Category: Political Commentary
The Elephant in the Room: The Other America Roars Back

The Elephant in the Room: The Other America Roars Back

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If you had any doubt that there really are two Americas, that doubt would have been shattered had you, like me, watched both the Democratic National Convention last week and the Republican National Convention this week. In stark contrast to the Dems’ dark and dystopian view of America, the GOP’s vision of the country was one of hope, progress, and unity. And while the DNC chose to present their view largely through a format of endless small video screens, much like a Zoom infomercial, reflecting the fear they would like to keep the country living in, the RNC chose a live, open, and dynamic format that, while different from a traditional convention, at least conveyed vivacity and unabashed spirit.

Honestly, as I said in my piece last week, I was expecting another largely virtual convention. That expectation went by the wayside from the very opening of the proceedings and was quickly forgotten. Dubbed “Land of Greatness” by the GOP, this was clearly, and refreshingly, an event with real people speaking to the country in real life, not a bunch of talking heads on screens and, in too many cases, in pre-recorded videos and speeches. Also refreshingly absent were the Hollywood elites that the Dems had chosen to emcee their convention.

It has been reported that President Trump used some of The Apprentice’s producers to help plan the RNC convention, and their influence and talent was clearly evident. Heretofore we were led to believe that the Democratic Party had the edge on using technology to its advantage, but if that was true in past years it’s no longer the case. And as the RNC convention demonstrated, technology or no technology, there is no substitute for people speaking directly and unfiltered to the audience.

From the opening speeches of the first night through the finale of Trump’s acceptance speech to a gathering of between 1,000 and 2,000 people on the South Lawn of the White House, followed by one of the most amazing fireworks displays over the National Mall that I’ve ever seen and a rousing operatic set by tenor Christopher Macchio, this convention walked all over the Dems’ Zoom display with big elephant feet. And while the Dems studiously avoided even one word of mention of the other elephants in the country, the months of violence and civil unrest rocking cities all across the nation, or how China was allowed to bleed away millions of American jobs, the Republicans took them head-on, portraying Democratic complicity in permitting both and how the country could look forward to more of the same were Joe Biden elected in November. Perhaps more even than the convention’s production values, this message may have resonated with voters. But we’ll get to that.

No More (Just) Mr. White Guy

Another myth dispelled throughout the most recent four nights is that the Republican Party is a party of old white men. While the Dems tried to make us believe that the country consists almost entirely of blacks and Hispanics, the Republicans demonstrated that people of all different backgrounds – white, black, Hispanic, Native American, men, women, old, young, natural born, and immigrant – can and do find a home in the GOP and, in case after case, to rise to positions of great authority within the party and the country. It was a direct refutation of the identity politics the Dems rely on and showed that people of drive and talent are welcomed and can thrive within the Republican Party based not on the color of their skin, but rather – in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., frequently cited during the convention – the quality of their character.

Some of the people of color, both luminaries and the largely unheralded, who spoke during the convention, all of whom had nothing but words of praise for the President, include:

  • Legendary NFL star Herschel Walker
  • South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott
  • Candidate for Congress from Baltimore Kim Klacik
  • Maximo Alvarez, Cuban exile and founder of Sunshine Gasoline
  • Former South Carolina Governor and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley
  • Democratic Georgia state legislator Vernon Jones
  • Norma Urrabazo, pastor and executive at the National Latina/Latino Commission
  • Myron Lizer, vice president of the Navajo Nation
  • Jon Ponder, former inmate and founder of HOPE for Prisoners, Inc.
  • Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez
  • Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron
  • Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng
  • Burgess Owens, former NFL player and candidate for Congress from Utah
  • Civil rights activist Clarence Henderson
  • White House advisor Ja’Ron Smith
  • Marine Corps veteran Stacia Brightmom
  • Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes
  • Ann Dorn, widow of former police captain David Dorn, killed in St. Louis looting
  • HUD Secretary Ben Carson
  • Alice Johnson, former inmate whose sentence was commuted by President Trump

A recurrent theme was how the media portrayal of Trump as a racist and misogynist was false. Herschel Walker, speaking on the opening night, perhaps said it best.

“It hurt my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald. The worst one is racist. I take it out as a personal insult that people would think I’ve had a 37-year friendship with a racist. People who think that don’t know what they’re talking about,” Walker said. “Growing up in the deep South, I’ve seen racism up close. I know what it is and it isn’t Donald Trump. Just because someone loves and respect the flag, our national anthem, and our country doesn’t mean they don’t care about social justice. I care about all of those things. So does Donald Trump. He shows how much he cares about social justice in the black community through his actions and his actions speaks louder than stickers or slogans on a jersey.”

Walker’s sentiments were echoed by Jon Ponder, a convicted bank robber released early from prison and who went on to found HOPE for Prisoners, Inc., an organization that helps former convicts get a new start in life. In one of several moments in which Trump himself appeared, the President signed a full pardon for Ponder right on camera. Looking on approvingly was Richard Beasley, the former FBI agent who had arrested Ponder and with whom he is now friends.

On the last night, Alice Marie Johnson, another former prisoner whose sentence had been commuted by the President after she spent more than two decades behind bars for a non-violent drug conviction that was her first offense, gave a moving presentation. She related how she had been sentenced to life in prison without parole, a product of the crime bill that Joe Biden had helped get passed in the 1990s.

“I was once told that the only way I would be reunited with my family would be as a corpse,” Johnson said. “But through the grace of God and the love and compassion of President Donald John Trump, I stand before you tonight and I assure you, I am not a ghost. I am alive, I am whole and most importantly, I am free.”

Going one step further, the day after the convention Trump gave Johnson a full pardon.

Other speakers who gave moving and powerful accounts of their encounters with the President and how he supported them were Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, Meadow, was murdered in the Parkland high school massacre; Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington, Kentucky, teen who was ridiculed by the media mob simply for wearing a MAGA hat; pro-life advocate and former Planned Parenthood employee Abby Johnson; and Carl and Marsha Mueller, whose daughter, Kayla, was held captive, tortured, raped, and murdered by ISIS.

The Big Media Lie

If you had any doubt about the source for creating and maintaining the two separate Americas, the mass media quickly wiped out any question you might have had about that. Because I didn’t want the interruptions with talking heads that marked coverage of the DNC convention on Fox News, I watched all four nights of it on MSNBC, which normally I’ll avoid like the plague. On MSNBC, I was able to see the entire DNC convention uninterrupted. But that wasn’t to be the case for the RNC convention. Early on the first night, as Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who had defended their home and lives from a mob of Black Lives Matter protestors only to be charged with gun violations by the same prosecutor who refused to charge any of the looters or rioters in her jurisdiction, were telling their story, MSNBC cut in so Rachel Maddow could “explain the lies” told by the McCloskeys. Now wait a minute. I don’t need a despicable character and congenital liar like Rachel Maddow explaining anything to me, nor do I need the likes of former Missouri Senator and Democratic hack Claire McCaskell, called out of the hangar of washed-up politicians by Maddow, or the racist Don Lemon or the general idiot Chris Cuomo on CNN, telling me about what the McCloskeys actually experienced. I’ve seen it first-hand and to me it’s clear who the liars are, and it’s not the McCloskeys.

Despite the biggest and most shameless lies told during the DNC convention, never once did Maddow or the others on the leftist networks interrupt it or “explain” any of those lies. But they did it repeatedly during the Republican convention. While Fox News was still doing its talking heads thing, I searched for a source where I could watch the RNC convention without it being filtered through interpretations or distortions of either side of the political spectrum. And I found it on C-Span, where I was able to watch the rest of the convention in its entirety without interruption.

I am sure I was not alone in this. While overall viewership ratings were down slightly for the RNC versus the DNC (as it was in 2016, too), it was off markedly for MSNBC and CNN. Meanwhile, Fox News, during Sean Hannity’s segment, scored record viewership for any convention coverage ever – more than 7 million viewers on the first night, compared with 2 million on CNN and less than 1.6 million on MSNBC, and 8 million on the second night. But the real gainer was C-Span, where viewership for the RNC convention was a rocking six times that for the DNC convention. On the first night of the RNC, 440,000 viewers, myself among them, tuned in on C-Span, versus just 76,000 for the DNC in the equivalent time slot, and this pattern continued through the week. The DNC performance on social media, according to Nielson Media Research, was no better. I think this was an indictment of the kind of distorted coverage provided by the other networks, especially the ones on the left.

