrying about in
disarray.................
As
a result of the need to have a Speaker in place in order to make sure
Trump can be sworn in as President, so Speaker Johnson won the vote in
the House yesterday after only a couple of votes, and now he will have
to watch his behavior, because the conservatives most certainly will.
They have his number, and there could be another rebellion, and nine
Republicans have made it clear, they have the votes to "vacate".
I
have nine commentaries of my own, and twenty five from other writers,
and I hope you will find them all worthy of your attention. I'm adding
one link here, an article by Andrea Widburg of American Thinker because I
think it's extremely important.
Since the Muslim rape and
grooming gangs of the UK have been written about in America, that's a
story that's well known here. In the UK, not so much....until now.....
and people are arrested for making these crimes public.
I've
said harsh things about Elon Musk, and I don't take one word back, but
you gotta give credit where credit is due, and he's managed to break
through the lock the Brits have on information with his "X" site
exposing the horrors these Muslims have perpetrated on these poor
innocent young girls, and have done so for many years, with the UK
judiciary, the police, and both the Tories and the Labour governments
having been a party to all of this. Someone needs to be held
accountable.
Will Elon Musk bring down the British government over the grooming gang cover-up? -
January 3, 2025 by
Andrea Widburg - By revealing facts to the
British people, he may be responsible for bringing down the Labour
Party and making Nigel Farage the UK’s new Prime Minister.....My X feed suddenly started featuring posts about the infamous and
utterly heinous story that Muslim rape gangs in Northern England had,
for more than three decades (from the late 1970s to 2013), exploited
hundreds of thousands of British children. Worse, they were enabled by
British police and politicians afraid of “inflaming tensions” with the
Muslim population.......
Let's try and get this right. Islam isn't
a religion, it's a criminal political movement masquerading as a
religion, and all these vile things Muslims perpetrate against
"infidels" is perfectly acceptable and encouraged in the Koran.
No matter what anyone says, you can’t marginalize the truth! You can
suppress it, you can ignore it, you can avoid it, you can attempt to
undermine it, you can attempt to subvert it, you can attempt to
organize against it, you can even laugh at it, but if we have the
courage and the fortitude to stand and confront the lies, irrespective
of the personal costs, the truth will stand the test of time, because
truth and time are on the same side.
I have to admit that I’m a skeptic when it comes to
politicians and their promises. I don’t trust the government to have our best
interests in mind.The Federal Beast in
DC and the swamp creatures that have taken over our nation are not our friends,
our representatives or our public servants.DC is a cesspool of corruption, shady backroom deals and dirty money.
But Imust
say I’ve been encouraged by Donald Trump’s first couple of weeks back in
office.He’s done more positive things
for America in a couple weeks than Biden, Harris and Obama ever did in their
entire careers.Of course, the Leftists
I just mentioned have a different agenda and a different vision for
America.Their stated goal was to “build
back better,” but of course, in order to do that, they first had to tear down
and burn down our nation as much as possible.And what they consider “better” is actually a perpetual nightmare for us
citizens, and a one-way ticket to all-out communism and dictatorial control.
As I’ve said before, if something is a good idea, and a real
positive thing, people will flock to it on their own.If something is, in fact, a burden, an
affliction, a hindrance, a punishment and a nightmare, then it needs to be
forced upon us.Obamacare.Forced to buy something you don’t want, that
doesn’t benefit you and that costs a fortune, or be penalized for refusing.The jab.“Take the jab or lose your job.”The Green New Deal.No more gas
stoves, everything electric, including the car you drive.Mandatory.Forced upon us, whether we like it or not.
If Obamacare was what it was sold to us as: “If you like
your doctor, you can keep your doctor;” “Cheaper than your monthly cell phone
bill,”etc., then people
would have loved it.Iremember when Obamacare took
effect.Our family had a wonderful
health insurance policy that cost us around $400 a month.Then we got the letter from our insurance
provider.Effective the first of the
year, our new premium would be $1600 a month, and our deductible would increase
to $12,000.Pay the bill or pay a
penalty on your income tax return.Your
choice.We took the penalty.Because there was no way we could afford what
amounted to more than a whole new mortgage on a whole new home.
The jab.At first,
they coerced people into taking it, calling it “safe and effective.” But of
course, if you got the jab, it wouldn’t work unless Igot the jab too.We later learned, as Big Pharma confessed, it
was not effective...it didn’t stop the spread of any virus, and though they
still try their best to hide the data, we now know it wasn’t safe either.In fact, it’s been the cause of millions of
hideous deaths and life-long injuries.Blood clots were pulled from dead bodies by morticians who never saw
anything like it before.They described
the clots as “window caulk” and “liquid nails.”
