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Thursday, October 31, 2019

Chicago Teachers Strike for $100,000 Salaries

By On October 31, 2019
Since October 17, the Chicago Teachers Union has banished 361,000 students from their classrooms by going on strike to demand a $100,000 average salary for its members.

The union insisted that taxpayers, “stop short-changing the people who make our schools work”.

4 in 10 Chicago public school students don’t meet national reading standards. Or, as celebratory press releases declared, 61% of Chicago students actually met the national average. Math is obviously not a key skill of Chicago educators except when it comes to demanding obscene pay hikes.

A “record” 57% of Chicago students also met the national average in math.

If 57% doesn’t deserve a $100,000 salary, what does?

Currently, Chicago teachers are living on starvation wages of $78,211 a year. The people responsible for that 57% “record” are shortchanged with a miserly starting salary of $52,958, a beggarly $82,630 10-year midcareer salary, and a $108,242 maximum salary that barely keeps them out of the poorhouse.

They can’t live like this.

Hundreds of thousands of students are left on their own as their educators “fight for the students” by demanding a 15% raise in 3 years, while Chicago’s lefty mayor will only offer them 16% in 5 years.

And that’s not counting the annual cost-of-living increases which make it more like 25%.

5 years from now, the starting salary for a Chicago teacher would be $72,000 while the average salary for a Chicago teacher would be $100,000. That’s the offer that the union claims isn’t good enough.

Waiting 5 years for a $100,000 salary would “short-change” the people who make our schools fail.

67% of Chicago’s school budget already goes to salaries and benefits. Another 33% is left over for the other stuff. Guess where that $2.5 billion that the union is demanding will come from? Not the 67%.

“The fact is there is no more money,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot insisted. “Period.”

Nonsense. There’s always more money. All Chicago schools have to do is put out more junk bonds, borrow another $500 million, pay $70,000 in interest a day (that won’t even cover the average salary of a public school teacher), and add it to the $9 billion or so in debt that it’s already carrying.

That’ll help put a dent in the $850 million in pension contributions this year.

Better make sure that the number of students meeting math averages doesn’t pass 60% or the next generation of taxpayers might figure out what’s going on and run for their lives and their wallets.

CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates previously had lots of ideas for raising money. “Where will the money come from? Rich people."

Ah, those rich people. They really are the answer to everything.

It’s not hard to see why Senator Elizabeth Warren, a rich person, turned up to a CTU protest.

Past tax returns showed that in 2017, a CTU VP had been earning $96,115 from the union. It’s doubtful that there have been salary reductions in the union since then. That would force the union’s management to go on strike against its membership. So, Gates is probably making six figures.

Is the money coming from her, a rich person? Nah, she has other ideas. Like gambling and drugs.

“We have a governor who has committed to legalizing recreational marijuana and putting a tax on it, we can take that as well,” Stacy Davis Gates ranted. “They are also talking about sports betting. We can take that. They’re talking about opening a new casino here in the city of Chicago. We can take that.”

We’ll take the drug and gambling cash… for the children.

Gambling and drugs will be used to help pay the $100,000 salaries of teachers in a city that actually brags that a record 57% of the students met national averages in math. This is what full spectrum failure, moral, economic, educational, political, looks like in this progressive Pottersville.

In Chicago, there’s only one difference between organized crime and organized lefties. Many criminals won’t shake down gamblers and drug dealers for cash, and then steal the money from the children.

There’s a union for that.

Stacy Davis Gates will take the drug and gambling cash, but there are things she won’t take.

"Rich white men tell black women with children in the Chicago Public Schools what to do all the time," she whined, after her name was misspelled in a note from the lawyer of the black female lesbian mayor.

Not only is Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s mayor, a black woman, but so is Janice Jackson, the CEO of the public school system. But, even when the mayor is a black lesbian, the race card never expires.

In a city and a system run by black women, those “rich white men” keep pushing everybody around.

And those “rich white men” will be paying those $100,000 salaries too. It’s the very least they can do.

It’s all theater.

361,000 students were left without an education, and their parents, most of whom work and earn a lot less than the privileged teachers whining that they can’t live on $100,000, were left to cope with them.

Mayor Lightfoot insists that there’s no money, but that’s silly. There will be money. Rich white men will provide it too. At interest rates that only a Chicago public school graduate would find acceptable.

The Chicago Teachers Union will get its insane raises. More money will be borrowed at ruinous interest rates to pay for them. The pension cost will be incomprehensible and won’t actually be paid.

