Each summer, whenever there is a heat wave, we are likely to see headlines touting the weather as evidence of global warming. But what do the data actually look like if you take a historical perspective? This Watts Up With That post provides a good overview of U.S. heat wave data. Here are some of the charts.
This is from the EPA, the U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index from 1895-2020:
These are from the Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment in 2017:
This one is from 671 individual U.S. Historical Climatology Network stations. It shows the number of days per station per decade that qualified under the technical “heat wave” definition. The gray bars represent the U.S. as a whole, while the other lines are regional. There have been shifting regional weather patterns, but when you average it out across the U.S., the decades of the 10s, 20s and 30s all had more heat wave days than we have had since:
If you read the linked post, it also addresses the *adjustments* that climate alarmists use to change the historical record to fit their theory.
The Never Trump faction is so committed to hating Trump it can’t think clearly about the end of Roe and give credit where credit is due.
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON
The left’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s historic decision last week overturning Roe v. Wade has been uniformly appalling but not at all surprising: violence, calls for more violence, calls to pack the court, ignore its decisions, dissolve it. In other words, about what you’d expect from people who want to destroy every institution they don’t control.
On the right, the reaction has been rather more mixed, mainly because of the cowardice and intellectual dishonesty of the Never Trump faction, whose leading lights can’t bring themselves to give credit to former President Donald Trump for accomplishing what the Republican establishment could not.
Make no mistake: without Trump, Roe would still be on the books. No other Republican candidate could have beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016, and no other GOP president would have yielded the results Trump did once in office.
Trump didn’t just deliver three solid originalist justices to the Supreme Court, he did so despite enormous pressure from Democrats and the media — pressure that any other politician almost certainly would have submitted to. Would any other Republican president have stood by Brett Kavanaugh amid the orchestrated smear campaign against him, or nominated someone like Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg less than six weeks before the 2020 presidential election? Of course not, and everyone knows it.
Trump was able to do these things precisely because he possesses qualities his Never Trump critics most deplore: combativeness, a disdain for the media, political instincts that told him the Supreme Court was of paramount importance to his conservative base and that he needed to deliver on the promises he made.
Indeed, crediting Trump for his central role in the overturning of Roe should not be a heavy lift, even for those who are no fans of the former president. You can think of him as a kind of Balaam’s ass, if you like, and still recognize the essential part he played.
For Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol, the easiest way to avoid this reckoning is simple hypocrisy. Just write the opposite of what you wrote in the past, and blame Trump for your intellectual dishonesty.
But for some Never Trumpers, the whole thing is… complicated. That’s how Timothy Carney of the American Enterprise Institute put it last week in a Washington Examiner column that was mostly a bunch of throat-clearing about how bad Trump was for the “GOP brand” and how much he hurt the conservative movement.
Never mind that the conservative movement Trump supposedly hurt has been working for decades to overturn Roe v. Wade, and indeed largely defined itself through opposition to abortion in an era when every major institution in American life was arrayed against it.
Carney doesn’t engage that argument, or any other, because he has no argument to make. He admits as much when he says, “no issue in politics is more important than abortion because no cause is more righteous than protecting innocent babies from slaughter. No president did more good on abortion than Trump. So this makes things complicated.”
No, it doesn’t. It only makes things complicated if you’re wedded to the idea that decorum is more important than actual victories for the conservative cause, or if you draw a paycheck from a Never Trump bastion like AEI. Maybe then it’s complicated. But out in the real world, where untold children will escape being butchered in the womb partly as a result of Trump’s resolve, it isn’t complicated at all.
Read in the best possible light, Carney’s hand-wringing over Trump’s role in all this is at least a tacit acknowledgement that he might have been wrong. Not so for the impossible-to-parody Kevin Williamson of National Review, who wasted no time churning out a laughably dishonest column about how the end of Roe isn’t Trump’s victory.
Why? Because, says Williamson, Trump did what any Republican president would have done and “delegated his judicial selections to the Federalist Society.” It does not seem to enter into Williamson’s thinking that Trump perhaps turned to the Federalist Society in light of the past failures of Republican presidents to nominate justices sufficiently originalist to overturn Roe. Indeed, it was a plurality opinion from a trio of justices appointed by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush that botched the chance to overturn Roe 30 years ago in Planned Parenthood v Casey, and instead maintained its central holding that women have a constitutional right to abortion.