We saw young people who’d been jabbed dying of sudden heart
attacks.“Turbo cancers” rose to levels
we’ve never seen before, as life insurance companies struggled to keep up with
the death rate, and millions of people just “died suddenly,”after taking the jabs.
But our Federal government forced this upon us and many lost
their jobs because they refused to be lab rats for Fauci.Others went along because they couldn’t risk
losing their jobs, and soon after, they lost their lives.
Not to mention the hospital mandates, forced upon us, once
again, by the Federal government.The
only allowable treatment for COVID was Remdesivir — a bioweapon that literally
melted internal organs.They knew this
would be the outcome, but free speech was so stifled, we couldn’t even post
alternative remedies to COVID on social media — Vitamin C, Zinc, Vitamin D3 —
all “disinformation.”Ivermectin was
called “horse paste,”and
that, along with HCQ — proven by multiple doctors around the world to dramatically
cure patients of COVID quickly — were forbidden.Pharmacies refused to fill those
prescriptions, and many doctors who advocated for them lost their licenses.
Let’s not forget that.Nor should we forget the Green New Deal...shutting down our energy
resources in favor of all-electric everything. Never mind that you need to burn
something in order to create electricity. It
was all a money-making scam, and hopefully most people understand that now.
It seems like a new day in America now.I’m grateful to President Trump for pardoning
the J6 political prisoners...hunted down and persecuted by a weaponized DOJ and
FBI.And while our FBI lied about the
infamous Hunter Biden laptop, loaded with damning evidence of crimes committed
by the sitting president and his family, they relentlessly pursued all those
who rallied in DC to question an obviously stolen election.
Most of those arrested and imprisoned never broke any law,
but that made no difference to the Biden administration’s so-called “Justice
system.”You could be charged with a
felony just for holding a flag at the rally.Radical Leftist judges would offer “plea deals” — meaning you would
plead guilty and get a lesser sentence.Those who refused to take the deal were aggressively prosecuted.A pastor friend of mine, who simply preached
to the crowd on January 6, was sentenced to thirty years in prison. He never even entered the
capital building.This was our nation
just a few weeks ago.
On his first day in office, Trump pardoned all those J6
hostages — including those who had been hunted down and jailed but not yet
charged.Today, they’ve all been
released.But through their ordeals,
many incurred huge legal fees while trying to fight for fair trials.Many lost their homes, their jobs — and some
have lost their lives.
Trump also declared a national emergency at our southern
border and ended so-called “sanctuary cities” across America.Approximately 10,000 troops have been sent to
the border to assist the border patrol.Gangs of illegals are now being deported back to their home
countries.We need all criminal
illegals to be sent back where they came from, and others to become American
citizens legally — learning our history and taking an oath to become
Americans.But what a totally
unnecessary expense.Not only have
taxpayers beared the burden of bringing these illegals here in the first place
— some with direct flights from their home countries, and then providing them
with free food, housing, healthcare and more — but now we have to bear the
financial burden of sending them back.
In his first days in office, Trump also cut the size of the
federal workforce, ended federal “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” programs and
declared there are only two genders: male and female.Not 72, only two. What a concept!
It seems DEI is on its last legs, as even major corporations
are stepping away now from kowtowing to the LGBTQP+ and “trans” agendas.Target stores, in particular, have announced
they are ending their association with the Human Rights Campaign, an
organization that shames companies into supporting these degenerate
causes.Target, you may recall, was the
first to implement the “transgender” restroom policies and last summer, promoted
“trans” clothing, including swimwear, for children.For me, it’s too little, too late. Target
hasn’t gotten one cent from me in years and never will again.
Trump also removed us from the Climate Change nonsense, by
withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement.And we’re withdrawing from the World Health
Organization, which has been poised to implement global control of sovereign
nations.
And at the end of his first week, Trump visited North
Carolina, devastated by Hurricane Helene in September.Many people there are still living in tents,
in the middle of winter.The majority of
helpful support residents there received was from individuals who volunteered
their time and talents to help with cleanup, emergency supplies and temporary
housing.FEMA’s efforts can only be
described as a colossal failure.Months
after the devastation, thousands who applied for FEMA aid are still waiting for
something — anything — and many have already been told they don’t
qualify for any aid.
Trump has vowed to speed up the process and cut the
governmental red tape that’s been holding up the recovery process there.He also visited California, which is still
burning, and he pledged his support to help the fire victims there.
