Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish articles

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Jack Smith, Clinton's DOJ Hit Man, Comes After Trump

By Daniel Greenfield On November 30, 2022 In Trump

When Bruce Wasserstein, a billionaire backer of the Clintons, provided a $25 million donation to Harvard Law, future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, then serving as dean, welcomed it. The gift built on the Wasserstein Fellows Program already established at Harvard Law which brought “outstanding public interest lawyers” to Harvard and provided them stipends of up to $24,000 to meet with and influence students toward social justice at the prestigious law school.

When Jack Smith became a Wasserstein Fellow, even while, unironically, serving as head of the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, seemingly soliciting and accepting a grant funded by a leftist billionaire (but who watches the integrity of the head of the Public Integrity Section) he joined a list of leftist activist lawyers working for the ACLU, Earthjustice, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Soros’ Open Society, Catholic Charities and the UN.

The mission of the Wasserstein Fellows was to gather “a diverse group of accomplished public interest lawyers who are enthusiastic about sharing their passions with law students on how to utilize their legal education to promote social justice.” Those passions included illegal migration, letting criminals get away with committing crimes and dismantling America.

How the DOJ’s Jack Smith would go about promoting social justice was a question that was answered twice. At least twice in public view where everyone could see and hear it.

The latest came when Attorney General Garland picked Smith as the Special Counsel to go after Trump. But before that anyone wondering what Jack Smith did to be chosen as a social justice lawyer would have had to be paying close attention to the IRS scandal that took place a year before he was made a Wasserstein Fellow.

Under Obama, the IRS and the DOJ had illegally targeted conservative nonprofits in order to silence political dissent. While Lois Lerner, sourly testifying before Congress, became the profoundly unsympathetic face of the IRS, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee revealed who was playing a key role in criminalizing dissent.

“The Justice Department convened a meeting with former IRS official Lois Lerner in October 2010 to discuss how the IRS could assist in the criminal enforcement of campaign-finance laws against politically active nonprofits. This meeting was arranged at the direction of Public Integrity Section Chief Jack Smith,” the Committee stated.

According to the Republican National Lawyers Association, “Public Integrity Section Chief Jack Smith told investigators that officials at the Justice Department discussed targeting conservative nonprofit groups with Lerner as early as October 2010.”

A year later, Smith became a Wasserstein Fellow.

Despite all this, Smith flew under the radar. While Lois Lerner was denounced, Smith remained virtually as anonymous as his name, including his actual name, John Smith, but Smith was just doing his job. Not on our behalf, but for those who had put him in his role.

Smith had been handpicked to run the DOJ’s public integrity section by Lanny Breuer.

Breuer, Bill Clinton’s Special Counsel who defended him during his impeachment hearings, and then Sandy Berger, after he stole classified documents from the National Archives to cover up Clinton’s actions, had been brought in by Obama to head up DOJ’s criminal division.

The Clinton consigliere, widely disliked, distrusted and hated even by fellow Democrats and lefties over his connections and client list, a man whom no one in D.C. believed had an ounce of integrity, then brought in Jack Smith to do some of his dirty work.

Would Lanny Breuer have picked anyone with integrity to head public integrity?

A New York Times review of some of Breuer and Smith’s cases appear to focus almost entirely on Republicans, touching on names like Sen. John Ensign, Rep Tom DeLay, Rep. Jerry Lewis, and Rep. Don Young, while mentioning the convictions of Rep. Rick Renzi and Gov. Bob McDonnell: respectively pardoned and overturned.

Public integrity under Obama meant targeting Republicans. It still does under Biden. Much as it did under the Clintons. Three corrupt administrations united by their abuses of the DOJ.

When a new day seemed to be dawning after Trump’s victory, Jack Smith made a timely exit from the government and became the head of litigation for the Hospital Corporation of America.

The Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) had become stocked with Obama administration veterans a few years earlier.

Marilyn Tavenner, almost as much of a staple of Obama scandals as Lois Lerner, who had headed the disastrous Obamacare rollout and tried to explain why the website wasn’t working, had come out of HCA. Nancy-Ann DeParle, the architect of Obamacare, became an HCA director.

Their real purpose of the HCA-Obamacare connection wasn’t to implement things on the consumer side, but to help broker a dirty deal that brought HCA on board with Obamacare. When King v. Burwell was poised to take on Obamacare, the HCA filed a brief on behalf of the illegal program to defend the exchanges as part of the dirty deal that it had made with the Obama administration.

Even as future Senator Rick Scott, the ousted former CEO of HCA, campaigned against Obamacare, warning, “If we have more government involvement we’re going to have dramatically worse health care”, Biden boasted of the HCA joining a deal to “cut costs” to make Obamacare work.

With that kind of history, Jack Smith going to work for HCA made a lot of sense.

To ordinary people, Smith’s career, the DOJ, war crimes prosecutor in Yugoslavia and the head of litigation for a hospital chain seem interestingly random. They do have one thing in common.

These were all priority projects of the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton had been obsessed with a government takeover of healthcare long before Obama. The disastrous intervention in Yugoslavia was a Clinton project. And the Clintons had been fixated on seizing control of the DOJ and punishing their political enemies.

That is what the DOJ began to do from Hillary’s abuse of FBI files to Russiagate.

Even Smith’s role as a Wasserstein Fellow has a familiar ring to it.

Bruce Wasserstein had a history with the Clintons. When Rahm Emanuel left the Clinton White House, he got a job running Wasserstein’s office in Chicago. And before long, the Clinton adviser and future Obama Chief of Staff and Mayor of Chicago had made $16 million.

Wasserstein did more than just host fundraising events for Bill Clinton, alongside Alec Baldwin, not to mention donating to Hillary Clinton, Gore, Schumer and so many other Democrats. (Although he was also briefly Mitch McConnell’s brother-in-law.) On his passing the corporate raider was praised for his “passion for social justice”. He never saw Hillary Clinton rise and fall.

It may be a coincidence, but Smith’s resume is what one might expect of a federal careerist with Clinton connections. Even his extended European vacation was the sort of thing that Clintonites used to build up their resumes. That resume became outdated in the Obama era, but Smith still seemed able to hit a lot of the right notes.

Smith was even named one of the “International Gender Champions” and claimed that he was “strongly committed to working with my Office to ensure that gender equality, as part of diversity and inclusion, is a key consideration to everything we do.”

There is one curious final note as to how Smith was picked as the Specialist Prosecutor for the Yugoslavia war crimes trials in the Hague. Smith was chosen in 2018 “after a selection process organised by the European Union” and was “appointed by the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo mission head, Alexandra Papadopoulou”. In 2020, Papadopoulou, a Fulbright Scholar, became Greece’s ambassador to the Biden administration.

Washington D.C. may appear small compared to some other major cities, but it’s a vast hive of careerists, contractors, consultants, lobbyists and activists all scurrying around the stone and glass buildings, the eateries and shops, whose relationships to each other are as entangled as they are hostile to us. As George Carlin once said, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”

Jack Smith is a lifetime member of the club. And now he’s been given the biggest job of his career. It’s not one that is likely to reap much in the way of immediate rewards. Just ask Bob Swan Mueller III, but it’s an act of public service to the political network that runs D.C.

And parts beyond, into the European Union, which helped contribute to Russiagate.

Since Smith’s leg was broken after a bicycle accident (a hazard in the Biden administration), he’ll be running the investigation of Trump from Europe. And no one finds it odd that an investigation of a former president will operate from the capital of the European Union.

But it’s not like we run our own country anyway.

The upper echelons of the administrative state are a network of political alliances by ambitious men and women looking for the next rung to power. They don’t work for us. Instead they serve their sponsors and use political connections to navigate the public-private career ladder.