To me, it is encouraging that so many Americans still want to get their news unfiltered and can see through the lies told them by the likes of CNN and MSNBC. Allowed to do so, it’s clear that views can begin to change. The post-convention show on C-Span took calls from viewers all over the country, with separate call-in numbers for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. It was no surprise that almost all the callers on the Republican line supported Trump. What was a surprise was how almost all the callers on the Democratic line said they were changing their support to Trump and, in some cases, changing their party affiliation to Republican after being life-long Democrats. Most of those on the Independent line also said they’d vote for Trump in November. Again, this pattern continued through the convention.

Probably the issue that was most cited by those shifting their support to Trump was the violence afflicting the country and the belief that the Dems were either unable or unwilling to do anything about it. It didn’t hurt that the worst of the unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was going on during the convention, and people were fed up watching American cities being destroyed by mindless violence. Apparently this message started to get through to the Dem leadership, and even to the talking heads of CNN and MSNBC.

After nearly three months trying to convince viewers that all that was going on was “peaceful protesting,” Cuomo came out Tuesday, the second night of the RNC convention, and called anti-police rioting “a Rorschach test for where this country is,” adding, “I think it probably represents the biggest threat to the Democratic cause.” And then Lemon, who previously had gone so far as to defend the rioting as a “mechanism for a restructure of our country or for some sort of change,” agreed with Cuomo’s Rorschach reference. And then he went on to reveal the real crux of the matter in his eyes: “The rioting has to stop. Chris, as you know and I know, it’s showing up in the polling. It’s showing up in focus groups. It is the only thing – it is the only thing right now that is sticking.”

So it’s not the loss of property, the loss of life, the destruction of livelihoods, the tearing down and burning of whole segments of American cities that is the problem. It’s that the poll numbers for Biden and “the Democratic cause” are going down. Got it?

Do you still doubt the key role the media play in creating and fostering the divisions the country is suffering through? The bigger question is, how can democracy even survive such bias and untruths?

Melania

Melania Trump, the largely unheralded First Lady, deserves a section of this posting all by herself. While all the adult Trump children – Donald Jr., Tiffany, Eric, and Ivanka – had speaking rolls during the convention, First Lady Melania’s presentation at the end of the second night was perhaps the most remarkable from a family member.

You didn’t have to wonder whether she used to be a model. That was apparent seeing the grace with which she carried herself coming down the long White House arcade to the podium. We get to see so little of this First Lady that it’s remarkable observing her beauty and composure, not to mention her striking wardrobe (it doesn’t hurt being married to a billionaire, but one can certainly see the attraction she held, and apparently still does, for the President).

Melania must be the most classicly feminine and cultured First Lady the country has had since Jacqueline Kennedy. Were Trump a Democrat and not a Republican, the media would be fawning all over her like a 15-year-old boy in heat, but instead she’s almost shut out, when not being actively derided. Part of that is probably the result of her own reticence to be the center of attention – we remember how at the beginning of the President’s term she preferred to stay in New York with son Barron – but the rest is pure prejudice.

It was striking to hear a First Lady speak with an accent. To me, it signified how open and welcoming this country is, to not only elect a black man to the country’s highest office, but now to have a foreign-born First Lady. And once she started speaking, it was clear the audience of about 100 people gathered in the Rose Garden, which she recently had renovated after many years without an updating, loved her. She seemed to have some difficulty with the teleprompters, holding her head in one direction or the other for a bit longer than seemed natural, but she spoke with confidence and expressed herself with a clarity that belied the fact that English is not her native language. If only Joe Biden could be as coherent.

The First Lady spoke of her immigrant roots.

“Growing up as a young child in Slovenia, which was under Communist rule at the time, I always heard about an amazing place called America, a place that stands for freedom and opportunity,” she said. “As an immigrant and a very independent woman, I understand what a privilege it is to live here and to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities that we have.”

Melania acknowledged the pain caused by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, saying, “”My deepest sympathy goes out to everyone who has lost a loved one, and my prayers are with those who are ill or suffering.” She also spoke of her work addressing the opioid epidemic, and her work with children both here and in Africa. She spoke to the mothers of the country about her “Be Best” campaign to encourage more civility in online discourse and the concerns they share about the use of social media by their children. And she addressed how her husband’s approach did not please everyone, but – garnering a laugh from the audience – she said, “Whether you like it or not, you always know what he’s thinking.”

Melania also addressed the issues of racial justice confronting the country, and described how she saw the legacy of the slave trade first-hand upon arriving in Ghana.

“It is a harsh reality that we are not proud of parts of our history,” she said, but went on to urge an end to the unrest, saying, “Stop the violence and looting being done in the name of justice.”

It occurred to me that Trump and his re-election campaign would be advised to make greater use of Melania, getting her out front-and-center to help influence hearts and minds. But, of course, most in the media had nothing good to say about her speech, and then another washed-up member of the Hollywood elite, Bette Midler, tweeted, “#beBest is back! A UGE bore! She can speak several words in a few languages. Get that illegal alien off the stage!”

If that wasn’t bad enough, she went on to tweet, “Oh God. She still can’t speak English.”

Well, Miss M – the M surely stands for Moron – how good is your Slovenian? What ignorance. But there must still be some decency left in this country because there was an outpouring of tweets accusing Midler of xenophobia and racism, which of course were appropriate words to categorize the venom contained in her mindless tweets.

The Dems Have Nothing to Say

It seems all the Dems have to offer in response are the kinds of gripes one has come to expect from them. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech, given from Jerusalem where he is on a trip promoting relations in the region, was criticized as a Hatch Act violation. Never mind the substance of what he said, or the demonstrable positive influence he and this Administration has had in the Middle East, in stark contrast to the mess Trump’s and Pompeo’s predecessors helped create.

Further criticisms were offered of Trump’s pardon of Jon Ponder or his overseeing of a naturalization ceremony for five new American citizens. Not to mention – horror of horrors! – his use of the White House and the South Lawn for his acceptance speech and the closing festivities. Never mind that Obama, in eight years, couldn’t manage to achieve criminal justice reform, which Trump has, or deported more people from the country than has Trump.

And of course, the other big criticism: People at the White House events weren’t wearing masks or social distancing. That’s the best they can do. Now remember, their candidate has said he’d shut the country down and require everyone to wear masks, so why would we be surprised? Never mind that the scientific evidence is, at best, mixed whether masks offer any real benefit, and no criticism has been made of rioters not wearing masks. But anything to divide us, and any criticism of Republicans is fair, right?

Note also that the Republican Party paid for the fireworks and other features of the closing ceremonies and no tax dollars were expended on them, but that won’t be enough to stop Nancy Pelosi and her gang from mounting one more expensive and pointless investigation.

But you know what? The Dems have squandered so much of the taxpayers’ money, the nation’s reputation, and our patience, I really don’t give a damn whether Pompeo broke the Hatch Act or whether it was technically proper or not that Trump used the White House as a backdrop during the convention. If the President can stir a bit of patriotic feeling and even a bit of excitement in his activities, I say go at it. The only marvel to me is that he has survived four years of the relentless and feckless and, at base, illegal and treasonous attacks mounted by the Dems and the dogs in their partisan media.

While Biden supporters all breathed a big sigh of relief at the end of their convention that their candidate managed to get through 25 minutes reading off a teleprompter and was greeted by flashing headlights in a Wilmington parking lot, Trump went almost three times as long, 70 minutes, in his acceptance speech, and no one doubted that he could. And then, as Uncle Joe cowered in his basement, Trump was off the next day for a campaign rally in New Hampshire.

But it wasn’t acceptable to the nihilists that one of the two major parties could hold its convention unmolested. After the final refrains from Macchio and the applause had died down, those attending the closing ceremonies at the White House were greeted by taunts, assaults, and death threats from the violent leftists, anarchists, and general morons and useful idiots gathered in the streets outside the White House grounds.

Among those attacked and threatened by the violent mobs were Sen. Rand Paul and his wife, Kelley. Beset by about 100 Black Lives Matter activists – some of which Paul said appeared to have been brought in from outside the area – Paul credited the D.C. police with possibly saving his and his wife’s life.

“I truly believe this with every fiber of my being,” Rand said, “had they gotten at us they would have gotten us to the ground, we might not have been killed, might just have been injured by being kicked in the head, or kicked in the stomach until we were senseless.”

The couple finally had to seek protection from the security detail assigned to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to escape the mob. Needless to say, there have been no denunciations of this mob violence on White House guests by Biden or any other Democrat.

This is what the country has come to, and why after two weeks of political blather I am slightly more hopeful that Donald Trump will be re-elected in November and we at least will have a chance, as slim as it might be, of being spared from the abyss.