Never mind all that, says Williamson. “No conservative who knows how to read supported Trump in 2016 because he was solid on judicial originalism — or any other major conservative issue.” But as Williamson surely knows, many conservatives (including some literate ones!) supported Trump in 2016 precisely because he committed to nominating Supreme Court justices who were solid on judicial originalism, and even released a list of possible nominees in May 2016 — something no other GOP primary candidate had ever done. Indeed, his explicit commitment to nominate originalist justices is one reason many Republicans who were on the fence about Trump decided to vote for him in the end.
None of this matters to Never Trumpers of Williamson’s bent of mind. To them, reality — even something as real and astounding as the end of Roe — will never overturn their smug conviction that they were right to oppose Trump. So satisfied are they in their own opinions and prejudices that nothing so mundane as actual events will ever persuade them they were wrong.
So be it. It’s not like the Republican Party needs the dozens of voters whose views these pundits represent. Williamson can go on writing his snarky, nattering columns peppered with snide little insults to Trump and the people who supported him. One has to pay the bills, after all, so he might as well have fun with it. Carney can go on striving to sound measured and respectable, for all it’s worth.
But the rest of us on the right, including some (like me) who have come to realize they were wrong about Trump, will remember that it took Trump, of all people, to bring about a result so glorious and long-sought that honest conservatives should be willing, even happy, to admit they were wrong.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Every night, I hear a report on the network news announcing the number of flights canceled. If it’s a slow news day, reporters might interview a couple of irritated, stranded travelers. Thousands of flights are axed on any given day. Many more are delayed. News readers just read the report, without any substantive questioning about why there’s suddenly a great shortage of pilots. The weather is the only excuse ever offered, and that doesn’t work when there are no storms slowing things down.
What’s going on? We’ve never had a pilot shortage before. We may currently have more air travelers needing flights than a year ago, but not more than before COVID—and yet, here we are, facing an entirely new problem. It’s so bad that American Airlines is offering pilots on its regional carriers double and triple pay for the month of July if they’ll take extra flights.
It’s not hard to figure out what’s happening—despite the seeming prohibition on our pilots saying anything about it. We rarely hear a peep from them, at least on mainstream news outlets. There’s even a noticeable dearth of questions asked at Fox News of late. Nobody is questioning this fiasco beyond some Fox Business report of a lot of pilot retirements. It just is, apparently.
There are always going to be retirements and saying, as the link above does, that it’s “expensive to become a pilot.” Give me a break! That’s never been an issue before. So why even consider it now? What job does one get where advanced training doesn’t cost money?
Let’s put the blame for this shortage squarely where it belongs: On COVID “vaccination” policy. Many pilots who got the jabs are suffering injuries and have been unable to pass their required 6-month comprehensive physicals. None of us want a pilot who has a heart attack mid-flight. If you search the net, you come up with reports like this one from last week that pretty much says it all but they’re not from mainstream sources, of course. Such reports are forbidden fruit for widely heard reporters.
There’s also the flip side—if pilots refuse to get the jab, they can no longer fly due to mandates. We have a perfect storm: If pilots are vaccinated, many can’t fly because of vaccine injury—a state far, far more common than our government would lead you to believe. They are desperate to keep that fact hidden.
If you’re not vaccinated, you can’t fly either. If you’re in the military (many pilots go commercial after their service years), you have the same problem, so the routine feed of qualified military pilots who transition to commercial piloting is effectively halted as well. There are ample stories of military doctors losing their jobs because they won’t certify heart-damaged fliers. I also note that we’ve had an extraordinary number of military plane and helicopter accidents of late, none of which have been followed up on or logically explained.
Finally, I remember much talk early in the Biden administration about a push to certify more and more minorities, whether there are qualified candidates. This was big news for a brief while. I don’t know whether that push has continued but, if so, it might make a difference. I can only guess. Are airlines afraid they’ll get in trouble for certifying too many non-minorities?
Back in early 2021, I wrote a bunch of articles about our surveillance state and censorship. You can click on my byline for my article archive if you want to review any of them. I posited that, if we succumb to the type of censorship and coercion that has sadly now become routine, we will soon lose our free society and destroy our Republic. At this point, we’ve lost our free society and our Republic is teetering.
If we continue to allow the government and tech giants to run rough-shod over our rights, censor the truth and disallow open dissemination of important information, while forcing nonsensical medical interventions on our people, we will lose everything we hold sacred. There must be more people brave enough to report real news on mainstream platforms. This story is but one of many that need our attention. The ramifications, once more people connect the dots, will hopefully lead to further exposing the sick program we’ve been fed over the last several years. Only then can we end it.
