The Democratic Party is making war on Republicans, conservatives, and America. All rules have been abrogated, all traditions trashed, all sense of fairness gone. It is past time for conservatives to quit being nice guys. The Democrats’ assault can be stopped only by a healthy dose of their own medicine.
Let’s start investigating prominent Democrats with an eye toward bringing criminal charges against them. Most of America’s district attorneys, those that have a political affiliation, are no doubt Republicans. Likewise, most attorneys general are Republicans. They all should think about Democrats who can be charged in their jurisdictions.
The Biden crime family is an obvious target. The evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop shows that he spends (or spent) most of his time communicating with pimps and drug dealers to arrange purchases of prostitutes and illegal drugs. He did this across the country, and his activities are already documented. There are many counties in which criminal charges could be brought against him. Then we have the other Bidens, including Jim and Hallie. As I understand it, criminal charges against Joe can’t be pursued until he is out of office, but all of the other members of the crime family are exposed.
But that’s not all. Many Democratic senators mysteriously become rich in office. How do they do it? Possible answers include outright bribes and sweetheart deals which they are offered by business or organized crime groups seeking political influence. This should be looked into. Has Chuck Schumer engaged in shady financial dealings? Let’s find out. We know that Nancy Pelosi was vastly enriched during her term as Speaker of the House. How did that happen? What other Democrats have shown extraordinary increases in net worth while working for public employee salaries? Let’s investigate them.
My guess is that there is a lot of scuttlebutt in Washington about how Democrats have gotten wealthy. That said, there are a couple of obvious obstacles to prosecutions: the statute of limitations must be taken into account, and the Democrats’ crimes probably are concentrated in urban precincts that they control. But the United States includes 50 states and many, many counties. Republican law enforcement officials at all levels should be looking for evidence of illegal conduct by Democrats and empaneling grand juries to investigate whatever they uncover.
Any prosecutions they bring will be more meritorious than Alvin Bragg’s ridiculous pursuit of Donald Trump. The time has come to fight fire with fire. The Democrats have let slip the dogs of war. Let’s bite back.
If you Google “what is conservatism?” this is the definition you will receive: “Commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation.”
This is but one more illustration of the lack of objectivity wherever the Left is in control.
The idea that conservatism means, by definition, “opposition to change or innovation” is nothing more than how liberals and leftists see conservatism. Why? Because the farther left you go, the greater the commitment to change and innovation. “Change” and “Innovation” are left-wing gods. That is why, for example, the mantra of the Barack Obama campaign and presidency was “hope and change.”
Because the Left is so committed to change (for its own sake), people on the Left assume that anyone who opposes leftism opposes all “change and innovation.”
Unfortunately, the Left’s misapprehension of conservatism is almost equaled by conservatives’ inability to define the term. For that reason, just as I recently defined another widely used term — “Judeo-Christian values” — I think it important to do the same for conservatism.
Preserving What is Best From the Past
Conservatives conserve.
If you want a good definition of conservatism, don’t Google “conservatism.” Google “conserve.” You will then find this definition: “To protect from loss or harm; preserve.”
The first and most important characteristic of conservatism is that it conserves what is best from the past.
Conservatives have no issue with change or innovation — when warranted or harmless. The American Revolution, which conservatives seek to preserve, ushered in a radically innovative blueprint for liberty and self-government. Our problem is with jettisoning past greatness and replacing it with mediocrity — which is precisely what has been done for at least a century.
What could be more noble, uplifting, beneficial or altruistic than giving every generation the best that humans have ever created? A generation that deprives the next generation of Beethoven, Shakespeare and Da Vinci is committing a combination of child neglect and civilizational suicide.
Opting for “Change” Over Excellence
Why, then, isn’t everyone — at least as regards conserving the best of the past — a conservative?
Here is why:
Since so few people in any generation can equal, let alone excel, the greatest of the past, conserving the past does not allow almost anyone living at the present time to shine.