Featured Image: GOP Elephant and Flag, from latinovations.com, used under Fair Use
Melania Trump: Brendan Smialowski, AFP-Getty Images, used under Fair Use
When Up Is Down and Down Is Up: The DNC Infomercial

When Up Is Down and Down Is Up: The DNC Infomercial

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If, like me, you were one of the half dozen people suffering through the four-day infomercial otherwise known as the Democratic National Convention, you may have gotten a view of an America you don’t recognize. One in which up is down and down is up.

Okay, okay. There were more than a half-dozen people watching this thing. But, relatively speaking, not many more. Network ratings for the convention were 40 – 50 percent below what they were in 2016, and overall viewership was off about 30 percent. In a year when a significant part of the population is confined to their home and with political divisions running at the highest level in our lifetime, one might have expected at least as many people to tune in as last time. But no.

To be fair, due to concerns about the coronavirus thing, this was a virtual convention, just as the Republican National Conventional, soon to follow, will be, and as such it lacked a lot of the pzazz and pageantry of live political conventions. But even given that constraint, one has to wonder who was behind putting this thing together, as contrived and staged as it was. Described by many as an extended infomercial, it verged into tedium and too often suffered from annoying, if minor, technical glitches, but mostly it just felt stiff and distant. All that is aside from the boundless balderdash and shameless deceits foisted on the audience by the various Dem sacred cows who paraded across the screen for four nights. But we’ll get to that.

Things started off inauspiciously the first night with an opening video featuring a series of scenes from cities around the country. That might have been okay, but what jumped off the screen was that almost all the shots were taken under overcast skies. Who, I wondered, had screened and greenlighted that video? What quickly became apparent, though, was that those gray skies were emblematic of the kind of vision of America that this party has and which would underpin much of what would follow that night and over the next nights of the convention. Not a bright and vibrant country, not a country of sunshine and blue skies, but a country moldering under grim and colorless clouds. It could have been Siberia in winter and not America in mid-summer.

The next thing that didn’t bode well was the appearance of actress Eva Longoria as emcee for the night. I had to check my TV listings to be sure this was the DNC convention and not the Academy Awards. Nope, it was the DNC convention, but the choice to use Hollywood celebrities underscores how much the Democratic Party has become the party of the elites. In this case, the Hollywood elites, some of the biggest financial backers of Dem candidates.

Longoria was more interesting as a Desperate Housewife than as emcee of a political convention. Her low-energy presentation didn’t generate much excitement, not for this viewer, anyway, as the evening wore on. And neither did the other celebrities who emceed over the next three nights. On the second night, it was Tracee Ellis Ross, who I confess I had to look up since I didn’t have a clue who she was. The third night had Kerry Washington, whom at least I’d vaguely heard of but couldn’t place where. The last night, the one I was watching as I wrote this, put Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld fame center stage. Dreyfus almost immediately distinguished herself by telling some sort of joke about Vice President Mike Pence that was as tasteless as it was senseless and unfunny. And it wasn’t the last tasteless and pointless joke of the night. Hey Julia, go back to being Elaine, and lose the stand-up.

The third thing that jumped out at the outset and which remained throughout the four nights was the racial make-up of the various people used for cameo appearances and coordinated applause on the dozens of video screens used to fill in the backdrop for the convention. I’m all for diversity, but looking at things through the eyes of the Dems, something like 80 to 90 percent of the American population is black, Hispanic, or Native American. That more than flips things on their head, given that about 13 percent of the population is black, 18 percent is Hispanic, and some small percent is Native American. And in the Dems’ world, there aren’t many Asians, who in fact make up about 6 percent of the population.

What wasn’t talked about

Before we discuss what was said at the convention, let’s talk about what wasn’t mentioned, not even a little, not even in passing: The violence, rioting, and crime that has been sweeping the country for nearly three months now. These things simply do not exist for the Dems, and somehow they think no one will notice their absence from the conversation (a favorite Dem word for talking about intractable issues).

It would be neither inaccurate nor an exaggeration to say that the coronavirus pandemic is the single best ally the Dems have. Fears of the virus are what led to cancellation of the live convention in Milwaukee. Given how the Democratic nomination process that led to the elevation of Joe Biden to the top spot was essentially hijacked by anonymous party power brokers, the riots going on in Portland and Seattle and other places would seem like boisterous frat parties compared to the violence that might have torn Milwaukee to shreds, in the mode of Chicago 1968, had the convention actually been held there.

The other thing the pandemic has done is to give Democratic governors the perfect excuse to close down their states, leading to massive economic disruption and helping to drive an economy, arguably the best in the country’s history pre-pandemic, into the ditch. The virus and the current economic downturn were often mentioned, ad nauseum, during the convention – albeit without much anchoring to facts – to the point that one could reasonably contend that Joe Biden has two running mates, the second one being the coronavirus.

What was talked about

Over the course of the four nights, some things became transparently clear, including that the Dems:

  • Are deathly afraid that low voter turn-out of party voters, especially on the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, will kill their chances in November
  • See slipping support among black and Hispanic voters as a mortal threat to electing Joe Biden as President
  • Realize how critical women voters are to winning in November
  • Don’t want you to know about the Faustian bargain party power brokers made to jury-rig Joe Biden at the head of the ticket in return for agreeing to the most radical left-wing programs espoused by Bernie and the so-called “progressive” (read “radical”) wing of the party
  • Think a bunch of weak-kneed has-been Republicans, dragged out to speak for a Dem candidacy, will move the needle with voters
  • Lack new ideas or programs a large segment of the electorate might get behind, but whatever is wrong with the country is all Donald Trump’s fault
  • Think if they tell big enough lies, which won’t be exposed or questioned by their lackeys in the liberal media, they can fool voters into voting for Dems in November

The irony is, they are probably onto something with most, if not all, of those points.

We heard over and over, especially on the fourth night, how people should text 30330 to work out their “voting plan,” whatever that is. We were told that so many times that no one could actually forget it, except of course Joe Biden, as he did at the end of the first Dem debate. And if anyone had any doubt about what voters the Dems were appealing to, that was dispelled by the overwhelming number of black and brown faces on all those video screens.

In a play for Bernie voters, old Bernie himself made the pitch for Joe Biden, but the programs and objectives outlined by him and the person who seconded Bernie’s nomination, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were in direct contradiction to the positions Biden staked out during the Dem debates. Notably invisible were the daytime workshops and caucuses where the most radical participants aired their plans and programs for what should happen after November.

No one wanted to talk about things like defunding the police, which most black voters don’t support, preferring to call it by some blather like “re-imagining the police,” even as Dem city councils and mayors around the country are already defunding and emasculating the police.

Biden, we were repeatedly told, had a plan for dealing with his second running mate, the coronvirus pandemic, but that plan sounded remarkably like what the Trump Administration has actually done and smacked of puffery more than substance. This as the candidate cowers in his Wilmington basement, kept on a short leash by his handlers. Meanwhile, demonstrating the very essence of ignorance with impudence, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo had nothing good to say about Trump, even after Trump had provided him with everything he had asked for and previously earned his praise as New York, under Cuomo’s oversight, rose to the top echelon of the world in mishandling the pandemic.

It was equally – what is the correct word? Amusing? Infuriating? Mind-boggling? – to hear Bill Clinton talk about bringing dignity to the Oval Office, or Barack Obama talk of scandal or being up to the job, or Michelle Obama (whose address had been prerecorded from the Obama’s $11.75 million estate on Martha’s Vineyard) talk about how much she loved America. Not unexpectedly, Hillary Clinton still can’t get over the fact that she lost to Donald Trump in 2016, nor was it a surprise that John Kerry would have the temerity to say that it is Trump and not himself and Obama and Biden who is soft on terrorism. Shameless is not just the name of a Showtime television series but can be applied to the top luminaries of the Democratic Party, given the breathtaking breadth and depth of their dishonesty and hypocrisy.

While no one wanted to talk about how Biden’s family profited from his position in generating enormous profits in China and Ukraine and other places, we heard how nice he was to train conductors and elevator operators, what a sweet guy he is, and how loyal he is to his family and friends. But none of that relates to how good or competent a president he would make, or his lackluster record stretching over 36 years in the Senate or eight years as Vice President, and least of all his current mental condition and ability to even serve in the world’s most demanding position. As reported by Politico, despite the words of praise Obama heaped on his former VP Wednesday night, the 44th president was slow to endorse Biden and told another Democrat, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

The real candidate

What the Dem power brokers would rather you not know is who their real candidate is, and that is their pick for Vice President, Biden’s first running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California. There is too much to say about the ploy they’re trying to pull in this piece, but even the most uncurious voter has to wonder about the pick of someone who was so unpopular in the primary contest that she dropped out of the race two months before the first caucus or primary election was held. Harris may have been unpopular to the full range of Dem voters, just as she has been a less-than-popular figure in her home state of California, but as the most liberal member of the Senate – designated by GovTrack.us as more liberal than self-proclaimed Socialist Bernie himself – she was an obvious choice for the far left power brokers of the party.