Enrollment in Chicago schools keeps dropping sharply even as the unions howl for more cash. CTU protesters claim that they’re striking for smaller class sizes, but they’re already getting them as the enrollment numbers fall by the thousands. The teachers are running out of students to exploit.

And that’s the real crisis.

Chicago can always borrow more money even if its bonds are rated below those of Puerto Rico, Somalia, and a burning pile of trash below an underpass that somehow talked J.P. Morgan into a bond issue.

But it can’t borrow more students.

Illegal aliens are doing their part. A sizable chunk of Chicago public school expenses is generated by students who don’t speak English. But why would your average illegal go to Chicago when he can stay in California? On a cold winter night, even hardened MS-13 gang members will shudder at the ‘lake effect’.

The Chicago Teachers Union is bulking up salaries and staff sizes for a huge influx of students that isn’t coming. If anything, the students are running the other way. And who can blame them?

The future of public education in Chicago is empty schools, $100K teacher salaries, and fake jobs.

Don’t worry. The “rich” will pay for it. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always gambling and drugs. They won’t pay for the $100,000 salaries, but that’s where plenty of those salaries will be going.






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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez Returns to The Place She Cost Thousands of Jobs

By On October 30, 2019
“I am back,” Senator Bernie Sanders declared in Queensbridge Park: under the shadow of Queensbridge Houses, the country’s biggest housing project and its biggest failed experiments in government housing.

Cabrini–Green, Pruitt–Igoe, and other mammoth projects have been demolished. Queensbridge or
'the Bridge' lingers on as the nation's worst socialist housing eyesore where nothing works except the guns.

Aides and proxies for the socialist politician insisted that the location was sending a message.

“Queensbridge was a deliberate choice,” one of his aides claimed.

It’s a hell of a choice.

The comeback rally was built around Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s endorsement of Sanders. Cortez had famously helped scuttle the deal that would have brought a coveted Amazon HQ to New York.

The location of that planned HQ would have been in Long Island City, near Queensbridge Houses. Amazon was bringing a potential 25,000 jobs. Queensbridge Houses, the largest housing project in the country, has 6,600 residents. Most of them are poor. A large number are unemployed.

Amazon would have brought job fairs and resume training to Queensbridge for 3 years. Instead, Queensbridge Houses gets a rally for the smug socialist who took away the future of its residents.

Assemblyman Ron Kim bizarrely claimed that Bernie's rally was a "a metaphor for all Americans who feel neglected by Wall Street.”

It's hard to think of a worse socialist metaphor than coming to a place to which a company tried to bring 25,000 jobs before being driven out by a Bernie Sanders ally to complain that capitalists don’t care.

"All the people protesting, where are they now?" Billy Robinson, a community activist had asked, weeks after Amazon pulled out, under pressure from the socialists, leaving local residents with nothing.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez went off to get a $300 haircut. Then she and Bernie, a socialist millionaire 1 percenter, returned to celebrate their own greatness in a place where the median income is $15,843.

Time to come back and ignore all the thousands of black people whose lives AOC ruined.

“It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being," the obnoxious rich girl from Westchester claimed.

So, Rep. Cortez hadn’t recognized her value as a human being until she turned 26?

Sanders called the socialist brat "an inspiration to millions of young people, not just here in New York, but across this country."

It’s doubtful that Cortez is an inspiration to anyone in Queensbridge Houses. They don’t get $300 haircuts in the ‘Bridge’. It did, at one time, hold the record for the highest numbers of murders of any housing project in the city. Last year, Queensbridge managed to goose murder rates with 3 shootings in 1 week as the five gangs based out of the mammoth project battled four gangs from another project.

None of them showed up to the Sanders-Cortez socialist lovefest.

“A few miles away from here, people on Wall Street make unbelievable amounts of money and live in incredible and ostentatious luxury,” Bernie Sanders screeched, “while right here, across the street from us, people are struggling day after day just to survive.”

Yes, they are.

But Sanders neglects to mention that they’re struggling to survive being shot at by fellow residents.

"You heard of us, official Queensbridge murderers," Mobb Deep rapped in Shook Ones (Part II) back in the day. "You all alone in these streets, cousin. Every man for they self in this land we be gunnin'."

In the Giuliani era, criminals were evicted from public housing, but in the ‘progressive’ De Blasio era, criminals are welcome in public housing, and that means more people getting shot in Queensbridge.

People on Wall Street do make lots of money. Some of that money nearly found its way to Queensbridge. And then Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez stepped in to make sure it didn’t happen.

Queensbridge Houses is 61% black, 30% Latino and around 2% white.