Therefore, if I can’t compose great tonal music, I won’t even bother trying. I might shine, however, if I write “atonal” music.
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If I can’t paint like a great classical artist, I will jettison all rules of art. I’ll throw paint onto a canvas or place a crucifix in a jar of my urine and call such things “art” — and demand that you, too, jettison all standards.
If I can’t hope to match Shakespeare, I will dismiss Shakespeare as just another Dead White Male and replace him with living nonwhite females who possess exponentially less talent.
The same holds true for teachers. Many of them are bored at the thought of teaching Shakespeare every year. So, they, too, opt for “change” and “innovation” over excellence — but thereby deprive their students of the best.
Replacing God With Man
Likewise in the moral sphere. Why would I teach the moral roots of our society — the Bible, the Ten Commandments, Aristotle, the American Constitution, the Founders? That would mean I have nothing particularly important to say regarding morality and society. Again, I won’t shine. So, I will ignore or even reject those moral codes and devise a new moral system.
That’s what Karl Marx did, quite consciously — which is why he hated Christianity and Judaism. Only if he could overthrow Bible- and God-based morality could his new morality be taken seriously. So, he replaced God with man, and he replaced good and evil with rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed. Today we are witnessing another rejection of God- and Bible-based morality, replacing the moral categories of good and evil with racial categories — white and black.
And talk about innovation. What could be more innovative than “men give birth”? While conservatives are boringly conserving the fact that men are men, women are women, and one cannot become the other, the believers in change and innovation insist that sex/gender is completely subjective.
Time Magazine Gives Away the Game
A couple of weeks ago, Time magazine inadvertently gave the game away.
In the introduction to its hundredth anniversary edition, the CEO and editor of Time described the purpose of the magazine.
You probably think they would write something like, “to report the news as truthfully as possible.” But you would be completely wrong.
Here is what the CEO and editor wrote: “As we begin our second century, that spirit of innovation and disruption inspires us every day.”
“Innovation and disruption.” There you have it.
Reporting news as truthfully as possible is not just boring. It is worse than that. It is conservative.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His commentary on Deuteronomy, the third volume of The Rational Bible, his five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible, was published in October. He is the co-founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.
I spent a year in Twitter purgatory for saying Rachel Levin is a man. And then one day, my account came back.
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON
Ayear ago, I was locked out of my Twitter account. On Friday morning, with no explanation, my account was unlocked. For a journalist, losing access to Twitter and to one’s followers is no small thing. I don’t have a huge following, but Twitter is an important platform in my industry, and losing my access to it limited my ability to do my job effectively.
I was locked out for saying that Rachel Levine, a high-ranking official in the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, is a man. Levine is “trans.” He identifies and dresses as a woman, but he is a man.
To be clear, I wasn’t saying that to be nasty but because The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site, had been censored and locked out by Twitter for naming Levine its “Man of the Year” in mockery of USA Today. USA Today had included Levine, a man, as one of its 2022 “Women of the Year.” (To be clear, even if I had said it to be nasty, that still doesn’t justify Twitter’s censorship.)
I wrote a column about the Bee’s account getting locked by Twitter censors, and about how its editor-in-chief and others were subsequently locked out for tweeting about what had happened. Then I tweeted out my column. This is what I said:
Notice that what I said wasn’t even primarily about Levine, but about Big Tech censorship in the name of woke ideology, regardless of the truth. It didn’t matter. As if to prove my point completely, a few days later I got a notice from Twitter that my account had been locked for violating Twitter’s policy regarding “hateful conduct.” By calling Levin a man, I had “misgendered” him and thus had engaged in hateful conduct.
Twitter informed me that if I simply deleted the offending tweet, I would get my account back. By deleting it, said Twitter, I would be acknowledging that I had indeed engaged in hateful conduct and would be agreeing not to do so again in the future.