To put a term to it, Harris is what is called a stalking horse candidate. Biden may be at the head of the ticket, but once in office – if he makes it that far – and it becomes apparent he’s not up to governing, Harris will be the one who runs the show. While the party poobahs do their best to keep Biden sequestered in his Wilmington basement, it will be Harris out doing the campaigning and, if voters buy into the ploy, running the White House and the government after Jan. 20. If the Dems manage to keep control of the House and succeed in taking back the Senate, the way will be clear for imposing the most radical agenda on the country. That’s the plan, anyway.

Think me cynical if you wish, but more than ever before in U.S. history we have two empty vessels put forth by one party to be President and Vice President, and it is the party power brokers, the radical “progressives” pulling the strings, who will be in control should their plan succeed. Even a cursory look reveals how both Biden and Harris lack core values and change their positions on just about any issue quicker than Arturo Brachetti could change his clothes. They are the perfect vehicles for a takeover of American politics such as the country has never previously seen.

If you were impressed by the four nights of the DNC’s infomercial, just wait for the four years, and beyond, they have in store for you.

Featured Image: Alex Martinez, Unsplash. Used with permission.
When They Come for Your Eyeglasses: Cultural Revolution in America

When They Come for Your Eyeglasses: Cultural Revolution in America

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If you know anything about the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in Cambodia in the 1970s, you understand the reference in the title of this posting. People who wore eyeglasses were deemed to be bourgeois and therefore needed to be killed. So did anyone who had an education. Or spoke another language. Or owned a car. Or lived in a city. Or existed at all. A word that has stayed with me for decades, reading the words of one survivor, speaking of what became of all his family members in the killing fields of Cambodia, was the Khmer word slap.

“Slap. Slap. Slap.”

“Dead. Dead. Dead.”

What happened in Cambodia, where estimates put the number of those murdered by the Khmer Rouge, or who died of starvation, disease, or exhaustion in the rural work camps to which they were exiled, at anywhere from 1 million to 3 million – no one really knows, though generally 2 million is the accepted number – is sadly not the exception to what happens when cultural revolutions reach their logical conclusion. No matter what their original motivations or justifications, they almost universally end in the wholesale slaughter of anyone not deemed sufficiently ideologically pure to those who wind up as the self-appointed leaders of the revolution.

Mobs of the French Revolution. Source unknown.

There were the tens of thousands who lost their heads to the Jacobins’ guillotines, or otherwise died, in the Reign of Terror – that one gets capitalized – of the French Revolution. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, which sound like pretty good things to aim for, turned into repression, imprisonment, and death for many, both those on the wrong side of the cultural and political divide and just ordinary innocents who got in the way of the murderous tide.

Dead in the streets during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Source unknown.

The Red Terror of the Bolshevik Revolution executed somewhere north of a quarter million people, but by the time the Russian Civil War had run its course the dead totaled at least 1.5 million, not counting the 3 million people who died of typhus just in the chaos of 1920 alone or the tens of millions who died in subsequent decades under the Soviets, into whom the Bolsheviks transformed.

And then there was Chairman Mao’s decade-long Cultural Revolution which wracked China from 1966 until 1976. Like all the other big social spasms there is no agreement on the number of dead and a million or two is considered a rounding error. But by China’s own official numbers, nearly 2 million people died and another 125 million people were persecuted or “struggled against” in brutal harassing, and often fatal, “struggle sessions” in which their cultural impurities were challenged by the Red Guards and their peers, colleagues, students, tenants, and even their own children. If all those who died as a result of the revolutionary insanity promulgated by Mao over the decades are included, estimates run as high as 80 million.

Cultural Revolution “Struggle Session,” 1966. From Flickr. Used under Fair Use.

While America’s incipient cultural revolution hasn’t yet taken a death toll approaching history’s worst, the numbers already are beginning to mount. When I first began writing this piece, just five weeks into the domestic unrest, more than 25 people – many black, whose lives ostensibly matter enough to have stirred the uprising – had been killed and an untold number injured in the demonstrations and associated violence sweeping the nation since the death of George Floyd on May 26. Through a holiday weekend and a couple of other days, and the toll continues to mount of the civilians killed in the “peaceful” protesting. On the receiving end of much of the violence, hundreds of police – nearly 300, some critically, in New York City alone during the early days of the unrest – and other law enforcement officers have been injured and at least one, in Oakland, Calif., killed.

Revolution American Style: Looters helping themselves to the politically correct garb at the Nike on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, in view of Rockefeller Center. Looters had already cleaned out Macy’s flagship store at Herald Square and numerous other stores and boutiques and businesses, big and small, throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Queens — four of the city’s five boroughs. Only Staten Island was spared.

And then there are the rising murder rates following calls, and actual actions, to defund or abolish the police: In New York, shootings are up 44% and murders up 23%, over last year. In Chicago, already an urban killing field, shootings are up 45% and murders up 34%. In the 24 hours from May 31 to June 1, the city experienced its most violent day in 60 years, with 18 murders. Philadelphia has seen a 57% increase in shootings and 24% increase in murders. In Milwaukee, homicides are up 95%. And in Los Angeles, in the first week of June alone, murders were up 250% from the previous week. Other serious crimes, such as assault, burglary, and arson, also are on the rise across the nation.

As the violence continues to mount it’s impossible to stay current with the numbers, but the ones cited give an indication of where things are headed. In the past weekend alone, gunfire claimed the lives of at least six children around the country: An 8-year-old girl, sitting in her mom’s car, in Atlanta. An 11-year-old boy, grandson of the founder of the DC chapter of the Guardian Angels, in Washington, D.C. A 7-year-old girl playing outside her grandma’s house and a 14-year-old boy in a crowd watching fireworks, both in separate incidents in Chicago. A 6-year-old boy in San Francisco. An 8-year-old boy in Hoover, Ala. All were just doing ordinary things when criminals running amok killed them.

Think it can’t happen here? Think again.

If you’re paying any attention at all, and haven’t been taken in by the apologist blather of the liberal media, you’ve been watching the wanton destruction of whole swaths of numerous American cities. You’ve seen the looting, arson, and defacement of both public and private property. You’ve seen the takeover and occupation of key parts of cities like Seattle, Washington, and New York. You’ve seen innocent people being beaten, dragged from vehicles, threatened with death, and killed. And you’ve seen the mindless toppling and destruction of numerous statues and monuments, all at the hands of the mob.

Chinese Red Guards raise their fists in ideological purity in 1966. Universal History Archive, UIG via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Looking at the range of historic figures attacked by mobs all across the land, one must assume that the mob leaders and their sycophantic followers are true morons who know nothing about history, nor about the underpinnings of the country, nor even about the abolitionist movement and the emancipation of slaves. Nor does their ignorance seem to matter to them. Suddenly every historic figure ranging from George Washington to Christopher Columbus, from Teddy Roosevelt to Thomas Jefferson, from Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, has been targeted for erasure from the national record, without sanction of any democratic process.

Demonstrators in New York City. Pexels. Used with permission.

This is a hallmark of cultural revolution, wherever it occurs, wiping out history and declaring a new Year Zero, the starting point of the revolution. It is disturbing to watch the inflamed furor of the crowds in the streets of America and their drive to destroy all remnants of history, in essence declaring a new Year Zero, and then to compare it with the inflamed furor of the crowds of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the boy-soldiers of the Cambodian terror, or that of any of the many social spasms that have torn apart other countries and societies. This should give pause to anyone with even the vaguest appreciation for history or fear of the dark places where cultural revolutions lead.

Young girl in 1967 China holds up a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Ulstein Bild via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

 

 

 

 

 

Young boy in 2020 Washington records it all on his cell phone. Photo by Gayatri Malhotra. Used under Fair Use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following the Cultural Revolution’s mandate to “destroy the Four Olds,” man smashes an old statue in 1967. Ullstein Bild via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.
U.S. Park Police survey the damage and secure the scene after protestors unsuccessfully attempted to pull down the statue of Andrew Jackson. the seventh president of the country, near the White House. Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

The Origins of the Chaos

There is no mistaking the strongly leftist, anti-American nature of the rhetoric and actions of the mob. Or how it has used the same tactics of other cultural revolutions — intimidation, public shaming, and violence – to force compliance with its demands or the expungement and cancellation of anyone who resists coming into line.

