The Attack On All Parts Of Our Food Supply

On March 4th, The Epoch Times posted an article about a raid by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture on an Amish farm in Pennsylvania.

The article reports:

In January, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, raided the Amos Miller Organic Farm, a longtime members-only organic farm in Lancaster County. Government agents took possession of many tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of food that had been produced on the farm for family and friends, people who rely on this farm for high-quality products that avoid factory methods, chemicals, and industrial processes.

This is the kind of food that many people around the country would love to buy but cannot because of the industrial cartels that control production and distribution in this country. Residents of Amish country are wildly fortunate to have such options, particularly as it pertains to raw milk products, which are widely considered to be more nutritious and delicious than processed milk. However, that truth is censored very heavily by YouTube, as part of the general censorship regime in operation now.

The article concludes:

What will save the food supply in this country is less government oversight and bullying and more of the free market that the Amish practice. It is highly dangerous for government powers to be deployed in harassing these people and thus further poisoning the food supply. I’m happy to admit that I was wrong on this subject for most of my writing career. But the COVID response taught me a thing or two. I learned that we cannot trust government oversight in any aspect of human health, particularly not that which affects our food.

And it’s not only about food. It’s also about religious freedom. Groups such as the Amish and so many others have thrived in the United States thanks to religious freedom. Their lifestyle and food choices are part of that. Take that away and you remove the whole guts of the whole basis of the American experience. It’s that serious.

Meanwhile, as government goes after raw milk, vast numbers suffer real injury from mRNA shots the government forced on millions of people. Pharma’s stocks continue to trade at high levels while true investigations get little attention by the captured corporate media outlets.

The Amos Miller Organic Farm deserves every passionate defense from anyone who values health and freedom. Make no mistake. The war on the organic farm is a war on all of us and only to the industrial benefit of large producers tightly connected to the cartel that runs agriculture in this country. The entire regulatory empire needs to be completely deregulated in the interest of the health and well-being of everyone.

Many of us wish we lived near a farm like the Amos Miller Organic Farm. The government is doing no one a favor by shutting it down.

When Sustainable Energy Isn’t Sustainable

On January 20th. a website at Substack called Energy Bad Boys posted an article about the Nobles wind farm in Minnesota.

The article reports:

In 2007, Minnesota began its quest to power the state with wind turbines and solar panels when the Next Generation Energy Act (NGEA) was signed into law. This legislation mandated that 25 percent of the state’s electricity come from “renewable” energy sources by 2025.

These mandates, along with generous federal tax subsidies and monopoly utilities seeking to maximize their government-approved profits by building new infrastructure, led to a building boom in wind turbines and solar panels.

From 2007 through 2022, Minnesota built thousands of wind turbines totaling 3,690 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity and 1,143 MW of solar capacity en route to meeting the mandates in 2020, five years ahead of schedule.

However, many of the turbines built to comply with the 25 percent mandate are already being refurbished or “repowered” long before the end of their supposed 25-year useful lives. In fact, one of these wind facilities, the Nobles wind farm, has already been repowered after just 12 years in service.

But why was Nobles refurbished more than a decade before the end of its useful life at a cost of $240 million? The official reason provided by Xcel Energy for repowering Nobles was to spur economic activity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and extend the retirement date of the facility from the year 2035 to 2045.

This story makes for a good newspaper headline, but the data tell a very different story. Digging deeper into the reasons surrounding Xcel’s decision to repower the Nobles facility illustrates how our state and federal energy policies are causing America’s energy decisions to grow increasingly irrational.

The article also notes:

Currently, there aren’t enough transmission lines to move the power generated from these wind facilities to other areas of the 15-state regional grid that could use it. This is because the existing transmission lines can only transport so much power at a time, similar to how water flowing down a sink is governed by the width of the drainpipe. As a result, the oversupply of electricity frequently causes power prices to go negative, which sends a signal to wind turbine operators to scale back supply, at least it works that way in theory.

In reality, the PTC pays wind projects $26 for each MWh of electricity the facility produces, whether or not that electricity is needed. The subsidies mean that electricity generated from wind farms could potentially be sold into the market at a price of negative $25 per MWh and still turn a profit for their owners. This is why the areas with the most wind turbines see the most negative prices, which you can see in the map below.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is only one of many illustrations of the fact that the government is subsidizing the quest for a perpetual motion machine that will never exist.

 

Many Europeans See The Threat

Farmers in Europe are fighting the restrictions that the World Economic Forum are attempting to impose of them in the  name of climate change. The protests have now spread to France.

Breitbart reported Monday:

Kicking off the “Siege of Paris” on Monday, thousands of farmers took to their tractors in a coordinated attempt to block off entrances to the French capital in protest against globalist green policies they say are destroying their ability to stay in business.

In an escalation of the latest example of popular uprisings that have come to define President Macron’s tenure in office, farmers descended in their tractors to shut down major highways leading into Paris on Monday following a week of similar protests throughout the country.

According to the Le Figaro newspaper, farmers successfully enacted blockades on eight major highways, with tractors lined up for tens of kilometres around the ring road surrounding Paris. In total 16 highways and 30 administrative departments around the city were impacted by the demonstrations on Monday, while separate farmer uprisings continued in at least 40 other locations throughout the country.

Requiring farmers to kill their cattle and the farm in certain ways limits our food supply. A hungry populace is easier to control–if you don’t agree with what the government is doing, they will decrease your food allowance.

The article also notes:

In addition to targeting Paris, at least 80 tractors enacted a blockade of the A7 highway and elsewhere outside Lyon, where local farmers have also spoken of a “siege” of the city.

“A siege normally lasts a long time, we are not specialists in blocking but we will maintain it for as long as it takes,” said the head of the regional branch of the FNSEA union Michel Joux. “There is palpable tension and exceptional motivation.”

Critical roads leading into Marseille, including the A7 and A55 motorways were subject to “snail operations” local officials said, adding that the A50 is “currently at a complete standstill”.

The battle between agriculture and green agenda proponents is set to become a key issue in the upcoming European Union Parliament elections in June, with farmers and rural communities rising up in France, Germany, Poland, Romania and previously in the Netherlands over green regulations, which they claim have become too much to handle on top of the rising cost of fuel and inflation.

Green energy has never been about keeping the planet clean–it has always been about control.