The media is already building up Smith’s mythos. “A Justice Department lawyer out of central casting,” the New York Times gushed, with a “grizzled mien”. And, “an idealist and a brilliant independent thinker and a gutsy lawyer”. Central casting always needs good actors to play the part and fool the people long enough for the next phase of the plan to kick into action.

And, at least unlike Bob Mueller and Joe Biden, Jack Smith probably knows where he is. And he knows who really runs things and whom he needs to serve to get that next big job.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Monday, November 28, 2022

The Bureaucracy’s Democrat Majority Made America a One-Party Government

By Daniel Greenfield On November 28, 2022 In Washington D.C.

When former President Trump, Gov. DeSantis, and Senator Ted Cruz, among others, endorsed rolling back the power of bureaucrats and their administrative state, Democrats panicked.

Senator Dianne Feinstein and Hillary's former running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, introduced a countermeasure which they called, "Preventing a Patronage System Act" according to Kaine, to "protect the merit-based hiring system for our federal workforce".

Media editorialists claimed that making it easier to get rid of federal employees would bring back patronage or the spoils system. The problem is that patronage never left.

We have spent generations living under a permanent patronage system. The spoils system, as bad as it was, kept one party from permanently packing its supporters into the government. Removing it just meant that the Democrats have permanently packed the federal bureaucracy.

That’s how America became a one-party government at the federal level in Washington D.C. Politicians of both parties come and go, but it’s the Democrat bureaucrats who call the shots.

The same media outlets now fussing about “patronage” were gleefully reporting how a “resistance” was operating within the federal bureaucracy to undermine President Trump. That same “resistance”, without the public posturing, has quietly sabotaged every Republican administration and any conservative piece of legislation that gets through the process.

Before the 2016 election, one in four federal employees claimed that they would leave if Trump won. Six out of ten federal employees supported Biden. Only 28% backed Trump.

In the 2022 cycle, the American Federation of Government Employees has doled out over a million dollars. 94% of that money has gone to Democrats.

Not only does the federal workforce tilt leftward, but the number of Republicans fell from a third to a quarter over the last generation. The federal machine that controls the lives of most Americans has limited representation for one of the country’s two major political factions.

But even that's misleading.

The men and women who actually run things are mostly Democrats. 63% of the senior executives, the highest officials within the bureaucracy, are Democrats, while the number of Republicans drops into the low 20s. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper notes that the "the overrepresentation of Democrats increases as we move up the hierarchy".

“Among employees in grades 1-12 of the GS, we find about 50% of Democrats (30% of Republicans and 20% of independents), which rises to approximately 56% at the top of the GS (grades 13-15), and to 63% among career SES,” the research showed.

This is what a slow-motion coup looks like.

Apologists for the bureaucracy might claim that this reflects a lack of qualifications by Republicans, but the share of independents similarly drops. Only the share of Democrats steadily rises. If we were looking at a similar breakdown of racial groups in which the share of every racial group declined as it moved up the ranks, except one, it would be evidence of bias.

And a political coup is far more corrosive and dangerous to a government than racial bias.

Democrats want us to believe that the consolidation of the civil service by one political faction is somehow a natural occurrence which does not reflect a calculated strategy or patronage.

In between political tests like diversity and equity, the insistence on concentrating federal leadership in Democrat areas, and providing special entryways and promotions to members of identity politics groups more likely to vote for their party, Democrats claim that it’s all “merit”.

After fighting to eliminate merit in college admissions, the military, and federal contracts, they want us to believe that they not only believe in merit, but want to protect it in the civil service.

Democrats created an independent bureaucracy that provides its own patronage. That corrupt system has led to everything from massive theft to IRS investigations of political opponents. And the result is much worse than the rotten spoils system ever was because it’s immune to change.

The modern civil service owes its existence to a crooked bargain between President Grover Cleveland, the first post-Civil War Democrat to occupy the White House, and one of the most personally and politically corrupt men to hold that office in the century, and the Mugwumps, the Never Trumpers of the era. The federal workforce massively exploded from 5,837 before the Civil War to 15,344 after the Civil War to millions over the next century. The civil service “reforms” were a key ingredient in what became a permanent patronage system built to benefit the Democrats and the liberal Republicans who were instrumental in imposing it on Americans.

Where before individuals had traded on their political support and campaign activities to win a few hundred offices during the spoils system, urban political machines packed the civil service with tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of their supporters in the next century.

The liberal promises of Wilson, FDR and JFK required a symbiotic growth in government. The government programs never delivered a better life, except by providing government jobs for Democrats. The spoils system was corrupt, but permanent patronage has not only rewarded members of one party with jobs, especially senior roles, to the tune of billions, but it also shifted power away from the voters and elected officials, and to partisan bureaucrats.

The solution to patronage isn’t professionalism, it’s smaller government. Government is not a meritocracy and there’s no point in keeping up the pretense that any part of it is merit based. The most fundamental virtue of our constitutional government is that the public has supreme power over the government. The civil service system has effectively eliminated that power.

Firing federal employees is a long difficult process. The Merit Systems Protection Board has repeatedly intervened to protect even the worst abuses by workers including outright criminal behavior. Americans can lose their jobs, but they can’t do anything about the bureaucrats who control their lives. Politicians come and go, but the Democrat administrative state abides.

A smaller government begins with a much smaller bureaucracy. President Trump’s commitment to wielding Schedule F is important, as are other ideas by conservative politicians. Schedule F would be crucial in rolling back the power of key policy-making bureaucrats, but it’s only the beginning. The Founding Fathers understood that government is innately oppressive. And government, like any parasitic infection, naturally grows unless it’s shrunk or it kills the host.

Apologists for the bureaucracy claim that eliminating the permanent patronage of the civil service would erode "public trust in our government" and "undermine the role of civil servants as stewards of the public good".

The public has no trust in the government. The one thing most of the country, across political and racial lines, can agree on is not trusting the government. Currently only about 29% of Democrats and 9% of Republicans trust the government. How much more trust is there to lose?

Civil servants are not “stewards of the public good”. The American people are. Monarchies and tyrannies have stewards of the public good. The only true constitutional and democratic virtue of a civil service is that it is easy to fire. A bureaucracy that can’t be gotten rid of isn’t serving the people, it’s mastering them, and that is what the administrative state has long since become.

The only reason Democrats are panicking over permanent patronage reform is because the ranks and especially the senior management of the federal bureaucracy are full of their people. There’s nothing democratic or merit-based about letting a corrupt partisan faction control the administrative state and the lives of hundreds of millions of people with no recourse.

The next president who isn’t beholden to the administrative state should provide that recourse.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Saturday, November 26, 2022

How Obama’s Big Economic Lie Caused Our Inflation Crisis

By Daniel Greenfield On November 26, 2022 In recent

Conspiracy theories and lies have a unique power to reshape the human mind. The things that we believe, even when we initially know that they’re a convenient rationalization, become a part of us. And eventually we come to build our entire worldview around a lie that we told long ago.

That’s the story of Russiagate, a bizarre conspiracy theory invented by the Clinton campaign and allies in the Obama administration that virtually every Democrat now believes is true. And it’s quite likely that Hillary Clinton, whose people made it up, also came to believe it’s true.

It’s also the story of the inflation crisis.

To understand how we got here, it helps to remember the last time a Democrat took over the White House during a troubled time with a mandate to save the economy. Time Magazine clumsily photoshopped him into a picture of FDR on its cover. The messianic ecstasy however soon gave way to frustration because Obama’s economic triumph never arrived.

The misnamed Recovery Act was a corrupt disaster, but, more relevantly for Democrats, it didn’t deliver anything meaningful and foreshadowed Obama’s transformation from the chosen one to just another politician. While Obama still did a great deal of damage, the FDR moment never came, and without it there was no momentum for a New Deal or a grander economic agenda.