Comparisons have been drawn between what is happening now and the revolutionary wave that swept the country a half-century ago. As riots, mob violence, bombings, and assassinations – as well as peaceful demonstrations – swept the country then, the same intolerance in evidence today was in evidence then.

The denizens of the People’s Republic of CHAZ/CHOP/Whatever mill about in front of the abandoned East Precinct of the Seattle Police. Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

I won’t pretend that there weren’t leftist and anti-American professors in my undergraduate time during the cultural upheaval that ran through America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But it seems in the intervening decades their presence has become pervasive on campuses across the country, exerting a powerful influence on generations of students. In a country where freedom of expression is enshrined in the first amendment to its Constitution, we’ve arrived at a stage on many of our college campuses where any divergence from political correctness and the accepted party line is repressed, blocked, decried, and only the orthodoxy of the left is tolerated.

Red Guards, better dressed, more neatly kempt, and better behaved than the Seattle occupiers, march in Waxi in 1967. Bettmann/Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

The revered liberal U.S. senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, already in that earlier era of unrest saw the anti-American underpinnings of the movement.

“To a degree that no one could have anticipated even three or four years ago, the educated elite of the American middle class have come to detest their society, and their detestation is rapidly diffusing to youth in general,” Moynihan wrote in a series of memos to President Richard Nixon in 1969 and 1970. “The effects of this profound movement of opinion will be with us for generations.“

Seattle burns. The acronym “ACAB” can be seen at many scenes of violence around the country and (so clever) it stands for “All Cops Are Bastards.” I wonder what acronym would express the essence of arsonists? Photo by joshwho.net. Used under Fair Use.

Moynihan saw the growth of nihilism arising out of the educated and upper classes, imposing their ideological purity on the society, and once more we see it now in the allegedly educated and upper classes on the frontlines of ongoing attacks on the nation’s historical monuments and other cultural icons.

“Nihilist movements typically have led to political regimes of the most oppressive and reactionary qualities,” Moynihan wrote. “I know there is an authoritarian Left in this country, and I fear it.”

Phnom Penh burns in 1975. Residents flee the city as the Khmer Rouge move in to occupy it and terrorize, exile, and murder the population. Photo by Claude Juvenal, AFP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Moynihan made one other prescient observation: “It would be difficult to overestimate the degree to which young well-educated blacks detest white America.”

Given the roles played by Antifa and Black Lives Matter in agitating the current unrest, and given the far-left roots and agendas of both groups in pushing for social upheaval, we need not be surprised by the anti-American nature of much of what we’ve witnessed in this country since the death of George Floyd. Over recent decades we’ve grown accustomed to seeing Antifa and other anarchist and far-left groups disrupt international financial meetings, like the G-8, but we’ve been less used to seeing them at other times and places. Since May 26 they have become a commonplace on American streets as Antifa and Antifa-backed activists employ the brown-shirt techniques of fascism in their purported quest to oppose what they call fascism, which encompasses both democratically elected government and capitalism.

Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov (1869–1947), Vandalism of the Revolutionaries, a scene in one of the rooms of the Winter Palace in December 1918 [sic; 1917], 1918. Gouache and watercolor over pencil. Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov Paintings, Hoover Institution Archives. Used under Fair Use.
Taking a higher profile in the current unrest is Black Lives Matter, a loose amalgam of individuals and groups operating under a roughly common theme which claims to put black lives foremost. But it doesn’t take much scratching below the surface to see the violent and leftist tendencies within the movement when BLM actions have included calling for the killing of police (which we have to assume includes both white and black and also other lives), supports defunding the police since the group claims the police don’t keep us safe, and it has nothing to say on the topic of black-on-black violence, the biggest source of snuffing out black lives. One is free to see what BLM thinks right on its web site, though keep in mind that it speaks for just one element of the BLM movement. Meanwhile, funding pours into both Antifa and BLM from a panoply of Democratic, liberal, and radical donors, not the least of which is George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, and a raft of mainstream foundations and corporations.

“Where’s the police when you need them?”

Panty raid on 16th St. Man in pink bra and panties attacks D.C. Delegate Eleanore Holmes Norton and MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell in District’s BHAZ. Image from Twitter video. Used under Fair Use.

That’s an actual quote caught on camera – you can’t make this stuff up – of Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s non-voting delegate to the House, probably thinking no one would hear it. Amid all the “defund the police” hoopla, that was what Holmes Norton muttered when a protester in the police-free “Black House Autonomous Zone” (BHAZ), a man dressed in a pink bra and panties, ran up to whack her and MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell as they walked down 16th Street Northwest in the nation’s capital. The pair’s private security detail quickly hauled the man off. After all, who needs police when you have your own security?

I have a broader question, though. Where is anyone protecting the rights of ordinary citizens as their homes, businesses, and very lives have been threatened and in many cases destroyed by violence and looting over the past six weeks? Given that the first duty of elected officials is to look after the safety and well-being of the citizens who put them in office, this is not a frivolous question. While some mayors and governors have done their duty in seeking to control the looting, arson, and vandalism, others, with apparent impunity, have been deliberately derelict in their duty.

Perhaps the most egregious example of dereliction is Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Washington State’s inept Gov. Jay Inslee. When ostensible protestors took over several blocks of the central part of her city, forcing police to abandon the East Precinct station and submitting residents and business owners to harassment and obstruction, Durkan — undoubtedly thinking she was being cute — lamely told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that CHAZ (short for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, which later morphed into Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP) could turn into “a summer of love.” Meanwhile, after pretending he didn’t know anything about the occupation in his state’s largest city, Inslee showed his utter ignorance by calling the occupation “largely peaceful” and “fundamentally American.” It took the murder of two black teenage boys, the wounding of others, and a litany of assaults, rapes, robberies, and acts of destruction of property to finally prompt the so-called powers that be to clear the area.

Horace Lorenzo Anderson Sr., left, father of 19-year-old who was killed in Seattle’s CHOP zone, speaking with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. Andre Taylor, right, is a community activist and founder of Not This Time. Image by Fox News. Used under Fair Use.

Adding indecency to incompetence and malfeasance, neither Durkan, nor anyone else in her administration, bothered to inform the father of the first 19-year-old victim that his son had been killed, much less express remorse, and the man wasn’t even allowed to see his son’s body for days. This all came out in a poignant interview with the father on Sean Hannity’s nighttime TV show on Fox News, an interview well worth watching if you care to see the depths of depravity to which your elected officials can sink in the pursuit of political expediency.

Unlike in countries like Cambodia or China, the power of the purse can be a powerful inducement to action in this country, and one only hopes that the lawsuits filed by aggrieved citizens bankrupt the city of Seattle and the state of Washington, as well as other jurisdictions where officials failed to act to protect their citizens. And the examples are legion, from Minneapolis to New York, from Chicago to Los Angeles, from Portland to Washington, and many other places.

A statue of Christopher Columbus winds up destroyed and under water in Richmond. Image by Parker Michels-Boyce, AFP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

On a national scale, one wonders what has become of the supposed scions of law and order in the House and Senate. Not unexpectedly, the Dems have wrapped themselves in the cloak of the cultural revolution, but with a few exceptions it’s been worse than silence coming from the Republican side of the aisle. Some Republicans have even bowed to the coercion of the mob, with such supposed conservative stalwarts as John Cornyn of Texas sponsoring a bill to make Juneteenth — a day few in the country had even heard of before this year — a national holiday, with two other alleged conservative senators, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and James Langford of Oklahoma, taking things one step further and adding an amendment to Cornyn’s bill that would have abolished Columbus Day. The latter two tried to obfuscate the reason for their amendment by expressing fiscal concerns, something that doesn’t otherwise seem to trouble Congress as it repeatedly runs up record deficits. Given backlash against their proposal, Johnson and Langford subsequently withdrew it, but not until their spineless complicity had been exposed. And yet another Republican senator, Mike Braun of Indiana, introduced a bill to limit the qualified immunity of police, something the mob has called for, although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on a number of occasions that qualified police immunity is a necessity. In response, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson suggested that perhaps Braun should give up his immunity as a member of Congress. So far he hasn’t done so.

The mob turns out to see heads roll in the French Revolution. Source unknown.

At times sounding like a lone voice calling for order, President Trump has decried the violence since it began, carrying that message over the weeks of the disorder and making it a focus of his Independence Day address at Mount Rushmore Friday night. Utilizing the power of executive orders Trump blocked the further destruction of federal statues and monuments and has at least slowed, if not stopped, the renaming of military installations around the country. But even he has been stymied in getting local officials to put a stop to the violence and lawlessness afflicting their cities and states. While threatening to implement the Insurrection Act of 1807 and send federal troops to establish order in beleaguered cities, he has held back from actually doing so, ostensibly because those local and state officials didn’t ask for the help. But that is little comfort to the victims of the violence and I, for one, would have preferred to see more action and less talking about it.