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone may ask himself the same question — but probably won’t, because there’s not much of a question to ask. Just weeks after announcing an edict that barred Nancy Pelosi from receiving the Eucharist at Mass. Today, the Vatican offered Pelosi communion within the Holy See, contradicting one of its own bishops.
What does that mean? Well… not anywhere near as much as it seems:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi received communion while attending mass at the Vatican in Rome, despite the fact the archbishop in San Francisco said she would be denied the sacrament because of her views on abortion.
Ms Pelosi, who is a devout Catholic, received the sacrament at a mass spoken by Pope Francis at St Peter’s Basillica on Wednesday. The mass was done for the feast of St Peter and St Paul.
The Pope does not give communion during such ceremonies and anyone who wishes to take communion simply has to approach one of the priests at the basillica. [sic]
Exactly. Recall what Cordileone actually wrote in his edict. He didn’t order priests to deny Pelosi the Eucharist, at least not explicitly. He did write that she was “not to be admitted to Holy Communion,” but never explained how that would work. The old model of small neighborhood churches where priests exclusively distribute the Eucharist and know everyone at the altar rail are long gone. In most Catholic churches, which now tend to be larger and serve a wider community, lay people distribute communion along with the priests, with no authority to deny it to anyone who presents themselves. The edict was meant as a directive to Pelosi, to instruct her not to present herself for communion, especially in churches under Cordileone’s authority.
The Vatican doesn’t have a requirement to abide by that, but they also don’t have a mechanism to do so even if the Holy See desired it. They have more than enough priests to distribute the Eucharist at Masses, but they also have no idea who’s prepared to receive and who isn’t. Almost certainly, none of the priests at the Vatican would have recognized Pelosi anyway.
The upshot of all this is that this isn’t likely to be a reflection of the Vatican’s view of the edict from Cordileone. In fact, as Inés San Martin reminds us at Crux, Pope Francis himself at least gave Cordileone some indirect moral support on that point, albeit a year earlier:
Pope Francis referred to the question of pro-abortion politicians and Communion in 2021, on his return to Rome from Slovakia.
At the time, Francis said that the Eucharist is for those who are “in the community” and politicians who support abortion are “outside of the community.”
However, he also said that in these cases, it’s a pastoral matter that must be addressed by the individual’s pastor.
Pope Francis began his response by saying that he’s never denied Communion to anyone, but also that, “I don’t know if any came in this condition. But I was never conscious of having in front of me a person like the one you describe.”
In other words, the story here isn’t “Vatican Contradicts Bishop over Abortion and Communion.” The story here is “Catholic Woman Defies Her Bishop on Other Side of the World.” Even the normally progressive-friendly National Catholic Reporter didn’t bother to comment on Pelosi’s communion, at least as of midday when I was writing this post. That’s because it may be news, but it’s not really much of a story … except in how it relates to Pelosi’s orientation to the church and her recognition of the authority of her bishop. And that hasn’t changed at all, so even as news it’s not much.
China has suppressed access to all information bearing on the lab-leak theory. Given that the CCP knows every jot and tittle of the evidence, its suppression is itself powerful circumstantial evidence in support of the lab-leak theory. Ridley confines this point to a glancing discussion in the penultimate paragraph:
In a court of law, a prosecutor would regard all this -available scientific evidence] as a strong case. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” he would probably say, quoting Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. And then he would start going through the extraordinary litany of unhelpful obstacles that the Chinese government has put in the way of the World Health Organisation and everybody else who tries to get information on the early patients and what happened in the lab. When WHO investigators went to Wuhan in early 2021 they spent just three hours in the institute and visited the wrong lab (with the wrong biosafety level) on the wrong campus (in Jiangxia instead of Wuchang). As far as we know the WHO investigators were not shown the lower biosafety labs where the SARS-like virus work had been conducted.
This all goes to China’s responsibility for the spread of the virus around the world and the related enormities it has caused. For some reason, however, this is an issue that has dropped from the public view of the Biden administration. President Biden himself has directed his ire on these enormities to the guy who preceded him. It is, shall we say, disgusting.
The Daily Mail provides these handy bullet points for the story:
• Joe Biden called Hunter in December 2018 saying he wanted to talk to him after reading a New York Times story about Hunter’s dealings with the Chinese oil giant CEFC.
• Files on Hunter’s abandoned laptop previously disclosed by DailyMail.com show that he struck a deal with the Chinese company worth millions of dollars.
• The Times’ 2018 story pointed out CEFC’s chairman Ye Jianming had been arrested in China and his lieutenant Patrick Ho had been convicted of bribery.
