“Democrats support their demagoguing with a broad-brush smear that Republicans are racist, and the canard that voting rules equate to voter suppression”.

The Biden Autocracy

Kenin M. Spivak At The American Mind:

The administration routinely disregards the Constitution, federal statutes, and republican norms.

When he introduced Kevin McCarthy as the new Speaker of the House, Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recited a series of mean-spirited comparisons for each letter of the alphabet. His first was a promise that Democrats would put “American values over autocracy.” In the midterm campaign, President Joe Biden claimed the election of Republicans would end democracy. Former President Barack Obama referred to a Republican victory as the end of “true democracy.”

Democrats support their demagoguing with a broad-brush smear that Republicans are racist, and the canard that voting rules equate to voter suppression. They charge, without evidence, that the Trump administration repeatedly exceeded its authority, and scapegoat all Republicans by the imprudent actions on January 6, 2021 of about one out of every 75,000 Trump voters.

Under cover of this onslaught, Biden has become the most autocratic president in at least 50 years. Justified by the fallacy that authoritarianism on behalf of so-called equity (i.e., racism) and other progressive causes is democratic (small “d”), and emboldened by the progressive echo chamber, the Biden administration pursues its left-wing agenda with smug indifference to bedrock rules of American jurisprudence and governance.

To suppress opposition to Biden’s unconstitutional and unlawful acts, government and other progressives seek to cleanse vocabulary and the public square of their utility, vilify and punish those who do not acquiesce, and foster corrupt (and unconstitutional) alliances with media and Big Tech that silence the opposition. Americans are justifiably afraid to speak out under the yoke of a weaponized Justice department, and intolerant school boards, universities, and professional organizations with the power to suspend and disbar, such as the American Medical Association and American Bar Association.

Article I, Section 3 of the United States Constitution requires the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” and in his oath of office, the president swears to do so. All federal statutes must comply with the U.S. Constitution. Executive orders and agency regulations must comply with both the Constitution and federal law. When President Biden instructs, authorizes, or merely permits the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to disregard U.S. immigration law, or federal departments and agencies to hire personnel, enact policies, and grant funds based on race, or to collude with social media to deplatform, demonetize, and censor private speech, he violates this core presidential responsibility, among other core protections guaranteed by the Constitution and federal law.

On September 30, 2021, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memorandum that purported to exercise prosecutorial discretion by prioritizing apprehension and removal of “noncitizens who are a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security.” He then limited enforcement to only these categories, and in April 2022, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) principal legal advisor directed ICE lawyers to dismiss most nonpriority cases, allowing at least an additional 700,000 illegal immigrants to remain in the United States.

8 USC 1226 and 8 USC 1227 set forth the laws applicable to the deportation of aliens. Section 1227 provides that “inadmissible” aliens “shall” be deported. Though appeals courts have held that even a statute that includes an absolute requirement is subject to some prosecutorial discretion, in general, prosecutorial discretion must be applied case-by-case, not as a blanket subterfuge to nullify a federal statute. In an effort to end-run this constraint, the Mayorkas and ICE memoranda profess to “authorize,” rather than “require” discretion by each prosecutor. Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stay a lower court ruling that the Biden administration lacked the authority to terminate Title 42. States are suing to seek enforcement of other immigration laws, but their standing is unclear. The immigration crisis is Joe Biden’s unlawful plan to annul immigration laws to expand the potential Democrat base.

Marking an attempted massive expansion of executive power, in 2021, Biden ordered all government contractors employees be vaccinated and wear face masks, and coerced OSHA to order businesses with 100 or more employees to require vaccinations; and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ordered a moratorium on evictions. Biden previously acknowledged that he lacked the authority for the vaccine mandates, and admitted that the “bulk of constitutional scholars” would say the CDC action did not “pass constitutional muster.”

