“PLENTY OF FACTORS”

Scandal-Ridden San Francisco FBI Field Office Involved in Pelosi Investigation

Given the highly partisan nature of the FBI, and the San Francisco field office in particular, there is no reason to believe FBI brass will do anything more than run cover for the Pelosis.

By Julie Kelly…at American Greatness:

October 31, 2022

No one should accept at face value the strange account of what happened to Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), at their California home last week.

Plenty of factors—a wholly dishonest news media, unsubstantiated claims the attacker was a foiled assassin who planned to kill the speaker of the House, and Mr. Pelosi’s recent legal troubles, to name a few—feed justified skepticism surrounding the alleged break-in and hammer attack that occurred in the wee hours of October 28. Details continue to change while leading Democrats including Hillary Clinton blame the incident, without evidence, on Republicans and Donald Trump.

This situation is yet another example of how the public’s complete lack of faith in major institutions is fueling doubt and suspicion. Unfortunately, that level of distrust extends to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a once-revered agency that has blown its reputation in service to the Democratic Party. And news that the San Francisco FBI field office is taking a lead role in the Pelosi investigation offers little comfort that the American people will ever find out the truth of the matter.

The San Francisco field office, like the bureau’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and many other offices across the country, is mired in scandal. It’s particularly true as it relates to the FBI’s cozy ties to Big Tech—and the San Francisco FBI office is ground zero for that quid pro quo relationship. Rather than investigate the nearly 300 Big Tech companies within its Silicon Valley jurisdiction for various offenses such as election interference, the San Francisco FBI office appears instead to be in cahoots with these powerful corporate interests to do the Democratic Party’s dirty work.

Few people benefit more than Nancy Pelosi, who of course happens to live in San Francisco. Democratic candidates and lawmakers are flush with campaign donations from Big Tech; in 2020 alone, Facebook and Twitter—the latter located in Pelosi’s congressional district and the former located just outside its boundaries—donated at least $5.5 million to Democrats and only a paltry $435,000 to Republicans, a 12-1 ratio in favor of Pelosi’s party. Conversely, threats made by leading Democrats to break up Big Tech or hold congressional hearings into alleged malfeasance have been slow-walked since Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel.

Fortunately, a lawsuit recently filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt laid bare how this lucrative back-scratching operation works. Elvis Chan, a top cyber FBI agent working in the San Francisco office, was in routine communication with Big Tech giants prior to the 2020 election to warn companies of “foreign disinformation” spread on their platforms—and the discussions just happened to coincide with the release of explosive materials found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Chan is named as a co-defendant in Schmitt’s sweeping civil suit seeking to hold accountable government officials working behind-the-scenes with Big Tech to censor information considered hostile to the regime.

“Defendant Elvis M. Chan is Supervisory Special Agent of Squad in the San Francisco Division of the FBI.” Schmitt wrote in a recent filing. “On information and belief, he has authority over cybersecurity issues for FBI in that geographical region, which includes the headquarters of major social-media platforms, and he plays a critical role for FBI—in coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms. Meta [Facebook’s parent company] has identified Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

Chan, for his part, publicly brags about his influence in Silicon Valley, boasting how he “was very involved in helping to protect the U.S. elections in 2020” by communicating “on a weekly basis” with Big Tech titans “That’s where the FBI and the U.S. government can actually help companies,” Chan said during a June 2022 podcast interview.

In other words, Chan is the power couple’s hand holder. (The Department of Justice is fighting a court order for Chan’s deposition on the grounds his involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop suppression effort was misrepresented.) And there is no indication the partnership will end anytime soon. Social media platforms continue to collaborate with the FBI to excavate incriminating evidence from the deleted accounts of January 6 defendants; Facebook is collecting private messages between users expressing “anti-government” or “anti-authority” sentiment—read: conservatives—and turning over those texts to the FBI without a subpoena. 

The Intercept reported Monday that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security plan to accelerate its joint effort to censor “misinformation” spread online. Targeted topics include posts critical of COVID vaccines, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and support for Ukraine. FBI counterrorism agents are being “reassigned” from critical surveillance of potential threats overseas to spy on American citizens. 

“They work on an undercover basis online to penetrate social networking chat rooms, online forums, and blogs to detect, enter, dismantle, and disrupt existing and emerging terrorist organizations via online forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, websites, and social networking,” one anonymous FBI agents told The Intercept.

There are other problems at the San Francisco FBI office. In early October, a California jury convicted a former FBI special agent for accepting at least $150,000 in cash and gifts on behalf of a corrupt Armenian businessman with ties to organized crime. Babak Broumand was the head of national security investigations at the San Francisco FBI field office at the time of his arrest in 2018. According to the indictment, “Broumand accepted cash, checks, private jet flights, a Ducati motorcycle, hotel stays, escorts, meals, and other items of value from an organized crime-linked lawyer.”

He was found guilty of four counts including bribery of a public official; Broumand will be sentenced in January and faces up to 45 years in prison.