The Sanders and Cortez rally was a sea of white faces. That mob of lefties, estimated at 26,000, didn’t come from Queensbridge Houses. There were probably more people who worked on Wall Street in that crowd than people who live in the housing project complex.

None of the three headliners of the Bernie’s Back rally, Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore (who had been dug up from a time capsule left behind in 2007), and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, are black.

Somebody in the most culturally illiterate political campaign since Hillary Clinton’s abuela imbroglio decided to bring in Michael Moore to headline a rally at one of the birthplaces of hip-hop music.

In Bernie’s mind, Queensbridge Houses is a pristine experiment in socialized housing from 1939 and a model of how government intervention can bring equality through subsidized housing. In the real world, the ‘Bridge’ was a disastrous progressive experiment right from the very beginning.

The mammoth complex of Y-shaped grayish-brown buildings looked like a prison. Like the even more infamous Pruitt-Igoe complex, its elevators skipped every other floor. All the modern designs, like asbestos tiles, that were supposed to transform housing did not hold up once the 1939 World’s Fair had come and gone. And the residents added to the fun by trashing ‘the Bridge’ into a miserable hellhole.

Or the triumph of socialism in action.

Nothing works in Queensbridge Houses. And nothing has worked for generations. The elevators don’t open. The doors don’t close. And the heat and gas come and go. The roofs leak and the mold grows.

Last year, HUD Secretary Ben Carson visited Queensbridge and suggested a federal takeover. One of the buildings hadn’t had any gas for four months.

This year, Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Cortez showed up to call for more of the same.

"Safe and decent housing is an essential right," Sanders insisted.

Queensbridge Houses shows how that ‘right’ works out in real life. The housing projects of Queensbridge mirror the miserable experiments in mass housing of Bernie’s old USSR. They’re built badly, they don’t work, and they exist only to serve as receptacles of endless human misery.

Bernie came to the site of one of socialism’s worst failures in New York City. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez showed up to the place where she stole thousands of jobs from its poor black residents.

A mob of white lefties followed them to an area they wouldn’t usually set foot in.

The only purpose of this disgusting farce was trying to revive Bernie’s failed campaign while giving Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez leverage to negotiate her eventual endorsement of Elizabeth Warren.

Nobody involved showed any real concern for the thousands of black people they were using as props.

"We want a justice system that doesn’t gun down Black folks in their houses," Bernie Sanders ranted at a building complex where black gang members are the ones killing people.

He called for a Green New Deal by buildings where people routinely don't have heating or cooking gas for months.

If the white lefty hipsters chanting for social justice wanted to see the reality of what the visionary policies they support look like in the real world, all they had to do was spend some time in ‘the Bridge’.

Instead, in the shadow of one of socialism’s biggest failures, Bernie demanded more socialism.

"Ain't no such things as halfway crooks," Mobb Deep rapped about ‘the Bridge’. No such thing as halfway socialists either.




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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.


Sunday, October 27, 2019

Hollywood's #MeToo Studios Only Want to Tell #MeToo Stories About FOX News

By On October 27, 2019
Over 80 women accused Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein of everything from harassment to rape. The drama of the case made the #MeToo movement go global. And you might think that there would be a movie in that. But years later, the closest we’ve come are rumors that Brad Pitt, who has his own history with Weinstein, might adapt the story of two of the reporters involved in the coverage.

Brian De Palma (Scarface, The Untouchables) will be making Predator, which will be about
Weinstein without actually naming Hollywood’s Voldemort. “My character won’t be named Harvey Weinstein, but it will be a horror film, with a sexual aggressor, and it will take place in the film industry,” he said.

Why not name Weinstein? And why treat a recent case as historical fiction?

“I was aware of some of the things that were happening during the Harvey Weinstein era and it is an interesting story to tell,” De Palma said.

Okay then.

Meanwhile there have been not one, but two, count ‘em, two movies about the #MeToo scandal at FOX News. Showtime adapted Gabriel Sherman’s dubious book, The Loudest Voice, into a seven-episode miniseries featuring top talent. Russell Crowe had to be paid enough money to spend 6 hours in the makeup chair, not to look like Harvey Weinstein, but Roger Ailes.

Russell Crowe had been accused of being recruited to kill an investigative piece on Harvey Weinstein’s assaults back in 2004. But, please give him an Emmy now for being outraged about sexual harassment. If it involves Republicans. Weinstein had all but made Sienna Miller a star and she used to call him “Pops” while claiming that he had never propositioned her. Give Pops’ favorite daughter another Emmy.