Where The Money Is Actually Going

On Friday, Zero Hedge reported the following:

President Joe Biden is heaping another $5 billion onto a $136 billion pile of taxpayer-funded student loan debt forgiveness, as one of his signature 2024 (vote buying) schemes heading into the 2024 election.

Not only has moral hazard been reduced to an academic concept, shouldn’t taxpayer funds be used to bail out poverty-stricken Americans before people with college degrees who signed their names to a contract for non-dischargeable debt? We digress.

Around 74,000 student loan borrowers will now see debt canceled as a result of administrative changes enacted by the US Department of Education in the latest round of relief – including borrowers enrolled in the government’s income-driven repayment and public service loan forgiveness programs, Bloomberg reports.

Each program requires at least a decade of payment or service to be eligible for relief. Mismanaged federal student-loan plans have left some borrowers without promised relief after making payments for as long as 25 years. -Bloomberg

“My administration is able to deliver relief to these borrowers – and millions more – because of fixes we made to broken student loan programs that were preventing borrowers from getting relief they were entitled to under the law,” Biden said in a Friday statement written by other people.

Of those receiving taxpayer-funded assistance, roughly 60% are taxpayer-funded “public servants” – so the snake continues to eat its tail. So, buying votes with voters’ money.

Since when is the federal government able to change the details of a contract mid-stream? Since this is essentially an expenditure, why is it coming from the Executive Branch? The House of Representatives is supposed to be in charge of spending. This should quickly be found unconstitutional by the courts, but I seriously doubt anyone will bring the case.

Slowly Uncovering The Spider’s Web

On Tuesday, The New York Post posted an article about the tunnels the Israeli Defense Forces are uncovering in Gaza.

The article reports:

Hamas’ sinister network of tunnels underneath the Gaza Strip may be over 350 miles long – or hundreds of miles more than initial estimates, sources said this week.

The tunnels may run for anywhere between 350 to 450 miles, and boast a staggering 5,700 entrance shafts, senior Israeli officials told The New York Times.

The new estimates – which could not be confirmed – are over 100 miles longer than the original numbers, which placed the tunnel network at around 250 miles long, the outlet noted.

The tunnels’ vastness is “extraordinary” given that Gaza’s longest point only stretches about 25 miles, the Times said.

…There are believed to be about 130 hostages left in Gaza – many of whom are suspected to be held somewhere in the vast tunnel network.

Thanks to new intelligence gathered during the campaign, the IDF can now quickly detect a single tunnel – a task they previously took up to a year, one anonymous official told the Times.

Some of the crucial information was found on the computers of Hamas operatives who were involved in digging the tunnels, as well as a list of families that “hosted” the tunnel shafts underneath their homes, the insider said.

The money used to build the tunnels was given to Gaza to create infrastructure that would result in the prosperity of its citizens. Obviously, those ruling Gaza had no concern for their citizens. That alone is reason to refuse to allow Gaza to rule itself–it has proven to be incapable of successful self-government.

Reining In The Federal Government

In recent years, the federal government has altered the lives of Americans in small ways and big ways. The small ways include dishwashers that used to take an hour to cycle now take two hours, showerheads don’t put out the same amount of water that they put out ten years ago, and washing machines also take longer to wash the clothes. These changes are not the result of laws passed by Congress (which is where we are supposed to get out laws), they are the result of federal regulations. Well, the ability of federal agencies rather than Congress to pass laws is now being challenged in our courts.

On Tuesday, The Daily Caller reported the following:

A federal appeals court shot down the Biden administration’s efforts to repeal existing regulations on dishwashers and clothes washers on Monday.

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion in a legal battle between eleven red states and the federal government over the Department of Energy’s (DOE) efforts to impose energy and water efficiency standards for dishwashers and clothes washers that asserted it “is unclear that DOE has statutory authority to regulate water use in dishwashers and clothes washers,” according to the opinion’s text. The Biden administration has attempted to push new standards for both appliances since coming into office in 2021 as part of a wider push to nudge the market toward more energy efficient appliances, which in some cases are generally  less effective than their other models, the court asserted in its opinion.

In March 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) proposed standards for dishwashers that allow the sale of models that run faster cycles, using more energy and water than standard dishwashers in the process. The Trump administration then adopted similar guidelines as policy in 2020, but the Biden DOE repealed those standards in 2021 before advancing its own standards that crack down on the faster models advantaged by the Trump administration’s rules in May 2023.

The article concludes:

Beyond clothes washers and dishwashers, the Biden DOE has also sought to impose energy efficiency regulations for items like water heatersfurnaces and pool pump motors. The administration has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars on helping state and municipal governments pursue building codes

“In this opinion, the court has forced DOE to follow the law and even noted that one of the positions DOE took in this suit ‘borders on frivolous.’ This decision allows manufacturers to build better dishwashers, not be encumbered by counterproductive federal regulations,” Devin Watkins, an attorney for CEI, said of the opinion.

The DOE did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Why We Need Accountability For The Money And Weapons We Are Sending To Ukraine

On Monday, The American Thinker posted the following headline:

Foiled Muslim terrorists were set to purchase American weapons from Ukrainian military official for pennies on the dollar

The article reports:

In April of 2022, Reuters ran an article on the status of a particular American munition—thanks to Joe Biden’s willingness to empty American stores for Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the war in Ukraine, the stock of Raytheon’s “Stinger” missile was dwindling, and “re-stocking challenges” had appeared on the horizon. A month later, in May, Axios reported this:

The U.S. Army awarded Raytheon Technologies a $624 million contract to produce 1,300 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to replenish its stock after sending around 1,400 of the missile systems to Ukraine in response to Russia’s unprovoked invasion.

The jihadists who planned attacks on cathedrals in Austria and Germany this past Christmas were offered a rocket launcher by an unnamed army official in Ukraine, according to the Austrian news outlet, Exxpress.

The site reported on Wednesday that the German Federal Criminal Police Office had obtained testimony from one of the suspects affiliated with the Islamic State terror cell in the Afghan province of Khorasan (ISPK) that revealed the group had been approached by “a contact who is supposed to fight in the army in the Donetsk Basin” regarding the purchase of a U.S.-manufactured FIM-92 Stinger missile.

It was reported that the Ukrainian national within his country’s military ranks offered to sell the weapon for $5,000 and regularly visits Germany to attempt to sell military equipment on the black market.