Which could explain why FBI Director Christopher Wray quietly replaced the head of the San Francisco field office in September. Robert Tripp was just moved from the bureau’s inspection division (the FBI’s version of internal affairs) in Washington to take over the San Francisco operation.

Late Monday afternoon, Tripp and Justice Department officials announced federal charges against the alleged attacker, David DePape, including the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Pelosi—a confusing charge, considering Pelosi wasn’t home and DePape clearly had no physical or mental capacity to do so. It appears more than anything to be political narrative-building by Biden’s Justice Department to bolster the idea that Trump and Republicans inspired another “kidnapping” attempt. The complaint, signed by a special agent assigned to domestic terror investigations in the San Francisco FBI office, also offers a conflicting account as to what happened when officers arrived and an incomplete timeline of events.

Given the highly partisan nature of the FBI, and the San Francisco field office in particular, there is no reason to believe FBI brass will do anything more than run cover for the Pelosis and conceal any damaging or contradictory facts about the confrontation. Prayers for Paul Pelosi are in order as he remains hospitalized for his injuries—a full investigation free from political interference also is in order. It’s unlikely, however, the FBI will proceed accordingly.

About Julie Kelly

Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior contributor to American Greatness. She is the author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right and Disloyal Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried―And Failed―To Take Down the President. Her past work can be found at The Federalist and National Review. She also has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and Genetic Literacy Project. She is the co-host of the “Happy Hour Podcast with Julie and Liz.”

Trouble At The Times?

NOVEMBER 1, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

AFTER THE HARVARD CASE, WHAT NEXT?

It is sad that 161 years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, and 154 years after the adoption of the 14th Amendment, we are still debating whether public institutions like the University of North Carolina should be able to engage in race discrimination. One might have thought that by now, that issue would have been settled.

Liberals seem resigned to the fact that that they now will have to pretend, at least, to stop discriminating on the basis of race. The New York Times emails out a daily roundup of the news–or “news”–and today’s email included this commentary on yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments:

Laws need support from the public or the courts to survive. Affirmative action seems to have neither.

A telling point.

Throughout nearly five hours of heated arguments for both cases, the justices in the court’s conservative majority aggressively questioned the lawyers arguing in favor of affirmative action policies. They appeared skeptical that such policies were necessary, fair or the best way to address racial gaps in higher education. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has long been skeptical of affirmative action, and other conservative justices suggested that Harvard had discriminated against applicants of Asian descent by disfavoring them in the admissions process.

Is there a difference between “discriminating against” and “disfavoring”? Any sane person would say, No, there is not.

But the Times seems to acknowledge that its battle to preserve a legal right to discriminate has been lost:

Lawmakers can, in theory, override Supreme Court decisions. But such a reversal typically requires support from their constituents: The public, after all, elects representatives who enact laws and place judges on courts. The public can also protest or criticize the courts to try to sway them. And the public can push to amend the U.S. Constitution or state constitutions.
***
A…movement defending affirmative action seems unlikely because a majority of Americans oppose the policy. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults said in March that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions, a Pew Research Center survey found. A majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian respondents opposed the consideration of race or ethnicity.

Even in liberal states, most voters do not support affirmative action. In 2020, about 57 percent of Californians rejected an amendment to the state’s Constitution that would have let government and public institutions, including public universities, adopt affirmative-action policies. In that same election, Biden won more than 63 percent of the vote in the state.

So if the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action, it’s not clear what, if any, path exists for policies like the University of North Carolina’s or Harvard’s to survive.

While correct as to public opinion, the Times’s conclusion is perhaps disingenuous. America’s universities will no more accede voluntarily to an adverse Supreme Court ruling than did public schools in the deep South after Brown v. Board of Education. It took not just lawsuits but federal troops to enforce the Court’s ruling that public schools should be integrated, and years went by before it finally happened. This time there will be no federal troops occupying Harvard et al., so we will have to rely on lawsuits.

As a practical matter, perhaps not much will change. America’s universities, especially its elite schools, will rather easily come up with proxies for race, and the composition of their student bodies probably won’t be much different.

Perhaps more important, then, is the principle: America will stand as a country that does not officially countenance discrimination by public bodies on the basis of race. If you thought that principle had already been established, you were mistaken. So this will be an important step forward.

But still: under the new regime, Asian-American students most likely will need to over-achieve, vastly, to be admitted to Harvard and other elite schools. Under whatever cover the schools may adopt, that isn’t likely to change.

It’s a battle between “Democracy and Fascism.”

VIEWPOINTS

What Is Democracy?

At the Epoch Times by Roger Kimball

October 31, 2022 Updated: November 1, 2022

Leaving aside the attack micro-drama involving Paul Pelosi, the Democrats seem to have two issues going into the midterm elections: abortion and democracy.

Neither seems to be getting much purchase with voters.

For reasons that seem puzzling to Democratic strategists, making the slaughter of the unborn (or, for some “make them comfortable” Dems, the recently born) a major plank on your platform just didn’t resonate with most women.