Cultural Revolution posters in Beijing, February 1967. Look similar to what has appeared on American streets in 2020? Jean Vincent, AFP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

It’s fairly transparent how the forces aligned against Trump have used the violence and disorder to further marshal opposition to him. As one after another of their schemes to overturn the results of the 2016 election has failed, this — combined with their attempts to keep the economy shut down — might be their last best hope to block Trump’s reelection in November. If enough Americans, they think, buy into the theory that Trump either failed to stop or actually encouraged the violence, or buy into the baseless accusation that he is a racist, or are discouraged enough to just stay home, they might have a chance. Their candidate by default, Joe Biden, has largely remained in his Wilmington basement as the furor swirled above ground level. If you have any illusions what a vote for him might entail, just consider how the most radical elements of the Democratic Party now hold sway over the party, and do a little simple arithmetic to see what chits they hold for parlaying Biden into position as putative nominee. It’s unlikely Biden would be able to govern for long given the visible advanced stage of his mental decline, so the person he picks as his running mate — whom he already has said will be a black woman, in true identity-politics style — is likely to be the party’s real choice. How radical will she be? Given the radicalism of forces within the party who will hold the real power and pull the strings, it almost doesn’t matter.

As the new Know Nothings of 2020 toss Columbus into the harbor and seek to fundamentally transform the country (a phrase used by his former boss and recently picked up by Biden, never mind that it contradicts what he told his rich donors a year ago, that’s just standard operating procedure for him), the future of the country hangs in the balance. What the demonstrators and looters and their supporters can’t accomplish in the streets, the party’s true power brokers — I’ve called them the new plantation masters — hope to leverage into electoral victory in November. Voters might take a hint from the sadly overturned statue of Junipero Serra, below, and stop before they take the country over a cliff from which recovery might well be impossible.

Remember, when they come for your eyeglasses, it will be too late.

Statue of Spanish missionary Junipero Serra seems to beg for its life as it lies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Source unknown, freerepublic.com. Used under Fair Use.

Featured image: Skulls and bones of victims of the Khmer Rouge. Source: History.com. Used under Fair Use.
Back to the Plantation

Back to the Plantation

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One of the vestiges of the plantation system which depended on slavery for its existence was the racial divisiveness perpetrated by economic elites to maintain their power and control over both blacks and whites. In simplest terms, this translates to “divide and rule.”

“You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings,” Georgia populist leader Tom Watson told a gathering of white and black laborers in 1892. ““You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both.”

Lyndon Baines Johnson, who rose through the ranks of Texas racist politics to become the president who, after decades of helping block civil rights legislation in the House and the Senate, fostered passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, once related essentially the same theory to Bill Moyers. In classic LBJ style, Johnson told Moyers, a Johnson staffer before he became White House Press Secretary and, later, a journalist, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Women March on Washington
Women March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Library of Congress.

This was a theory I first learned in the aftermath of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It made sense to me then, and it still makes sense to me, though the nature of those elites have changed during the intervening half century, as have their tools. And it wasn’t just white populists who laid out the theory, plain as day for anyone who cared to look.

The white liberal and the new plantation

“The white liberal is the worst enemy to America and the worse enemy to the black man.”

That’s not a quote from Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh. It’s a quote from Malcolm X, the black liberation theology leader and firebrand, who said it about the same time LBJ was getting the civil rights theology and launching his War on Poverty, and not long before Malcolm X’s assassination on February 21, 1965.

“The white liberal aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power,” he said. “The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn.”

Malcolm X
Malcolm X. Source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

Malcolm X’s message – it’s worth reading the full quote, which is quite long – was that blacks need to solve their own problems and not depend on whites of either persuasion, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, since for either of them it’s just a game of power and control.

“The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros, and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked, or deceived by the white liberal then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.”

Now, 55 years later, Malcolm X’s message still hasn’t gotten through to many African Americans, much less to both white and black people who continue to pursue and support policies that effectively keep blacks, and all people of the underclass, down on the new plantation. I’m reminded of his message watching the multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi and her hypocritical House Democrats kneeling in Kente cloths draped around their necks, and as trendy young white people proclaim on social media that they “stand against racism,” as if any right-thinking person doesn’t stand against racism, any less than someone might stand against kicking puppies or drowning babies. Or as politicians, lacking as much in balls as brains, call for disbanding the police, when it is black people who will be the main victims of the lawlessness, violence, and vigilantism that inevitably would ensue.

Look at what people do, not what they say

By way of disclosure, I’ve never considered myself a liberal, even during my radical phase (aspects of which persist). Like Malcolm X, I’ve never trusted self-proclaimed liberals who always have struck me as having ulterior motives or who operate under some sort of misplaced guilt or, at best, a Pollyannish view of the world. I tend to discount what people say in favor of what they do and, even more, the results they obtain through their actions and policies. This is highly relevant if you want to see the principle of “divide and rule” at work in contemporary liberal politics.

Consider this crucially important fact: While the U.S. has spent somewhere north of $22 trillion – that’s trillion, as in a thousand billion or a million million dollars, 22 times over (by some estimates, depending on how you count it, it’s closer to $27 trillion) – since LBJ declared the War on Poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address, the percentage of the population living in poverty has hardly changed at all in the past half century. Given that in the most recent normal year total U.S. GDP was just over $21 trillion, that’s a powerful lot of money to garner zero real reduction in the poverty rate. How can this be, you ask?

Look at the charts, below, to get a visual picture of the reality. What we see is that poverty was in major decline beginning in 1959, five years before Johnson’s declaration of his war on it. That decline continued for another five years, running through 1969. Beginning in 1970, a full 50 years ago, there has been essentially no long-term change in the poverty rate even as the country threw trillions of dollars of the national treasure at it.

As is visible, there have been blips up and down through both Democratic and Republican administrations and congresses, but the same overall reality persists across the span of a half century. As the third chart demonstrates, the African-American poverty rate has shown, marginally, the most improvement, especially when compared with the Hispanic and general poverty rates. But an interesting and undeniable reality emerges when you look at the first and third charts: The highest recent poverty levels in all three key categories – African-American, Hispanic, and the general population – peaked during the Obama administration, and all three reached historic lows during the Trump administration. How can this be, you might ask, given that Obama is painted as a friend of the poor and minorities and Trump is portrayed not only as their enemy, but as an out-and-out racist?

Like I said, get below the rhetoric and the reality emerges. Clearly taking the brakes off the economy and creating jobs that lower the unemployment rate and empower individuals and families, as Trump did in stark contrast to the effect his predecessor’s policies had on the economy, provides a road map for reducing poverty. Jobs are a key factor, if not the only one, in poverty reduction. There are other factors at work, too, and we’ll look at them toward the end of this piece.

Follow the money

“Follow the money” is a phrase that we learned from Deep Throat during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. It’s salient to our discussion here.

I had a sociology professor when I was an undergrad at Rutgers University sometime in the late 1960s. I don’t recall his name, but he was a black man, and I always looked forward to his classes. One thing about him was that he was straightforward and honest in his discussion of social issues and didn’t try to promote any ideology, something that seems to have become a hallmark of more recent sociological education (I can say this having since been a professor of sociology myself and seeing the ideological blather in the text books, and ostensibly believed by other professors, that is fed to students in the field).

In any case, my professor had previously worked with an anti-poverty agency on Long Island in New York. He told us how this agency had spun its wheels “studying” how to provide low-income housing to people, how much money passed through it, how it debated one approach and another approach, and in the end, not a single unit of housing was built. My professor said that, had the money the agency spent been given to the people it ostensibly had been set up to help, every one of those families could have gone out and bought their own house.

Sadly, my professor’s example is far from a unique case, given the trillions of dollars spent on “helping” poor people over the intervening five decades without any real effect (a similar calculation was made for FEMA’s spending after Hurricane Katrina when it was determined that the money the agency spent bureaucratically could have paid for a new house and two new cars for everyone who lost their home in the storm, and that, too, is far from unique).

If you still have any doubt that the vast bulk of the money spent fighting poverty doesn’t go to the people in poverty, the chart below should dispel that doubt. As per-person spending has climbed inexorably over the past six decades, it certainly hasn’t gotten to those in need of the funds. As per-person spending approaches $20,000, the poverty level this year for a family of four is set at $26,200. If the preponderance of the money went to that same theoretical family, they’d be receiving nearly $80,000, a long, long way from the poverty level. Needless to say, that’s not where most of the money goes.