The article concludes:

First, the cadaver-in-chief pulls out of Afghanistan in the most asinine and irresponsible of ways, causing the murders of American soldiers and Afghan civilians, and hands billions of dollars over to the terrorist group now running the government; then, he delivers weapons over to one of the most notoriously corrupt government cartels in the history of the world, and those arms somehow make it to the black market, being sold to the very jihadists who have “intensified” thanks to his efforts and foreign policies.

Seriously, what a tangled web—how is it possible that one man can play such a crucial role in crisis after crisis? Well, because that man is Joe Biden.

No more money to Ukraine.

The Important Story

The list of Epstein Island visitors is important. I suspect there is also video evidence to back up the claims made by the trafficking victims, but as long as Ghislaine Maxwell is safely ensconced in her Florida Country Club prison, those videos will never see the light of day. However, there is a more important story that is being overshadowed by the focus of Epstein’s list of frequent guests and visitors.

On Wednesday, The U.K. Daily Mail reported the following:

  • Investigators believe a network of high-end brothels operating in the Boston and D.C. areas was a honey trap to ensnare politicians and government officials 
  • But whether the plot was intended to aid Russia, China, South Korea – or even Israel – remains to be determined 
  • Clients, believed to include members of Congress, military officers, and national security contractors, have not yet been unmasked and charged 

How many of our high-level ‘public servants’ were being controlled by people who intend to do us harm?

The article reports:

The brothels were raided in November and prosecutors said they were looking to charge 28 people in Massachusetts alone.

…Han Lee, the alleged mastermind, Junmyung Lee, 30, and James Lee, 68 – all South Korean-born U.S. nationals – were charged in November with running the sex ring. The three Lees are not related.

Han and Junmyung both live in the Boston area so the locations of four of the brothels there made sense. James lives in Torrance, a suburb of Los Angeles.

Members of Congress, military officers, and national security contractors who ‘possessed security clearances’ were among the steady customers at the ‘high-end brothels’ run by the ring, prosecutors say. 

The ring’s clients, who paid rates of up to $600 an hour, included corporate executives, professors, lawyers, and scientists.

…The probe into ‘their involvement in prostitution is active and ongoing,’ Department of Homeland Security Special Agent Zachary Mitlitsky said in a court affidavit.

A spokeswoman for the US Attorney’s Office in Boston, which is prosecuting the case, cited the same reason in declining to comment on questions about the prostitution ring, including whether the suspects had ties to foreign intelligence.

Experts interviewed by DailyMail.com suspect the brothel scheme was a honeypot. 

The twin locations where ring operators selected to set up shop is the first clue, a number of them said.

As the country’s political headquarters, Washington presents a target-rich environment for spies.

In the affidavit, investigators identified six ‘target locations’ where the brothels were based, four in the Boston area (‘Target Locations 4-7’) and two in Virginia (‘Target locations 8 and 9). 

The names on this list of clients are the ones we want to see because of the national security implications.

 

How Safe Is The Manufacturing Of The Vaccine?

On Sunday (updated Monday), The Epoch Times posted an article about manufacturing violations in the production of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine.

The article reports:

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectors uncovered problems at a Moderna plant used to manufacture a substance that is part of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to a newly released document.

Moderna failed to meet multiple requirements, including rules aimed at minimizing the potential for contamination, according to the document.

FDA inspectors performed inspections at the plant in Norwood, Massachusetts from, Sept. 11 to Sept. 21, visiting nine times in total.

They found that equipment used to manufacture the substance was not cleaned properly before usage, that a mock cleaning done for manufacturing did not adequately simulate the actual process, that written alarm procedures were not followed, and that neither the equipment nor the plant were designed in a way that would make contamination less likely.

Inspectors also learned that Moderna used materials beyond their expiration date.

“There are more than two thousand expired items stored in your … warehouse and cold storage at time of inspection,” Unnee Ranjan, the FDA’s lead investigator, wrote in a summary of the inspections.

The article concludes:

Another part of the FDA report, dated Sept. 21, described how the Norwood facility did not have adequately designed air handling systems to “assure appropriate air quality in the … cleanroom in which the mRNA drug substance is manufactured.”

Inspectors also said they found positive air pressure was not “consistently maintained” between cleanrooms and airlocks and that monitoring data showed the cleanroom pressure turned negative between January and September. That development was “not assessed for potential impact,” they said.

“At face value, it appears multiple controls designed to prevent contamination were deficient,” Mr. Lynn said.

Another recently released document, produced by the nonprofit Informed Consent Action Network on orders from a federal judge, showed the FDA detected in Andover, Massachusetts, issues with the manufacture of a substance used in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Pfizer said in response it had taken actions to correct the issues.

The government is still putting ads up on television encouraging Americans to take the vaccine, even after there have been numerous reports of serious side effects. Now we find out there are manufacturing problems also? It’s time for the Covid vaccine to go away.

 

 

Is Anyone Surprised?

On December 28th, NBC News reported the following:

U.S. intelligence officials have determined that the Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. this year used an American internet service provider to communicate, according to two current and one former U.S. official familiar with the assessment.

The balloon connected to a U.S.-based company, according to the assessment, to send and receive communications from China, primarily related to its navigation. Officials familiar with the assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time.

The Biden administration sought a highly secretive court order from the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect intelligence about it while it was over the U.S., according to multiple current and former U.S. officials. How the court ruled has not been disclosed.

The article concludes:

After the balloon was shot down, a senior State Department official said that it was used by China for surveillance and that it was loaded with equipment able to collect signals intelligence.

The balloon had multiple antennas, including an array most likely able to collect and geolocate communications, the official said. It was also powered by enormous solar panels that generated enough power to operate intelligence collection sensors, the official said.

Defense and intelligence officials have said the U.S. assessment is that the balloon was not able to transmit intelligence back to China while it was over the U.S.

The FBI forensics team that examined the balloon after it was shot down completed a classified report about the equipment it carried, according to multiple U.S. officials. Its findings remain secret and have not been widely briefed.

Federal judges on the surveillance court, where proceedings are held in secret, must determine whether there is probable cause that the surveillance target is a foreign power or a foreign agent and that the surveillance is necessary to obtain foreign intelligence information. The court’s rulings are classified.