Or, rather, it resonated negatively, partly because it was transparently a cynical attempt at political manipulation, and partly because, for the vast majority of women, motherhood is an important part of their lives. The prospect of blighting that part of themselves doesn’t rally the troops.

Appeals to “democracy” is a little more complicated, but no less saturated with cynicism.

As attentive readers will have noticed, the word “democracy” is appealed to whenever it looks as though Democrats might lose.

One sign that this is about to happen is the promiscuous deployment of the phrase “our democracy.”

They really mean it. It’s not your democracy, peon.

If you voted for a Republican, you voted “against our democracy.”

As I have put it elsewhere, what “democracy” means to them is “rule by Democrats.”

It’s worth pausing to ponder the evolution of this novel meaning of “democracy.”

Originally, of course, “democracy” meant “rule by the demos,” the people.

But as Orwell showed in his novel “Animal Farm,” there’s a moral or political entropy at work in human affairs that, unchecked, regularly perverts “the people” into “some people.”

All animals are equal, you see, but some are more equal than others.

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that the prevalence of this degeneration in the human heart is one reason that most political theorists, from Plato and Aristotle on down, have been suspicious of democracy.

Aristotle thought it the worse form of government, leading almost inevitably to ochlocracy or mob rule.

James Madison, in “Federalist No. 10,” warned that most democracies have been as “short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

It was part of Madison’s genius, supported by Alexander Hamilton and the other Founders, to forge a species of democracy that carefully modulated the passions of the masses in such a way that protected individual liberty.

You may have noticed that the loudest voices among Democrats aren’t much interested in preserving individual liberty. They’re interested instead in the acquisition and retention of power, on the one hand, and the exercise of control, on the other.

It’s both amusing and alarming to watch this dialectic play out in elections.

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected in a free, open, and (using the term in its old sense) democratic election.

But the nomenklatura screamed that his election was illegitimate, a challenge to democracy, because—why? Because the wrong person won.

The signs are not good for the Dems in the upcoming elections.

Therefore, their weaponization of the election is proceeding at warp speed.

TV host Jane Pauley is part of the advance guard.

If the Republicans win, she implied, democracy could end in the United States.

“The very future of our democracy,” she said, is on the ballot in 2022.

Pauley was the warm-up act for CBS reporter Robert Costa, who sang the same song, only louder.

“The Republican Party,” he said, “is gripped by people who are election deniers. How should the press contend with that? It’s happening inside one particular party.”

Not the phrase “election deniers.” It’s meant to share in the moral obloquy heaped upon “Holocaust deniers.”

The left did the same thing to people who dared to express reservations about the narrative according to which the world was about to end because of “global warming.”

They were denominated “climate deniers” in an effort to smear them with the same moral tar brush.

Misapplying such moral opprobrium is, as I have noted, dishonest and disreputable, but such considerations never stop the left from their attempts to destroy people with whom they disagree.

Now that the midterms are nigh and the writing is on the wall, everywhere one looks, one sees the left’s efforts to engage in preemptive discreditation.

According to MSNBC, the election isn’t just an election between Democrats and Republicans.

It’s a battle between “Democracy and Fascism.”

Political analyst Anand Giridharadas explains, “This is a contest between part of the country that believes in continued and expanded liberal democracy, effort to pursue a more perfect union, and a part of the country that is now attracted to the idea of fascism in the United States.”

Or how about this from a top Biden adviser named Keisha Lance Bottoms: “What we see, again, with this MAGA Republican agenda is an effort to disrupt our democracy. … I think it will always be important to call out any effort there is to destroy—essentially, destroy—the United States of America.”

Gosh.

No wonder nobody trusts the media anymore.

Not, as anyone who has been paying attention will have recognized, that this is anything new.

On Nov. 8, 1994, the GOP picked up 54 House seats. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” was the darling of the electorate. The left went nuts.

The problem, as always, was the voters. Why hadn’t they listened to their betters?

Peter Jennings (remember him?) couldn’t believe the bad behavior of the voters. He compared them to toddlers throwing a temper tantrum.

“It’s clear,” Jennings said, “that anger controls the child and not the other way around. The voters had a temper tantrum. … The nation can’t be run by an angry 2-year-old.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Commenting on Jennings’s outburst, Cal Thomas posed a question, the answer to which we are still awaiting.

“Why,” Thomas asked, “do liberals such as Jennings refuse to believe it was their failed ideas—not voter anger—that did them in?”

Let me know when you find out the answer.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent book is “The Critical Temper: Interventions from The New Criterion at 40.”

“Justice Sotomayor going full critical race theory…”

 NOVEMBER 1, 2022 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN THE DAILY CHART

THE DAILY CHART: PUBLIC SCHOOL SPENDING BY RACE

One notable aspect of the oral argument yesterday about affirmative action was Justice Sotomayor going full critical race theory about the issue, claiming, among other things, that blacks were segregated into public schools that are “under-resourced.” While it may be true that urban public schools lack a lot of resources when it comes to common sense and rigorous instruction, Sotomayor, like most liberals, measures this only in money.