In September 2021, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling vacating the CDC’s eviction moratorium for exceeding its authority. Four months later, the Court barred implementation of the OSHA rule, observing, “OSHA, in its half century of existence, has never before adopted a broad public health regulation of this kind—addressing a threat that is untethered, in any causal sense, from the workplace.” Then, four federal Courts of Appeal largely rejected the mandate for federal contractors. In January 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit unanimously characterized the President’s actions as the “anything goes” pursuit of a statutory purpose.

In the opening salvo in his war on fossil fuels, Biden suspended oil and gas leases on federal lands. In August 2022, the federal district court for the Western District of Louisiana held that Biden had exceeded his authority, and issued a permanent injunction staying the order in the 13 states that filed a lawsuit opposing it. Biden has slow-walked compliance, and imposed new conditions on drilling and processing, while concurrently depleting the strategic oil reserve, and blaming the oil industry for his unlawful actions.

The Taylor Force Act, enacted in 2018 by a bipartisan vote, generally requires the U.S.to cease funding the Palestinian Authority until the PA stops paying stipends to Palestinian terrorists and their families who target U.S. and Israeli citizens, takes steps to end violence, publicly condemns anyone who tries to kill an Israeli or a U.S. citizen, and fully investigates such crimes. The PA has made clear it will not comply. Nonetheless, consistent with anti-Israel sentiment among progressives, Biden lawlessly restored financial aid to the PA. Recent grants total about $1 billion.

Parents who objected to Covid shutdowns, Critical Race Theory, affirmative action, and schools’ secretly supporting LGTBQ priorities, are speaking out at school board meetings. To crush them, in September 2021, the White House secretly collaborated with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to write a letter from the NSBA to Biden seeking Federal assistance to stop the parents. Five days later, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a directive to the FBI and U.S. attorneys to meet with state and local leaders to develop strategies to address the purported threats of violence. FBI agents began investigating and questioning parents, even though the alleged violence was a matter for local police. These coordinated actions led to an apology from the NSBA, but Garland never backed down, putting DOJ’s lethal thumb squarely on the side of the administration.

The autocratic use of the DOJ is obvious in the marked difference between the responses to violence on the left and right. More than 900 arrests were made in the wake of the January 6 events, and hundreds more may face charges in the continuing DOJ investigation. In September, 20 FBI agents invaded Mark Houck’s home to arrest him, with weapons drawn, for a minor altercation during a pro-life protest. Houck’s lawyer had previously advised prosecutors that he would accept a summons for Houck to appear. By contrast, few steps were taken to protect conservative Supreme Court justices from pro-abortion demonstrators, prosecutors seldom pursued rioters and looters following George Floyd’s death, and the DOJ has been dropping charges against those it did pursue, including many of the violent rioters who attacked a Federal courthouse in Portland, and a man who tried to torch an NYPD cruiser.

Article I of the Constitution exclusively vests in Congress the right to appropriate funds and set the U.S. debt. During and after the 2020 presidential election, leading Democrats, including then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Biden, talked about seeking Congressional action to forgive student debt. Both acknowledged that the president lacked the authority to do so without Congressional action. As the midterm election neared and polls showed the potential for the Republicans to sweep the House and take the Senate, Biden bribed voters with more than $400 billion of federal funds by forgiving $10,000 in student debt for individuals with incomes below $125,000 or household incomes below $250,000, and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. After a bit of delay as lawyers researched who would have standing to challenge this colossal overreach, a federal district court promptly enjoined the plan, followed by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. When the administration petitioned the Supreme Court to permit the program to continue, the Court declined to do so, leaving the Biden administration to defend the legality of its vote-buying scheme and how it squares with its commitment to fair elections.