Democrats and their think tank and academic allies refused to admit that the Recovery Act was a mistake. Instead, like all leftists, they insisted that the experiment hadn’t been properly tried. Just as Communism can never fail because it’s never been truly tried, the massive stimulus had never been properly tried either. The only problem with the Recovery Act was that it wasn’t big enough. Had Obama and the Democrats pulled off a truly huge package, they would have gotten their New Deal, held Congress and completely transformed America.

That excuse became the big lie that most people forget, but that the media occasionally kept warm and that Obama administration veterans carried with them into the Biden White House.

The rest is history and $6 eggs.

“The way I see it, the biggest risk is not going too big, it’s if we go too small. We’ve been here before. When this nation hit the Great Recession that Barack and I inherited in 2009, I was asked to lead the effort on the Economic Recovery Act to get it passed,” Biden assured the country in his speech. “But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t quite big enough. It stemmed the crisis, but the recovery could have been faster and even bigger.”

Senator Schumer scoffed to CNN, “We’re not going to make the mistake of 2008 and 2009 and do such a small measly proposal that it won’t get us out of the mess that we are in right now.”

The small measly proposal that Schumer was ridiculing had been a massive $800 billion.

He explained that the Democrats wouldn’t negotiate with Susan Collins, Murkowski or Romney because, “we cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years.”

Biden and Schumer’s remarks showed just how thoroughly the Democrat elite had absorbed the ridiculous excuse for Obama’s economic failures. Even before the election, insiders were repeating the meme that Obama’s stimulus plan had been too small.

“Joe Biden doesn’t want to come into office and sit on a sloggy economy for four, six, eight quarters,” Jared Bernstein, who would become Biden’s chief economist, promised.

“Massive as it sounds, the next Covid bailout deal may already be too small,” Politico suggested.

Like a lot of bad Democrat ideas, the “too little spending” narrative began in part with Paul Krugman, the New York Times hack who has never failed to be wrong about anything, including his spectacular claim that “by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

“This wasn’t a test of fiscal stimulus, even though it has played out that way in the political arena: the whole thing was obviously underpowered from the start,” Krugman contended.

In, “Hey, Small Spender”, the absurdly wrong economist insisted that “the stimulus wasn’t actually all that big compared with the size of the economy” and that too much of it had been focused on tax cuts and “wasn’t mainly focused on increasing government spending.”

“If job-creating government spending has failed to bring down unemployment in the Obama era, it’s not because it doesn’t work; it’s because it wasn’t tried,” Krugman clamored.

In 2020, he was still arguing that, “Obama paid a heavy political price because recovery was too slow thanks to inadequate stimulus.”

In the years since, Democrats would point to aborted proposals for a $1.8 trillion stimulus plan and argue that it would have turned everything around. It’s no coincidence that Biden’s American Rescue Plan, one of the engines of the runaway inflation, crashed in at $1.9 trillion.

The Obama people were trying to make up for what they believed went wrong in 2009.

Communism hadn’t been properly tried and they tried it to the tune of $1.9 trillion.

What had actually happened in 2009 was that the leftists who championed government spending failed and were allowed to write a narrative in which they were right all along. Their conspiracy theory claimed that history would have come out very differently if not for Obama’s cowardice and Larry Summers introducing cautionary notes in the administration.

“So many bad things have followed from Obama’s caution back then. The course of history could have been very different,” Krugman mournfully complained in 2020.

This time around, they did it their way.

The Biden administration ignored Summers and went all in. Now it’s hunting around for someone to blame. According to a Bloomberg article, Biden has been yelling at his advisers and wondering if they “had paid too little heed to warnings that the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would flood the economy with too much cash, acting as kindling for inflation.”

That was followed by the familiar coda. “If Biden and his economic aides, including Deese and Jared Bernstein, erred on the side of a larger stimulus it’s because they all worked in the Obama White House following the global financial crisis and witnessed firsthand how a too-small rescue package played a role in delaying a labor market recovery.”

The Biden administration had come to believe their own lies and excuses from a decade ago. And they will come up with new lies, excuses, and conspiracy theories to explain their current disaster. Eventually its veterans will learn to believe them and turn them into future policies.

“There’s a pretty good probability that we’ll look back on how America handled the pandemic shock, mostly under Biden, and see it as a big success story,” Krugman has continued to argue. He also denied the existence of inflation and is now busy rejecting the reality of a recession.

But for once Krugman is right. Whatever happens, he and his allies, and the rest of the media will look back and impose a narrative on the misery that we are all going through. Eventually they may decide that the trillions spent also weren’t enough and we should have done more.

And when the time is right, they will try to do it all over again.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thursday, November 24, 2022

Being Thankful for the Left

By Daniel Greenfield On November 24, 2022 In recent

When we celebrate Thanksgiving, after being thankful for family and friends, for health and comfort, for food and shelter; we shouldn't forget to be thankful for the left.

There is no light without darkness and without evil, the good often fails to find their own voice. It is in the presence of slavery that we remember the worth of freedom. Men and nations are forged in war; not only the war of shell and shot, but the war of ideas. War teaches us to fight for what we have. Wars of ideas teach us to stand up for what we believe.

It is because conservatives are basically hopeful and confident that we are also prone to extremes of despair. Too many us were shocked at the decline of our society because of our great confidence in it. The faith that conservatives have in America makes them vulnerable to being crushed by the latest victory of the left.

I have seen far too much despair and defeatism, too many comments that suggest there is no hope for America and the only thing left to do is pour a glass of wine and watch the sun go down. But those comments testify to how sheltered Americans are from the struggles against tyranny around the world.

Eight years of Obama and four years of Biden are bad, but try sixty-nine years of Communism on for size. That's what generations of Russians had to live through. Ask some of the conservative activists in Europe who have never had any of the freedoms that we still take for granted whether they've given up hope. Ask people from countries where criticism of Islam can mean death, whether they've given up hope.

There are countless tales of courage over the last century of men and women who did not stop fighting, who did not stop teaching their children so that they would not stop resisting. And those stories have not ended. They continue today in Europe, Asia and South America. And those people would envy the conditions under which we fight, where we can protest without being shot or sent to prison, where we can have a shot at winning elections if we try hard enough.

Where we are, compared to 100 percent of the rest of the world, still free.

We face a hard fight, not only for our freedom, but the freedom of the world. The international left has made America its special project. It knows that if it can extinguish the hope of liberty in this land then it will drive the rest of those who hope for freedom across the ocean deeper into despair. And it wants your despair. It wants you to give up so that the rest of the world gives up too and bows under its chains.

And yet this fight is a glorious one. This fight is our birthright. And we should be thankful for the fight.

It would be more pleasant if there were no Obama or Biden. If Alinsky had never been born and Marx had never been whelped. It would be nice if we lived in a world where red was just a color and the Democratic Party was a rural movement suspicious of the Federal government and dreaming of an agrarian utopia. But then so would never having to work for a living or getting up out of bed.

Life is challenge and we face all kinds of different challenges. We get up early out of bed in the morning and drive to work. We rise in the middle of the night when the baby cries and we go to the hospital when our loved ones need us there. We do dreary things and terrible things that seem so different from the life we imagined as children. And we do them not only because they are duty, but because these challenges, the daily ones and the once in a lifetime ones, make us who we are.

Besides these prosaic challenges, the daily routines and the occasional tragedies, there are uncommon challenges that we face when the foe comes to our gate and demands that we bow and become slaves. This is the challenge that we face as a society, a nation and a people. It demands more of us and it ennobles us. It makes us a great people and a great nation, rather than only another people who seek to live in comfort with no thought for anything else.

Good emerges in response to evil. We need our enemies to remind us of who we are and what we can do when our backs are against the wall. We need evil to remind us of the good that we are capable of. As a whetstone sharpens a sword, so evil sharpens us into a weapon against it. It makes us morally stronger and teaches us the stark truths that we cannot take refuge from evil; we must confront it.