In essence, Twitter wanted me to confess my sin, do penance, and receive absolution. If I refused, I would remain in Twitter purgatory, unable to access my account or use Twitter at all. Or, to shift metaphors, Twitter was asking me to engage in a Maoist-style struggle session and confess my thoughtcrimes in order to regain access to my account.
I refused. For one thing, I had not in fact engaged in “hateful conduct.” As I wrote at the time, it is actually hateful to affirm men and women struggling with gender dysphoria in the delusion that they can change their sex. Telling the plain truth is, in this context, the opposite of hateful conduct.
Twitter’s policy on “misgendering” is the equivalent of saying we should “affirm” women struggling with anorexia by telling them they really are overweight and need to be thinner. Affirm the mental illness, in other words. That of course would be cruel, just as it is cruel to affirm the delusion that a person is a member of the opposite sex.
Not that any of that mattered to Twitter. My multiple appeals were ignored, as far as I can tell. I never got a response of any kind. Even after Elon Musk bought Twitter and boasted about how it heralded a new era of free speech on the platform, I remained locked out.
Fast forward to this week, and my colleague Sean Davis also got locked out. His crime? Factually reporting on the “Trans Day Of Vengeance” following the murder of three children and three staff members at a Christian school in Tennessee at the hands of a transgender shooter.
“The cold-blooded mass murder at a Christian school in Nashville by an apparent transgender person came just days before a planned ‘Trans Day Of Vengeance’ organized by the Trans Radical Activist Network,” wrote Davis in the tweet Twitter locked him out of his account over.
Every word of that statement is true, but Musk-era Twitter still found an escuse to censor Davis for having the temerity to tweet it. According to Twitter, Davis violated the platform’s rules against “violent speech” simply by stating a fact, that a trans activist group was planning a “Trans Day of Vengeance.” Others, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Daily Wire journalist Luke Rosiak were also censored on Twitter for reporting on the “Trans Day Of Vengeance.”
Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, claimed Twitter had to “automatically sweep our platform and remove >5000 tweets /retweets of [the ‘Trans Day of Vengeance’] poster.”
But Davis never shared the poster. He simply linked to a Daily Wire news report about the event that included the poster as part of its coverage, as any honest media outlet should. Irwin and Twitter, however, pretended that anyone tweeting about the “Trans Day of Vengeance” was promoting it, and hence promoting violence.
“We do not support tweets that incite violence irrespective of who posts them,” Irwin said on Twitter. “‘Vengeance’ does not imply peaceful protest. Organizing or support for peaceful protests is ok.”
By doing this, Irwin not only lied about the facts but defamed Davis and everyone else who reported accurately on what these trans activists were planning. According to Twitter’s twisted logic, reporting on, say, a jihadi terrorist threat would be tantamount to supporting it.
Initially, Twitter rejected Davis’ appeal, maintaining that he did indeed engage in “violent speech.” But then, on Friday morning his account was unlocked, along with mine.
Robby Starbuck appears to have alerted Irwin and Musk to the Federalist staff bans after Twitter also locked out The New York Post (again). Starbuck, a conservative director and producer, had to explain to Twitter execs how their own platform was working, that it was pulling and attaching the image of the “Trans Day of Vengeance” poster to every tweet that linked to the Daily Wire news story about the event.
As Starbuck noted, journalists should able to report on things like the “Trans Day of Vengeance,” especially in the immediate wake of a transgender maniac slaughtering a bunch of innocent people. “The public deserved to know about Trans Day of Vengeance so they could plan to avoid areas there may be danger,” wrote Starbuck. “We don’t want a press afraid to post/talk about that out of fear they’ll be locked out of their accounts.”
That’s exactly right. Unfortunately, the whole episode illustrates the inherent problem with content moderation and enforcement on all social media platforms, not just Twitter. Whether the owner is Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, censorship and propaganda are unavoidable as long as these companies believe they can and should police what people are allowed to say online.