If you study the route of the balloon, you will notice that it flew over a number of significant military installations. I don’t believe that is a coincidence. You will also remember that the balloon was shot down over water–after it had flown over the entire country–and because  it was shot down over water, its electronics were fried. Is anyone in our government looking out for the security of America?

Follow The Money

On Friday, CNBC reported that the U.S. government has decided not to pursue further charges against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

The article reports:

  • Prosecutors have decided against pursuing a second trial against disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
  • In a note to Judge Lewis Kaplan on Friday, the U.S. government said that much of the evidence that would have been presented had already been submitted during the first trial.
  • In November, following a month’s worth of testimony from nearly 20 witnesses, a jury found the former FTX chief executive guilty of all seven criminal counts against him.

The article notes:

The second trial, which had been slated to start in March, addressed an additional set of criminal counts, including conspiracy to bribe foreign officials, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and substantive securities fraud and commodities fraud. 

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote in the letter to the Court that “a second trial would not affect the United States Sentencing Guidelines range for the defendant, because the Court can already consider all of this conduct as relevant conduct when sentencing him for the counts that he was found guilty of at the initial trial.”

I suppose it is just an incredible coincidence that after Sam Bankman-Fried donated $100 million in stolen customer funds to US politicians, the US Government announced they’re dropping six charges against SBF and will not prosecute him for a political campaign finance violation. Any guesses on what the second trial would reveal about campaign finance violations and the people who received funds illegally?

 

If You Wanted Your Pizza Delivered…

Beginning in 2024, California’s new minimum wage law passed by the Democrat legislature will go into effect. The new law sets the fast-food minimum wage at $20 an hour. That’s a pretty good place to start if you are a worker. However, what does it do to the bottom line of a company who is in business to make a profit (most companies are in business to make a profit)?

On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article detailing the impact the law, which will go into effect in April, has already had.

The article reports:

The state will raise its overall mandated minimum-wage rate from $16 an hour to $16.50 an hour overall, starting in 2024. But some industries will get an even bigger wage shock: fast-food minimum wages go up to $20 an hour starting in April. Meanwhile, workers in the health care industry will see their minimum wage rise to $18, $21 or $23 an hour, depending on the job.

It’s about time, you say?

Let’s start by saying we’re not against anyone getting a raise. But raises should come from the companies themselves, not from government decrees. As study after study in recent years show, government-mandated minimum wage hikes usually hurt those they’re meant to help.

It’s an irony that seems lost on California’s leftist political class, now in total control of the state, continues to “help” those at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder by making it more expensive for businesses to hire them and keep them working.

Already, with California’s looming minimum-wage tax on fast-food chains in the state, employers are tweaking costs by reducing hours, laying off workers and charging you more for that cheeseburger, fries and a drink that you crave.

Though the calendar says it’s still 2023, franchisees of the Pizza Hut chain have announced this week they’re laying off 1,200 drivers who used to deliver their piping-hot pies door-to-door. With the new higher wages, they can’t afford to keep drivers working.

The article points out some other consequences:

So who will suffer?

“Every time we raise the minimum wage, kids lose their jobs,” Ohanian explains. “This isn’t efficient, and it isn’t right. We should not be implementing policies that prevent people from being able to work.”

As for the argument that the hike is needed to “keep up with inflation,” whose inflation are we talking about? Just the workers? How about the businesses? With three-quarters of their costs being labor-related, they have to take immediate action, or go out of business.

And then there are the customers. They, not the businesses, will foot the bill when they buy a suddenly-much-pricier cheeseburger or a pizza. Prices will go up, as they inevitably do, when higher costs can’t be offset by gains in productivity.

For the curious, there are literally dozens of studies and reports out there (including our own) that explode the myths of raising minimum wages, ranging from Walter B. Williams’ 1977 landmark study for Congress that showed minority youths suffered most when minimum wages rise, to more recent studies showing that non-wage losses after a minimum-wage hike offset any gains for workers.

What will now happen, no doubt, is that there will be more automation (robots already prepare food at McDonald’s, Chipotle, White Castle, Panera and other outlets), more self-service terminals, and fewer workers overall.

And, oh yes, stores will close. Marginal stores that can’t make up the higher costs will simply shut down, thanks to inflation and higher wages.

Sometimes when the government aims to help, it simply makes things worse for the people who are struggling to make ends meet already.

 

 

The Festivus Report

On Friday, Fox News posted an article about Rand Paul’s annual Festivus Report.

The article reports:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., released his annual Christmas “Festivus” report Friday for the ninth year in a row, outlining $900 billion in government waste. 

Among notable instances, the National Institutes of Health allocated funds to study Russian cats on treadmills, photos of Barbies were utilized as identification to obtain COVID relief funds, the Department of Defense lost $169 million of outdoor-stored military gear, $6 million went towards tourism in Egypt by the United States Agency for International Development, and the Small Business Administration provided over $200 million to “struggling” music artists such as Post Malone, Chris Brown, and Lil Wayne.

Up from $30 trillion in debt in 2022, this year’s debt amounts to $34 trillion, the report also highlights. 

“Who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt? Everybody,” Paul wrote in the report. “This year, members of both parties in Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling, which empowered the government to borrow an unlimited amount of money until 2024. As Congress spends to reward its favored industries and pet projects, the American taxpayers are forced to pay the price through recordhigh inflation and crippling interest rates.”

He added: “The same big spenders teamed up, yet again, to continue sending Americans’ hard-earned money to foreign countries and funding endless wars, all while ignoring our porous southern border.”

The article concludes:

The Congressional Budget Office forecasts a staggering increase in national debt, estimating an average addition of $2 trillion annually for the coming decade. This translates to over $5 billion in debt daily over the next 10 years. 

“As always, taking the path to fiscal responsibility is often a lonely journey, but, as I’ve done in years past, I will continue my fight against government waste this holiday season,” Paul wrote. 

Last year, Paul’s report broke down $482 billion in wasteful spending, from the billions spent giving COVID relief funds to ineligible people to a $118,000 study on whether Marvel movie villain Thanos would really be able to snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet.

Until the uni-party is unelected in Washington and in many of our states, we can expect more of the same.

 

More Shenanigans On The FISA Renewal

On Monday, The Washington Examiner reported the following:

Neither of the two bills to reauthorize and reform a powerful spy tool used by American intelligence agencies will be voted on this week after the Rules Committee pulled the legislation amid intense backlash.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who sits on the Rules Committee, confirmed to the Washington Examiner that neither the House Judiciary Committee nor Intelligence Committee bills to reauthorize and reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would be voted on this week.