In United States v. Alvarez (2012), the Supreme Court held that labeling speech as “false” or “misinformation” does not strip it of First Amendment protection. In Matal v. Tam (2016), the Court unanimously held there is no hate-speech exception. The Court has repeatedly applied the First Amendment prohibition on “abridging the freedom of speech” to executive actions. Chief Justice Warren Burger further warned that it is “axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

Despite being blatantly unconstitutional, at least 80 senior officials in 11 federal agencies, including the White House, DHS, CDC, and FBI, have participated in a concerted, until now largely covert, enterprise to suppress dissenting voices by colluding with, and coercing, social media companies into blocking, demonetizing, and suppressing views to which the administration objects, including so-called misinformation (views the Biden administration labels as false) and disinformation (views that are inconvenient for the Biden administration, or lack its preferred context). I wrote at length here about this fundamental danger to a free society.

As blatant and pervasive as the administration’s efforts to suppress opposing views, Joe Biden has reserved the place of honor in his pantheon of autocratic acts for his pervasive, all-encompassing racism.

More than once, the Supreme Court has opined that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people” (e.g., Rice v. Cayetano [2000] and Hirabayashi v. United States [1943]). Chief Justice John Roberts observed that using racial discrimination to undo racial discrimination doesn’t work; rather, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 [2007]). In Shaw v. Hunt (1996), the Court unambiguously explained: “Racial classifications are antithetical to the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in federally funded programs, and Title VII does the same in private employment. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibits the federal government from varying individual property and contract rights based on race or color.

Despite the unambiguous strictures of the Constitution, federal law, and Supreme Court precedent, on its first day in office, the president issued an executive order requiring a “whole-of-government” effort to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in all aspects of federal-government policies and American lives. As I explained last year, Biden then issued a second order on DEI in the federal workforce, a government-wide strategic plan, and a Gender Equity Plan that require government agencies to adopt plans to make personnel, policy, contracting, and financial decisions based on race and LGBTQI+ status.

The Biden administration’s 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP) and trillion dollar infrastructure bill included billions to advance “equity” for restaurants, farmers, small businesses, homeowners, and construction companies. These benefits are unavailable to straight white males, and, often, other whites and Asian Americans. For example, ARP included $28.6 billion for grants to restaurants that the administration generally made available only to blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, and Asian Americans from the Indian subcontinent. Another act granted loan relief to minority farmers, excluding whites.

ARP prioritizes up to $785 million allocated for Covid-19 tests and vaccines for communities of color, including $35 million to hire racial minorities and LGBTQI+ individuals for the public health workforce without regard to whether they were the most qualified.

The administration has ordered that 11 percent of federal contracting dollars be awarded to small businesses owned by so-called marginalized minorities, and makes certain grants available only to “disadvantaged minorities” for medical research, infrastructure, student aid, and public housing.

Courts have consistently ruled against the administration’s racial agenda. In June 2021, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals declared unconstitutional the provisions of ARP for distributing COVID-relief by race and sex. An ARP program that allocates debt relief based on race and excludes white farmers has been enjoined by numerous courts, though the government has obtained stays in enforcement. More than a dozen other lawsuits are pending against Biden’s DEI programs

Yet, the Biden administration shows no sign of relenting. In accordance with Biden’s executive orders, at least 140 agencies have announced they are developing action plans to prioritize race in their mission.

We live in a democracy with three branches of government. When the executive branch knowingly disregards the Constitution and federal law the remedies are largely confined to expensive, protracted litigation, and impeachment, conviction, and removal, as provided for in the Constitution. Litigation is cumbersome, and Biden has generally evaded adverse decisions by slow-walking compliance, and issuing new, similar orders. Impeachment and conviction are impracticable given the small Republican majority in the House, Democrat control of the Senate, and the chilling fact that Kamala Harris is next.

With America’s elite institutions, the media, and a majority in the Senate aligning to excuse and even encourage growing autocratic overreach, including censorship and violent DOJ attacks on citizens exercising their Constitutional rights to petition Government and express their views, they create the circumstances in which progressive bogeymen may become real.