As I argued in a recent edition of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis publication, the entire concept of content moderation is a euphemism for suppressing disfavored speech under the pretext of neutrality. Content moderation policies are at best an excuse to ban or block whatever a social media company’s executives do not like. At worst, as the “Twitter Files” have shown, content moderation provides cover for a policy of pervasive government censorship that would otherwise run afoul of the First Amendment.
I suppose I’m glad to have my Twitter account back, but honestly, I’m not sure I’ll go back to using it. Not only is life better when you don’t use social media, but Twitter obviously has all the same problems it had before Musk took over, and it’s not at all clear whether the platform can be salvaged.
For all Musk’s promises, it’s obvious that Twitter is no haven for free speech. Whatever else has changed at Twitter, one big thing hasn’t changed: if you say the wrong thing, Twitter will censor you.
In October 2020, just months prior to his death, Rush Limbaugh warned us that Democrats were done with elections. He said they no longer “believe they should have to persuade anybody to agree with them. … [T]here’s no question that they resent the electoral process.”
What was happening at the time Limbaugh made these remarks? Well, rather than aiming to win voters’ hearts and minds, then-candidate Joe Biden’s handlers were trying desperately to limit his public exposure lest Americans see they were about to elect a man who was in the early stages of dementia.
We know from the “Twitter Files” that the FBI had scuttled an investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop which they’d obtained the previous December. The FBI was working frantically behind the scenes with Big Tech executives to get ahead of the blockbuster story they knew the New York Post was about to drop.
Additionally, Democratic operatives throughout the country were busy trying to skirt election laws enacted by state legislatures to increase mail-in voting. Moreover, Pfizer and BioNTech were waiting to announce that their COVID-19 vaccine had shown success in Phase 3 studies and would be available to the public the following month.
Democrats no longer even try to win on the issues. Instead, they put their efforts into creating conditions which will maximize their chances of victory. The disgraceful indictment of former President Donald Trump, they expect, will guarantee he wins the GOP nomination. They are convinced that Biden will prevail in a 2024 rematch. The indictment has the added benefit of taking the focus off the House Republicans’ investigation of the Biden family’s alleged foreign influence peddling scheme and even lesser issues such as calls for the public release of the “manifesto” written by the transgender murderer who gunned down six people at The Covenant School in Nashville this week.
I wish Limbaugh were alive today to weigh in on the Biden administration’s massive power grab.
They resent the whole premise behind elections. … Therefore, they don’t believe in campaigns. They don’t believe in the free, open exchange of ideas.
…
They don’t believe in giving legitimacy to anybody who is not already on their side. So if this is who they are psychologically — if they have no interest in persuading people, if they have no interest in acquiring power as a result of massive public support — then who are they? …
They don’t want it to derive from persuading people that their ideas are the best — and where is all of that codified? All of that thinking, all of that behavior is codified in elections. What are elections about? …
[E]lections are the result of persuading millions of people to support you. They resent having to do that.
They can’t persuade a majority of Americans to support Black Lives Matter. They can’t persuade a majority of Americans to support burning down American cities and private property. They can’t persuade a majority of Americans to go along with their ideas on guns and eliminating free speech. They can’t persuade anybody to agree with that!
Those are things they’re gonna have to force on people, and they are more than willing and eager to force that stuff on you, but they need the power to do it. So they have to go through the motions. …
But they resent the hell out of it. And in their world, it’s the one thing standing in their way: This need, this requirement to win elections. And I’m just telling you: As soon as they can figure out a way to eliminate elections, they will do it, ’cause they resent the hell out of it. …
They are attempting to win elections without broad public support. That’s what they’re trying to do. That’s just another way of phrasing what they’re doing. How do you win elections without broad public support?
You have to cheat. You have to game the system. Most people who consider themselves Americans and practitioners of small-D democracy, believe in the sanctity of elections. They believe in the sanctity of campaigning and convincing a majority of Americans to support them.