If there were no left, would there be nearly as much patriotism among true Americans as there is now? And if there were no left, how many of us would really contemplate the core principles of freedom and free enterprise? If there were no left, how many of us would ponder what we truly believe and what compromises we are willing and unwilling to make? If there were no left, would we be the same people that we are today?

For those of us who believe in the Bible, the Lord created both darkness and light. And if it were not for the darkness, would the light be nearly as precious to us? Imagine a world without sunrise or sunset, where the sight of rays of light clearing away the darkness would have no meaning? And then remember that things are treasured to the extent that they can be taken away from us.

Would we value freedom as much if we did not have to defend it? Would we hold it as dear if we did not fear that it would be taken away? Would we even be aware of what freedom is and what a free people must be if not for the dark hand of those who wish to strip us of those freedoms?

It is the left's opposition that has added urgency to a hundred issues, from the national debt to the War on Terror to freedom of speech and of religion. It has made us think about those issues, to take them out of the back of our minds and hold them up to the light as a reminder of how important they are and what must be done about them.

The left's corruptions remind us of the need for purification. As it gathers the worst of all around it, we find ourselves called to be better than we are. As the left works to doom our country, and as we suffer defeat after defeat, these defeats only serve to remind us that we must be better, that we must do more, learn more and become more in order to save our country.

War is the great teacher and this is a political war, short on bodies and heavy on minds, it is a war in which casualties are not taken in the chest or the arm, but in the mind, in reason and emotion, and against these weaknesses, we can and will prevail.

As we fight the left, we become stronger, more dedicated and more purposeful. We become the men and women that we were meant to be.

As you sit around your tables, thinking of all that you have gained and lost this year, remember and be thankful for the left, for though the winter ice gives way to the summer sun and bitter defeat gives way to sweet victory, it is defeat and hardship that teaches better than comfort and ease. We can learn more from our defeats than we ever could from our victories. Our defeats teach us endurance and fortitude, they teach us that defeat can be borne and that its sting can be turned into the weapon that unseats the foe. And our foes make us who we are.

Their evil teaches us to find the good within ourselves. Their strength teaches us to find our own strength. And their plots against what we have teach us how many treasures we have, not least of these being the full value of our freedom and our happiness that they wish to take from us.

Their war on America is teaching us to be better Americans. It may not feel that way right now, but we are privileged to have this opportunity and this fight.

We should be thankful for the left, its assaults on us are teaching us how to fight and its plots against our freedom are teaching us how to be free.

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Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Spielberg Has Become Biden

By Daniel Greenfield On November 23, 2022 In recent

‘The Fabelmans’, Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, is a moving and touching tribute to himself.

The movie exists because Spielberg, like Joe Biden, has stuck around long enough to become an institution. Despite recent bombs like a woke West Side Story remake, Hollywood is willing to subsidize Spielberg much as the Democrats prop up Joe Biden, because he maintains the fiction that the industry represents something more than a cynical power and money grab.

And Spielberg, with Bidenesque levels of bad judgment, decided that what he wanted to do was film a mawkish coming of age story that had been done a million times before. The sensitive boy, drawn to his mother, misunderstood by his father, who pursues his dream of writing novels or making movies until he succeeds enough to be able to tell the story of his own preciousness is a staple of literary and cinematic industries trapped in a narcissistic love affair with themselves.

‘The Fabelmans’ is formally dedicated to Spielberg’s parents, but would make them roll in their graves. But that’s okay. The protagonist of ‘The Fabelmans’ is the young Spielberg who heroically emerges from the trauma of middle-class life to make a movie about his growth as an artist. And the privilege of being the subject is reducing everyone around you to objects.

The trouble is that Spielberg is no more of an artist now than Biden is a politician. Both men are propped up by parasites and enablers dining out on their name recognition. Spielberg’s Ron Klain is Tony Kushner, a leftist hack playwright who has been the hump on Spielberg’s back for over a decade. The adult Spielberg, like the child filmmaker of ‘The Fabelmans’, had a knack for capturing dynamic moments, but no grasp of the bigger picture. Like other boomer blockbuster directors, including pal George Lucas, he brought to life the creative influences of his childhood, movie serials and thriller comics, monsters and space aliens, created as disposable rubbish by an earlier generation.

It never occurred to Spielberg or many of his contemporaries that they were destroying the culture that had made their childhoods magical while supporting social policies that are wrecking the lives of the next generation. The famed director need look no further than his daughter who has become a porn star. Instead, Spielberg once again cinematically looks to the past while funding radical politicians and causes, from George Gascon to abortion in Kansas.

The present that Spielberg helped to make by funding radical leftist causes is no pleasant place, from the homeless encampments and crime of Los Angeles, to the destruction of a generation of teens, so instead he keeps pointing the camera into the past so as not to see the future.

After running out of fairy dust from past generations, Spielberg turned to historical dramas whose only notable points were that he managed to miss the point about them every time. From ‘Schindler’s List’ to ‘Munich’ to ‘Bridge of Spies’, he rode liberal cliches around history while increasingly coming to side with the villains from the Muslim terrorists to Communist spies. Those movies and the hollowness of the Jewish background depicted in ‘The Fabelmans’ do nothing to disprove the otherwise implausible story from ‘Red Dawn’ director John Millus that Spielberg only discovered about the Holocaust from reading Time-Life books in his thirties.

Kushner provided Spielberg with a point of view, anti-American, and, in the case of ‘Munich’, anti-Israel, that only someone as fundamentally ignorant of history as Spielberg would have taken seriously. The historical howlers in ‘Munich’ and ‘Bridge of Spies’ are legendary, but Spielberg dismissed the critics as just younger versions of his father who don’t get his genius.

That’s fine, but there’s no more genius left. Biden is propped up by teleprompters and earpieces, Spielberg by special effects. The real visual talent in his latter-day movies like ‘The Fabelmans’ belongs to the editors and cinematographers who once collaborated with Spielberg but now drag him through the business of auto-tuning his movies to look visually stunning.

Editor Michael Kahn, who has been with Spielberg through ‘E.T.’, ‘Raiders’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’, and Janusz Kamiński, who followed him from ‘Schindler’s List’ through almost every project since, could make a student film look good. In the Peak TV era of massive budgets and runaway technological prowess, Hollywood projects have never looked so good or been so badly written, composed and edited. Spielberg is lucky to hang on to Kahn who can make even his most disjointed efforts seem coherent or to Kamiński who brings a touch of old world cinematography to fill any frame with light, but none of that can disguise the missing auteur.

Steven Spielberg can’t make a movie just like Joe Biden can’t be president. The army of spongers, grifters, enablers, talented colleagues and technical personnel can fool most people, but the resulting products never leave the ground because there’s no guiding vision. Neither Biden nor Spielberg are animated by any greater impulse than clinging to fame. Facing mortality and oblivion, they retreat into sullen tirades and narcissistic self-pity. Both men are celebrated for their empathy, but their decline reveals that they never cared for anyone but themselves.

‘The Fabelmans’ should be the end of Spielberg’s career. A final tribute to a man who lost the plot decades ago from an indulgent industry that uses the myth of creative genius to cover its many sins. But, like Biden, Spielberg has no intention of leaving the stage. Unable to tell any stories except those gleaned from his Time-Life library and then pre chewed by Tony Kushner, he has achieved his dream of being taken seriously while losing the young boy within.

That boy, the protagonist of ‘The Fabelmans’, is self-centered, but he’s driven by visions of adventure. What happens to that boy when he loses the impulse to imagine, to dream and invent, to escape his suburban life by imagining another one? The familiar story of Boomer culture is that he becomes a narcissistic shell without the redeeming quality of creativity.