Kenin M. Spivak is founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank. He is the author of fiction and non-fiction books and has served as a director and C-suite officer of public and private companies. Spivak has written for National Review, the National Association of Scholars, and Huffington Post. He was chairman of the Editorial Board of the Knowledge Exchange Business Encyclopedia, and a long-time director of the RAND Corporation Center for Corporate Ethics and Governance. He received his A.B., M.B.A., and J.D. from Columbia University.

….”the University of Pennsylvania amassed millions from foreign countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, and more”.

January 28, 2023

Mike Pompeo’s ugly revelation about American academia and China

By Andrea Widburg at American Thinker:

The old saying is that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” That is, whoever is paying the largest share controls what’s being said, and nowhere is this more true than in academia. An anecdote in the new book by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo makes this clear, for he describes MIT’s fealty to Chinese dollars, something that silenced a speech by the then Secretary of State.

Chinese parents like sending their children to American colleges. By the peak year of 2019-2020, before COVID hit, 372,532 Chinese students were studying at U.S. colleges and universities. That number, obviously, dropped a bit with COVID (down to 290,086 in the 2021-2022 academic year), but there’s no reason to believe it won’t bounce back again.

The cool thing about foreign nationals is that they pay cash. There are no discounts and scholarships to disrupt the money flowing to the Chinese students’ chosen colleges. Instead, these students pay the full tuition amount, no matter how ludicrous it is.

However, unlike American dollars, which colleges take for granted (whether from governments, institutions, or individuals), college administrators must be careful to keep the Chinese happy, or the money dries up. (Stanford, coincidentally or not, expelled Steven Mosher in the early 1980s after the Chinese went ballistic when he dared to reveal China’s forced abortions.) Mike Pompeo’s recently published (probable pre-presidential campaign) book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, reveals that the “keep China happy” policy controlled MIT.

Image: Mike Pompeo. YouTube screen grab.

I haven’t read Pompeo’s book, but Douglas Murray did. In an essay in the New York Post, Murray notes that most media outlets have focused obsessively on any gossipy tidbit that Pompeo dropped about his time in the Trump administration, from Trump himself to John Bolton, to foreign leaders such as Kim Jong-Un.

(That’s a reminder that most of what passes for political news in America’s media is simply the “adult” version of the same mean-girl gossip that dominated our high school years.)

Murray ignores the gossip and focuses on Pompeo’s description of why, despite being America’s Secretary of State, a position of key importance in international politics, he got canceled at MIT.

As a reminder, Murray explains that Pompeo, like Trump himself, recognized China as our greatest geopolitical enemy, both in economic terms and in terms of potential military confrontations. And like Trump, he’d say this out loud:

In a speech in October 2019, he told an audience of business-people (many of whom made money in China) that the Communist Party of China is “a Marxist-Leninist party focused on struggle and international domination.”

At one point, Pompeo wanted to deliver a major speech about China and how it distorted American academia, both by coopting funding and through its policy of requiring all Chinese students to be agents for the CCP. Writes Murray:

The speech was scheduled to take place at MIT, which had previously held an MIT-China Summit in Beijing sponsored by Chinese tech companies including ones that are now under sanctions for providing technology to crush human rights in China.

But shortly before the speech MIT said they couldn’t host the US Secretary of State after all. A strange move, no? Well according to Pompeo he picked up the phone and spoke with the president of MIT, Rafael Reif. And Reif claimed that there was no way that the speech could go ahead because of the risk of offending Chinese students. By MIT’s own data in 2021-22 a full 25% of international students at the university were from China.