• Hunter accidentally recorded himself referring to Ho as the “spy chief of China”
• After seeing the story online, Joe called Hunter and left a voicemail
• “I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear,” Joe said in the voicemail. [Miranda Devine explains that Biden was referring to a New York Times story about the arrest of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partner Patrick Ho on bribery charges.]
• The message flies in the face of the president’s repeated denials that he ever discussed Hunter’s overseas business dealings with his son
This latest development in the Biden family pay-to-play scandal provides further proof a special counsel is needed to oversee the ongoing criminal probe.
MARGOT CLEVELAND
In 2018, while Hunter Biden was reportedly under investigation for his dealings with Chinese businessmen, Joe Biden left a voicemail message telling Hunter: “I think you’re clear.” This latest development in the Biden family pay-to-play scandal provides further proof a special counsel is needed to oversee the ongoing criminal probe.
In an exclusive, The Daily Mail on Monday reported that a voicemail recovered “from a backup of Hunter’s iPhone XS,” stored on his abandoned MacBook laptop, captured Joe Biden leaving this message for Hunter on December 12, 2018: “Hey pal, it’s Dad. It’s 8:15 on Wednesday night. If you get a chance just give me a call. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to talk to you. I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear. And anyway if you get a chance, give me a call, I love you.”
The New York Times article referenced by the now-president, entitled “A Chinese Tycoon Sought Power and Influence. Washington Responded,” detailed the dealings of two corrupt Chinese businessmen, Ye Jianming and Patrick Ho—both of whom had connections to the Biden family through CEFC China Energy.
Ye acquired CEFC in 2006, according to the Times article, with the business focused on “securing the rights to overseas oil fields in strife-torn places like Chad, South Sudan, and Iraq.” “From 2009 to 2017, CEFC’s revenues jumped from $48 million to $37 billion,” the Times reported, noting that Ye’s first outreach to the Biden family came in 2015.
The Washington Post, which independently authenticated Hunter’s abandoned laptop months after its pre-election discovery, likewise reported that emails recovered from the hard drive showed that an intermediary for CEFC first “reached out to Hunter Biden in December 2015 to set up a meeting between the then-vice president’s son and Ye.”
The proposed 2015 dinner didn’t happen, but the Times article reported that an aide to Ye would later meet Hunter. Then, in May 2017, Hunter met with Ye in Miami. During that meeting, Hunter reportedly “offered to use his contacts to help identify investment opportunities for Ye’s company, CEFC China Energy, in liquefied-natural-gas projects in the United States.” As a thank you, Ye sent a note of gratitude and a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter’s hotel room.
While the natural gas project discussed never materialized, in early August 2017, Hunter executed a consulting agreement with CEFC. It provided him a retainer of $500,000 and a monthly stipend of $100,000 while James Biden, Joe’s brother and Hunter’s uncle, pocketed $65,000 a month. According to the Washington Post, “over the course of 14 months, the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle.”
Then in November 2017, Ho, the CEFC vice-chairman and secretary-general, transferred to one of Hunter Biden’s entities $1 million, ostensibly for “representation.” Hunter, however, seemed to have no role in defending Ho, who was charged that month for crimes related to alleged bribes to officials in Chad and Uganda and attempting to arrange for CEFC to serve as a middleman with Iran to avoid sanctions. Following his arrest, Ho also called James Biden, although James believed the call was likely meant for Hunter.
In 2018, when the article that prompted Joe Biden’s messages hit, the millions in payments from CEFC to business ventures controlled by Hunter Biden were not known. Thus, at the time, the Times merely reported, “it is unclear whether Hunter Biden struck any business deals with CEFC or Mr. Ye.” Since then, the public has learned both of the multi-million-dollar connection between Hunter and CEFC and of a video showing Hunter calling Ho “the f-cking spy chief of China who started the company that my partner [Jianming], who is worth $323 billion, founded and is now missing.”
Also unknown when the Times ran its December 2018 story was that Hunter Biden was himself purportedly under investigation for his business dealings with CEFC. A month after the 2020 election, however, CNN reported that federal prosecutors in Delaware were investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, specifically his dealings in China and with CEFC. Significantly, in its report, CNN claimed that two people briefed on the Hunter Biden investigation claimed it “began as early as 2018.”
That Joe Biden told his son “I think you’re clear” in relation to reporting discussing Hunter’s connection with CEFC, and that this assurance came just one week after Ho’s conviction while Hunter Biden was reportedly under investigation for his business dealings with Ye and Ho, raises the question of whether Joe Biden had any inside information concerning the investigation of his son.