When you look at the sheer volume of money involved, is it any wonder that those into whose hands, and pockets, it passes want to be sure to keep their constituents in poverty? In this context, what is said about one party in particular, the Democratic Party, that it depends on the existence of a permanent underclass for its very existence, begins to make sense and takes on credibility. Looking strictly at the numbers, the existence of poverty, maintaining as many people as possible dependent on the largesse of what passes for anti-poverty spending, bolsters its electoral power and, more, furthers the interests of its power brokers while favoring their influence and their wealth. They are the new plantation masters.

Down on the urban plantation

It’s a clever ploy, a revival of “divide and rule” for more than half a century, and the Democratic Party continues to rely on this strategy, keeping its black constituents down on the urban plantation, well into the 21st Century. Consider for a moment these facts:

  • Democrats run 35 of the nation’s 50 largest cities (37 if you count the “Independent” mayors of San Antonio and Las Vegas, both of whom ran with Democratic support).
  • Democrats run 15 of the 16 cities ranked the worst-run cities in America in 2019 by WalletHub, including Washington, D.C., which came in 150th out of 150 cities ranked. Other cities in the bottom 16 include Los Angeles (ranked 135th) , Philadelphia (137th), St. Louis (139th), Chicago (140th), Cleveland (141st), Oakland (144th), Detroit (145th), New York (146th), Chattanooga (147th), and San Francisco (148th). Gulfport, Miss., ranked 149th, is the only one of the worst-run cities with a Republican mayor. The only big city to rank in the top 10 of best-run cities was Oklahoma City, also with a Republican mayor.

    Detroit decay
    Detroit decay. Pixabay.
  • All of the top 10 most dangerous cities in the country, including Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Baltimore, Stockton, Cleveland, and Buffalo, have Democratic mayors. Of the top 25 most dangerous cities, most are controlled by Dems, and have poverty rates between 18 and 39 percent, compared with a 2019 national average of 12.3 percent. As gun violence runs rampant in these cities, most have strict gun control laws, giving meaning to the phrase, when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.
  • All but two of the 10 cities rated “least healthy” on two different lists are run by Democrats.
  • All 10 cities with the highest numbers of homeless residents, led by Los Angeles with an estimated 58,000 homeless people, are Democratic-run sanctuary cities which provide refuge to illegal immigrants, disadvantaging lower-income legal residents of those cities and creating unsafe and unhealthy conditions for all residents.
  • The Democratic virtual one-party state of California, with one of the largest and most prosperous economies in the world, has the highest poverty rate of any state in the union, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure.
  • Six of the 10 least educated cities in America are in the same Democratic one-party state of California. In Democratic stronghold Baltimore, which ranks fourth in per-student educational spending in the nation, not a single student in 13 public high schools is proficient at math, and nine of 10 black boys in the city’s schools can’t read at grade level. Meanwhile, thousands of consultants, contractors, and administrators are paid salaries in excess of $100,000 a year by the city’s school system.
  • Many of the cities run by Democrats haven’t elected a Republican mayor in more than 100 years. That’s the case in Newark, N.J., ranked the fifth worst city in the nation to live in. Detroit, once the wealthiest city in America and the one LBJ planned to be the “Model City” of his Great Society, and which today is ranked the country’s worst city, hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1957, about the
    Detroit decay
    Decay of Detroit, the “Model City.” Daniel Lincoln/Unsplash.

    time its golden era began its swan song. Chicago, one of the country’s most segregated and violent cities, elected its last Republican mayor in 1927. St. Louis, one of the nation’s most dangerous and poverty-stricken cities, has been electing Democrats as mayor for 71 years. Philadelphia, for 68 years. Baltimore and Oakland for more than half a century. In Flint, Mich., Dems have been mayors for 88 years. In New Orleans, mayors have been Democrats since 1872 – 148 years, longer than most countries have been in existence. What do all these cities have in common, besides being Democratic fiefdoms? They’re all wracked by poverty, crime, corruption, and urban decay. If anyone cares to argue that the Democratic Party, the party that in its history supported slavery and Jim Crow, has changed over all those decades, if anything the change has been for the worse where these cities’ residents are concerned and as their condition has continued to deteriorate over the decades.

So where have all those trillions of anti-poverty dollars gone? That would be a good question to ask these mayors, city councils, state governments, their Congressional backers, and those running the various anti-poverty agencies and failed school systems, spread from coast to coast to coast. And maybe their bankers and investment brokers and real estate agents, too.

And don’t buy into the argument that other developed countries spend more on anti-poverty programs than the U.S. (for the most part, they don’t), or on healthcare (they don’t), or education (they don’t). Money, at least not its lack, isn’t the problem. Misguided programs, corrupt officials and politicians, and just plain bad policies are. Given the dismal results of those policies over such a long period of time, one has to assume that malice of intent more than just bad judgment lies at the heart of their failure. Divide and rule: Keep those poor folk down on the plantation and rake in the big bucks. Follow the money.

Martin Luther King Jr. march on Washington
Martin Luther King, Jr., leads the march on Washington, August 28, 1963. Library of Congress.

What things work and how the plantation masters work against them

There are some things that are known, at least empirically, to help people get out of poverty. The plantation masters know this, and they work against them methodically, often under cover of some sort of politico-babble. We’ll look, briefly, at them here.

Education

Getting a decent education and at least a high school diploma – and, better, a college degree — is one of the known routes out of poverty. Educational choice, through vouchers and charter schools, in many cases have been shown to offer low-income people a better education than often available in the normal public school system. Even Barack Obama said “The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.” So why do he and so many of the urban plantation masters oppose both vouchers and charter schools (while putting their own kids in private schools)?

Two-parent families

Two-parent families are another antidote to poverty. The overall child poverty rate is 17.5 percent. For children in homes headed by a single mother, it’s 50 percent. In 2015, 77.3 percent of non-immigrant black births were to unmarried mothers. For Hispanic immigrants, it was 48.9 percent. For whites, it was 30 percent. In 1965, the rate was 24 percent for black babies and 3.1 percent for white babies. There are many factors involved in this differential, the role of welfare rules that favor single mothers, households without a man or father, being just one of them. Whatever the reasons, the economic impact is significant.

Helping black men improve their situation

A better educational environment, improved employment opportunities, and staying out of trouble with the law help black men improve their situation, which overall has a positive impact on reducing poverty among African-Americans. Trump’s answers have been improving employment prospects, economic opportunity zones in under-privileged communities, and criminal justice reform. The answer of at least one Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, is to help African American, Latino, and Native American communities “start businesses selling legal marijuana.” Yup, keep those poor folks in the drug culture. After all, it’s been such a big help to their communities over many years.

Full-time employment

Finding and keeping full-time employment Is another of those elements that are basic to getting out of poverty. Rather than depending on public assistance, becoming self-sufficient is a critical step in upward mobility, and its efficacy is evidenced by the relation between a declining unemployment rate and declining poverty rate. But the new plantation masters would rather depress employment, shutter whole industries and send jobs to China, thus increasing dependency on them.

These are not the only things that impact on poverty, but they are some of the bigger ones. By now, 56 years on, it’s time to declare America’s longest war – the War on Poverty – a lost cause, and to begin to empower all people in poverty, and most especially African-Americans, as Malcolm X said, to solve their own problems, and to send the new plantation masters packing. All the signs are that they won’t go easily, and they’re already figuring out new ways of fleecing the populace and keeping folks down on the plantation. Divide and rule is as relevant today as it was in 1892, and as long as people buy into it, its impact will be as pernicious and long-lasting.

Featured image: Sugar Cane Plantation. North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy Stock. Used under Fair Use.
The Cards Are Falling Faster Now

The Cards Are Falling Faster Now

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It’s always nice to be right. It’s especially nice to be right about developments of great import and which have been the subject of machination and obfuscation at the highest levels. In all modesty, I can’t think of a single key point I’ve made on the conspiracy to undo the results of the 2016 elections on which I’ve been wrong, but I’ll resist the urge to spike the ball. But now we’re finally seeing so many of the underpinnings of what has gone on for the past three-plus years peeled bare so that there can’t be any further doubt about the intent by one side of the political spectrum, utilizing the levers of power of the nation, to deprive Donald Trump of the fruits of his electoral victory.

It’s just under 14 months since I described a secret attempt by those in power, aided and abetted by many in the mainstream media, to undermine the nation’s electoral process and to thwart the election of a single person – Donald J. Trump – to the presidency, and to stymie his ability to govern once elected. I called for the identification, investigation, and prosecution of those involved in what amounts to the greatest and most far-reaching conspiracy in U.S. history. At the time I called it a ‶silent coup attempt.″ I think now we can dispense with the word ‶silent″ and just call it what it is – a coup attempt.