In fact what was clear was that the no-platforming of an American Secretary of State on an American campus had nothing to do with a fear of upsetting Chinese students. What Reif and his fellow academic cowards were afraid of was that their money spigot from Beijing would be shut off.
It’s not that academics have no principles. It’s that their principles are driven by greed and anti-American animus. Those things dovetail perfectly when the Chinese are involved. They also dovetail perfectly when Joe Biden’s classified documents landed at the “Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement,” which opened in 2018 and attracted huge amounts of foreign money:
Records indicate that the University of Pennsylvania amassed millions from foreign countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, and more. Following Biden’s appointment as an honorary professor, donations from foreign entities exploded from $31 million in 2016 to over $100 million in 2019, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
This included about $61 million in gifts and contracts stemming from China between 2017 and 2019, per the report.
Small wonder that college students emerge as America-hating leftists who dream of a world like China, one with complete government control over guns, speech, and political thought. They’re the dancers, college is the piper, and China is paying the money and calling the tune.

A GANGSTER’S WORLD?

January 28, 2023

Biden Family Values: They like to live large

By Monica Showalter at American Thinker:

Joe Biden likes to advertise himself as ordinary ‘Scranton Joe’ who’s a family man and “devout” Catholic to the public.

A look at news rolling out about Biden’s extended family in the wake of recent scandals suggests a different story. Far from being Lunchbucket Joe, House Biden is more like Venezuela’s Maduro family, or Chavez family, or Cuba’s Castro oligarchs. Cut to the chase and throw in Beijing’s princelings or Russia’s oligarchs, who frequently make cameo appearances. Not surprisingly, most claim to have a soft spot for “the common man.” 

Sound like the Bidens?

All we have to do is look at the latest story from the Daily Mail about how Joe used his “pull” to get his ne’er-do-well niece Caroline a fancy new job she’d never have otherwise gotten as a convicted criminal on probation for a $100,000 credit card theft.

President Biden helped his convict 31-year-old niece Caroline Biden land an interview for a job at Masimo Corporation, whose owner is one of his biggest donors, but she balked at the $85,000-a-year salary, records from Hunter Biden‘s laptop show. 

Caroline, the daughter of Joe Biden‘s brother Jim and his wife Sara, in 2017 pled guilty to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup on a stolen credit card. 

She managed to get out of a grand larceny charge and the two-year prison sentence that carried, but was sentenced to two years’ probation, which she wanted to serve in Los Angeles to be near her cousin Hunter Biden. 

How the hell she managed to avoid prison for that is as mysterious as how Hunter Biden got into Yale. That kind of stuff happens When You’re A Biden, which almost sounds like a Broadway song. What other Scranton Joe family has a “big guy” who can get every relative, down to nieces and nephews, out of any jam they get themselves into.

It wasn’t just her. Hunter Biden was time and time again spared charges and jail time over his tax evasion, his falsification of his gun permit application, evidence of bribery and influence peddling, and his numerous drug incidents. He lived a wild and free-spending life at Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood as recently as 2018, around the time when he was occasionally driving old dad’s Corvette from the Biden family garage where the misplaced classified documents were held. He seemed to have gotten a sweet deal in his string of homes around the Venice, California area.

Donations, it should be noted, tended to follow from these various “saves,” as the Daily Mail noted in its report. 

The entitlement mentality of this Biden scion of political privilege was stratospheric. The Mail continued:

Records show Jim Biden had asked Hunter to convince his cousin Caroline to accept a job, after a lifetime of only holding cushy jobs she had secured through her family name, according to the Free Beacon.   

Emails show the job she was interviewing for in July 2018 at Masimo promised $85,000 per year plus a guaranteed 10 percent bonus plus stock options. 

‘That’s below minimum wage in California after taxes,’ Caroline wrote in an email to her father. ‘I cannot take this job. I have never made this little money in my life.’

Caroline said she could not accept a job that would pay her ‘less than $180,000.’ 

She then appeared to ‘bomb’ the interview, get passed up for the job, but was offered an internship at the company as a favor to her uncle Joe. 

‘I didn’t get the job,’ Caroline texted her cousin Hunter. ‘I was given an intern job at 31 years old because of your dad asking him to give me something even though I bombed it.’

By July 28, Caroline texted Hunter that his father Joe was ‘done’ with her. 