…Now, with the bills being punted until next year, it theoretically gives committees the time to work out the differences. The House is also expected to vote on the National Defense Authorization Act on Thursday, which includes a short-term extension of FISA until April 19, 2024, something certain members also oppose.

“I’m really disappointed that we’re talking about a four-month extension in the authorities of FISA,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who helped author the Judiciary Committee bill. “So we should be laboring through to get this thing done, in my opinion.”

Under Section 702 of FISA, the federal government can surveil foreigners without a warrant for national security purposes. The collected information becomes part of a vast database of foreign intelligence that incidentally includes information about U.S. citizens who may have been communicating with people overseas.

There have been documented abuses of FISA. Because of this, most members want reforms but disagree on what those reforms should be.

I personally think that we have seen enough abuses and misuses of FISA to want it to go away. Obviously Washington politicians and bureaucrats do not have the maturity to use it wisely.

On Monday, The Conservative Treehouse reported:

For those confused. There are two bills to modify the FISA702 reauthorization in the House.  (1) HR 6611 from the House Intel Committee and (2) HR 6570 from the House Judiciary Committee.  The intel committee bill expands domestic surveillance authority under the modifications; the judiciary committee bill requires the DOJ to get a search warrant before they can look at the incidental collection of American citizens.

Both bills came out of committee and were scheduled for a floor vote tomorrow, which has been cancelled due to public outcry (good job).  Speaker Mike Johnson initially planned to let both bills get voted tomorrow and the bill with the most votes advances to the Senate.  😬That’s a hot mess.

The House Intel Committee bill organized by Chairman Mike Turner is absolutely horrible. It expands FISA702 surveillance and makes things much worse.  The House Judiciary Bill organized by Chairman Jim Jordan is not structurally that much better, but it does put strong curtailments on the 702 surveillance authority by forcing the DOJ to get actual court approved search warrants on American citizens.

It should not come as a surprise to see a panel of 46 experts in Deep State weaponization come out in support of the Intelligence Committee bill, and then decry the insufferable 702 limitations put into place in the Judiciary Committee bill.   The bad guys want the House Intel version.

As I stated, it’s time for FISA to go away.

Unfortunately, The Government Spying On Americans Isn’t New

On Wednesday, Just the News posted an article about our government spying on Americans. According to a whistleblower, this is not anything new.

The article reports:

The public-private efforts to restrict and suppress purported “mis-, dis- and malinformation” across tech platforms started almost immediately after the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016, ramped up a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, and included U.S. and U.K. military contractors and plans to cut off financial services to dissenters and sue them.

That’s according to a “highly credible whistleblower” who says they were recruited to participate in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) “through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by” the Department of Homeland Security, independent journalists who reviewed the Twitter Files at new owner Elon Musk’s invitation said Tuesday.

We are at a point that if an American says that two plus two equals four and the government wants it to equal five, the American is charged with spreading misinformation or disinformation. That is not a good place to be–particularly for a representative republic.

The article concludes:

Breuer (U.S. military contractor Pablo Breuer) told a podcast the duo’s work involved getting “nontraditional partners into one room,” such as social media companies, “special forces operators” and DHS employees, “to talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way.”

He explained how the “in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different” when trying to sell Americans on a domestic version of the “Great Firewall of China.”

While Chinese citizens believe this censorship is to “protect the citizenry,” Americans “would absolutely lose our minds” if the feds “tried to sell that narrative,” Breuer reportedly said.

The reporting trio said they would present the underlying documents from the whistleblower to congressional investigators in the coming weeks and “make public all of the documents we can while also protecting the identity of the whistleblower and other individuals who are not senior leaders or public figures.”

The FBI declined to comment on the report to Just the News, and DHS and CISA did not respond to queries. Neither did Terp (U.K. defense researcher Sara-Jayne Terp) and Breuer.

The Washington swamp is a danger to all free Americans.

All Politics Is Local

On Friday, The Patriotic News posted an article about the recent elections in Green Charter Township in Michigan. The voters there were not happy with the actions of their governing board, so they voted ALL of them out of office.

The article reports:

The good people of Green Charter Township, a small rural community north of Grand Rapids, ousted all five of the board members in a special election held Tuesday. They swapped the five, all Republicans, for candidates who ran without party affiliation. To show they meant business, the townspeople immediately called in locksmiths to change the locks on the main government building. 

The residents took such drastic action in opposition to the construction in their town of a $2.3 billion EV plant by a company, Gotion, that has links to China

Voters were angered that the now-ousted board moved forward with the project despite severe backlash from the community. At a hearing last year, one resident remarked, “My family members fought communism, and you’re bringing it right here.”

Another resident, Harry King, said, “Right now, we are not on friendly terms with China. They are threatening us. I consider them the enemy. I don’t want them here, either.”

The plan for the Michigan plant, and another targeted for Illinois, has reportedly caught the attention of congressional Republicans, who have called on the Treasury Department to investigate Gotion. In response, the company remarked, “We are a multinational company and don’t believe in political posturing and are still committed to bringing thousands of jobs to the state of Michigan.”

The residents realize that their fight is not yet over, but they are prepared to continue their opposition to the plant.

The article concludes:

Political newcomer Corri Riebow, who ran for the clerk position in the special election and won, said of the town’s brand new government, “We just plan on making it as difficult as possible for them to continue their process. They don’t even have a sight planned, they don’t have permits yet, so, we’re not their friend.”

This is what can happen when voters understand the issues and get involved.

Dealing with Threats from China

Author:  R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D    

In spite of the naïve efforts of Henry Kiesinger, who advocated the policy of reaching out to communist China, China has become militarily and economically not only our rivals, but in some ways they have surpassed us. Is their government less totalitarian and communist in their principles and actions? Definitely not. Quite the opposite–their plan is to dominate the world, and they appear to be succeeding. A compromised Joe Biden who clearly has been profiting from shady business deals his son and brother made with China is not helping. 