That’s where you get your mandate. That’s where you get the power to implement your ideas. And the more people voting for you, the more power you have, the bigger mandate you got. These people resent having to get a mandate. Why should they have to get public approval? Screw these idiots. …
That’s who these people are, and they’re so ticked off they’re burning down your town; they’re burning down your city. They resent the hell out of having to please you. They resent the hell needing your support. They hate it. They’re not interested in your support. They’re not interested in what you think. They’re not interested in your point of view. They don’t care to have to find out who you are and how to persuade you. And they resent the hell out of the fact they have to do it.
…
It’s all about knowing who anybody is. And how do I know? I listen to them. I watch ’em. It’s abundantly clear. They do not like America. It’s beneath them. They do not like the democratic process. They resent it. It’s beneath them. Their ideas, such as they are, are all that matter. And if you don’t agree with them, too bad. You can’t stop ’em. You’re nobody.
AManhattan grand jury has indicted former President Donald Trump, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office confirmed following late-Thursday media leaks. While the indictment remains under seal, one thing seems certain: America has now entered the era of “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” politics.
The Democrat district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, breathed new life into the infamous boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, when the Manhattan prosecutor targeted the former president in connection to a 2016 payment made to Stormy Daniels. Bragg’s decision to push for an indictment against Trump, presumably for falsifying business records, promises to herald in a new political age — one in which local prosecutors will target partisan enemies, big and small, making a mockery of the criminal justice system in the process.
The fact that news of the charges leaked to the left’s favorite scribes at The New York Times, while the indictment remained still under seal, punctuates perfectly the Sovietesque times in which we live: The legacy media may not be state-run, but they peddle propaganda nonetheless.
Guesswork
Until the indictment is unsealed, any discussion of the charges requires some guesswork, and with sources late Thursday reportedly telling CNN the grand jury charged Trump with more than 30 counts, the prognostication is much more difficult. But from earlier reports, it appears the D.A.’s criminal case against Trump revolves around Sections 175.05 and 175.10 of the New York penal code.
Both sections define the state crime of “falsifying business records,” with Section 175.05 providing “a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with the intent to defraud, he makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” Section 175.10 converts the “second degree” misdemeanor to a felony if the person falsified business records with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
The factual theory for charging the former president with falsifying business records seems to rest on “Trump allegedly causing the Trump Organization to falsely report payments made to Michael Cohen in 2017 as ‘legal expenses,’ when the money instead reimbursed (and then some) Cohen for the $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep the porn star from publicly claiming she had sex a decade earlier.” The Trump Organization then reportedly paid Cohen $35,000 a month for “legal services” in 2017, while Cohen never provided any legal work for the business.
Legal pundits believe the indictment will ratchet up the alleged falsifying of “legal expenses” offense to a felony by charging Trump with lying about the payments to Cohen to conceal a violation of federal election law. Cohen has already admitted to paying off Daniels to advance Trump’s electoral chances, and he appears poised to be a star witness against Trump. Another possibility, however, is that the Manhattan D.A.’s indictment accuses Trump of falsifying the organization’s “legal expenses” to aid in tax fraud.
The U.S. attorney has already declined to charge Trump with federal election law violations, making any attempt by Bragg to tie the federal offense to the state charge of falsifying business records reek of political payback.
Bragg’s expected use of Trump’s physical absence from New York — ironically because he was serving as commander-in-chief in D.C. — to sidestep the five-year statute of limitations that applies to a felony of falsifying business records, will also add to the stench of the case. And a public that watched Trump hounded since he first announced his candidacy for president isn’t likely to focus on the legal technicalities of the statute of limitations. Rather, the average American will consider the delayed charging of Trump to be a desperate ploy to concoct a crime.
Trump himself was quick to advance this theory, opening his press release by calling the indictment “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history.” “From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower,” the former president continued, the “Radical Left Democrats … have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement.”
“You remember it just like I do,” Trump stressed, ticking off the attacks: “Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.”
30-Count Craziness
Trump will reportedly appear in a Manhattan court on Tuesday for his arraignment. Whether the indictment is unsealed before then is unknown. But the leaks continue, including, as noted above, news that the grand jury reportedly charged Trump with more than 30 criminal counts.