About that: while there are wide differences in per-pupil spending across the nation for a variety of normal reasons, when the spending is broken down by race, it looks like this:

Which American Fem Is More CORRUPT, NANCY OR HILLARY?

November 1, 2022

Pelosi Got Hammered

By J.B. Shurk at American Thinker:

When a story comes out about a Pelosi getting hammered, a normal person assumes the news has something to do with a drunk speaker of the House named Nancy slurring through a staged press conference with her Pravda media friends.  You do not expect to find out that an alleged commie Castro nudist with a fondness for psychedelics has managed to Mission: Impossible his way past tight security surrounding one of the speaker’s guarded homes in order to play handyman with her husband’s tools.  

If there were ever an apt metaphor for how horrendous crime has become in the blue hellholes ruled over by pompous, pampered Democrat “elites,” surely a Black Lives Matter–supporting, gay love–loving hippie effortlessly traipsing into the local digs of another out-of-touch, loony leftist — whose wife happens to be third in line of presidential succession — surely takes the cake!  If Nancy Pelosi can’t keep her drunk-driving husband safe from the carpentry fetishes of unwanted intruders, how can she keep normal law-abiding citizens safe from the narco-terrorists and sex-traffickers slipping past the southern border?  Oh, right — unlike Paul Pelosi’s alleged attacker, the U.S. government has given the criminals at our borders permission to enter freely.  

Needless to say, the whole Pelosi break-in is just too tantalizingly odd for ordinary Americans to dismiss as normal, run-of-the-mill, celebrity-inspired criminal craziness.  In my neck of the woods, few home invaders could have made it onto the premises without heavily armed homeowners greeting the interlopers with a few well placed slugs to say, “Hello.”  It boggles the mind to imagine that it is easier to sneak up on Nancy’s gilded husband in the middle of the night than it is to break into the humble abodes of “flyover country” folk, but that is the “official story,” and if there is anything Americans have learned during the Age of COVID and Climate Change Hysteria, the “official story” is the only story that will suffice.

Of course, the “official story” pushed by Hillary Clinton, Groper Joe Biden, and their mind slaves in the propagandistic press is that the alleged commie culprit attacked Nancy’s husband Paul in an act of solidarity with Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” patriotic posse.  Even though the alleged perp’s public history is about as anti-MAGA and pro-Marxist-socialist as one could possibly imagine, Drunk Hillary insists he’s part of the same “vast right-wing conspiracy” that’s been tormenting the Clintons ever since her husband Bill got caught hiding Cuban cigars with a White House intern in the Oval Office.  Creepy Joe says the hammer-time mayhem occurred only because too many dull-witted Americans (takes one to know one?) keep questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election.  (By the way, if you haven’t yet seen Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules for a quick tutorial on the mechanics of mail-in ballot fraud, definitely check it out.)  And the oligarchy’s approved corporate press agents are all sputtering breathlessly that Paul’s unwanted hammering in crime-tolerant San Fran strikes yet another blow against our oh, so fragile, precious “democracy” — which apparently replaced our much more robust constitutional federal republic without amendments or fanfare right around the same time Obama and Holder’s Department of Justice began formally categorizing political adversaries as enemies of the State.  On the other hand, all of these people still inexplicably blame communist Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of JFK on “right-wing extremism” and “Texan aggression,” so their credibility is about as solid as our borders are secure.

No doubt you’ve seen all the details first reported and subsequently “clarified” or outright retracted by the San Francisco Police Department and the Democrats’ minions in the press.  It took nearly three days to “clarify” that Paul Pelosi did not know his attacker, that an unknown third party had not actually opened the front door for the police, that Pelosi and his unwanted guest were not wrestling in their underwear, and that the altercation involved a single hammer rather than dual hammer dueling.  Even in this technologically regressed era, when Pennsylvania and other battleground states require many days to (find and) count enough Democrat votes to “save democracy,” it remains somewhat shocking that major details surrounding a major case could get so bungled by the same officials and reporters who routinely demand public trust.  

Publicly available images of the Pelosi mansion show a ubiquity of security cameras surrounding its perimeter, so it strains credulity to suggest that the suspect’s movements and actions that night were difficult to pin down.  Surely the fact that an alleged drug addict with a history of mental illness seemingly managed to penetrate Pelosi’s security so effortlessly begs for further official clarification, lest the unbridled temerity of America’s growing criminal class swell further.  I mean, my word!  If it is that easy for a commie Castro nudist to prance right in the back door of the home of one of America’s most powerful politicians, then no unarmed American can possibly be safe!  Banning hammers in the United States would only ensure that ordinary, helpless Americans are forced to invite criminal hammer-holders into their homes during times of repair.  No, for safety’s sake, the Pelosi intrusion proves why every American should be armed to the teeth.  Only a commie malcontent brings a hammer and sickle to a gunfight!