The ranks of the Democrats and of the Left are stocked with these aged man-children who, despite their best efforts, became what they hated and feared about their parents, but without the sense of decency and responsibility that Spielberg still ridicules in his father. Spielberg’s Peter Pan, like his ill-fated movie project with Robin Williams, never goes back to fairyland, but also never grows up into a functioning adult. Even at the age of 75, he is still a child. But without the charm, the spark and the inventiveness of childhood. ‘The Fabelmans’ is a bookend to a career that began with glorified pulps, left childhood behind with ’Hook’ and returns once again.

Only this time the house is empty. All that’s left are old grudges and older memories.

The only thing interesting about ‘The Fabelmans’ and Spielberg is how uninteresting it all is. Some artists emerge from trauma, but that is no more of a precondition than any of the other myths of genius. The only achievement of ‘The Fabelmans’ will be to dissuade anyone from believing that there’s anything interesting about Steven Spielberg. But Spielberg was probably the only one who ever thought that there was. Much as Joe Biden believes he’s interesting.

After tiring of the cowboys and urban desperados, the pratfall comics and doomed love affairs that made it an industry, Hollywood fell in love with telling its own story. There’s a reason so many movies are set in Los Angeles and so many Academy Award winners revolve around the film industry. The greatest trick ever played by the industry is the conviction of its own importance. The mysticism of the auteur director, the little god of the theaters, still has its own shrine even as the industry is being reduced to an ancillary Big Tech project that exists to sell subscriptions to streaming services while the movie theaters go begging for spare change.

Spielberg could potentially help change that. ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ struck a powerful blow for movie theaters and for making movies the way that they did in populist 80s. But he’s too busy being wrapped up in his tiresome politics, nostalgia and narcissism. The director most celebrated by the industry is too busy looking in the mirror to save the movie theaters that made him great.

‘The Fabelmans’, prepped for a Thanksgiving release, is exactly the kind of movie that put people off going to movie theaters. Spielberg and his cohort once shook up a movie industry that had become wrapped up in virtue signaling and experimentation by making crowd-pleasing fare. Many decried Spielberg for turning out ‘dumb’ blockbusters filled with special effects and driving out the incoherent leftist navel-gazing exercises being inflicted on audiences at the time.

Spielberg never got over being snubbed as an unserious artist. After ‘Jurassic Park’ ushered in the age of special effects blockbusters that abandoned storytelling for computer generated fantasies, he spent a generation making po-faced cluelessly serious Oscar-bait. Now he can’t even properly do that anymore. All that’s left is more of the incoherent narcissistic navel-gazing that he built his fame and fortune on routing in his talented youth all those years ago.

Biden ran as the man who could save the Democrats, instead he’s destroying them. Spielberg keeps promising to save Hollywood, but like Biden, he’s too far gone to save his own legacy.

America and their respective industries would be better off without both of them.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Biden Prints Money for the Taliban

By Daniel Greenfield On November 22, 2022 In Taliban

After being described as “partners” by the Biden administration, the Taliban announced that they’re bringing back sharia punishments by chopping off hands and stoning their victims.

Last year, the Biden administration had praised the Taliban’s “openness” to women’s rights.

This development puts the nail in the coffin of claims by Biden administration figures that the Jihadist organization had changed into a kinder, gentler Taliban. But the media has conveniently ignored revelations of the close collaboration between the administration and the Taliban.

Front Page Magazine was one of the few conservative publications that exposed the over $1.1 billion in aid directed by the administration after the Taliban takeover, the special licenses issued by the Biden administration authorizing financial transactions with the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s Haqqani Network to distribute that aid, and the billions stolen from 9/11 families for the Taliban.

The Biden administration has been stonewalling the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with the State Department and Samantha Power’s USAID refusing to allow employees to be interviewed about, among other things, their “compliance with the laws and regulations prohibiting transfers of funds to members of the Taliban and the Haqqani Network”.

Instead, the Biden administration has been chartering Osama bin Laden’s old airline which had been used to ferry drugs and terrorists to evacuate the Americans that Biden had left behind. These hostages have become another cash cow that the Taliban are using to extract money from American taxpayers through the offices of their allies in the Biden administration.

Biden administration figures have repeatedly met with Taliban leaders. According to Al Jazeera, run by the state sponsors of the Islamic terror group, the administration had even provided assurances that the United States will not fund any resistance to the Taliban.

Coming a few months after Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed while under Taliban protection, a “high-level delegation” that allegedly included a top CIA figure, agreed not to “fund any armed groups or non-state actors in the country”, particularly the National Resistance Front, consisting of the Northern Alliance members who had originally helped us liberate Afghanistan.

This betrayal came even after clear evidence that the Taliban were harboring Al Qaeda.

Why would the Biden administration unilaterally throw away our best leverage against the Taliban without getting them to end their support for Al Qaeda and other terror groups?

The Biden administration then went beyond just appropriating $1.1 billion in humanitarian aid, much of which will benefit the Taliban in one way or another, while authorizing transactions with the terrorists, but actually conspired to print money for the Taliban to replace their old bills.

According to Biden’s State Department spokesman, the administration was “working hard with international banks to facilitate payment transfers from Afghanistan’s central bank to European printing companies where new banknotes would actually be produced” to “replace what had been crumbling banknotes in Afghanistan”.

Spokesman Ned Price explained that, “Afghanistan’s markets, even today, run widely on cash, but existing banknotes are crumbling. And that’s why this is such an urgent challenge.”

The Biden administration’s idea of an “urgent challenge” in Afghanistan isn’t preventing Al Qaeda from reforming, it’s not getting out Americans, or stopping the Taliban from stoning people, it’s arranging for a Polish printing company to churn out banknotes for the Taliban.

It’s not enough for the Biden administration to steal billions from 9/11 families and send it to the Taliban, it has to go all the way and actually print money for the Islamic terrorist group.

Thanks to Biden, the Taliban will get 10 billion in ‘Afghanis’ from Poland and another 10 billion from a French company. $3.5 billion in assets in the United States are being transferred to a Swiss trust fund held for the Taliban so that a future administration won’t be able to recover it.

The Biden administration claims to be concerned about Taliban atrocities and then continues to enable the terrorists.

Karen Decker, the head of the U.S. Mission to Afghanistan, conducted a “listening tour” of Afghan women who fled the Taliban and claimed that she shares their “concerns and their hope.” Then she described printing money for the Taliban as “part of our commitment to help the Afghan people”. The only Afghan people that she’s helping are the Taliban.

Thomas West, Biden’s Special Representative to Afghanistan, boasted, “I am very pleased to say that in the past 24 hours we have finally seen the conclusion of two currency transactions.”

There is no other conclusion to be drawn from these latest revelations except that the Biden administration wants the Taliban to remain in power. And has been consistently scheming to bypass legal restrictions on funding terrorism to funnel money to the Taliban.

A responsible administration that served our national interests would be providing a fraction of the aid to the National Resistance Front and other anti-Taliban groups that it’s funneling to Ukraine, and it would, at the very least, use sanctions to undermine the Taliban regime.

Instead, Biden is laboring to protect the Taliban and to keep the terrorists in power.

That’s the same conclusion that the Taliban have drawn. That’s why after prolonged hesitation and doubletalk, they are shedding any pretense about their intentions.

The Taliban’s Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada ordered judges to impose “the ruling of sharia” on, among others, “seditionists” and “apostates”.

“Those cases that have met all the Shariah conditions of limitation and retribution, you are obliged to issue the limitation and retribution, because this is the order of the Sharia and my order and it is obligatory to act,” the Taliban’s spokesman tweeted.

The Taliban have begun a comprehensive crackdown using the traditional brutal punishments of Islam. They’re testing the Biden administration and know that they have nothing to worry about.