Unless Bragg has uncovered something much beyond the details already reported about the Daniels payment, the Manhattan prosecutor will have only made matters worse by pushing for an indictment of the former president on more than 30 criminal counts. Given the lack of leaks about anything new, the most likely scenario is that the grand jury got to 30-plus counts by charging Trump with separate counts for each of the monthly payments made to Cohen in 2017. Then, the grand jury could add additional counts for each month Trump allegedly made the payment to “aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
With this approach, it isn’t hard to see how easily the grand jury could convert one hush-money payment into some 30 crimes. And while the left and the Never Trump right might see a lengthy indictment as further proof of Trump’s malfeasance, if the indictment contains no new details, the piling on to reach the reported 33 counts against the former president doesn’t make Trump look more guilty — it makes Bragg look more like Beria.
UPDATE: Members of a group of Chinese Christian dissidents detained in Thailand were forced to pay fines for overstaying their visas on Friday, but their legal status remains uncertain amid deep concerns they will be forced to return to China to undoubtedly face imprisonment and torture.
Influential members of Congress and top human rights advocates in Washington are urging the Biden administration to take immediate action to ensure the safety of a group of Chinese Christian dissidents and two Americans detained by Thai authorities Thursday.
The group of refugees, including 35 children and 28 adults, fled China in 2019 to escape persecution. They initially sought refuge in South Korea and then Thailand while seeking emergency asylum in the United States. But the U.S. State Department and Department of Homeland Security have declined to grant the church members emergency asylum, as it has done for many others, including tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing their war-ravaged countries, and the first group of Afghans airlifted into the United States amid the chaotic U.S. evacuation in August 2021.
For months, human rights and religious freedom advocates have warned the State Department that Thai authorities have a history of working with the Chinese government to draw Chinese nationals out of hiding, arrest them, and send them back to their homeland, where they face imprisonment, torture, or worse.
Now the very scenario they warned about has taken place: On Thursday, Thai police raided the residence where the 63 refugees were staying and two Americans were visiting, arrested the group, fingerprinted them, and detained them in a holding facility.
The Chinese nationals face a deportation hearing Friday and could be sent back to China in a matter of days. Two American women from Tyler, Texas, Deana Brown and Stacy Nichols, are also being held, although it’s unclear whether they face charges. Brown is the founder and CEO of Freedom Seekers International, a nonprofit that helps Christians persecuted overseas to resettle in the United States.
Rep. Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urged swift action by the Biden administration to help protect the group of Christian dissidents. The group of 63 are members of the Shenzhen Holy Reform Church, a Protestant Christian denomination founded in 2012 on the Chinese mainland bordering Hong Kong.
For several years, the Shenzhen Holy Reform Church existed relatively peacefully but faced increasing surveillance and intimidation tactics under President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on all religious organizations that don’t agree to state church registrations and the government’s heavy-handed rules. The church’s pastor, Pan Yongguang, was ordained by the Philadelphia Bible Reformed Church of the Presbyterian Church in America, the second-largest Presbyterian denomination in the U.S.
Most of the church members decided to flee China after state police quashed widespread protests in nearby Hong Kong amid Beijing’s tighter city control. The exiled Chinese Christian group is referred to by some advocates as the “Mayflower Church,” inspired by the Pilgrims who left their homeland for the New World four centuries ago.
“Religious freedom, and its protection abroad, are core tenets of America’s constitutional tradition,” McCaul told RealClearPolitics in a statement. “I strongly urge the administration to ensure the safety of those connected to the Mayflower Church who are threatened by the [Chinese Communist Party].”
A spokesman for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said the senator has been closely tracking the crisis throughout the day. “It would be catastrophic and indefensible for Thai authorities to deliver these dissidents to the Chinese Communist Party,” the spokesman said. “They should be released immediately.”
The bipartisan U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom on Thursday expressed grave concern over the developing crisis and pressed the State Department to move quickly to help safeguard the group.