Maybe as more details come dribbling out, the events of that night will make more sense.  However, when a gay rights and BLM activist who looks like a New-Age-y vegetarian disciple of the left’s murderous hero Che Guevara comes knocking on Paul Pelosi’s back door in the middle of the night and Pretend President Biden and his Democrat Propaganda Machine immediately jump into action by blaming Trump-supporters, the whole spin operation reeks of the same odor still choking doubters of Jeffrey Epstein’s declared suicide.  Maybe Epstein — the key witness to a child prostitution ring involving unknown perverts and rapists purportedly from the highest ranks of the world’s business and political classes — killed himself in a New York jail cell while guards and cameras were conveniently absent, and maybe Paul Pelosi’s alleged commie Castro nudist attacker was leading a secret double-life as a MAGA enthusiast.  Maybe the same FBI agents who still can’t find the alleged culprit responsible for leaving failed explosive devices near Republican and Democrat party headquarters around January 6, 2021 will miraculously find footage of the San Fran hammerer wearing a bright red cap and suspiciously waving an American flag.  Or maybe all the politicians and media pundits trying to frame the Pelosi incursion as a right-wing terrorist attack will be proved once again as first-rate peddlers of pernicious misinformation.  

What is absolutely certain is that neither the U.S. federal government nor its media propaganda organs give a fig about crime or political violence unless it can be used to slander MAGA Republicans.  Pro-life organizations and churches are firebombed, and the FBI does nothing.  Conservative volunteers and Republican campaign workers are brutally beaten and shot on the street, and the corporate news is silent.  A cowardly neighbor severely wounds Senator Rand Paul in a sneak attack, and Democrats (including Nancy Pelosi’s daughter) cry with laughter and jubilation.  A Democrat stalwart, brainwashed by the endless corporate news promoting the lie that Russia stole the 2016 election from Hillary, nearly succeeds in assassinating an entire baseball team of Republican senators and representatives (again including Rand Paul), and the Democrat-Media Complex hides behind calls for unity, while simultaneously casting blame on the victims.

Some commie nutjob gets into the Pelosis’ fortified complex, though, and somehow it’s all Trump’s fault!  As always, the mainstream media lies and doth protest too much!

(And Now, For Something DIFFERENT?)

 OCTOBER 31, 2022 BY STEVEN HAYWARD at Power Line:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS FOR THE WIN

I listened to all five hours of the Supreme Court oral argument today while on a long car drive home, and am hoping to post a special podcast tomorrow going over the whole scene, but for me, one single moment especially stands out. Seth Waxman, the primary attorney defending Harvard (a former solicitor general under President Clinton), was going head-to-head with Chief Justice John Roberts about whether race is a “minor” factor in admissions, or a decisive factor, as the defenders of race-conscious admissions were trying to have it both ways all day. Let’s just pick up the dialogue in the middle:

MR. WAXMAN: No, I know. I’m –I’m attempting to answer your question.

There is no doubt that for –as the testimony showed, that for applicants who are essentially so strong on multiple dimensions, so extraordinarily strong on multiple dimensions that they are sort of on the bubble, that they might –they have a real candidate for admission, African American –being African American or being Hispanic or in some instances being Asian American can provide one of many, many tips that will put you in.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, people say that, yes, but you will have to concede, if it provides one of many, that in some cases it will be determinative.

MR. WAXMAN: I do. I do concede that.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. So we’re talking about race as a determining factor in admission to Harvard.

MR. WAXMAN: Race in some –for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor, just as being the –you know, an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Yeah. We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players.

I nearly drove off the road in delight at this reply. If the case turns out the right way, I think this will be one of the key moments where Harvard lost the case.

Since The Obama Era….

Permissible and Impermissible Incendiary Speech?

For many on the Left, what most see as incendiary and violent rhetoric is simply contextualized as the necessary
talk of social justice.

By Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

October 30, 2022

United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hit the airwaves to connect the recent assault on Paul Pelosi with “fascism” and “white nationalism.” She insists that both are now ubiquitous. And both prompt increasing politically motivated violence. (Ocasio-Cortez remains oblivious to the greatest sustained political violence in our recent history; the 120 days of Black Lives Matter and Antifa-fueled rioting, arson, looting, and mayhem of summer and fall 2020—often cheered on or defended by public officials and social media.)

The deplorable violent attack on Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has been described as the logical reification of increasing bitter political discourse. Shrill accusations spread even as full details of the attack are still not known. But the general picture of the assailant is one of an unhinged conspiracy freak of all flavors. He seems to have been a lunatic, drug-crazed white supremacist and anti-Semite, a former hemp jeweler, and nudist, who was either homeless or was living in a cluttered hippie-like commune in Berkeley plastered with pride and BLM flags. 

Nonetheless, almost immediately the Left has seized on the attack to blame supposed right-wing political rhetoric as the cause. 

As we enter the final week before the midterms and likely near-historic Democratic losses in Congress, this effort to manipulate violence in the news for last-minute political advantage will increase—but certainly it is not new. 