That suggests that a family culture of entitlement has been festering for a long time at House Biden. There was no sense of gratitude, let alone expectations of having to strike out on one’s own. The Big Guy was always there for them — yet at the same time, curiously absent as a parent who could teach his offspring and other relatives any sense of right and wrong. They didn’t have that at all in that family.

More evidence of the entitlement mentality of the Biden princelings could be seen in the Vogue writeup of Naomi Biden’s wedding. Naomi is the daughter of Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden’s granddaughter. She fully expected to hold her wedding at the White House even though that had never been done beyond immediate family in the past. She even used the White House as a convenient crash pad, with Joe’s consent:

When the couple’s lease ran out on their DC apartment, they asked Nana and the president if they could move in for a few months while wedding planning, along with their mini Australian shepherd, Charlie, who can often be seen gamboling on the South Lawn with the Bidens’ German shepherd, Commander. “I try to remind myself it’s the White House, but it also gets normalized over time,” says Naomi. 

Naturally, Naomi and the rest of House Biden have their upscaling of standards and expectations. 

Here’s how she saw her White House wedding:

Naomi enters the Green Room inside a beehive of giddy activity: hairdresser, make-up artist, stylist Bailey Moon and two Ralph Lauren designers, Andrea and Lorenzo, who have come as keepers of the custom gown, quick to jump into the frame and help fluff and smooth the mille-feuille organza, charmeuse, and crinoline skirt.

“Like every little girl, I had a vision in my head—it was Grace Kelly’s dress I loved,” admits Naomi, who with her Audrey Hepburn brows and honey-colored hair is not a far cry from the Princess of Monaco (after all, a White House wedding is our country’s version of a royal one).

Ahhh, a royal wedding. Because she’s a royal and has her privileges. It figures.

It gets worse when we get down to brand names here:

The bride and groom climbed a ladder to cut a seven-foot-tall, eight-tier lemon cake with buttercream frosting, while nearby, a dessert bar included everything from 20-inch apple pie (the groom’s cake) to the president’s favorite Graeter’s chocolate chip ice cream. “He used to be a Breyers guy all the way but we’ve gotten him to upgrade to Graeter’s,” Naomi says.

Breyer’s? Eeeew.

That wasn’t all of it, either.

“I do know [Jill Biden] lost sleep over the fact that I was planning to serve turkey sandwiches at the lunch,” Naomi adds. (They amended the menu to chicken pot pie, as a surprise for the father of the bride, as it is Hunter’s favorite and the dish Dr. Biden cooks for him every year on his birthday.)

Turkey sandwiches to wedding guests? How dreadful. How very lunchbucket.

Obviously, this is a hell of a princeling class of privilege encircling the House of Joe Biden. Like all of these princelings cited, including the trashy Latin American ones, they are virtually all socialists who declare themselves to be looking out for the common man. Yet as their regimes of total power settle in, the nomenklatura activity begins, with every unworthy and tainted relative holding their hand out and being treated with deference even in the middle of crime sprees by the powers that be. We saw that with the Castros, the Chavezes, the Maduros, the oligarchs of Russia, the princelings of China and now we see it with House Biden.

What kind of trash is this? It’s influence, it’s entitlement, and its ill-gotten gains to the most unworthy people on earth. That’s Lunchbucket Joe’s real game and it’s a disgusting one, no different from Maduro’s.

Creating California For Dem Minnesota!

Democrats can never get enough of your money

(Article sent by Mark Waldeland <m.waldeland@comcast.net>

Fri 1/27/2023 1:17 PM

CA Dems Have Found a New Way to Punish Its Residentstownhall.com

. . .California was one of several blue states last week to unveil bills to impose new wealth taxes. The other states were Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York and Washington. Each state’s proposal contained a different tax approach, but they all centered around the same basic idea: the rich must pay more. 