The Loudest Voice miniseries rehashed the usual lefty culture war targets from a previous decade, the Bush administration, 9/11, and sank like a stone. Even dedicated FOX-hating proggies didn’t want to spend the bulk of their free time watching Russell Crowe try to act his way through a wet paper bag in a neverending story about events that could be summed up in three sentences.

Reviews were poor and only some 300,000+ viewers tuned in to see the episodes when they first aired.

Was there a more interesting story that Showtime could have made a miniseries about?

Showtime is a subsidiary of CBS. And CBS had its own TV version of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, complete with Clinton connections.

CBS CEO and former Chairman Les Moonves was accused of harassing and assaulting numerous women, he allegedly even had a staff member who was there to perform sexual favors for him. A CBS board member, who was a major Hollywood producer, had said, “I don’t care if 30 more women come forward and allege this kind of stuff.”

Moonves was a good friend of the Clintons and had shepherded their projects through the pipeline.

But Moonves was not just any executive. He transformed CBS from a midwestern family network into an urban and edgy network that pushed the boundaries. The story of his rise and downfall isn’t just a #MeToo scandal, it’s an important story about the cultural changes in the industry and the country.

It’s the kind of story that The Loudest Voice claims to be telling.

But Moonves’ own Showtime gang has no interest whatsoever in telling it. Instead, the former toy of television’s worst sexual predator, spent a fortune accusing FOX News of sexual misconduct.

Lest you think that a seven-episode miniseries could exhaust the topic, Bombshell, a movie starring Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie, will be coming to theaters soon.

Bombshell is not to be confused with the movie of the same name about Hedy Lamarr: who merely escaped Nazi Germany, became a movie star, and whose ideas helped pave the way for WiFi. That movie was considered unimportant. This one bashes Republicans.

Bombshell is being released by Lionsgate, whose former executive vice president of legal affairs accused its general counsel of assaulting her and trying to make her his slave.

Literally.

At one point the powerful Lionsgate figure allegedly told her that, "he wanted me to be his slave and he wanted me on my knees to crawl to him."

After coming forward, the former Lionsgate lawyer claimed that Lionsgate execs struck back and prevented her from finding work.

There could be a movie in that. But just not from Lionsgate. Or anyone in Hollywood.

Instead, Lionsgate, which has its own sexual harassment problem, is betting big on a movie about FOX's sexual harassment problem. And, of course, no one will actually call out Lionsgate for its hypocrisy.

Just like Showtime got a pass.

The #MeToo scandals tore a swath through the industry leaving major holes in CBS (Les Moonves, 60 Minutes exec producer Jeff Fager, Charlie Rose, Rick Najera), NBC (Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw, Mark Halperin), NPR (Michael Oreskes, head of news, David Sweeney, chief news editor), not to mention scandals involving the head of Amazon studios, the chief creative officer for Walt Disney Animation, Bill Cosby, Paul Haggis, Morgan Freeman, Russell Simmons, Tavis Smiley, Louie C.K., Kevin Spacey, Jeffrey Tambor, James Franco, Casey Affleck, and an endless legion of other big industry names.

None of that was worth a movie. The only #MeToo stories Hollywood will tell are about Republicans.

The same industry which has yet to cobble together one single lousy movie about Harvey Weinstein, a predator whose crimes became international news and whose fat face is instantly recognizable, has managed to ignore the disasters at CBS, NBC and NPR, to make two productions about FOX News.

The movies come from CBS and Lionsgate. Both of which have had their own #MeToo scandals.

Bombshell and The Loudest Voice are pictures of a corrupt industry. Just not the industry that CBS and Lionsgate had in mind. These propaganda flicks exist in negative space. The important stories are the ones that they aren’t telling. And the reasons why they aren’t telling them are the real story.

There’s an old Soviet anecdote about an American and a Russian who are arguing about freedom.

The American tells the Russian that he can go to the White House and shout that the President of the United States is an idiot. The Russian tells the American that he can also go to the Kremlin and shout that the President of the United States is an idiot. CBS and Lionsgate, like the proverbial Russian, will prove they oppose sexual harassment by shouting how terrible the situation for women is at FOX News.

Why won’t the only major Hollywood project about Harvey Weinstein that appears to be going somewhere even use his name? It’s not because the industry still fears Harvey. Those days are done.

But the industry is full of guys like him, and many of the boys and girls who work in it are complicit.

When you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see there (a common problem in Hollywood), you project it outward. Build an effigy and burn it. And then pretend that it’s a problem that the other tribe has. Tell the story often enough and maybe you’ll even believe it. And hopefully the public will.