A related question concerns the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretapping of Ho. According to The Daily Mail article that broke news of Joe Biden’s voicemail message, the outlet had obtained a copy of a FISA surveillance order that “revealed that federal agents were monitoring Ho as a potential spy for China.” That surveillance likely continued, at a minimum, until Ho’s arrest in late 2017, meaning that the FISA surveillance likely swept up some communications with or about Hunter Biden.
Even if not, the evidence continues to mount against the Biden family, leaving two fundamental questions: What is taking the Delaware U.S. attorney so long? And why hasn’t a special counsel been appointed yet?
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
Riding the New York City subway this afternoon, this deplorable saw a sign advertising the new City University of New York (CUNY) ASAP program. ASAP stands for Accelerated Study in Associate Programs. This program provides additional support and funding for students in two-year community college programs and is supplemented by another program for four-year students. These are giveaway programs to incentivize more students to go to college and stay in college and to participate in the leeching mindset that has attacked our culture.
These programs are an extension of the premise that students are kept from their true goals because of economic stresses. Money is thus the main obstacle to progress towards a degree, either towards an AA degree (Associate’s two-year degree) or a B.A. degree. Thus, students with special needs, minority students, students of color, non-English speaking students (as a first language), students without means to attend school without working, students with criminal records, students who cannot decide what to major in, students who have low level reading or math abilities, students who have trouble organizing their time in order to get their work in on time, students with drug or alcohol problems, students without regular access to a computer, students whose parents repeatedly tell them they will never amount to anything, students who have served time in any local juvenile or adult detention facility, and students who are raising one or more illegitimate children will get additional financial incentives that may enable them to stay in school and hopefully finish at either a two-year or four-year City University institution. The taxpayer will pay for the additional emoluments to these student sub-groups.
The thinking behind the establishment of these programs has a longstanding and dishonorable history. In education, we can trace the progressive vision embodied in these programs to Jonathan Kozol’s best-selling book Death At An Early Age published in 1967. Just as Dr. Benjamin Spock’s book at the end of WWII, Babies and Child Care published in 1946, eventually sold 50 million copies and revolutionized child care in the direction of greater permissiveness, Kozol’s book convinced educators and parents throughout the country that in order to fulfill the promises inherent in education we needed to throw much more money at our schools, especially in our urban areas which were overwhelmingly racist.
Further, Spock and Kozol were both openly leftist in their politics. Kozol was thrilled by the educational experiences he witnessed in Castro’s Cuba. A focused article about his political allegiance appeared in City-Journal in the year 2000 which stated, “Taking as his starting point the crude Marxist view that education in all societies is ‘a system of indoctrination,’ …. he worked out a method by which teachers could subvert capitalist America’s bad indoctrination and—cleverly and subtly—substitute some good left-wing indoctrination in its place.”
Lastly, in 1943 one of the leading founders of so-called humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow, came out with his “hierarchy of needs.” These were human needs that had to be met as the individual sought self-actualization. Although Maslow did not identify with a particular politics, the emphasis on needs strangely identified him with Marxism because of Karl Marx’s saying that under communism the principle that would be fulfilled would be “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.” This was at odds with classical Western thinking that, going back to the Greeks, emphasizes rationality, goodness, and justice as the highest intellectual and moral goals of humankind, and with Christianity which emphasizes the revealed moral law of an omniscient, everlasting, and perfect God – a law based on love for neighbor and love and obedience to God made possible by Jesus Christ.
Although Maslow never expressly embraced the leftist position this writer is attributing to him, by putting self and actualization at the center of his theories, Maslow was actually a revolutionary trying to overthrow the historical foundations of society, not unlike Marx and his ilk. Yet at the same time, he preferred the term humanist to the term communist.
The above theories represent three errors in post-WWII America. We see the elevation of self (Maslow), contempt for urban school systems supposedly mired in neglect and racism (Kozol), and the sophomoric view that indulgence and affection should take first place in parenting (Spock here undermined the building of good character which comes from the centrality of spirituality in the family). These errors are repeated in the new ASAP and ACE systems of CUNY.
Before even looking at the list of some of the benefits being offered, it should be asked if financial dependency is consistent with the goal of intellectual and professional independency that inherently has a claim on college graduates? Thus, one of the benefits listed by CUNY is “a dedicated advisor to guide your progress from entry to graduation.” To what extent will a student who has had this so-called “dedicated advisor” be able to function competently once they graduate as a teacher, nurse, computer adept, radiology technician, etc.? Or will they continue to need a dedicated advisor to take them through the specifics of their employment minute-by-minute and day by day once they get through this program dependency.