Supreme Leader Akhundzada had been a chief judge in the Taliban’s court system during their original period of rule when they became notorious for inflicting grotesque and horrifying punishments on anyone who displeased them.

Nothing has really changed.

Last year, the Taliban captured Danish Siddiqui, the chief photographer for Reuters, in a mosque, beat and tortured him, ran him over with a car, and shot him at close range.

The same media, including Reuters, which has amplified Qatari propaganda about its Al Jazeera terrorist operatives, like Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey and Shireen Abu Akleh in Israel, has remained mostly silent about this atrocity against an actual journalist by the allies of Qatar.

The Biden administration, which has attacked Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi’s death and announced an FBI investigation of Israel over Abu Akleh’s death, has made no such efforts over the mutilation and murder of Siddiqui. Biden condemned the Saudis and the Israelis over Khashoggi and Abu Akleh, but never once mentioned Siddiqui’s name.

Jalina Porter, until recently a Washington Wizards cheerleader, who was elevated to a State Department spokeswoman, failed to condemn the Taliban after Siddiqui’s brutal murder, but only called for “an end to the violence” and a “just and durable peace settlement.”

The complicity and the double standards spoke eloquently about the administration’s agenda.

Last year, the Taliban’s Supreme Leader made his position clear to the rest of the world, “I cannot compromise on Shariah to work with you or even move a step forward.” He warned that “even if the world uses an atomic bomb, we will rule the country according to the Sharia Law.”

That was back in July.

The Biden administration and its media allies knew that they were lying about the kinder, gentler Taliban and their openness to human rights. They told those lies to keep the money flowing.

After robbing 9/11 families, diverting money to the Taliban under a dozen pretexts, including payments for hostages that the Biden administration chose to leave behind, and even collaborating in printing money for the terrorist group, there will be a brief condemnation as the Taliban resume openly mutilating, killing and torturing victims through their Islamic courts.

But the Biden administration will make sure to keep taxpayer money flowing to the terrorists.

The shameful treason we saw at the panicked evacuation of Afghanistan was not the climax, it was the middle of a conspiracy to put the Taliban in power by the enemies of America. Those enemies are not just in Moscow, Tehran or Beijing, they are right here in Washington D.C.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Monday, November 21, 2022

Obama Goes Jussie Smollett With a Fake Noose

By Daniel Greenfield On November 21, 2022 In recent

The Obama Presidential Center is only slightly less popular in Chicago than a rat with syphilis, a gang member doing a drive-by or Mayor Lori Lightfoot (ranked in reverse order of unpopularity).

The vanity memorial to the third worst president in American history has been underway for eight years. Local residents have fought it in court and community organizers have protested against it, demanding that the Messiah of Hope and Change buy them off.

“Obama himself was a bridge between communities, and this presidential center will be as well,” David Axelrod claimed. Instead, like Obama himself, the Obama Center divided everyone.

Black opponents call white supporters racists and black supporters call white opponents racists.

Truly, a wonderful reminder of the way that Obama always managed to bring us together.

Locals complain about the traffic, the noise and worry that black people will lose their homes. Others wonder why anyone actually needs a billion dollar monument to a retired politician.

When the Center was first proposed, Obama was a minor deity demanding his temple, now he’s a fallen god. Like the Clintons and Carter, he has receded into political obscurity. Once Democrats worshiped the ground he walked on, now they don’t care.

At least until the Obama Presidential Center claimed to have found a noose on the site.

The rope, commonplace on any construction site, was carefully bagged up and ominously displayed for the cameras.

Treating the rope like an emergency, the Obama Foundation paused work and issued a statement declaring that, “This shameless act of cowardice and hate is designed to get attention and divide us.”

It has been the only time anyone outside Chicago has paid attention to the Obama Center.

Which KKK member would have shown up to Jackson Park, these days filled heavily with black people, to plant a noose at what is probably the most highly secured non-military construction site? After a series of fake nooses which turned out to be as real as Jussie’s lynching, there’s every reason to be skeptical of this publicity stunt trying to make Obama relevant again.

That hasn’t stopped the Lakeside Alliance, which is handling construction, from offering a $100,000 reward for the grim roper. Construction on Chicago’s own white elephant project was halted, but “vehicles will be going in and out of the site today as Lakeside Alliance team members prepare for anti-bias training that will begin next week and to secure the site.”

If anyone working construction intentionally set up a noose to represent a proposed hanging of Obama, “anti-bias training” isn’t gonna fix that. All it’s going to do is make the construction workers dealing with cold and windy days even more miserable as they’re forced to hear lectures about their white privilege from racists who make five times more than they do.

The Obama Foundation brought in the Lakeside Alliance, a coalition of five, mostly black construction companies, because they were supposed to be handing out the work to minorities.

The public face of the Lakeside Alliance was Mamon Powers Jr, a name almost certainly taken from a Madea movie, who declared that “we put the president’s alliance together” because “I thought we black people should be in charge. We can build anything. We’ll select the white partner, most compatible with us, that believes in our vision, our mission and our goals.”

With four black-owned construction companies, which workers would be planting nooses?

It’s a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, tied together with Bubba Wallace’s NASCAR pull rope which was also mistaken for a noose and led to an FBI investigation and media outrage.

With six figures on the table, you would think that even the most fanatical members of the Lakeside KKK would have turned in their rope-bearing compadre. And yet no one has come forward to claim that $100,000. Or O.J.’s $500,000 reward for information about the real killer.

Local sleazy pols have however rushed to cash in on the fake noose.

“Hate has no place in Illinois. The noose is more than a symbol of racism,” fumed morbidly obese billionaire Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. Mayor Lori Lightfoot claimed that the rope was “disturbing” and “repulsive”: two words that have often been used to describe her face.

Say what you will about Obama, and there’s lots to say, he has at least avoided staging hate crimes against himself in the past. But a man desperate for attention will do anything.

Just ask Jussie.

The Obama Foundation’s fundraising has been dropping.

The messiah’s foundation wants to raise $1.6 billion for a center that dozens of schoolchildren, and frightened tourists seeking refuge from rampaging thugs will visit each year. That’s a lot of money for a guy who hasn’t been able to hand out government contracts since the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

In 2018, funding fell 30%, but still grabbed $165 million in scratch. Last year, it struggled to bring in $160 million. That was the year that Amazon robber baron Jeff Bezos wrote a $100 million check to Obama on the condition that he name the plaza after former Rep. John Lewis and then dance for his amusement every weekend on his spaceship as he leaves the earth behind.

Obama, not to put too fine a point on it, needs money. And unless Michelle becomes secretary of state or takes his old job, the number of donors willing to write him checks is declining.

The noose is convenient. Very convenient.

And while I’m not saying that Obama hired two Nigerian trainers to put a rope around his neck while shouting, “Jackson Park is MAGA country”, it’s more plausible than that 4 black construction companies in a black area planted a noose just around end-of-year fundraising.

The KKK doesn’t do end-of-the-year fundraising drives. Nonprofit foundations however do.

Work on the Obama Presidential Center has resumed. And hopefully donations have picked up to ensure that the white Obama staffers running the place can afford vegan cruises to Iceland.

But considering the trauma that greeted the finding of a rope at a construction site, and the pain inflicted on Chicago and Illinois residents by the news, I have, out of the goodness of my heart, contacted the Obama Foundation with my tip and told them where to send my $100,000 check.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Sunday, November 20, 2022

Voters Aren’t Choosing Dems, Dems Are Choosing Voters

By Daniel Greenfield On November 20, 2022 In US Election

The people had squandered the confidence of the government and could only win it back by redoubled work. Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

—The Solution, 1953

To understand how we got here, we need to begin with the founding premise of America, the one that motivated former British subjects to take up arms against a king, that the people had the right to choose their governments.