Bombshell and The Loudest Voice aren’t exposes. They’re industry cover-ups.






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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Why the 'Woke' Corporations Back China

By On October 22, 2019
Think there’s a contradiction between ‘woke’ corporate titans like Apple and Disney silencing anyone opposed to China’s crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong?

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s synergy.

The same forces that made the major brands scattered around your kitchen, living room and garage broadcast their support for gun control, gay marriage and illegal immigration are fueling their support for the People’s Republic of China pulling another Tiananmen Square in Hong Kong.

The lefties in Beijing and Berkeley used the same set of ideological tools to force companies to toe the party line. They roped off access to an appealing customer base, the population of mainland China, urban millennials with huge amounts of disposable income, in exchange for ideological compliance.

Communist China is one entangled oligarchy which mingles political party and company. Sound familiar?

The CEO of Nike sits on the board of Disney. The CEO of Disney until recently sat on the board of Apple. The CEO of Apple sits on the board of Nike. Good thing we have a “free market economy” isn’t it?

Disney, Apple and all the rest have no problem understanding their Chinese Communist counterparts.

ESPN smears democracy protesters in Hong Kong for the same reason that it celebrated Colin Kaepernick. There’s a fundamental contradiction in principles between supporting a Communist police state and denouncing American police officers, but a perfect synergy of political expediency.

Disney, ESPN’s parent company, has embraced identity politics from the top down, even as its head honcho, Bob Iger, remains whiter than vanilla ice cream, not because it really believes in this stuff. The Chinese Communist Party believes in One China. Its American counterparts believe in A Thousand Genders. Lefty power in China is built on unity and solidarity. Lefty power in America is built on divisive minority coalitions. But it’s only a difference if you focus on the means rather than the ends.

And the Mouse didn’t eat the entire entertainment industry by being unable to see the endgame. Avengers Endgame brought in $612 million in China. That’s the real endgame that it cares about.

In America and China, a lefty political elite controls the culture. Chinese and American lefties interlock cultural, economic and political power. Disney, once seen as a square family friendly studio, can rule the box offices in America and China because it advances the cultural goals of their political elites.

American corporations went ‘woke’ because their ideal customer base, wealthy millennials, were reprogrammed by academia. Getting access to young people with lots of money required ritual virtue signaling, first by cultural industries, which didn’t need much encouraging to function as gatekeepers, censors and reeducators, and then by all the other industries which bowed to the culture.

If Disney didn’t advance the party line, its comic book movies would be ridiculed, dismissed and denounced, and its cartoon remakes would be accused of racism in America. And in China, where the loci of political control are even simpler, they would never be released in the country’s movies theaters.

China’s Commies control the entire economy. America’s lefties control the cultural economy. And our few real exports to China are either agricultural or cultural. And soybean farmers aren’t tweeting about Hong Kong. The ‘wokest’ parts of our economy, entertainment and tech, are that way because they depend on the cultural sanction of the same political movement that killed millions in China.

If you’re going to sell thousand-dollar phones made by slave labor in some dusty factory town where the air is poison, you need the sanction of the Communist Party of China and the culture industry of California. And if you’re going to dump your cultural garbage in American and Chinese movie theaters, both owned by the same Chinese corporations, you’ll need to run the stuff by cultural censors.

Chinese censors are concerned about portraying their leaders as powerful and discouraging insurrection. American censors want to push their identity politics. That’s how you end up with ESPN cheering Colin and booing Hong Kong protesters. Chinese and American commies both get what they want and ESPN gets a foothold in the Chinese market and among the Ivy League’s wealthy woke grads.

The Hong Kong protesters won’t be too happy, but how many Avengers movies do they watch? How many iPhones can they buy? How many copies of Battlefield do they play? That’s the real question.

The ‘enemies of the people’ in Hong Kong are free market Christians who don’t want a police state controlling their lives. Funny coincidence, those are also the ‘enemies of the people’ in America.

Giant multinational monopolies don’t like free markets. They encourage competition.

The last thing the NBA, Disney, Apple, Nike and the rest of the ‘megas’ want is competition. What they want is a walled garden tended by a kindly Zen-Communist tyrant who will give them a virgin territory in exchange for a huge slice of the pie to be shared with local political partners. And, of course, slavish devotion to the tyranny of whatever it is the locals believe in, dialectical materialism, the transcendence of gender, which is a small price to pay by people who don’t have any principles or believe in anything.