I should also mention Trump’s pardon of the many pro-lifers
who have been jailed for simply standing in the gap for the unborn, about to be
slaughtered by abortion.The previous
administration hunted down pro-lifers, just as they hunted the J6ers and many
went to prison.They’re now free as
well.Now, a bill has been introduced in
the Senate to repeal the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances act (or FACE) —
the law the Biden administration used to convict 23 pro-lifers who prayed
outside abortion clinics and urged women in unplanned pregnancies to choose
life.
He also followed through with his promise to declassify the
files on the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations.And he has promised to release “everything.”
It will be interesting to see what “everything” entails.Ihope
it really is everything, because then we will finally have the solid proof that
our CIAorchestrated all of
those killings.
And he’s halted all foreign aid, pending review, including
all aid to Ukraine.Hopefully a peaceful
end to this needless war will soon be coming.And he ordered the Secretary of the Interior to officially rename the
Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.Even Google Maps is complying with this.
It appears to be a new day in America, where our new
President is truly putting Americans ahead of the interests of our
enemies.I still think the Federal
government has too much power.Apparently, they have the power to remove our rights and the power to
restore them, if they so choose.That’s
not how it’s supposed to be, and our Founders set this nation up with three
branches of government to give us a system of checks and balances.It shouldn’t have to take executive orders by
any president to get things done.
But Congress, I believe, will remain hopelessly lost in
gridlock.Two opposing parties, fighting
each other, rather than fighting for what’s right and best for our nation.Trump’s actions in his first days have been
mostly encouraging, but those charged with the duty to represent us as citizens
should have been doing that all along.If they had, we wouldn’t have such a disastrous train wreck to come back
from.But that’s the way it is in DC,
and Idon’t see the Swamp
changing.Too many there are making too
much money, serving their own interests rather than those of the people.
I am extremely concerned though, about Trump’s big
announcement regarding a massive expansion of Artificial Intelligence, or
“AI.”He’s got companies investing more
than a half trillion dollars to rapidly expand AI in this country, with a
specific focus on our healthcare.This
is dangerous stuff.
First of all, if you do some research, you’ll find that AIis truly demonic in nature.I’m sure Trump believes it’s just the next
new wave of technology and he wants America to lead the way.He doesn’t understand the evil behind it.He envisions AI being able to detect
pre-cancerous cells in our bodies and then be able to manufacture new mRNA
vaccines — specific to each individual — within 48 hours.
Have we not learned our lesson regarding
DNA-altering jabs?Or the tyranny our
healthcare system will heap upon us when given the chance?Leave our DNAalone,
Donald.Nothing good can come from this,
but rather, Ibelieve, it
will put us on the fast track to something so evil we can’t even imagine the
implications now. Yes, I think he has good intentions with this. But once
again, I think he’s being manipulated, just as he was with COVID, only a
million times worse.
For now, there’s much work to be done, and we can’t just sit
back and leave it up to Trump to “fix it all.”Those
of us who claim the name of Christ must take this opportunity to “build back
better,” and by that, Imean
courageously and boldly working to bring individual people, couples and
families back to God and His perfect plan for mankind.If we don’t take this opportunity to return
our culture to one of personal accountability and holiness — if we continue to
sit back and do nothing, then our nation will remain under judgment, and things
will be even worse four years from now than it’s been the last four.If you can imagine that.
February 7, 2025 Vaccines: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
An overview of traditional vaccines and mRNA injections
Vaccines have become a controversial issue — partly due to RFKjr, but
mostly because of the government’s vaccine policies. Here is a brief
overview of this matter, from the perspective of a Scientist, not a
medical professional.
The Good Old Days —
When vaccines first came out, they were only approved following rigid Scientific testing and protocols (RCTs).
These studies typically took 10± years to carefully asses Safety
(especially long-term) and Effectiveness. Here is the CDC's definition
of vaccines they had for decades:
“A product
that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a
specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”
Not
surprisingly, as time went on, pharmaceutical companies tried to reduce
the high cost of developing these vaccines, as well as the time needed
to get approval. Critics claimed that these amounted to shortcuts in the
Scientific assessments, and lawsuits became more frequent.
NCVIA (National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act)
was a major milestone in 1986. This largely indemnified Big Pharma:
“With the stroke of a pen, Congress essentially abolished vaccine injury
lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers…” COVID-19 precipitated another
major vaccine milestone (see below)…
My outline has
twelve points for you to consider about how we have gone off the rails
from what was a successful traditional vaccine program. I could add
more, but believe that a dozen should adequately get the message across…
Problem #1 —
Since traditional vaccines became widely used, some Big Pharma parties apparently concluded that it would be profitable to expand the bandwagon. In other words, if parents would automatically agree to get four vaccines for their child, why not make it five? Then six? How about seven?