This writer had to have a test administered in a New York City hospital a few months ago, and the nurses assisting the doctor could not get the equipment put together for the test. A third nurse had given me a dressing gown to put on after taking off my clothes, but the doctor told me I did not have to take off my clothes. It was a comedy of errors from beginning to end. Will we see a further explosion of these confusions as students increasingly depend on “dedicated advisors?” Teaching in a four-year CUNY, I was asked by a student before the Covid pandemic “How many sentences in an essay?” and another student asked about an exam question, “Do you want an introduction and conclusion?” Will the dedicated advisors answer questions like these before they arrive in class?
(1)Free unlimited MetroCards [used in NYC public transportation]; (2)Textbook assistance to reduce (or eliminate) the cost of textbooks; (3) A scholarship covering tuition and mandatory fees for any gap left after applying your financial aid award (for students receiving financial aid); (4) Special registration options that help you get the classes you need that also fit your schedule; (5) Opportunities to take classes with fellow ASAP | ACE students to foster community and build your network. The students are thus totally financially dependent on the system. And we can wonder if they will receive these benefits even if they cut classes. “To foster community” in the previous list likely means the administrators will make sure that you are able to contact other students to find out what work you missed, and perhaps get assistance from your peers to be able to complete the work. You see: the message of the ASAP initiative is “your problems are our problems.” You are part of a village now. Yes, Hillary Clinton is hidden behind the curtain orchestrating your success. She and the whole community will make sure that you get through.
George Floyd had ‘violent criminal history’: Minneapolis police union chief
The head of the Minneapolis police union says George Floyd’s “violent criminal history” needs to be remembered and that the protests over his death are the work of a “terrorist movement.”
“What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd. The media will not air this,” police union president Bob Kroll told his members in a letter posted Monday on Twitter.
Floyd had landed five years behind bars in 2009 for an assault and robbery two years earlier, and before that, had been convicted of charges ranging from theft with a firearm to drugs, the Daily Mail reported.
Floyd died last week after a white cop kneeled on the 46-year-old black man’s neck for nearly 9 minutes, a shocking incident that was caught on video and is sparking widespread violent protests, including in New York City. Floyd had allegedly just tried to pass a phony $20 bill before he died.
“This terrorist movement that is currently occurring was a long time build up which dates back years,” Kroll said in his letter of the protests, adding that some of his city’s issues exist because Minneapolis leaders have been “minimizing the size of our police force and diverting funds to community activists with an anti-police agenda.
“I’ve worked with the four defense attorneys that are representing each of our four terminated individuals under criminal investigation, in addition with our labor attorneys to fight for their jobs. They were terminated without due process,” Kroll wrote.
As Thaddeus McCotter contends, the reproduction of a “Stalinist show trial” is now live in Washington. That invites a look at the original production of 1936-1937, from one of the keenest observers at the time.
“The Moscow trials, and the purges that followed them, were a turning point in the history of American liberalism, for it was irrevocably polarized by the controversies to which the trials gave rise,” explains the late philosopher Sidney Hook in Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century, published in 1987. As Hook recalled, “news of the trials burst like a bombshell.”
The principal defendants were “all old Bolsheviks, Lenin’s comrades in arms, who had been glorified as heroes of the October Revolution until they fell out of favor with Stalin. Chief among the defendants was Trotsky, acknowledged by Stalin as the architect of the Petrograd insurrection that had placed the Bolsheviks in power.”
As Hook wondered, “had architects of the great experiment been agents of the Western secret police?” The notion was “inherently incredible,” and the charges against Trotsky, Bukharin, Radek, and others were “mind-boggling.”
The heroes of the October Revolution, Stalin contended, had assassinated Kirov in 1934,
planned the assassination of Stalin under the direction of Trotsky, and “conspired with fascist powers Germany and Japan to dismember the Soviet Union, in exchange for services rendered by the Gestapo.” They were also charged with “sabotaging five-year plans, putting nails and glass in butter, inducing erysipelas in pigs, wrecking trains” and so forth.
All the defendants “confessed with eagerness,” but as Hook recalled, “equally mystifying was the absence of any significant material evidence.” Leon Trotsky, then in exile, “charged that the trials were an elaborate frame-up and defendants had been compelled by torture to play self-incriminating roles.”