In late October 2018, after the despicable mass lethal shooting of worshipers in the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue, the Left immediately blamed Donald Trump and his supporters. That useful pre-midterm narrative insisted that Trump had provided the rhetorical fireworks that set off anti-Semite and conspiracy nut, Robert Gregory Bowers. 

The killer came from an atrocious family background. He was a known loner and outsider who came to embrace white nationalism. But in his incoherent rants and postings, he had made it clear that he was also no fan of Donald Trump. He considered the president pro-Jewish (Trump’s son-in law is Jewish and his daughter a Jewish convert) and a “globalist.” That fact, apparently, was of no importance. For the next week before the midterms, the media saturated coverage of supposed Trump culpability for Bowers’ crazy violence. 

In general, the Left has three predictable characteristics when it seizes upon pre-election news of shootings and assaults.

Things Just Happen to Conservatives 

Violence of any sort of against conservative political figures rarely has anything to do with combustible rhetoric emanating from the Left. 

When New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin was recently physically attacked on stage by a troubled alcoholic David G. Jakubonis (released into an alcoholic recovery program from police custody a few weeks after his attempt on Zeldin’s life), the media made no effort to tie the assault to politically driven rhetoric. 

When Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was severely injured by a crazed neighbor, there was no suggestion that left-wing extremist talk, and in particular political attacks on Paul, had pushed the assailant over the edge—although there was plenty of undisguised liberal schadenfreude at Paul’s injuries. For example, in a March 2020 tweet, Christine Pelosi (Nancy and Paul’s daughter) snarked: “Rand Paul’s neighbor was right.” 

James Hodgkinson was a declared left-wing political activist and former Bernie Sanders campaign worker who went hunting for Republican legislators and ended up shooting six people—among them Representative Steven Scalise (R-La.), the House majority whip at the time, who nearly died. 

The media did not attempt to tie the unstable Hodgkinson to often hysterical anti-Trump and anti-MAGA rhetoric of the time. And the matter was mostly forgotten as the work of another unhinged shooter.

Acceptable Violent Rhetoric?

Second, calls for violence from the political Left, often from among its most high-profile officials, are simply dismissed as occasional excitable verbiage. They are not considered to play a role in any subsequent shooting or assault as a catalyst for the unhinged. Consider what then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) screamed in March 2020 to an angry throng of pro-abortion protestors before very doors of the Supreme Court:

I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

Ostensibly nothing could have been more combustible than riling up an already furious crowd of pro-abortion protestors, then identifying Supreme Court justices by name, then claiming the two named would pay a justified “price” for their actions, and then issuing an “if you . . .” threat through vivid imagery of violence, e.g. “You won’t know what hit you if you …”

The response? Few in the media believed that Schumer had lowered the bar on what was acceptable speech directed at the Court—not even when two years later a fanatical pro-abortionist, would-be assassin Nicholas Roske showed up near Brett Kavanaugh’s home. Roske was apparently angry over illegal court leaks that Kavanaugh would vote to repeal Roe v. Wade. The would-be assassin certainly wished Kavanaugh “to pay the price.”     

Both before and after that scary aborted hit, protestors had shown up at Kavanaugh’s home and also forced him to leave a restaurant. Note that Pelosi and House Democrats held up House passage of bipartisan legislation to provide increased security for Supreme Court justices. That bill had passed unanimously in the Senate and would have been sent immediately to get Joe Biden’s signature, were it not for Pelosi’s hold-up.

On Inauguration Day in 2017, Madonna infamously screamed to an angry crowd assembled about the ceremonies, “Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”

No one considered that such inflammatory imagery had anything to do with the numerous threats that Trump, like all elected presidents, received. Indeed “fact checkers” immediately went to work, as they do in such examples of left-wing incendiary rhetoric, to offer “context” in order to avoid any “misunderstanding” or “confusion” about what Madonna was “really” trying to convey. 

Ditto in June 2020, when Kamala Harris offered an incendiary boast of approval to Stephen Colbert—just 17 days after a violent BLM and Antifa-led crowd in Lafayette Park attempted to torch the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, and then sought to storm the White House grounds, sending the Secret Service and the Trump family into a secure presidential bunker:

But they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. They’re not. This is a movement. I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels. That they’re not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.

Again, the media and “fact checkers” insisted she was referring only to peaceful protests, although the summer riots of 2020 entailed $2 billion in damage, dozens killed, 1,500 law-enforcement officers injured, the torching of a federal courthouse and police precincts, and 14,000 arrests. 

At the height of the June 2020 violence, New York Times essayist and architect of the “1619 Project” ruse, Nikole Hannah-Jones, dismissed the nationwide massive looting with the apologetics: 

Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence . . . Any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property, but these are not reasonable times.

An unbiased observer might have concluded her televised editorialization empowered looting and violence that nearly always accompanied it. 