It doesn’t really matter if this walled garden is in China or California. Either way, the ideal outcome is a totalitarian leftist state and the enemies are Christians who believe in a free market economy.

Can you think of anything a soulless ‘woke’ monopoly would hate and fear more than religious believers who also believe in personal freedom? That’s why Disney, Apple and the ChiComs are on the same page.

Apple, Disney and all the rest are about brands. A brand is a form of identity.

Brands don’t make good products. Instead they churn out overpriced junk and use advertising to fuse consumer loyalty to their brand. And that brand, a sports team, an Apple logo, becomes part of the identity of the people who are brainwashed into identifying with it even to their own detriment.

That’s why ad agencies have gone gaga for identity politics. And why every other ad you see is virtue signaling so hard that it would make Mao roll his eyes. They’re all in the manufactured identity business.

Identity politics manufactures identities and then convinces its dupes that their lives are hopeless and incomplete until they also implement open borders, gun control, and a ban on fossil fuels.

Sound familiar? Buy into the revolution now. Organizers are standing by to take your call.

That’s also why religious believers are the enemy. They don’t make ideal consumers.

People who have a form of meaning in their lives that isn’t for sale on Black Friday aren’t good consumers. Lefties with thirty genders and a hole the size of Cleveland where meaning should be, are.

So are Communist drones in a society drifting away from Communism while suppressing religion.

That’s why California and Communist China are the capitals of ‘Capitamunism’. And why free market Christians are the enemies in both of the capitals where identity politics are their own religion.

In China, it’s nationalism. In America, it’s anti-nationalism. But those are just different identities. And advertising is in the business of monetizing identities. The militant Chinese nationalist vocally insisting that everything in Asia belongs to Beijing and the furious Black Lives Matter activist demanding that we build Wakanda in Oklahoma are two sides of the same coin and ESPN will market to both of them.

And if a few protesters in Hong Kong or police officers in Dallas get shot, that’s also the same coin.

What really matters is the next game, the next movie, the next phone and the next crackdown. What matters is that you can buy governments, shut down protests and suppress the truth. What matters is that more people, in China and America, are realizing that what they want isn’t a sale: it’s freedom.









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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Bernie Sanders’ Perpetual Motion Green New Deal

By On October 16, 2019
One time, as I was riding in an Uber from the airport, the driver began explaining perpetual motion.

Even though we were in a motor vehicle which needed regular infusions of gasoline to keep going, the driver, who was a devotee of ancient Egyptian technology, claimed that the pyramids were really generators, that modern technology had been stolen by the white man, and that free energy was real.

He also had a video of a perpetual motion machine powered by a bicycle chain. “It generates energy by sliding down,” my driver assured me. “And then it gets pulled up by its own weight. It’s real simple.”

I never got around to asking him why he didn’t use the perpetual motion bicycle chain to power his car.

But now, Senator Bernie Sanders has announced his own perpetual motion energy plan.

In Bernie’s new Green New Deal, 20 million new jobs will be created to fight, what the elderly socialist claims is, a “climate crisis”. These jobs will be "good paying, union jobs" in "energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants", not to mention the eternal New Deal fantasy of government work camps under a "a reimagined and expanded Civilian Conservation Corp".

And this perpetual motion plan will pay for itself by, among other things, "collecting new income tax revenue from the 20 million new jobs created by the plan."

The bicycle chain slides down. And then gets pulled up. And creates 20 million jobs. It’s real simple.

Bernie’s plan calls for spending a mere $16.3 trillion (also known as most our national debt) and that will create 20 million union jobs in such booming sectors as sealing windows and coding (when the coders have been unionized, all our software will work as well as all other union sectors), and then the income tax from those 20 million jobs will help cover that $16.3 trillion. Presumably with some tax hikes.

But it’s okay. We’ll just pay the workers more so they can afford to pay the higher taxes. It’s real simple.

Much like my Uber driver’s perpetual motion machine, the energy will be free.

First, Bernie will “ban the imports and exports of fossil fuels”. There will also be bans on fracking, coal mining and offshore drilling. And he’ll also “ensure fossil fuels stay in the ground by stopping the permitting and building of new fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and refining infrastructure.”

You wouldn’t want those fossil fuels escaping the ground and sustaining human civilization.

Then, President Bernie will use the SEC to force "financial institutions, universities, insurance corporations" to divest from oil and gas and buy "clean energy bonds". Those “clean energy bonds” will be subsidizing the failed “renewables” strategy that doesn’t work, but will now have been mandated.

