This comes from Britain, not the U.S., but the similarities to the U.S. are obvious:
According to a study from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), over a fifth of all children have been “missing” from schoolrooms since the government began implementing lockdown measures. The report found that 2 million of the nation’s nine million students are not attending class regularly.
The figure includes 1.67 million kids who were deemed “persistently absent” by the Department for Education (DfE) during the second term of 2021, representing an 82 per cent increase over 2020.
No doubt we have millions of “missing” kids in the U.S., as well. Across the country, when schools went remote something like 30% of students–more in some schools–checked out. They never logged on, never completed an assignment, never took a test. How many of those kids have come back, or ever will come back, to school? Lockdowns in general were a disastrous policy, but closing down the schools was probably the worst of all.
Home schooling seems to be unusual in the U.K.:
The CSJ went on to state that there has been an “alarming” 34 per cent increase in students being educated at home, with 81,000 home schooled children.
That represents only 4% of the two million who are “not attending class regularly.” So the issue isn’t a trend toward home schooling, the problem is a large number of students who have simply dropped out. The price of this devastation of kids’ education, borne most heavily by the least privileged, will be paid for a generation in the U.S., as well as in Britain.
The elites hate Trump and the MAGA movement because populism gives the everyday person a say in how America runs.
SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT
Donald Trump finally made an announcement on Tuesday that he’d been hinting at for a long time; he will, once again, be running for president. Naturally, the internet and airwaves were flooded with people providing their perspectives on who the future of the Republican Party would or should be.
A considerable amount of the rhetoric surrounding Trump and his candidacy, however, remains incredibly cynical and appears to be guiding Republican voters away from the political framework that unleashed America’s latent economic prowess and led to cultural wins previously thought impossible, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Republican voters need to be extremely skeptical of whose advice they take during this upcoming presidential election cycle. Instead of blindly advancing one candidate over another ahead of what is shaping up to be a bloody primary, Republican voters should remember the voices that led them astray during the 2016 presidential election cycle and remember what policies have improved the country’s economic health and which contributed to its steady decline.
It should come as no surprise that many of the people currently calling for the Republican Party to move on from Trump and the unique brand of MAGA populism are proponents of the economic and cultural liberalism that gutted American industry and turned the culture into a dystopian hellscape.
Generally speaking, when there is bipartisan collaboration on something, the American people are going to get screwed. Just look at the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which is little more than wasteful government spending on projects that will likely never materialize. So it should be incredibly alarming that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer plans to meet with his counterpart, Mitch McConnell, to discuss removing the MAGA influence from the Republican Party.
Why should Schumer — a Democrat — have any influence over the ideological composition of the opposite party? He shouldn’t, but McConnell doesn’t like the MAGA influence either because it challenges his grip on power and his interests, so maybe he’ll hear Chuck out and sabotage future Republican candidates who make him uncomfortable by restricting funding, as he did to candidate Blake Masters in Arizona.
Furthermore, without the populist influence of MAGA Republicans, it is unlikely that the 115th or 116th Congress would have taken any steps toward implementing the economic and cultural reforms that unleashed American prosperity during Trump’s first term. Pieces of legislation like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017; the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act; SUPPORT for Patients and Communities (which expanded opioid treatment options while cracking down on the proliferation of illicit drugs); and the ratification of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that replaced NAFTA would not have materialized without a heavy populist influence in Congress.
Schumer seeking to remove this influence from the national legislature makes sense. After all, he’s a Democrat; he wants to win. McConnell’s collaboration with Schumer to remove the influence of conservative populism from Congress is inexcusable and should make his supporters question his intentions.
And, of course, there are members of the pundit class like The Dispatch’s own David French, who insisted this past summer that “Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the continued existence of the United States as an intact republic. Our nation may not survive a second Trump term.” French, one of the last of the original Never Trumpers, has a noted distaste for those on the “gutter right,” celebrated the reported loss of Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, and has argued a “Christian case” for a student loan bailout.
French’s input on 2024 should be taken with a massive grain of salt. Granted, he’s a bit of an outlier, seeing as how he is a self-identifying conservative who celebrates his own side’s failures while justifying leftist abuses of power, but people like him — anti-populists, if you will — are surprisingly common among the punditry class.
What unites these people — the anti-populist pundit class, the elitist politicians, and their acolytes — isn’t just their opposition to Trump as a political candidate. They are utterly repulsed by the people Trump represents, and they are nothing short of disdainful of the American people who told them to shove it.
Take Trump out of the equation, even. If, for the sake of the hypothetical, Hulk Hogan won the presidency in 2016 on the basis of re-establishing the U.S. as the global manufacturing hegemon while promising to restore national sovereignty at the southern border and reverse the cultural malaise that ate away at people across the heartland, the McConnells and Frenches of the world would be anti-Hogan.
They hate Trump, but they really hate you. You, your family, and your community are supposed to finance their special interests with your tax dollars until the end of time. They couldn’t stand having their interests put on the back burner for four brief years while Trump advanced the interests of the American people. Trump’s willingness to actually deliver for the people, effectively giving them a semblance of control over the government, wasn’t supposed to happen.