Sometimes leftist elected officials were more focused than Harris or Schumer in their calls for physical confrontations. Consider Maxine Waters’ sick June 2018 clarion call to physically confront and harass Trump officials:

Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere . . . The people are going to turn on them. They’re going to protest. They’re going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’ 

Since the Obama era, there has been a serial effort to demonize the working class as somehow Neanderthal-like, clueless, and to be written off. Obama’s “clingers” slur transmogrified into Hillary’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” and on into Biden’s “chumps” and “dregs.” And we forget sometimes that well before Donald Trump’s chants of “Lock her up!” it was Barack Obama on the campaign trail who suggested to his supporters to confront their adversaries and “Get in their faces.”      

And Obama gave further advice about such confrontations, saying: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.” And lest we forget, Obama reminded his supporters “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry!” 

Joe Biden waited until his campaign and presidency to hone his prior tough talk—for example, of taking Trump behind the gym to beat him up or calling those at his campaign events “fat” and “lying dog-faced pony soldiers”—into a fiery condemnation of his political opponents. In two now infamous speeches in recent months, Biden damned roughly half the country (“It’s not just Trump”) as “semi-fascists”:

What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy . . . It’s not just Trump. It’s the entire philosophy that underpins the—I’m going to say something: It’s like semi-fascism.

Biden a few days later elaborated on that charge in an even more divisive rant couched in near-Old Testament imagery: “MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.” 

Again, despite the efforts of fact checkers and press secretaries to contextualize Biden’s eerie speech, the clear meaning of his speech writers was that Republicans who had voted for Trump had irrevocably “made their choice” not to live with the rest of the nation in the “light” of truth, but rather in some dark nether regions among the “shadow of lies.”     

A disturbed leftist might at this point ask, if half the nation is semi-fascist and thrives on anger and dwells in some dark domain of lies, what then are we to do with such hopeless threats to democracy? 

Unleash the FBI to “lose” subpoenaed phone records, to alter court documents, and knowingly to deceive a FISA judge with a false dossier? Have the FBI work with social media to censor unwelcome political speech or to mislead and suppress information deleterious to Biden’s campaign? Summarily excuse the FBI hierarchy after lying to federal investigators?

Have FBI informants work to destroy a political campaign, transition, and presidency? Surveille parents at school board meetings on the prompt of teachers’ unions? 

To deal with Morlock semi-fascists and those in the “shadows,” are any means then necessary?

Projection Again

Third, attributing violence to conservative political rhetoric is characteristic of the larger progressive embrace of projection. And by now we know how that tic works.

Those who deify Stacey Abrams or are amused by Hillary Clinton’s near decade-long lunatic obsessions with election denial are the most prone to scream “election denier!” They slander anyone who expresses doubts about the 2020 balloting, in a fashion that Clinton, Jill Stein, Hollywood stars, or Jimmy Carter routinely did in 2016.

Joe Biden’s long history of racist slurs and outbursts have become prerequisites for his current serial charges of “racism!”—extending now to the absence of sufficient leg space in economy class.

Screaming “Russian collusion” is a guarantee that the progressive accusers—Hillary Clinton and her cohort—were past masters of colluding with the Russians. Their paid henchmen like Igor Danchenko and Charles Dolan vacuumed up Russian-leaked lies to feed Christopher Steele with the known falsehoods central to his collusion charge.

So, too, the more the Left charges conservatives with rhetorical culpability for subsequent violence, all the more the guardians of proper political speech can contextualize and excuse what a Charles Schumer or Maxine Waters or Joe Biden says. 

Their logic is the fallacy that those who police violent political verbiage cannot themselves possibly ever need such policing—or in fact peremptorily police others precisely to excuse their own culpability. 

So, yes, let us by all means tone down the political fireworks lest the nation’s unhinged translate such rhetoric to violence. But let us also remember that for many on the Left, what most see as incendiary and violent rhetoric is simply contextualized as the necessary talk of social justice.

WHAT DOESN’T THIS PRESIDENT JOE LIE ABOUT?

Joe Biden Is Lying To Americans About Medicare And Social Security’s Insolvency

BY: CHRISTOPHER JACOBS at the Federalist:

OCTOBER 31, 2022

While Biden and his cronies line their own pockets, ordinary voters will get hit the hardest by Democrats’ debt denial.

CHRISTOPHER JACOBS

A dozen years ago, Democrats faced a dilemma. A long-term care entitlement known as the CLASS Act that they added to what became Obamacare faced serious solvency concerns. But after Scott Brown, R-Mass., won a shock Senate victory for Republicans in a January 2010 special election, ending Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority, Democrats didn’t have the votes to alter the CLASS Act or remove it from Obamacare.

What did Democrats do? The Obama administration suppressed the internal documents showing that the CLASS Act wouldn’t work. (I and Republican staff colleagues later obtained these documents, compiling them into a report.)

Democrats also convinced many in the disability industry to support Obamacare, in no small part by arguing that the CLASS Act would benefit them — even though many, if not most, Democratic policymakers realized the program contained too many structural flaws ever to get off the ground. The Obama administration eventually admitted just that — 18 months after the law passed.

It was one of the more cynical stunts I have seen in my time in Washington of exploiting a vulnerable community by selling them false hope. But in some ways, it echoes the tactics President Biden is using in a likely futile attempt to avoid an electoral wipeout on Nov. 8.