Now that we are in this adversarial position with a powerful China, made so primarily by our buying their products, what do we do about it? There are several things we must do. First, we must clearly recognize their global ambitions as a threat to our country and treat them as such.  Second, we must stop awarding them special privileges such as favored nation status and exemptions from rules governing other developed countries. Third, China must no longer be permitted to purchase land or major businesses in our country.  Allowing them to buy our farm land and food processing industries is about the dumbest things we could do.  Fourth, many colleges and universities are receiving research grants and programs funded, and in many cases staffed, by the Chinese. This not only allows them access to our developing new technologies but also to  control the actual outcome and reporting of this research. Look where Dr. Fauci’s funding of gain of function research in the Wuhan lab got us.    Fifth, we need to return the manufacture of essential products to this country as President Trump had initiated. The idea that most of our essential pharmaceuticals are manufactured overseas is seriously risky.    Sixth, close the border and deport all illegals including the increasing numbers of Chinese that are coming over the southern border. 

Last but not least, we should shut down access to the social platform TikTok as India has done. TikTok is increasingly being accessed by the youth of our country. It is estimated that 60% of TikTok users are age 11 to 26. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is like most Chinese corporations, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, our federal government has banned TikTok from being used on any federal government devices. If TikTok presents this kind of risk, why are we allowing our impressionable youth to be exposed to the propaganda, personal data collection, and anti-American ideas prevalent on it?  A recent study showed that the mechanism that TikTok uses of short videos can in the long term affect a person’s brain and diminish their ability to focus and stay on task. This is particularly true for young users. Thirty four of our 50 states have joined the prohibition of using TIkTok on state owned devices. So far, only Montana has banned TikTok on private/personal devices.

North Carolina should step up and do the same. 

Given the compromised Biden regime, the Republican controlled House of Representatives is our only current option to address this issue.   Another reason, among many, to vote for Donald Trump. 

The Economy Is Questionable At Best

I love it when a Democrat is in power–when unemployment rises it is always a surprise–even at Fox News.

On November 3rd, Fox News posted an article about the current state of the American economy.

The article reports:

U.S. job growth slowed more than expected in October, a sign the labor market is finally softening in the face of higher interest rates, stubborn inflation and other economic uncertainties.

Employers added 150,000 jobs in October, the Labor Department said in its monthly payroll report released Friday, missing the 180,000 jobs forecast by Refinitiv economists.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, unexpectedly ticked up to 3.9% — the highest level in nearly two years. The pickup in the jobless rate suggests that layoffs are on the rise; the survey of households shows that the number of workers laid off rose in October by 92,000 from the previous month.

The unemployment number of 3.9% is not really a good measure of the economy unless it is looked at in relation to the workforce participation rate, currently slightly down at 62.7. Just to give some perspective, the workforce participation rate was 62.8% when President Trump took office in January 2017. It peaked at 63.3 in February 2020 (the ‘stop the spread’ shutdown began in March 2020). The reported unemployment rate is calculated only counting people who are looking for jobs. I suspect that if you counted everyone who is able to work but not working, the number would be much higher.

The article also notes:

The report also contained steep downward revisions to job growth at the end of the summer. Gains for August and September were revised down by a total of 101,000 jobs to a respective 165,000 and 297,000, the government said, suggesting that the labor market is weaker than it previously appeared.

The bottom line here is that the economy is not really growing although inflation is. For further details, please follow the link above to read the entire article.

 

Regaining Our Rights Guaranteed By The Fourth Amendment

The U.S. Constitution was not written to give Americans their rights. It was written to insure that the government respected the God-given rights of Americans. The Constitution was written to limit the rights of the government–not the rights of Americans. That concept seems to have gotten lost in recent years.

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The government in recent years has violated that amendment by spying on Americans without cause or has invented causes (see Carter Page). Now that it has come to light that some Congressional staffers were spied on, Congress has decided to do something about it.

On Friday, Just the News reported:

House Judiciary Committee Republicans are pressing ahead with sweeping reforms to the government’s FISA surveillance powers that among other things would would prohibit the FBI from searching through Americans’ phone records without a court-approved warrant. 

The effort is on track to be wrapped up by the end of the year when several Patriot Act powers expire. Republicans and Democrats are coming together on this matter in rare bipartisan cooperation, lawmakers told Just the News.

“We’ve got, I think, strong agreement amongst members of the Intel Committee and members of the Judiciary Committee. And frankly some Democrats as well, that there needs to be stronger penalties if you abuse the system,” Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show in an interview aired Friday night.

Jordan said he was focused on what is known as the Section 702 system “where they can create this database” of phone communications metadata that currently can be searched by agents without a warrant. 

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court earlier this year declassified a report revealing that FBI agents had inappropriately searched Americans’ phone records more than 270,000 times over a two year period, alarming civil liberty experts and generating bipartisan condemnation.   

I hate to be cynical, but it seems that Congress is only getting around to dealing with this problem when it affected them. That’s okay. I just hope they successfully end unwarranted government spying on American citizens.

A New Level Of Trump Derangement Syndrome

On Friday, The Western Journal posted an article about a recent commentary published in Salon Magazine.

The article includes a screenshot of the commentary headline:

Somehow, with all of the illegals pouring across our southern border and our government having no idea who they are, I don’t think it will be the MAGA and Christian Republicans who are responsible for the next terrorist attack in America.

The article notes

He (Brian Karem) went on to insist that that “There is little difference between [South Carolina Sen. Tim] Scott, [Louisiana Rep. Steve] Scalise and Hamas,” and outrageously added, “Further, there is little or no difference between most of the GOP leadership, including Jim Jordan and Donald Trump, and the leaders of Hamas.”

“Donald Trump and his followers are terrorists,” Karem added.

This is an outright calumny, of course. Republican leaders are nothing like Hamas. They have killed no one. They have not murdered babies, raped and decapitated women or murdered large swaths of people, like Hamas has — and like Hamas proudly says it will continue doing.

…The original title of the piece proclaimed, “MAGA and Christian nationalism: Bigger threat to America than Hamas could ever be.” Salon changed it to read, “Far-right MAGA theocrats: Most dangerous threat to America.”

Neither headline contained any truth. But both articles are perfect examples of how the far left in America has worked against half the country, with FBI stormtroopers “investigating” and harassing parents at school board meetings and MAGA voters, the IRS harassing Christian organizations or Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton calling MAGA voters “deplorables” and haters.

 

 

Why Is The Government Even Involved In This?