DFL proposals will give Minnesota the highest top rate of tax in the United Statesamericanexperiment.org

Aren’t Biden Fascists Wonderful For Minnesota Mining!!

Interior Department Blocks Minnesota Twin Metals Mining Project In Big Win For Beijing

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE at the Federalist:

JANUARY 26, 2023

The ‘Twin Metals Project’ would have tapped the Duluth Complex, where 95 percent of U.S. nickel reserves and 88 percent of U.S. cobalt reserves remain underground.

TRISTAN JUSTICE

The Biden administration blocked plans for a major nickel and cobalt mine in northern Minnesota Thursday while the U.S. remains reliant on overseas supply chains for its critical minerals.

The “Twin Metals Project” would have tapped the Duluth Complex within the Superior National Forest, where 95 percent of the nation’s nickel reserves and 88 percent of American cobalt reserves remain underground.

Now, pending litigation over leases, the Department of the Interior has blocked the nearly $3 billion mine over concerns about the safety of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness inside the national forest.

“The Department of the Interior takes seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a press release. “Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy.”

The department withdrew more than 225,000 acres of the Superior National Forest from consideration for mining operations, ensuring the Twin Metals project’s demise for the foreseeable future.

The agency’s decision to block the project, however, is a major step back for American mineral independence while the government’s mining regime remains so broken that the administration is shopping in Canada for natural resources.

Debra Struhsacker, a hardrock mining and environmental policy expert who has testified before Congress five times, told The Federalist the administration’s refusal to allow the Twin Metals project to move forward is premature.

“It is truly unfortunate that at a time when there is widespread recognition that the U.S. urgently needs the copper, nickel, and cobalt in the Twin Metals mineral deposit to help achieve the nation’s clean energy objectives, that this world-class deposit is now off-limits for at least two decades,” Struhsacker said. “The public’s interest would have been better served if the administration had performed a rigorous environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act to examine the specifics of Twin Metal’s proposed mining project and determine whether the deposit could have been developed in a way that would have ensured environmental protection of the Boundary Waters Area Watershed.”

Meanwhile, a report from the left-leaning Brookings Institute published last fall warned about the severe vulnerability presented in mineral supply chains by an overreliance on overseas adversaries. Even as leftist lawmakers want to ramp up the use of emissions-free energy technologies that require critical minerals, the Biden administration has slow-walked efforts to reform the U.S. regulatory regime over mining.

Beijing stands to benefit the most from Washington’s neglect.

According to Brookings, nearly 70 percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where workers often operate in sub-human conditions complete with child labor. The Chinese have out-invested every global competitor in the Congolese mines.

More than 30 percent of the world’s nickel comes from Indonesia, where the Chinese are also investing heavily to cement a sphere of communist influence. The East Asian island country has also struggled to mine sustainably.

Republican Rep. Pete Stauber, who represents the district in northern Minnesota where the White House has doomed the Twin Metals Project, called the administration’s ruling “an attack on our way of life.”

“Unfortunately, this harm to our country and our future has become the norm, as this President’s goal is to put America last,” Stauber said in a press release. “Not even one month ago, Joe Biden signed an agreement to fund mining projects in Chinese-owned mines in the Congo, where over 40,000 children work as slaves in forced labor and inhumane conditions with no environmental protections.”

Last week, Politico highlighted President Biden’s African pivot to counter Chinese dominance on the continent’s lucrative mines.

“In a memorandum of understanding Wednesday, the State Department pledged to help build an EV battery supply chain in Congo and Zambia,” E&E News reported. “The department and other U.S. agencies will offer technical assistance to the two countries, cooperate on feasibility studies and explore opportunities in the sector for U.S. companies, according to the [memorandum].”

Last year, House Republicans launched an investigation into Hunter Biden’s involvement with the sale of a Congolese cobalt mine to a Chinese company in 2016.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s Department of the Interior has stonewalled efforts at effective oversight of the agency’s decisions surrounding the Twin Metals project.