Selling People a Lie

In a recent speech that more closely resembled a harangue, Biden attacked “mega-MAGA trickle-down” economics. He inveighed against Republican lawmakers who he claimed will “threaten the full faith and credit of the United States for the first time in our history, putting the United States in default unless — unless we yield to their demand to cut Social Security and Medicare.” He followed up by proudly proclaiming, “I will not cut Social Security. I will not cut Medicare, no matter how hard they work at it.”

By claiming he will never reduce Medicare or Social Security spending, Biden is trying to sell the American people a lie — the lie that either program can last without significant changes. Medicare is already functionally insolvent and faces a cash crunch that will see the program officially unable to pay its bills within six years. That could happen even sooner if an impending recession lowers the amount of payroll taxes going into the program’s trust fund. Social Security faces similar solvency issues soon afterward.

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If you need any additional convincing that our entitlement programs need fixing, consider this quote: “If you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up. I mean, it’s not an option for us to just sit by and do nothing.”

That quote comes from, of all people, Barack Obama, in a 2011 press conference. Yet what have his vice president and the rest of his party done to fix the problem? Not just nothing — worse than nothing.

Destroying Medicare, in Three Simple Steps

Thus far, Democrats’ “plan” for Medicare has consisted of the following:

1. Raiding Medicare to the tune of $716 billion in Obamacare. Democratic lawmakers claimed the law’s Medicare “savings” could both improve Medicare’s solvency and fund Obamacare. But sheer common sense dictates one can only spend the same money once. Unfortunately, though, making Medicare appear more solvent on paper (but not in reality) allowed presidents and Congress to ignore the program’s problems for the past 12 years.
2. Raiding Medicare again, to fund more leftist priorities. This summer, the Inflation (Reduction) Act took well more than $130 billion, and by one measure more than $250 billion, in Medicare funds for more Obamacare subsidies for the wealthy, subsidies for Teslas, and other climate pork.
3. Attacking any Republicans who have the courage to propose structural changes to make Medicare and Social Security solvent for the long term.

To those three steps supported by practically all Democrats, Biden added a fourth:

• Cheat on his Medicare taxes, using a loophole the Biden administration now wants to eliminate. Tax experts estimate Biden underpaid his Medicare taxes by hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the Internal Revenue Service refused my efforts to insist on an audit of Biden’s returns — this even as Democrats funded 87,000 IRS agents who will harass other Americans, just not Biden.

Recall that even as Biden was cheating on his Medicare taxes, he spent tens of thousands of dollars per month renting this mansion outside Washington:

Pictures like this demonstrate that Biden loves “mega-MAGA trickle-down” economics when he benefits from it.

Ordinary Citizens Will Get Hurt

While Biden and his Democratic cronies line their own pockets, ordinary voters will get hit the hardest by Democrats’ debt denial. By failing to address the problem in a timely fashion, lawmakers will have to make more radical changes to entitlement programs should they wait to act until a fiscal crisis emerges. As Obama himself said in his 2011 press conference:

If you’re a progressive who cares about the integrity of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and believes that it is part of what makes our country great that we look after our seniors and we look after the most vulnerable, then we have an obligation to make sure that we make those changes that are required to make it sustainable over the long term.

The cynical stunt of Biden and the Democrats in going back to the “Mediscare” well likely won’t save them from an electoral reckoning on Nov. 8. Worse yet, it means American families will face an even tougher reckoning when the fiscal crisis finally hits.

Chris Jacobs is founder and CEO of Juniper Research Group, and author of the book “The Case Against Single Payer.”

“We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players”.

OCTOBER 31, 2022 BY STEVEN HAYWARD at Power Line:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS FOR THE WIN

I listened to all five hours of the Supreme Court oral argument today while on a long car drive home, and am hoping to post a special podcast tomorrow going over the whole scene, but for me, one single moment especially stands out. Seth Waxman, the primary attorney defending Harvard (a former solicitor general under President Clinton), was going head-to-head with Chief Justice John Roberts about whether race is a “minor” factor in admissions, or a decisive factor, as the defenders of race-conscious admissions were trying to have it both ways all day. Let’s just pick up the dialogue in the middle:

MR. WAXMAN: No, I know. I’m –I’m attempting to answer your question.

There is no doubt that for –as the testimony showed, that for applicants who are essentially so strong on multiple dimensions, so extraordinarily strong on multiple dimensions that they are sort of on the bubble, that they might –they have a real candidate for admission, African American –being African American or being Hispanic or in some instances being Asian American can provide one of many, many tips that will put you in.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, people say that, yes, but you will have to concede, if it provides one of many, that in some cases it will be determinative.

MR. WAXMAN: I do. I do concede that.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. So we’re talking about race as a determining factor in admission to Harvard.

MR. WAXMAN: Race in some –for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor, just as being the –you know, an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Yeah. We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players.

I nearly drove off the road in delight at this reply. If the case turns out the right way, I think this will be one of the key moments where Harvard lost the case.