For American Communists and fellow travelers, the charges and confessions were all genuine. “My greatest shock,” Hook writes, “was the discovery that hundreds of liberals, proud of the progressive American heritage they had invoked in criticizing injustices in the United States, Germany and Spain, were prepared to turn their backs on it when questions were raised about justice in the Soviet Union.”
The Dewey Commission of Inquiry, named for philosopher John Dewey, set out to determine the truth of the Moscow Trials. This commission “was spurned by liberals,” many of whom were swayed by Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times. Sidney Hook was on to him from the start.
“At the height of the agricultural destitution and famine in the Soviet Union, brought on by the forced collectivization of the peasantry,” Hook recalled, Duranty “sent glowing reports about the state of the Soviet economy and countryside.” For Stalin’s best apologist, the Moscow Trials were 100 percent legitimate.
As The New Republic had it, Duranty “has been forced to the conviction that the confessions are true” and “it seems to us that the weight of the evidence supports Mr. Duranty’s views.” Trouble was, there was never any material evidence, even from Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev or any of his successors.
“If dark court proceedings were a rigamarole played out for some dark purpose of Stalin and his regime,” Hook writes, “then the promise of socialism was revealed as a mockery of the great humanist ideals.”
The dark purpose of Stalin (Iosif Dzhugashvili) was to eliminate his rivals. In that cause, “Stalin was prepared to violate every fundamental norm of human decency that had been woven into the texture of civilized life.”
For Stalin, “rewriting history was in a sense a method of making it,” and this involved “the denial of objective historical truth.” By agreeing that the trials were legitimate, American liberals legitimized Stalin and the Soviet Communist regime.
That regime rejected the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, and so forth, as so much “bourgeois” formality. The January 6 proceedings in Washington violate fundamental and longstanding norms of American justice. Witness the summary arrests, detention without trial, solitary confinement, denial of bail, withholding of evidence, and a lot more.
Stalin aimed to eliminate his rivals, and the January 6 session targets Donald Trump, first and foremost. Democrats charge that Trump and his followers are guilty of an “insurrection.” The police shooting of Trump follower Ashli Babbitt, the only death by gunfire that day, is no object to the ludicrous charge.
Stalin’s show trial boasted media defenders such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Duranty has been replicated by establishment media defenders of the current show trial. These are the same people who peddled the Russia and Ukraine hoaxes, with no regrets after both were proven false.
Stalin charged that his fellow revolutionaries conspired with foreign powers. The January 6 proceeding maintains the fiction that Donald Trump got elected only by colluding with Putin, and that the American people had no role in his victory. The January 6 proceeding does not conduct audits or consider any evidence of voter fraud. It simply assumes that the 2000 election was the most secure in American history, with no comparisons of voter fraud in past elections.
The Moscow Trials were all about Stalin, and it’s hard to exaggerate the veneration of this man by American academics, journalists and politicians. Sociologist Anna Louise Strong, for example, wrote in I Change Worlds that “one must not make a god of Stalin. He was too important for that.” At bottom, the January 6 proceeding is all about Joe Biden.
By implication, the people of America were panting for a man who had achieved little if anything in all his years in the Senate. They wanted a man who has trouble with basic motor functions and memory; a delusional character who believes he served as a liaison during the Six Day War, when he was still in law school. America wanted a man who tells African Americans they “ain’t black” if they fail to support him, a man who says the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks” and not even competition for the United States.
The Moscow Trials were also a diversion from the economic disaster Stalin had inflicted on the Soviet Union. The January 6 proceeding is a diversion from the disasters “Joe Incompetent” is inflicting on America. By implication, this is what the American people wanted. In the style of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, Joe tells Americans they live in the best of all possible worlds. The Junta’s Duranty squads chide the people for failure to recognize the great job Joe is doing.
“The economy is strong,” claims government-controlled National Public Radio, “but voters aren’t feeling it.” Tiffany Cross of MSNBC complains that Americans are “more concerned with saving money than saving democracy,” and “high prices” cause people to be less interested in the “compelling testimonies and evidence” in the January 6 hearings. That is indeed a Stalinist show trial and under the Biden regime, Stalinist conditions are expanding on other fronts.
The “Disinformation Board” of the Department of Homeland Security, briefly “paused,” is being recast under the leadership of Kamala Harris, the beneficiary of poontronage from Democrat queenmaker Willie Brown. Professional propagandist Nina Jancowicz will doubtless be singing backup, and as with the USSR’s Pravda, the truth will be only what the government’s board declares it to be. In the best Stalinist style, American history is also being rewritten.