Now the divine right of kings has given way to the radical right of leftists to take power from the people in the name of the people. Unable to directly coerce voters, they instead exploited loopholes and weaknesses in the system to reinvent who the people were.

Democrats began by choosing a new electorate, one that was strategically defined by Senator Ted Kennedy and others as being more demographically friendly to its political machines. Into the urban political machines that had begun to lose their old immigrant bases as the Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants that had sustained them moved on to the suburbs, mass migration poured in a new electorate that would be more pliable and obedient to the party.

The combination of open borders and third world mass migration reshaped the political landscape. Cities, always prominent, became the 800-pound gorillas of politics, turning entire states in their direction. The nation’s demographics changed as rapidly as its politics did.

But that was only the first step. The second step, now well underway, was reshaping the structure of elections to allow Democrats to find the voters, instead of the voters finding them.

Voters going to the polls were exercising their power. But ballot harvesting and mail ballots transformed voting from an active act into a passive one. Voters weren’t choosing candidates, the political machines behind the candidates chose them. Massive voter registration, outreach and ballot harvesting machines targeted areas based on demographics and unearthed the votes that their statistical models showed that they needed in order to be able to win elections.

Election officials coordinating with Democrat operatives crunched the math and worked out how many votes would be needed for a given election. Big Tech bosses and their executives and engineers helped them develop the statistical models to harness the power of Big Data.

And elections came to bear little resemblance to people lining up to vote in their local house of worship. Big Tech had ‘disrupted’ another industry. Elections looked like Amazon: a massive giant leveraging its competitive Big Data advantage to disrupt how elections worked. And like many Big Tech operations that empowered monopolies while claiming to empower the people, elections went from empowering people to choose their representatives, to instead empower special interests, organizations and the party to win elections by choosing voters.

The bold idea of reversing power relations by reshaping the country to elect candidates, rather than shaping parties and candidates to appeal to the voters, reversed the historic gains of the American Revolution, turning America from a republic of free men to an oligarchy of the few.

Under the guise of ‘people power’, that is what the new elections have turned the country into.

While many concentrate on issues of voter fraud, they are symptomatic of a larger systemic change that transcends whether any given vote was cast legitimately to whether the system as a whole is legitimate. And the definition of a legitimate system, as set out by the Declaration of Independence, is one that allows the people to choose their representatives. Not vice versa.

It is difficult to look at today’s system of national elections and seriously believe that the results represent the consent of the governed. Democrats had previously argued that they were a more legitimately representative party because their identity politics included a wider spectrum of groups. But even in a midterm in which every single minority group, Latinos, Jews, black voters, American Indians and Asians, moved closer to Republicans, Democrats still held out.

They did it by analyzing voter trends and countering them by finding enough ballots to outweigh them. And in a system with ballot harvesting and mass migration, there will always be some ballots that can be found and delivered to outweigh the people. No matter how belatedly.

What happened in the midterms, once again, was that the voters rejected the Democrats, and the Democrats found other voters to overrule them. Those minorities who turned on the Democrats had their votes nullified by multi-billion dollar political machines who simply dug deeper, found folks who were (or perhaps even weren’t) legally eligible to cast a ballot and got to them.

With a massive national population that is being demographically transformed by millions of new arrivals, there will always be options for a political movement that is redefining elections from the active work of informed citizens to a passive surrender of support to the emissaries of political bosses. The old corrupt Tammany politics of wards and ghettos are running America.

What’s at stake is more than the outcome of any given election, but the very concept that America’s forefathers fought and bled for. America is not the only nation that has elections. Many countries, free and non-free, have them. What made our elections matter was that the power actually lay with the people, not with organizations and politicians claiming to represent them. When the people cease to be the source of political power, then elections become a meaningless charade that cover up the abuses of an oligarchy or a totalitarian state.

America’s elections only matter to the extent to which they represent an active decision by voters to choose officials to represent them, not a passive submission to their authority.

The Democrats have built a vast operation that allows them to ‘elect voters’. Unless America restores a system in which people elect politicians, our elections will remain fig leaves for a corrupt oligarchy of Big Tech monopolies and radical activists determined to take our power away.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Friday, November 18, 2022

Using Military Wokeness to Justify Affirmative Action

By Daniel Greenfield On November 18, 2022 In Woke

The Supreme Court may be on the verge of ending the last vestige of systemic racism.

Affirmative action faces its acid test in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. At stake is the system of racial discrimination imposed on Asian and white students by Harvard and the University of North Carolina. How could the Biden administration possibly justify racial discrimination in college admissions?

National security. In the Biden era, a woke military brass insists that everything is national security, from critical race theory to abortion, except actually winning wars.

Letting colleges racially discriminate against Asian and white students is “vitally important to our nation’s military,” according to Biden’s Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.

“Our armed forces know from hard experience that when we do not have a diverse officer corps that is broadly reflective of a diverse fighting force, our strength and cohesion and military readiness suffer. So it is a critical national security imperative to attain diversity within the officer corps,” she falsely claimed.

There is no actual evidence that the military has performed any better under racial and gender quotas. If anything, there’s correlative evidence to the contrary.

The last time we won a war, the officer corps was a good deal less diverse.

Minority representation in the Air Force officer corps was below 10% in 1991 during the Gulf War. Currently, it’s at 23% and the woke brass want it to be at 32%.

The Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., is black. Gina Ortiz-Jones, the Under Secretary, is gay and fillipino. Joanne S. Bass, the Chief Master Sergeant, is part Asian and replaced Kaleth O. Wright, who was black. Gen. Anthony S. Cotton, the head of Global Strike Command, is black.

All of these men and women are “firsts” and a number of them are woke racists who have spewed hatred for our military and our country. Ortiz Jones threatened states that restrict child sexual abuse and grooming. In a speech where he “seemed to barely contain his rage“, Brown claimed that “the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution ‘that I’ve sworn my adult life to support and defend’ have not always delivered ‘liberty and equality’ to all.”

How is the military readiness of the Air Force faring under this band of woke diverse agitators?

A recent independent review ranked the Air Force as “very weak” warning of “an extraordinarily small amount of time in the cockpit for pilots” and cautioning that its munitions would probably “not support a peer-level fight that lasted more than a few weeks”.

The Air Force has dropped its commitment to an 75% to 80% aircraft readiness rate to take ”a more holistic view of readiness.” Instead of having 8 out of 10 planes that can fly, the holistic approach means that we ought to be satisfied with 5 out of 10 FF-22 stealth fighters, 6 out of 10 F-15Es, 7 out of 10 F-35As, and 5 out of 10 CV-22 Ospreys.

Instead of being ready to defend this country, the Air Force opened its first Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office. The planes may not fly, but everyone will be lectured about white privilege.

The Biden administration told the Supreme Court that racial discrimination against Asian and poor white students had to go on for the sake of this twisted racist idea of “national security”.

“It is not possible to achieve that diversity without race-conscious admissions, including at the nation’s service academies,” Solicitor General Prelogar told the Supreme Court.

How is that culture of systemic racism working out at the Air Force’s service branch academy?

At the Air Force Academy, “some elements from CRT canon are included in the course”.

A professor boasted that, “I teach critical race theories to our nation’s future military leaders because it is vital that cadets understand the history of the racism that has shaped both foreign and domestic policy.”

The Air Force Academy football team released a video supporting the racist hate group, Black Lives Matter. Its former superintendent accused America of suffering from “systemic racism” and declared, “The Black Lives Matter movement is important and I understand the purpose and the oppression behind the movement.”

The McDermott Library already offers copies of Ibram X. Kendi’s “How To Be An Anti-Racist”, along with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ rabidly racist screed, “Between The World And Me”, which demonized the police officers and firefighters who died on 9/11 as “not human to me”.