On Tuesday, Fox News reported that the Biden administration is considering a ban on menthol cigarettes. Haven’t they got more important things to deal with? This is happening at the same time states are legalizing recreational marijuana use. I guess the marijuana lobby is spending more money than the tobacco lobby at this point. Also, why simply ban menthol cigarettes, why not just ban cigarettes? All you are doing by banning menthol cigarettes is make smoking less pleasurable for smokers, you are not doing anything to help them deal with their tobacco addiction.

The article at Fox News is actually concerned about the impact the ban will have on President Biden’s election chances in 2024.

The article reports:

The Biden administration’s proposed menthol cigarette ban could become a thorn in the president’s side during the 2024 elections, political operatives planning to run ads attacking him have told Fox News Digital.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initially proposed rules prohibiting menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars in April 2022 to “prevent children from becoming the next generation of smokers” and to “help adult smokers quit.” After missing its August deadline, the agency said it remains a top issue, and they are nearing the end of the process.

“Finalizing these two product standards remains a top priority for the FDA,” Brian King, the director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, told Fox News Digital. “The posting of both rules on the [White House’s Office of Management and Budget] website means they have reached the final step of review for regulatory documents.”

The proposed ban has faced worries from critics who say it could lead to heightened border problems with Mexican drug cartels saturating the U.S. black market with the prohibited products. Politico reported that it has also divided Black leaders, with some arguing it would lead to over-policing against the community.

The article notes:

“Criminalizing cigarettes as the Biden administration promotes heroin injection sites is bad policy and bad politics,” Brian Colas, a Republican operative and former campaign manager to Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, told Fox News Digital. “Expect to see targeted campaign ads aimed at shop owners, law enforcement and those impacted by the pending ban.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Remember when adults had the right to do stupid things without government interference?

When Red Tape Meets Medical Care

On Monday The Washington Examiner posted an article illustrating how the handling of the coronavirus in New York provides a look into the potential problems with government healthcare.

The article reports:

I have a lot of fears in life: sharks, heights, wrinkles, government controlling my healthcare.

Recently, the New York Times provided plenty of fodder supporting the latter anxiety, revealing the results of a study it conducted that examined the disparities between public and private healthcare at the height of the pandemic in New York City. The disparities included staffing levels, differences in the age and type of equipment available, and access to drugs and experimental treatments. As one might guess, patients at the city’s community facilities fared far worse than those in private facilities, with their mortality rate 3 times higher in some cases.

All hospitals saw higher staff-to-patient ratios than best practices would recommend. In a typical emergency room, that figure should look like 1 nurse for every 4 patients. But during COVID-19, private facilities experienced ratios closer to 1 nurse for every 6 to 7 patients. At the government hospitals, that number was 1 nurse for every 10 to 15, and at times even 20 patients.

Less time per patient meant fewer tests, less information, and less monitoring. Several patients woke up from medically induced comas and, in confusion, removed their oxygen masks, leading to death. This occurred at the Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, where staff referred to the patients as “bathroom codes” as their bodies were typically discovered near the bathroom 30 to 45 minutes later. One doctor told the New York Times that for every 10 deaths he saw, two to three patients could have been saved with the proper care.

The article goes on to explain that despite the makeshift hospitals put up to serve patients during the epidemic, those hospitals were barely used.

The article notes:

The paper (The New York Times) looked at the hospital set up at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to study why this occurred. Though the center was equipped with 470 beds and hundreds of employees (many of them out-of-state healthcare providers being paid handsomely), it ultimately saw only 79 patients and closed its doors after one month. It was a catastrophic failure, the kind only government can pull off.

Patients were not admitted due to red tape, delays due to the need to train workers on computers and other problems. Meanwhile, many patients died. Please follow the link above to read the entire article. The problems in New York were due to red tape, cronyism, extensive bureaucracy, and the general inability of the government to respond quickly to a crisis.

At some point Americans need to learn that there are charitable organizations out there that do a better job of responding to an emergency than the government. The Salvation Army, Samaritan’s Purse, Operation Blessing, and the Red Cross are a few of these organizations. I live in a city that was hit hard by hurricane Florence. It was encouraging to know that as the storm was bearing down on the city, Operation Blessing was parked nearby out of harm’s way ready to come in and provide meals and supplies to the people who were impacted by the storm. The recovery efforts in my city were largely undertaken by religious and charitable groups and ordinary citizens. A friend who is a teacher and realized that he wouldn’t have classes for a while gathered a group of friends and a few chainsaws and went around helping people move trees off their houses and clear streets. It’s time to get back to individual responsibility–even in healthcare.

 

I Am Sure This Won’t Be An Isolated Incident

On July 23rd, Human Events posted an article written by Daniel Turner, the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs.

Here are some highlights from the article:

During the last night in my condo in DC, I had to walk my dog an extra lap around the block because a crazy person was outside screaming obscenities. I wasn’t afraid. I just didn’t feel like getting into it with him or having to listen to his story—his “Let me just tell you something,” attempt to get money from me. It was 1 A.M., and I was tired from a night out—but more so, just tired in general. Tired of it all.

I’m a city kid, through and through. And not a recent one. Not some Nebraska transplant who moved to the city and immediately thinks of himself as a local. A woman tried that on me once. With her affected upspeak cadence, where declarations sound like interrogatories, she told me she was from “Brook-LAN?” “No, you’re not,” I retorted (obnoxiously, being the 6th generation New Yorker that I am). “You LIVE in Brooklyn. People who are really from there don’t pronounce it like that.”

My uncle Bob, the family historian (and former Congressman representing our neighborhood from Queens) traces our family in Manhattan since the 1840’s. Between my Irish dad, from the Irish part of Manhattan, and my Italian Mom, from the Italian part of Brooklyn, we have family or friends in practically every part of the city. New York is not just where we live; it’s like a family member, as loved as offspring, as revered as a grandparent, as formative as a mom and dad.

I left that family member in 2003, when I moved to Washington, DC for work. It’s not New York, but it’s still the city, and, for the past 17 years, it’s been an exciting time to call it home. I’ve witnessed the birth of entire neighborhoods: Shaw, 14th Street, The Atlas District, Navy Yard, Ivy City, The Wharf. Parts of DC you couldn’t even drive through at one point now had Michelin Star dining and outdoor beer gardens. From abandoned streets with burnt-out buildings—many still bearing the scorched marks from the fires of the ‘68 riots—multi-million-dollar row houses were restored, new condos arose, and wine bars and gyms multiplied like Abraham’s offspring.