Today (e.g., see here) there are nearly twenty different vaccines for children!
But, it’s worse! Look at the number of injections, the CDC is recommending: by the time a child is two (2) years old they will get some FORTY injections!
One does not need to be a Scientist to suspect that this situation is driven by Big Pharmaceutical profits, not the health benefits to children.
Problem #2 —
Although there was some Scientific testing regarding Safety & Effectiveness for most of these different vaccines individually, there does not seem to have been sufficient Scientific testing for these vaccines in combination.
In
other words, it is well-established that there can be serious adverse
reactions between two otherwise good medical treatments (vaccines,
pills, etc.). Has there been adequate scientifically testing about the
longterm safety effects on a two-year-old who gets some forty (40) vaccinations?
Not to my knowledge.
Problem #3 —
Why isn’t this being done by the CDC or FDA? Good question!
Why haven’t prominent medical organizations (like the AMA) made more of an issue about this clearly risky situation? Good question!
Note the AMA’s mission is stated to be: “To promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.”
Regretfully,
the answer to both of these questions appears to be that these agencies
and organizations are heavily influenced by Big Pharma.
What that also means is that these agencies and organizations have significantly departed from their publicized mission statements.
For example, its website boldly states:
“CDC increases the health security of our nation. As the nation's
health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from
health threats. To accomplish our mission, CDC conducts critical science
and provides health information that protects our nation against
expensive and dangerous health threats and responds when these arise.”
FYI, these are the same people who insisted on the necessity of COVID masks, despite 100+ studies concluding that they were unsafe and ineffective.
Problem #4 —
Then COVID-19 is dumped into this unscientific caldron.
Make
a wild guess as to what “solution” that Big Pharma will tell federal
politicians and government agencies that they ought to rely on for this
“global medical crisis”?
Since they have government health
agency approval, plus doctors’ support, plus parental compliance to give
two-year-old babies some forty injections, clearly no one will object to extending this thinking to adults in an emergency!
Wait! Why not prescribe a medication instead? Reread the prior paragraph.
But shouldn't the federal healthcare policy regarding COVID-19 be what is in the best interest of American citizens? Reread “Problem #3” above.
One silver lining of COVID-19 is that this NIH Study explains how it exposed what was already going on regarding the failing US medical bureaucracy.
Problem #5 —
So our Federal health agencies supported the COVID-19 “solution” of a vaccine. However, there was a HUGE obstacle to that plan: Scientific Safety and Efficacy testing for traditional vaccines takes 10± years to do properly.
Their answer was: since we are in a “global emergency” (pandemic), the normal (i.e., Scientific) way of producing a vaccine will not work.
The solution (agreed to by government agencies who are no longer adhering to their mission statements) is to approve a new type of injection: mRNA.
Here is an outline of some of the significanttechnical differences between a traditional vaccine and an mRNA injection, and some of the mRNA dangers. Near the time that mRNA was being enthusiastically promoted to the public, this voice of reason spelled out realities. Years later this Study bluntly stated:
“To
date [2023], there are no published studies on the biodistribution,
cellular uptake, endosomal escape, translation rates, functional
half-life and inactivation kinetics of synthetic mRNA, rates and
duration of vaccine-induced antigen expression in different cell types.”
The
justification for approving these technical changes was that mRNA
injections could be developed more quickly than a traditional vaccine
could.
Problem #6 —
So
now that we understand that we will NOT have the same Scientific
testing done on mRNA injections that has usually been done for
traditional vaccines, let’s look at the Safety part, as there are several concerning differences.
For example, some studies (e.g., here and here) concluded that short-term adverse events from COVID-19 mRNA exceeded those of traditional vaccines.
That said, the most disturbing difference is that there is essentially zero mid-range and longterm safety testing of mRNA injections.
The
possible negative consequences of a COVID-19 bio-chemical injection are
far-reaching, and many may not be apparent for years. This study identifies eighteen (18!) pre-existing medical conditions that can lead to adverse COVID-19 injection outcomes, including death.
Here are many other medical conditions, which are mostly not tested for prior to mRNA injection approvals. This study says: “No one actually has any idea of medium- and long-term effects of COVID-19 vaccines.”
All this is due to what is marketed as a benefit: mRNA injections can be approved in a year or so, whereas traditional vaccines take 10± years.