“USCIRF is deeply concerned by the detention of the 63 Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church, or Mayflower Church, members in Thailand,” said USCIRF Chairman Nury Turkel, whom then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed. “They are at imminent risk of deportation to China where they will suffer severe consequences, including imprisonment and torture.”
USCIRF Vice Chairman Abraham Cooper, whom Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appointed, said the Chinese government has a long history of engaging in “transnational repression activities” by abducting Chinese dissidents from Thailand.
“We urge the U.S. government to use all feasible tools at its disposal to ensure Mayflower Church members’ safety,” he said.
Advocates described various ways the U.S. could come to the group’s aid. Thai authorities could agree to allow the group to seek immediate asylum at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok. The State Department and DHS could then grant the group humanitarian parole, giving them temporary legal status to resettle in the United States. U.S. officials could also negotiate temporary asylum for the group in a third country to allow for the more lengthy and extensive U.S. processing time.
Former Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf, a USCIRF commissioner and longtime champion of religious freedom during his three decades in Congress, called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to intervene directly and call his counterpart in the Thai government.
“If Secretary Blinken made the call, this would all be resolved,” Wolf told RCP in an interview. “A five-minute telephone call to the Thai government and then him sending a message to the American embassy in Thailand to give these decent people a visa and let them get on a plane to Texas.”
“This is not unusual,” Wolf added. “Secretaries of state do this all the time.”
Wolf also pointed to the timing of the crisis coinciding with reports this week that a growing number of Chinese immigrants are crossing illegally into the United States this year. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that, in the past five months, at least 4,300 Chinese undocumented migrants had been apprehended crossing the southern border, more than double the number for all of the previous year.
Bob Fu, a Chinese American pastor who founded ChinaAid, an organization providing legal services to Chinese Christians, has spent years helping the Mayflower Church members gain sponsors to underwrite all their expenses during their immigration legal limbo in South Korea and Thailand. The same sponsors have agreed to bankroll their resettlement if and when they are allowed into the United States
Back in January, Fu told RCP that the group could have tried to enter the U.S. illegally through the border but wanted to respect U.S. immigration law and abide by the legal process.
If Thai authorities order their deportation back to China, it’s tantamount to a death sentence, said Fu.
“That’s the worst-case scenario. We can safely conclude they will all end up in prison and tortured because they are already being called traitors in violation of Chinese national security law.”
The CCP is already waging a transnational intimidation campaign by contacting family members of the group who remain in China to accuse them of treason and subversion of state power, Fu said. And, he warned, several developments leading up to the Thai police raid on the group’s residence suggest the CCP is involved.
Over the last week and a half, the church members confronted one man in their group who admitted that he had been speaking with Chinese authorities. The alleged spy then sought other housing and was seen being forcibly removed by Thai authorities, Fu said.
“He confessed [to other church members] that he had been in communication with Chinese state security,” Fu said of the alleged spy living among the group. “We don’t know where he’s being held now or whether he’s already back in China.”
Fu said he has been in direct contact with U.S. embassy officials in Bangkok, who are working hard to find a solution to avert the group’s forced deportation to China. He also praised the efforts of Rashad Hussain, Biden’s ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom, over the last several months to try to help the church members gain entry into the United States.
Yet, he described a “sort of stonewalling” in some U.S. agencies and bureaus who have claimed over the last several months that the group of Christian dissidents was “not facing an imminent threat.”
“They said they’re not in danger,” he said. “I think that mentality really hurt and jeopardized the lives and safety of these 63 members.”
In January, a State Department spokesperson told RCP that the agency does not comment on individual refugee cases and directed questions about humanitarian parole and asylum decisions to DHS. The agency did not immediately respond to a Thursday inquiry about the Thai detention of the church members and two Americans.
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ White House/national political correspondent.