We put up with a lot in order to live in the city: lousy transportation, noise, traffic, pollution, and our fair share of homeless people. It’s all just a part of living in urban America. But I’ll gladly tolerate sirens and car horns in exchange for a new restaurant on the corner. For major league sports, performing arts, museums, and bars, I will put up with the occasional crazy guy on the street, metro derailment, or gridlocked traffic because an intersection is blocked by some group “raising awareness” about something or other. That’s just the price of the urban lifestyle, and as a life-long city dweller, I knew what I was paying for—and with what.

I did my part, too. My role in the fabric of urban society, overlooked but essential, was to spend my money. Eat, drink, shop, spend, tip, pay. And man, did I pay: taxes, rents, then a mortgage and HOA fees. I paid taxes on things the government deemed “bad” for me, like alcohol and cigarettes; taxes on services which organized labor deemed “bad” for them, like rideshare. I paid gas tax, cable tax, cell phone tax, and, of course, income tax. Lots of income tax.

All I asked in return was relative safety and to be left alone to enjoy the city. City-living in America, for decades, meant tolerating mild inconveniences so that you could be left alone, alongside millions of others. That was the tacit pact.

And DC broke it.

Please follow the link to read the rest of the article. He talks about how bad management has changed Washington, D.C. Establishments that used to be nice places to gather with friends are now boarded up and covered with graffiti. When the law is not enforced, cities deteriorate. When a city is not properly governed, crime increases, and families move out. I suspect we will see more of this in some of our major cities in the near future.

Warped Programming

There is a saying in computer circles, “Garbage in, garbage out.” That saying also applies to learning and governance. A person’s basic perspective on life will determine their success, their ability to get along with people, and their general happiness. All of us at one time or another have avoided someone who simply is not pleased with or grateful for anything. Their warped perspective has prevented them from being happy. Well, we are about to see another warped perspective invade an area of our government.

Yesterday The City Journal posted an article titled, “Cult Programming in Seattle.” The subheading on the title is, “The city is training white municipal employees to overcome their “internalized racial superiority.”” This sort of thinking (and training) is not going to promote racial harmony. As soon as you accuse someone of something negative because of their race, you are making a racist statement. It really doesn’t matter what race you are or what race you are attacking–it is a racist statement. What is the difference between saying ‘you are racist because you are white’ and ‘you are less intelligent because you are black’?

The article reports:

Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” Hoping to learn more, I submitted a public records request for all documentation related to the training. The results are disturbing.

At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.

Again, the idea that white is evil and black is good is racist, just as the reverse is racist.

The article continues:

Once the diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.” As part of this process, white employees must abandon their “white normative behavior” and learn to let go of their “comfort,” “physical safety,” “social status,” and “relationships with some other white people.” As writer James Lindsay has pointed out, this is not the language of human resources; it is the language of cult programming—persuading members they are defective in some predefined manner, exploiting their emotional vulnerabilities, and isolating them from previous relationships.

It’s important to point out that this “interrupting whiteness” training is not an anomaly. In recent years, nearly every department of Seattle city government has been recruited into the ideological fight against “white supremacy.” As I have documented, the city’s homelessness agency hosted a conference on how to “decolonize [their] collective work”; the school system released a curriculum explaining that “math is a tool for oppression”; and the city-owned power company hired a team of bureaucrats to fight “structural racism” within their organization. Dozens of private companies now offer diversity training to public agencies. The idea that all whites have unconscious, “implicit bias” that they must vigilantly program themselves to overcome has become an article of faith across corporate boardrooms, academia, and law-enforcement agencies, even though the premise is unscientific and impossible to verify.

The endgame is to make Seattle’s municipal government the arbiter of the new orthodoxy, and then work outward. At the end of the session on “internalized racial superiority,” the diversity trainers outline strategies for converting outsiders and recommend specific “practices for interrupting others’ whiteness.” In effect, the activists have organized an ideological pyramid scheme—using public dollars to establish their authority within the government, then using that authority to recruit others into the program. As Lindsay writes, “the goal is no longer to indoctrinate on what is ‘rightthink’ and ‘wrongthink.’ It is to make the [subject’s] thinking be completely in line with the view of the world described by the cult doctrine.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is chilling.

Telling The Truth

Rick Grenell definitely left his mark as acting Director of National Intelligence. Things that should never have been classified were unclassified so that the American people could see for themselves what their government had been up to. Hopefully, John Ratcliffe, who replaced Ambassador Grenell, will be as equally concerned about unnecessary government secrecy.

Ambassador Grenell was interviewed on Tucker Carlson Tonight last night. Fox News posted an article about the interview late last night. The article includes a video of the interview. Please follow the link to view the interview. It is telling.

The article reports:

Former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell told “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Monday that his time in the Trump administration has shown him that the great political struggle is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, but between the District of Columbia and the rest of the U.S.

The article includes a screenshot of something Ambassador Grenell tweeted:

The article continues:

“The fact of the matter is,” Grenell said, “we have a real problem in Washington, D.C., because it’s a system that it no longer is Republicans and Democrats pushing against each other to create good policy. It’s a fight between Washington and the rest of America.”

“What we have [is] a system in Washington where people get jobs if you’re there, if you know someone and you work your way up, and it’s like musical chairs from one agency to another,” Grenell added. “There is no outside thought, there’s no outside perspective.”

Grenell, who also spent two years as U.S. ambassador to Germany, characterized Trump as a great disruptor of this insular system.

“He’s breaking their system,” he said. “He doesn’t play by the rules.

The article concludes:

“I saw that at ODNI,” Grenell added. “I saw that by entering the intelligence world, and senators from the Democratic Party saying, ‘You have no experience, what are you doing — why should you be there?””

Grenell specifically called out Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, by noting that Grenell had received his first intelligence briefing back in 2001, before Warner was elected to public office.

“He said that I wasn’t qualified,” Grennell said of Warner. “I actually am a receiver of intelligence, and [I’m] an expert on the consumer part of the intelligence and how to utilize it, but that perspective is never brought to Washington.”

Change is hard–particularly if that change means you are losing control of something you have controlled for a very long time. That is the current battle in Washington. Does the bureaucracy want to represent the American people or do they want to represent only their own interests?