In May last year, the department demanded thousands of dollars to release records on an earlier decision to cancel leases.

Peter McGinnis, a spokesman for the Functional Government Initiative (FGI), which filed the request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), told The Federalist Thursday the department eventually waived the fee but has yet to comply with the public transparency law.

“On the one hand, the Biden administration is advocating for a clean-energy transition and claims it is fixing the supply chain crisis,” McGinnis said. “On the other, it is cutting off access to domestic supplies of the raw materials needed to make that transition happen and leaving us more dependent on China for these critical minerals.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

“Does it make sense for the attacker to cry foul when its bloodthirsty plan backfires?

January 27, 2023

History class takes a holiday at The Washington Post

By Michael Berenhaus at American Thinker:

In “‘Farha’ film on Netflix brings Palestinian lens to a broad audience” (1/23/23), Washington Post reporter Claire Healy can’t hide her determination to report news from the Palestinian point of view.  The article is about a movie based on a Palestinian story by director Darin Sallam.  Sallam admits that “the movie is based in part on a story related by a Palestinian girl” (emphasis added) to Sallam’s mother…who obviously relayed it to Sallam.  Not exactly the criteria historians would use to instill confidence in its accuracy.

Not only does Healy report the Palestinian hearsay as fact, but she does so from a uniquely Palestinian perspective.  In particular, when Healy states that a war began after Israel declared Independence, she conveniently neglects to mention that the war was started by local Arabs (who now call themselves Palestinians) and five neighboring Arab armies with the expressly genocidal goal of destroying the nascent Israeli state and exterminating its Jewish inhabitants.  In that war, Jews and Arabs were both displaced, and many of the Arabs fled to clear a path for what they thought (and were told) was a conquering Arab army.  Yes, there were Palestinians as well as Jews who lost their homes.  But the Washington Post falsely claimed that 750,000 local Arabs were part of a “forced exodus.”  The Palestinians are entitled to their bias, but a news reporter is expected to meet a higher standard.

The overriding tragedy omitted from the Post article is the fact that if the Palestinians hadn’t started the war, no one would have been displaced.  Yes, the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) “story” is “rarely included in mainstream media in the United States,” as the Post article states, but they neglect the reason: it is false!  Arab aggression started the war, and had the Arabs won, the Jewish people would have been subjected to a second Holocaust. 

Is it a catastrophe for the military aggressor in a war to lose?  Does it make sense for the attacker to cry foul when its bloodthirsty plan backfires?  That’s what happened — not a pretty picture.  So what are they to do?  In this case, the losing side stooped to the level of struggling to rewrite history with a propaganda film.  And the Post gladly came along for the ride. 

The Post article is littered with even more omissions.  Israel didn’t “seize” the West Bank and Gaza.  It took it from Jordan — not the Palestinians — while defending against a Jordanian attack.

The director said the movie “represents the Palestinians who had to move on and live with all the pain and losses.”  But they didn’t have had to “move on.”  They could have opted for peace instead of war. 

The true Nakba (catastrophe) is that the few surviving Palestinian refugees and millions of their descendants are presently held (virtually imprisoned) in camps by their Arab brethren in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in addition to the West Bank.  In the neighboring countries, many are restricted in that they are not allowed to purchase homes, hold many occupations, or live a normal life.  In the West Bank, Palestinians are crowded into areas, deprived of international aid meant for them but siphoned away by Palestinian leaders who use the largess to build opulent mansions for themselves and live like kings.

How about a movie that exposes the Arab mistreatment of fellow Arabs — which has gone on for 75 years?  Bring that to the mainstream media, spark outrage, and help cure their self-inflicted malady.  That would genuinely help the Palestinians “move on” instead of supporting their habit of grinding an axe against Israel.

Dr. Michael Berenhaus is a freelance watchdog activist who works tirelessly to combat anti-Israel bias in the media.  He has been widely published in news sources such as The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.