The elite’s attempts to pivot the base of the Republican Party away from its ongoing fascination with populism is how they plan on driving a wedge back between the American people and control of the government.
“All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us…they can’t get away this time.”
–Chesty Puller, United States Marines
Only in politics could 2022 players be surprised by the “innovation” of a mail-in ballot-led strategy exactly the same as was used in 2020.
If more than 20 million people watched Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, 2,000 Mules, why didn’t candidates prepare for phantom voters?
Political people are really stupid.
In 2020, Democrats set up corner mail-in ballot drop boxes, harvested thousands of floating ballots, and live, on video tape, dropped them off at ballot-gathering stations.
In 2022, only the Republican Party, truly The Stupid Party, could be caught flat-footed with its opponents doing exactly the same thing, exactly the same way, at full scale, on video, again.
It is exasperating to listen to the moaning in Arizona where the Maricopa County election fraud factory did precisely the same thing in 2022 as it did in 2020 – stealing an election from a group of promising candidates. They even had their candidate skip debates the way Joe Biden did, hiding in her basement!
Let’s ask the question nobody is asking: Why were candidates spending millions on ads and organizations while ignoring the work of cleaning up the voter rolls?
The Democrat, leftist ballot strategy has one absolute, must have, ingredient: Floating ballots.
A floating ballot is the one that goes to 434 Prescott Street for Bill Jones. But the address is an apartment building, so it cannot be delivered because it does not indicate that Bill is Unit 34. That free-floating ballot is collected by someone – and eventually voted.
This happens in almost every state in about every multi-unit building. We saw it in many states in 2020 and 2022.
In 2022, innovative Republican candidates, a very few, mailed postcards to every voter in their congressional district. The cards that came back = NON-DELIVERABLE ADDRESS. They challenged ballots sent to these addresses, and perhaps they sent volunteers to find some of those accumulated ballots.
We know a voter integrity team in Georgia, working from their kitchens, doing similar “analysis.”
People, this isn’t hard. This isn’t expensive. This is mandatory! Find the phantoms!
Why do we not see every major political campaign have an outreach to identify phantoms and stop the ballot-harvesting? Clue: The Republican organizations are as into keeping phantoms on the voter rolls as the Democrat leftists.
Don’t believe me?
Mike Lindell hired us to work with the voter integrity team in Wisconsin right after 2020 election. Sheriff David Clarke called me when I was in Tucson and asked if we would apply Fractal Programming, which is described at www.Omega4America.com, to voter rolls.
Lindell is as colorful in real life as he is selling pillows on television and he’s equally passionate.
Let me take you there.
Mike called me at 8:00 p.m. asking me to run the voter rolls for one of the reddest states. The next morning, I had to present the voter roll phantoms to its Secretary of State, via a Zoom call.
I had two hours to find at-scale phantom voters in one of the reddest states and present them to a group of 20 lawyers after my first cup of coffee the following morning.
It wasn’t hard.
Voters registered in prison. People voting from homeless shelters – for 20 years. (Homeless shelters do not have 20-year residents, don’t email me about this). Active voters in a frat house who were 106 years old, and a voter who was 1,900 years old who registered to vote, just before the 2020 election.
The response from this Republican secretary of state was complete denial. No matter how crazy the phantom’s address was – like a jail – he refused to concede there was any phantom inhabitation of his state’s voter rolls.
We now run about 20 states and they are all like this.
Phantom voter fraud is the heart and soul of ballot-harvesting election-stealing.
If we eliminate phantom voter fraud, people will still screw with machines, Maricopa County will make sure its voting machines do not work in Republican precincts, but the fake-ballot harvesting at scale will end. It’s where the big votes are!
Election fraud is an industry. It is core to the fabric of both Democrat and Republican establishments.
If there is any election truism we found in 20 months helping voter integrity teams in over a dozen states, it is that only America-First candidates appear to be victims.
Phantom voters appeared in a state representative election in Wisconsin between two Republicans, one of whom was trying to unseat an unpopular guy. Guess what? Phantoms moved from their current homes, to this little state rep district, voted, then seem to have moved back. All in a couple of weeks.
Do you think this was a Leftist plot? Hardly.
Same thing happened in a Florida congressional race where an America-First candidate lost a primary to a RINO and there were about three times the number of phantoms in the final total as were needed to turn the race. Who do you think won?
Cleta Mitchell of the Public Interest Legal Foundation reported on the 31 states who use ERIC, which was an originally Soros-funded entity, providing virtual food and clothing to phantoms. ERIC is a totally faked-out entity giving both Republican and Democrat governors cover for keeping phantoms on the voter rolls.
Back to Chesty Puller.
We know election stealing is the intended end for the ballot-first strategy.
We know how they do it. We see, thanks to Fractal Programming, literally every voter in every state across scores of databases; we can determine if they are likely fake. Same thing with addresses.
We can see voter rolls, on different dates and attack “sovereign voter fraud” when the government is in on it. We can see when the voter is inactive, changed to active, voted, then changed back – invisible to most current tech.
After my last piece on election fraud, I counted almost 1,000 emails. The top question: “What can I do?