Federal pension funds will also be forced to throw away the futures of their workers in the same way.

By 2030, the entire country’s electricity and transportation grid will be powered by “100 percent renewable energy.” Which is to say you’ll spend a lot of time sitting around in the dark.

But the whole thing will pay for itself “through litigation, fees, and taxes” on the fossil fuel industry.

First Bernie will bankrupt the energy industry and then pay for everything by taxing the industry he bankrupted. The bicycle chain goes up and then it goes down. Which part of that don’t you understand?

At least the energy will be free. Or virtually free.

Bernie’s Green New Deal proposal claims that, “after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs.”

Operators are standing by to take your call.

Bernie promises to “end greed in our own energy system”. Goodbye Edison, vamoose Tesla. There’ll be no more profiteering from the infinite free energy generated by the Green New Deal. Forget energy greed. And the energy grid. There’ll be neither greed nor grid in the Green New Deal.

How will this free energy work?

Simple. "The renewable energy generated by the Green New Deal" will be sold to "cooperatively-owned" utilities that " demonstrate a commitment to the public interest". Ban oil, coal and gas, then force all the financial institutions to subsidize “clean energy” which will be sold to lefty cooperatives.

And they say Communism doesn’t work.

There will be no more “energy greed” because the Green New Deal, whose key pieces of energy infrastructure, windmills and solar panels, are the least reliable ways to produce energy, and only work intermittently when there’s sunlight and wind, will resell its energy to politically correct utilities.

Everything will be subsidized and pay for itself by taxing the oil industry that no longer exists. And forcing everyone to invest their savings and pensions in a boondoggle worthy of Venezuela.

The bicycle chain goes up. The bicycle chain goes down. And you’re really gonna need those bicycles.

As Bernie puts it, "We will move beyond oil toward an electric car." There'll be $2 trillion in grants to buy electric cars. And $681 billion for electric car trade-ins. Then $407 billion to replace all buses with electric buses. And $216 billion to replace trucks with electric trucks. Plus, another $100 billion to “decrease the cost of a new electric vehicle to at most $18,000.”

(It's only money. Taxpayers have lots of it.)

Actual cars will be eliminated through the, "regulation" and "enforcement" of personal vehicles.

But don't worry about the cost of charging your new electric car, built by unionized "indigenous peoples" and "communities of color", because with charging stations everywhere, "drivers will no longer need to worry about where to charge their car or if they can pay for it."

The electricity is "virtually free".

The entire country, including all its vehicles, and long-haul trucks and school buses, and your car, will be dependent on an energy grid run by political apparatchiks who worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign and whose power supply varies depending on the weather, and are managed in defiance of economics.

What could possibly go wrong?

Better hang on to your bicycle. You’re going to need it once the blackouts, brownouts and restrictions on power usage kick in. After a while that $2 trillion worth of electric cars will be banned through “regulation and enforcement”, while everyone except seniors will be told to ride bicycles.

The bicycles will be powered by that unique form of renewable energy known as human muscle.

Human ingenuity and folly are the only true sources of renewable energy. Both are infinite. And sometimes it can be hard to tell one from the other. That is why socialism continues to endure. Not because it works, but because there will always be people who want to believe that the bicycle chain can go up and down, and that your trillion-dollar spending plans will be paid for by your fantasies.

Any intelligent adult would see Bernie’s Green New Deal as raving lunacy. Take the plan to subsidize 20 million jobs with income taxes from those 20 million jobs. Or the claim that the Green New Deal can be paid for with taxes on the energy industries it proposes to wipe out. Or a call to spend $150 billion to “decarbonize” shipping and aviation “as soon as possible”. (Just put windmills on the planes.)

Portions of the Green New Deal read like socialist gibberish poorly translated from the original Russian.

“We will establish a ‘take back’ program to require large corporations that produce goods with the materials needed for this clean energy transition to pay to take those goods back from consumers who no longer want them to establish a nation-wide materials recycling program so we can use as many recycled materials as possible to build the renewable energy equipment needed to transform our energy system,” one particular breathless sentence insists.

There’s no room for periods or commas in this excited vision of a world in which consumers eagerly rush to turn over the goods they no longer want so they can be used to construct windmills for free energy.

After the Bernie revolution, the people will have been educated to realize that they no longer need material goods. (Bernie however will have upgraded from three houses to four.) And they’ll rush to turn over all their iPhones and convertibles, while the evil corporations which convinced them that they needed those things will atone by beating their lawnmowers into solar panels and windmills.

This isn’t a political vision. It’s environmentalist messianism. It doesn’t work. But it isn’t really meant to.