If you look up the definition of coup d’état in a range of dictionaries, you’ll see that common elements of definitions say it is a sudden and decisive change of government, often by illegal or violent means, and usually by a small group already having a power base within the government. The attempt to remove Trump from office meets all the elements of those definitions.

Now, thanks to the actions of Attorney General Bill Barr and acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, we get to see the actual words, actions, and sworn testimony of those involved in this attempted coup. Through these revelations, we also get to see the lies told, the possible sources of the leaks made to the media, and the motivations of the key actors. And more clearly than ever, we see how the attempt to undermine Trump leads directly back to his predecessor, former President Barack Obama.

Seeing Behind the Cover-Up

Most clearly we see how top officials in the FBI deliberately baited National Security Advisor Lt., Gen. Michael Flynn, a Trump confidante, into a perjury trap in an attempt to use him to get at Trump. There is evidence that this was done, if not with the knowledge of the former Chief Executive, with his tacit approval. Like a Mafia boss, Obama surrounded himself with plausible deniability while his henchmen carried out the hit.

You can read the words in the memos and recovered text messages yourself. But it’s not just me, or numerous other commentators, saying Flynn was deliberately railroaded into pleading guilty to a charge of perjury. Read what former FBI Special Agent James C. Gagliano says about it and how he lays out how it was done and how those involved deviated from standard FBI procedure to achieve their ends.

When you’re done reading that, there is Mollie Hemingway’s detailed timeline on the Federalist on how the railroading of Flynn, whom Obama despised since he had the temerity to oppose several of Obama’s key initiatives, began on Jan. 4 at the FBI and then was brought to the White House the next day. At the Jan. 5 meeting with Obama were most of the key players – FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and Vice President Joe Biden. Also present was Sally Yates, Deputy Attorney General at the time who briefly became Acting Attorney General under Trump.

Yates later told the Mueller investigation that Obama opened the conversation that day by saying he had learned about Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and, “It was not clear … where the President first received the information.” Yates told the Mueller team that she was so surprised by what she was hearing that she was having “a hard time processing it and listening to the conversation at the same time.”

Yates also believed the information the FBI had supposedly developed on Flynn should be shared with the incoming administration, which Comey resisted, making up his own rule book in defiance of DOJ hierarchy and procedure and even of law.

Part of what shocked Yates was the extent to which Flynn’s identify and conversations, which as a U.S. citizen were not meant to be revealed in counter-intelligence activities conducted against non-U.S. actors, had been unmasked by so many people within the administration. That list includes more than 30 names, including all those at the Jan. 5 meeting, except Obama himself, as well as then Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and Obama Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, and some U.S. ambassadors and lower level government officials. Whether any of these unmaskings, hundreds of them, as unsettling as they are, had a political intent or were illegal is a matter of debate and conjecture at this point. But what seems to be clear is the leak of supposedly derogatory but classified information concerning Flynn to David Ignatius of The Washington Post, and which formed the basis of Ignatius’s column on Jan. 12, 2017, clearly is illegal. The question is, who within the cast of characters leaked it?

Lest there be any doubt that all this subterfuge traces back to Obama, there is Susan Rice’s email to herself, drafted as Trump’s inauguration was under way on Jan. 20, 2017. It is so obviously a “CYA” move by Rice, herself confirmed as a bold-faced liar by her untrue statements made repeatedly to the American public following the Benghazi fiasco of Sept. 2012, to write this on the morning the administration was to change, and two weeks after the Jan. 5 meeting:

“President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.”

By the book. Right. And Rice, like so many other of the miscreants in the conspiracy, revealed her own perjury when she previously claimed that she knew of no surveillance of incoming Trump administration officials. She is now saying that she wrote the email at the direction of Obama White House Counsel Neil Eggleston.

Applying Occam’s Razor

There is one thing about the whole Russia hoax (as it has been revealed to be from the Mueller investigation through these latest releases of names and messages) that never made sense to me. I’m a big believer in Occam’s Razor which, in simplest terms, says the most logical explanation for something is usually the correct answer.

The question that has occurred to me all along, a question I’ve asked both as a former diplomat and also as just someone who applies common logic to issues, is why the Russians would prefer Trump over Hillary Clinton. It was Hillary who presented her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with the stupid “reset button” (which looked disturbingly like the red button to trigger nuclear missiles and which misspelled the Russian word for “reset” so it read “overcharge”) on March 6, 2009. And Obama himself who, on an open microphone on March 26, 2012, told outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to convey to returning Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would have more flexibility after his re-election.

Obama: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

It’s also clear that Obama knew of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections (nothing unusual since they’ve been doing it for nearly a century now) by at least late summer 2016, and the entire sum of his efforts to get them to stop it was telling Putin, “Vladimir, cut it out.” Meanwhile, he chose not to inform Trump of what was suspected about Russian meddling.

If all that is not enough to raise questions, there is the whole saga of the hacking of the DNC computer servers in the lead-up to the 2016 elections, and how the FBI never was allowed access to those servers by the DNC, which turned forensic analysis of the hack over to CrowdStrike, a company tightly within the Democratic Party orbit. Without going into all the gory details of that saga, you can learn more than you want to know about it here. Among other suspicious developments, which point more to an inside job, U.S. security surveillance, or a third-party hacker than clandestine Russian government hacking, is that intel and forensics experts concluded the data likely was taken off the DNC computers faster than could have been possible by remote hacking. In other words, the data likely was pulled off onto a fast local device, like a flash drive or CD-ROM.

Occam’s Razor tells me that either the Russians were screwing around in general – it’s long been the intent of Russia and the Soviet Union that preceded the current federation – or that they were more likely to be supportive of Hillary than of Trump. Now Occam wasn’t a partisan of any major political party, but his logic sure makes sense to me.

No More Hearings or Reports

I think at this point we’re past settling for more hearings or reports. It’s time for prosecutions of the guilty parties in this conspiracy. While Sen. Lindsey Graham, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has scheduled hearings covering the FBI investigation into alleged Russian electoral interference and the Trump campaign to begin June 1, a criminal investigation into these same issues has been under way for some months by U.S. Attorney John Durham, appointed to the case by AG William Barr. Numerous commentators supposedly in the know keep telling us that indictments are likely to be forthcoming soon, and other reports point toward the end of this summer.

On thing is clear: Time is running short. Admittedly, criminal investigations and prosecutions can take time. That’s understood. But with just months remaining before the November elections, it’s essential that prosecutions begin sooner rather than later. Not only is it inevitable that there will be charges that the DOJ is attempting to skew the elections – by the same people who have worked hard for more than three years now to cripple the Trump administration – but if by chance Trump fails to win reelection, the entire legal drive to convict the guilty parties in this most sordid and unsavory chapter in U.S. political history will be ditched, and we’ll never learn of the true depth of corruption within the FBI, the intelligence community, and the Obama White House. This would be a tragedy for the country.

Assuming there will the indictments, how high will they go? Certainly there is indication that some mid-level officials, such as former FBI Counterintelligence Chief Peter Strzok and former FBI Deputy Director and Mueller Deputy Andrew McCabe, might be included in them. If there is to be any semblance of justice, higher ups, including Comey, Brennan, and Clapper, should be included, too. If you’re still naive enough to believe in an even-handed application of justice, the perjuries, abuse of power, and leaks of classified and official information that have gone on involving these parties are certainly sufficient to charge them.

But what about above that level? A prosecution of Hillary, for her security violations and mishandling of classified material and her obstrucion of justice? Of Obama, for being the source of so many of the misdeeds that went on and for looking the other way as violations racked up? Of Biden, for his deceits in trying to cover up his involvement in the political pogrom carried on against Trump, or for allowing his influence to benefit his son’s enrichment in Ukraine and in China? If you’re expecting justice to reach that high, I have a bridge to sell you. As I’ve said all along, it’s not going to happen. Barr has already said he doesn’t plan to charge Hillary or Obama with anything criminal, and that certainly extends to Biden as well.

As many and as fast as the cards have fallen, the top actors are going to be allowed to skate. And they’ll do so under full cover of the media umbrella that most of the mass media offer them, that political-media complex I’ve described. Some of us know that, had we done even a fraction of what these people have done, we would be behind bars. But that application of justice apparently doesn’t extend to the top levels of political actors in the country.

I’ve been right about the other key facts of the matters that have dogged the country the past three-plus years, and as much as I’d prefer to be wrong about this last one, I just don’t see it. But it would be gratifying to see even some of the key bad actors where they truly belong.

Photo credits: Featured image: Rob Carr, AFP, Getty Images, used under Fair Use