The answer is to demand every major political campaign have a voter clean-up strategy.
Why would you donate your time, your dough, to a candidate who will just get screwed by phantoms while his or her opponent refuses to debate and lives in a basement?
And start raising hell with your state reps to dump ERIC. Why would any Republican state use a phantom voter care and feeding system?
We will never eliminate mail-in voting. We can, however, chase phantoms off the voter rolls and end much of the election stealing.
They are all around us – we have them just where we want them.
Now let’s eliminate their phantom ballot inventory.
Has Nancy Pelosi really been the Democrats’ House leader for only 20 years? It feels longer than that. As disappointing as this year’s election was, the fact that we no longer will be exposed to Ms. Pelosi is a big plus. And her successor will likely be an out radical, as opposed to a camouflaged radical. So that could be helpful.
Others will offer more nuanced political commentary, but to me it seems that Nancy leaves a dual legacy. First, she pioneered the tactic of drafting 1,000-page bills in secret and voting on them 24 hours later. Remarkably, no one in the liberal commentariat had any problem with this. It will be interesting to see whether the Republicans now do the same thing. If they do, it will be a scandal.
Second, Pelosi is a stock trader of genius. She has brought insider trading to a whole new level, generating a nine-figure net worth. And evidently it is entirely legal if you are the Speaker of the House.
In March of 1947, then-President Harry S. Truman gave a speech that became known for establishing the Truman Doctrine.
“…Every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures….”
Those words were directed overseas.
Today, those words resonate domestically. Ideologies that promise purpose and legitimacy to those who crave power without merit subvert our public institutions and threaten Americans with Truman’s “second way of life.”
Armed agencies of U.S. governance intimidate those who have different opinions and dare to express them. They collaborate with private media to squelch ideas that conflict with their vision. They compromise election integrity. They also lock down those most likely to represent conflicting aims, all the while accusing political opponents of their own transgressions. There are outside pressures, too, most notably from a regime whose forebears committed the greatest atrocities and mass murders in history and who have infiltrated U.S. institutions including the highest levels of national governance.
It has never been more important that we defend a liberal order and the rule of law that sustains it from those who would force failed ideologies upon us, destroying freedom and the morals that underpin liberty. This is war, one we must fight and win.
What does it mean to fight under these conditions? The national government is corrupt and brutal when aroused, so we should not start there. If seriously challenged, they react with thinly veiled condescension, invective and overwhelming force; their power is undeniable when focused.
We must start by building new, trusted institutions and financial centers located outside today’s corridors of power and peopled by those who believe in a liberal order under a rule of law and who achieve by merit and enterprise, not connections and corruption, e.g., Strive Asset Management in Columbus, Ohio. We must build trusted networks headquartered and staffed outside today’s techie Kremlins that prize diversity of opinion, not conformity under threat of cancellation, termination, imprisonment or intimidation, e.g., Substack. We must educate young and old in the history and philosophy of liberty and the morals that underpin a liberal order; we don’t need poison ivy-covered halls or stained glass mausoleums to do that, especially with today’s technology, e.g., PragerU.
What about leadership? Is great political leadership required today? Given the magnitude of the effort required, it would be disingenuous to suggest we can do without it. If we wish to preserve today’s Union, at some point we’ll need a great political leader. If it turns out we need to break it up, we’ll need several more.
The so called Greatest Generation did not lack for real political leadership in their hours of need, among them Winston Churchill in the U.K., Franklin D. Roosevelt in the U.S., and in the Soviet Union, one of the Second World War’s greatest generals, Marshall Georgy Zhukov, who was treated like dirt by one of history’s greatest degenerates, Josef Stalin. After the war, there were the wise men: Lovett, McCloy, Harriman, Bohlen, Kennan and Acheson, all architects of the peace and a liberal world order that lasted quite a while.
What about today’s political leaders? Nobody in politics today springs to mind, but I think we know who they aren’t. They certainly aren’t anyone who takes power under the banner of unity and then does nothing but divide and project. They certainly aren’t anyone whose combination of ego and immature discourse reminds one of a conceited, clever but nasty sixth grader instead of a statesman.
A great leader today would call upon liberty’s cultural leaders and ask them for their guidance formulating policies and programs to create, develop, support, and sustain liberty. Our liberty culture leadership bench today is deep and sits outside of the political realm. A great leader would be wise to call upon them for their counsel — my list would be Ray Dalio, Dennis Prager, Claire Lehman, Bari Weiss, John Allison, Jordan Peterson, Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Peter Zeihan, Austin Bay, Jan Jekeilek, Dave Rubin, J. K. Rowling, Douglas Murray, Jonathan Haidt, Steve Pinker, Stephen Hicks. There are many more.
The good news is that the fight is now well underway. Great leaders will emerge. There is potential among some of those who haven’t yet been really tested but who look like they may be ready for center stage. Meanwhile find the new birthers of liberty, join them, support them. And brook no interference. Find a way. If Truman were alive today he would be aghast, but then he would certainly agree that Americans must support free peoples here in the U.S. as well as overseas.
MN Prager Discussion Group 