Also available is “Race Course Against White Supremacy”:a book by domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers bombed the Pentagon, and described it in his memoir in these words: “Everything was absolutely ideal. … The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”

That racism and domestic terrorism are the Biden administration’s ideas of “national security”.

Having wrecked readiness while leading to the worst recruitment rates in a long time, the Biden administration is now trying to use the racist policies that it imposed on our military to justify the continued systemic racism being used to racially discriminate in college admissions.

Affirmative action isn’t a national security issue: it’s a national security threat.

The Supreme Court has the opportunity to end systemic racism and free a new generation from having their destinies controlled by their race, but it can also stop military wokeness from undermining national security, military readiness and weakening us in front of our enemies.

“If we don’t think about this, we’re not going to have anybody who is going to join our service to go fight China or Russia,” Chief of Staff Brown falsely claimed earlier this year. “And you’ve got to look at the demographics of our country, how it’s changing.”

Meanwhile, the Air Force’s recruitment service cautioned that, “We have warning lights flashing” with “our ‘qualified and waiting’ list is about half of what it has been historically.”

The Air Force struggled to meet its recruiting goals and completely fell short of its traditional +25% bumper. And it only got that far by spending $22 million on bonuses of up to $50,000.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic and just before a new level of wokeness set in, the Air Force exceeded its recruitment goals. In 2022, it couldn’t match those numbers and failed to meet Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard numbers entirely.

Diversity isn’t helping recruitment, it’s killing it while aiding our Communist enemies.

No one wants to join to fight China or Russia, when they also have to fight their own leadership calling them a bunch of racists and putting affirmative action ahead of merit and ability.

Joe Reeder, Bill Clinton’s Army Undersecretary, who is white, claimed that, “If a young black soldier can’t look up in the hierarchy and see, from time to time, a Colin Powell … he’s not gonna fight. I wouldn’t either.”

That would have come as news to Medal of Honor recipient Webster Anderson who, after taking two Viet Cong grenades to his legs, “propped himself on the parapet and continued to direct howitzer fire upon the closing enemy and to encourage his men to fight on” and tried to throw back another grenade, which blew up in his hand, but although “only partially conscious and severely wounded” still “refused medical evacuation and continued to encourage his men.”

The greatness of the United States military lay in men like Anderson, who was black, and countless others, of all races and creeds, who set aside their differences to defend their country.

The military was once a place that transcended race. Now a woke racialized military has become incapable of inspiring, of fighting and of winning. By ending the systemic racism of affirmative action, the Supreme Court can help make our military a great institution again.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thursday, November 17, 2022

Mayor Lori Lightfoot Accuses 75% of Chicago of Being Sexist Racists

By Daniel Greenfield On November 17, 2022 In recent

With 77 people shot last week, it’s another pleasantly murderous autumn week in Chiraq.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot got her $16 billion budget with its focus on ‘equity’ passed. By equity, Lightfoot meant giving herself a maximum 5% raise.

Aldermen, or as the newly woke Windy City calls them, Alderpeople, got a 9% raise.

It is unlikely that Lori will ever see a dime of the pay hikes for her $216,210 salary because they’re due to kick in by 2024. No one thinks Lightfoot will be in office by then except the unions still funding her campaign which managed to burn through $607,449 in campaign funds without even running any ads. It’s another achievement in an administration filled with them.

Where is the money going? Who knows. It’s Chicago. Everyone wants a nibble and a political operation has got a lot of mouths to feed. But everyone knows where her numbers are going.

Last year, Chicago’s failed racist mayor had a 26% approval rating. Up from 16%. Only 5% strongly approved. 50% strongly disapproved. These days her approval rating hovers somewhere in the 25% range. Those are challenging numbers even for Chicago elections in which polls matter much less than poll workers and counting the votes is the real democracy.

That didn’t stop Mayor Lightfoot from announcing that she was running again during the summer. Chicagoans greeted it with the same enthusiasm as a dead rat in the gutter.

“I get angry. They say, sometimes, I take things personally. You know what I say? They’re absolutely right,” Lightfoot rambled in her reelection video.

City residents have been taking her crime wave personally. And they’re angry too.

In a true testament to Lightfoot’s talent for racial healing, even black voters are turning on her as Chicagoans of all races and creeds come together to say that they’d rather have Al Capone’s corpse as mayor..

“Lori Lightfoot has a problem and it’s interesting for a black woman to have a black problem,” a local political analyst observed.

That’s odd because according to Mayor Lightfoot, her only problem is that she’s a black woman in a racist and sexist city.

Lightfoot claimed that “about 99%” of the attacks on her are because she’s a black woman.

“Women and people of color are always held to a different standard,” she whined. And claimed that men “don’t like to see a woman assume power.”

But, nobody, including black people and women, seem to want her to assume power again.

With 5 black candidates running against her, Lightfoot doesn’t have a base anymore except the one in the mirror. But that hasn’t stopped her from blaming everything on racism and sexism.

“I don’t look or sound like any other mayor we’ve ever had before, and I’ve had to fight to get a seat at the table,” Lightfoot complained in her reelection announcement, taking the familiar aggrandizing and self-pitying tone that grated on the city throughout her entire mayoral career.

Absent from the Hillaryesque pitch is any reason why normal people should care.

The implicit message is that anyone who votes against her is a sexist racist or a racist sexist. And with polls showing her doomed to defeat, Chicago must be the most sexist racist city ever.

If only 25% approve of Lightfoot, 99% of the other 75% must be bigots according to her math.

Or maybe it’s the 3,561 “shooting incidents” in Chicago last year which makes the Iraqis in Edgewater nostalgic for their homeland. There’s the 6-year-olds being shot and 5 people being robbed in one hour. And a general sense that the city is even more broken than usual.

Beneath the bluster, Mayor Lightfoot is feeling desperate. Her $16 billion boondoggle budget refrained from the traditional property tax hike: passing the buck in the hopes of managing public anger. Like a whirligig, Lightfoot twirls through contradictory claims, from blaming State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for crime to embracing her, from attacking the police to promising to invest in more police helicopters, from claiming to fight corruption to giving herself a 5% pay hike.

In a fundamentally divided city, Chicagoans are united in being sick and tired of Lightfoot.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Mayor Lightfoot announced her racist policy of refusing to let white reporters interview her. These days fewer reporters of any color would even bother and even fewer readers and viewers would pay any attention to the latest excuses and lies.

With Lori, everything is always someone else’s fault. After a weekend in which over 100 people were shot, she complained that “we are seeing historic levels of violence” and “yet we see people in Congress sitting on their hands and not doing anything.”

After Officer Ella French was shot and killed, police officers at the hospital turned their backs to her. Her father yelled at the mayor who has tried to blame a Columbus statue for the murder of police officers.

“Get that f—— statue back before noon tomorrow or I am going to have you fired,” Lightfoot allegedly yelled at a government lawyer who had tried to negotiate a deal with Italian-American groups to restore the statue..

“You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians. … You are out there stroking your d—- over the Columbus statue, I am trying to keep Chicago police officers from being shot and you are trying to get them shot,” Lightfoot ranted. “My d— is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d— in Chicago.”

Lightfoot then convened a Chicago Monuments Project Advisory Committee which called for “artistic interventions” targeting statues of Lincoln, Franklin, Grant and Washington.

But those statues are likely to outlive the city’s racist mayor.

A whole lot more Chicagoans like Washington and Lincoln than Lori Lightfoot. And the 2023 election is likely to do to her political career what her racist mobs did to the city’s statues.

The statue of Columbus that stood proudly in Grant Park until it was assailed by Black Lives Matter racist mobs and removed by the racist mayor is still absent. But it would not be hard to imagine a Columbus comeback after she has been sent packing.

As part of her $16 billion equity budget, Lightfoot wanted to build a whole lot of affordable ‘tiny homes’ of 500 square feet each.

Next year, she can go live in one.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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