According to the “1619 Project,” critical race theory, and so forth, America is a bastion of racist oppression. Except, that is, for the revisionists’ tenured positions at prestigious universities and media outlets, except for their high-level government jobs, except for their six-figure salaries, except for their generous benefits and gold-plated pensions, except for their stock portfolios, fancy electric cars, beach houses, and so on.
Like those arrested on January 6, 2021, anyone less than worshipful of the Biden regime is a domestic terrorist. The Biden Junta also applies that description to parents who object to the racist indoctrination of their children. If Americans thought the nation was becoming more Stalinist by the day, it would be hard to blame them.
Meanwhile, for the Moscow Trials and Stalinism in general, Sidney Hook’s Out of Step is hard to beat. For the current Stalinist show trial, read Julie Kelly, a one-woman Dewey Commission digging deep for the truth.
Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Hollywood Party and other books including Bill of Writes and Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation. His journalism has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Spectator (London) and many other publications. Billingsley serves as a policy fellow with the Independent Institute.
Here’s an odd fact that I don’t recall hearing before. Were you aware that Wisconsin has had a law on the books banning almost all abortions since 1849? Even after Roe v Wade was decided, the law was never repealed. It simply became unenforceable. But now, after Dobbs, the law is technically back in effect. This has captured the attention of the state’s Governor, Tony Evers, along with his state Attorney General and other Democrats. Evers is facing a tough reelection bid this year and he must believe that the abortion question will be a political winner for him because he decided to seize it with both hands over the weekend. He promised to work to ensure that the law would not be enforced on his watch, but he also went one step further. He said that if any doctor was charged under the law, he would grant them clemency. (NBC News)
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, vowed over the weekend to grant clemency to anyone charged under the state’s 1849 law banning most abortions.
That law, enacted more than a century before Roe v. Wade, has remained on the books in the state and has technically retaken effect following the Supreme Court ruling Friday overturning the landmark case.
Evers, Wisconsin Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul and several county district attorneys in the state have said they would refuse to enforce it, but it remains possible that other officials — such as other district attorneys and newly elected state lawmakers — could enforce it now or in the future. Evers and Kaul are both up for re-election this fall, and both are facing tough races.
Governors are entitled to grant clemency for all manner of offenses, and if Evers were to do this there is little that could be done to stop him. Of course, that assumes that anyone is actually going to bring charges against a doctor this year, which seems far from certain. But his promise exposes yet another case of the executive or legislative branches of the government at any level coming into conflict with the judicial branch, and that’s a problem.
From Joe Biden’s criticism of the Supreme Court to situations like the one we’re seeing in Wisconsin, the system simply isn’t working as intended by the Founders. Laws are passed as needed by the legislators elected by the voters. The executive branch has the responsibility to enforce those laws. When asked to do so, the judicial branch reviews the laws to ensure they are constitutional. It’s really supposed to be just that simple.
But now we have the executive branch, both at the federal level and in multiple states, refusing to enforce existing laws and undermining the judicial branch by questioning their rulings, lessening people’s faith in the democratic process. And in the case of Governor Evers, even if law enforcement attempts to enforce this particular law and a judgment is rendered by a jury of the accused’s peers, the Governor is announcing that he will preemptively cancel that process in all such cases before he’s even been presented with an opportunity to review each case.
If the Governor doesn’t want to see this law enforced there is a way to ensure that doesn’t happen. And this applies to any law in his state, not just this Civil War-era abortion law. Convince a sufficient number of voters that the law needs to be repealed and encourage them to have their state legislatures do so. Then he can sign the bill doing away with the law and the problem will be resolved. But if there is insufficient consensus among the voters that the law needs to be removed and he thwarts it across the board anyway, you have a problem. That would be an example of blatant autocracy and a rejection of the democratic process.
Remind me again who is undermining democracy in the United States today? This is going on in far too many places and it involves issues ranging from abortion to gun control and beyond. (In New York, the Governor and the state legislature are already calling a hastily arranged session to try to thwart the Bruen decision.) If this situation fails to alarm you, I would suggest that you’re not seeing the big picture. This is about more than simply one policy or law. If you are in the majority and figure out a way to game the system in your favor, the shoe will eventually be on the other foot and your political adversaries will follow your example. We’ve seen the same scenario play out with the fight over the filibuster in the Senate. And it’s not going to end well, I fear. If the Democrats continue down this path, the shoe may be on the other foot far sooner than they might believe.
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