Again, the most important part skipped in the mRNA injection approval process, is medium and long-term safety testing. That’s a VERY BIG deal!
Problem #7 —
Another
serious safety concern is that pharmaceutical companies have not
disclosed (to date) all of the ingredients in the mRNA injection! Their
stock excuse is that this is proprietary information.
“Proprietary
information” is a legitimate concern when a company has heavily
invested in a product and doesn’t want a competitor to copy their
product without incurring the time and cost of R&D. (Think China.)
But who are the COVID-19 competitors of Big Pharma (Pfizer, etc.)?
Further,
the primary customer for 95%+ of these injections is the government —
and Big Pharma already has signed contracts. So how would they be
financially harmed by disclosing the contents of their mRNA injections?
Problem #8 —
Yet
another serious obstacle that the powers-that-be encountered in getting
the American public to accept their COVID-19 “solution,” is that the
mRNA injection did not comply with the CDC’s definition of what a vaccine was!
As mentioned above, for decades the CDC's definition of a vaccine was:
“A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to
produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that
disease.”
The new CDC definition of a vaccine: “A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
Again
the takeaway here is that mRNA injections are NOT anything like
traditional vaccines, so it is a major misnomer (intended to fool the
public) to call them a “vaccine.” The reality is that they are “bio-chemical injections.”
[For some additional concerns about mRNA injections see here.]
Problem #9 —
We
probably could have dealt with all of the above, IF there was honest
and accurate data regarding the mRNA injections, publicly available.
There were two major reasons why this did not happen.
First is the inherent weakness of the voluntaryVAERS data system. This Harvard study concluded that (typically) only 1% of adverse outcomes are reported through VAERS! Why wouldn't that have been fixed a long time ago?
Second is that since everyone in the medical establishment involved was laser focused on PTA (instead of Safety and Effectiveness for Americans), accurate mRNA adverse effect data was not going to happen (e.g., see this report).
When there were adverse reactions to adults and children getting
injected, many of those were ignored, explained away, attributed
elsewhere, etc.
As a result, when one looks for data to
see what really happened with COVID injections, it is misleading,
woefully inadequate, etc — i.e., essentially useless.
Problem #10 —
Yet
another pesky problem to the political COVID-19 “solution” was that
there was increasing scientific evidence that there were alternative
solutions that were: a) much less expensive, b) had few (if any) side-effects, andc) also had solid long-term safety records.
“Responsible
for advancing the public health by helping to speed innovations that
make medical products more effective, safer, and more affordable and by
helping the public get the accurate, science-based information they need to use medical products to maintain and improve their health.”
If
that was anywhere near accurate, that would mean that the FDA would
certainly objectively investigate such a potentially superior option,
right? NO!
It would be one thing if the FDA simply ignored IVM — but instead they actually aggressively attacked it — and mocked IVM users as fools for using a “veterinary” product!
It’s stunning that the FDA would take such a stance on what is universally acknowledged as not only a medical wonder drug, (it has been documented as being antiparasitic, antibacterial, antiviral, and anticancer!), and also one of the safest pharmaceuticals in history.
Another
stunning revelation during the COVID fiasco is that few (if any)
preventative options were ever discussed as being beneficial. For
example, did the CDC, the FDA, the AMA, or Dr. Fauci ever say anything
like:
“Keeping yourself in good health is your
first barrier to COVID-19 defense. Part of that would be to take Vitamin
D, which has been shown to be a safe and inexpensive anti-viral treatment.” [Note that the study I referenced here was published in 2020, so medical “experts” would have been aware of it.]
Not to my knowledge.
Problem #12 —
An exacerbating situation here is that (pressured by pharmaceutical lobbyists), Congress chose (via the Prep Act, which built on NCVIA ) to protect the interests of vaccine and injection manufacturers, rather than to protect the public’s right to safety, or to provide the public with legal recourse against malfeasance or incompetence by pharmaceutical companies. Hmmm. Didn’t they learn anything from NCVIA?
Big
Pharma’s argument was that lawyers were indiscriminate in filing
frivolous lawsuits against them, so defending such suits would make it
uneconomical for them to produce vaccines, so they would stop.
Certainly,
there is some merit to protection from frivolous lawsuits, but it seems
like there should be a middle ground here. Instead, it appears that we
have gone from one extreme to another.
The Bottom Line —
So
when people like RFKjr cast aspersions on vaccines, don’t be fooled by
the wails of lamestream media, and other self-serving or misinformed
parties.
The takeaway is that the US “vaccine” business has lost its way, and is long overdue for a complete overhaul from stem to stern.
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