It is hard to single out the most egregious demagogue in the U.S. Senate, but near or at the top of my list is Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. He likes to blast “dark money” even though Democrats by far receive more so-called “dark money” than conservatives or Republicans. (I’m updating my periodic Lexicon of Political Terms accordingly, to reflect that “dark money” means “donations from the private sector that supports ideas or causes the left doesn’t like.”) Whitehouse in particular likes to attack the Federalist Society as some kind of “cabal” or conspiracy to transform the federal judiciary, as if there were no issues whatsover that any decent person could possibly argue over. He never deigns to argue about anything. If it were up to Whitehouse, I suspect he’d censor or outlaw the Federalist Society. Fortunately he’s just another Senate blowhard.
Ditto for climate change. Earlier this week Whitehouse chaired a Senate committee hearing on the subject “Left Holding the Bag: The Cost of Oil Dependence in a Low-Carbon World.” It was a set up to denounced fossil fuels, of course, with the witness lineup tilted four to one in favor of the climatista party line. The dissenting Republican witness was our pal Ben Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute, who has actually appeared here on Power Line under the pseudonym “Comrade Molotov.”
You can read his complete prepared testimony to the committee here, but here are a few short highlights:
The “Low-Carbon World” assertion explicit in the title of this hearing assumes a structural economic shift away from conventional energy — fossil fuels — that is virtually certain not to be observed. Because fossil fuels are overwhelmingly the most efficient forms of energy available now or prospectively, market forces will not engender a massive shift away from them toward such unconventional forms of energy as wind and solar power. Such unconventional energy technologies are uncompetitive because they are far more costly and far less reliable than conventional energy. That is why they cannot survive a competitive market test, and it is only large subsidies, both direct and indirect, and other policy-driven subventions that allow them to survive. . .
The IPCC in a recent report argues that achievement of the purported 1.5°C “safe” limit on global temperature increases would require implicit taxes equivalent to over $35 per gallon of gasoline by 2030, in constant year 2022 dollars, and rising sharply thereafter. Congress will never enact such policies. . .
There is no evidence of a climate “crisis” in terms of temperature trends, polar sea ice, tornadoes, tropical cyclones, wildfires, drought, flooding, or ocean alkalinity. The IPCC is deeply dubious about the various severe effects often asserted as prospective impacts of increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG. Moreover, NASA reports significant planetary greening as a result of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, and data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization show that global per capita food production increased 46 percent between 1961 and 2020, and 20 percent for 2000-2020.
The “crisis” narrative is derived wholly from climate models that cannot predict the actual temperature record.
The whole thing is a tour de force. Naturally this didn’t go down well with Sen. Whitehouse, who decided to attempt his best imitation of the late Joe McCarthy. Here’s his cross-examination of Ben (“Mr. Zychel,” he calls him), where, note, he barely bothers to inquire about the substance of the issue at all, but attempts to sully Ben for having once—30 years ago—taken a tiny indirect fee from a tobacco interest (less than $1000) for a paper about the efficiency of tobacco taxes, and for dissenting from the cliches of the party line about the “climate crisis,” rather than talk about the actual subject of the hearing. I doubt Whitehouse is used to being talked back to as directly as this (12 min. long):
But this wasn’t enough for Sen. Whitehouse. He came back at Ben again at the close of the hearing, with a complaint about the Citizens United case that is so bizarre and incorrect that one wonders just how dumb Whitehouse is. (First, Citizens United had and has no effect on donations to nonprofit organizations like AEI; second, as far as money goes, the climate campaign dwarfs—by an order of magnitude at least—the funding level of any climate dissenting organizations. Maybe Whitehouse ought to have a hearing about why those organization spend their lavish funds so badly.)
Let’s just say Sen. John Kennedy he ain’t.
Takeaways: you know the old saying—if you’re taking flak, you know you’re over the target. The ad hominem attacks on Ben suggests that his testimony totally blew out the props from the whole green energy whim wham, and if you watch the whole hearing you can see the other witnesses tacitly note this here and there. If you are a glutton, you can watch the entire 90 minute hearing here.
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