My driver didn’t try powering his car with the perpetual motion bicycle chain. The idea of it was what mattered. Once upon a time, American socialists were cranks confined to lecturing students or random people about their magical economics with no real risk of having to put their delusions into practice.

The truly vital thing was the pseudo-religious vision of a remaking the world into a magical place.

We all like believing that wonder can transcend material reality. For religious people, God is the source of wonder. Others, like my driver, find validation in imagining the technological miracles of ancient Egypt. And millions of lefties believe that given total power they could reshape reality to create their vision of a magical world unbounded by the materialism of economics and energy.

In the real world, the only way the bicycle chain keeps going is if your feet are working the pedals. And lefties invariably realize that the only “free energy” doesn’t come from wind or solar.

The only “free energy” with which lefties build their utopias is slave labor.

Ancient Egypt wasn’t powered by magical batteries or lost ancient technologies. It worked because of slave labor. Communist dictatorships got things done not because they had good ideas, but because they enslaved millions of people. Bernie proposes bringing back the Civilian Conservation Corps. Perhaps he forgot that Norman Thomas, America’s leading socialist, had called CCC a “system of forced labor”.

Or maybe Bernie remembers all too well.

The bicycle chain rattles. Keep pedaling. It’s the only way to generate power in the Green New Deal.








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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

How Obama’s Senior Response Director Profited From Disaster in Puerto Rico

By On October 10, 2019
By September 2018, despite billions of dollars in aid, Puerto Rico was still a mess. By August, FEMA had stopped paying for the nearly 2,500 displaced Puerto Ricans who had been living in hotels after Hurricane Maria had wrecked their homes. But the FEMA times were good at Casino Del Mar.

San Juan's Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz had become a CNN celeb by wearing a, "Help Us We Are Dying" t-shirt. But no one was dying at the luxury resort in San Juan with its 15,000 square feet of gaming tables and its seven restaurants. Except maybe some especially unlucky gamblers. Its blue neon wave walls were shimmering, the machines were jingling and there were some high rollers at the tables.

One of those high rollers was a FEMA administrator.

Ahsha Nateef Tribble’s job had been to get Puerto Rico working again. That’s why Ahsha had been appointed FEMA's Power Sector Chief and Infrastructure Chief for Recovery.

And she was certainly helping one part of Puerto Rico recover.

At Casino Del Mar, Donald Keith Ellison, the former president of Cobra Acquisitions, who has been indicted alongside Tribble, was seen in surveillance footage picking up $3,000 worth of casino chips. The indictment alleges that Tribble and Ellison were together at the gambling tables and the cash cage.

Tribble and Ellison were gambling in more ways than one. The stakes would have easily broken the Casino Del Mar. Ellison’s Cobra had received $1.8 billion in federal contracts to restore Puerto Rico’s power grid. And Tribble had the authority to dispense $200 million in public assistance projects.

What was a mere $3,000 compared to the millions and billions that they were already playing with?

The indictments of Tribble and Ellison ended the game. The dice have come up snake eyes and the croupier is taking back all the chips. But the game of profiting from catastrophe was a fun one.

At Casino Del Mar, Ahsha Nateef Tribble was enjoying the good life at the top of a meteoric career. But while her annual salary of $149,000 placed her among the top 10% of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), it wasn’t enough to buy her everything she wanted.

And that’s what Ellison was allegedly doing by, in the language of the indictment, promising, offering and giving “Ahsha Nateef Tribble a stream of things of value, including airfare, ground transportation, helicopter fights, hotel rooms, meals, entertainment expenses.” $149,000 a year only goes so far.

Not that Ahsha had anything to complain about. After earning a BS in Math from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, an MS in Meteorology from Florida State, she had traveled out of state to the University of Oklahoma for a PhD in Meteorology. And the year she graduated she was somehow already the Technical Chief of Staff at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Commerce at NOAA.

Two years after graduating, she was the Executive Officer at the NOAA National Hurricane Center.

Five years after graduation, she was the Chief of the Climate Sciences Division for NOAA's National Weather Service.

With that kind of resume, Ahsha must have been brilliant. But her indictment doesn’t suggest a genius. Even an evil genius would have done a better job of cashing in than hotels, a casino and a copter.

There is, unfortunately, another explanation.

And it’s why the blame for the Puerto Rico mess falls squarely on the Obama administration.

Under Obama, the former Florida girl was in D.C. as a senior policy advisor coordinating with the White House. Obama's White House then put her on staff as a director at the National Security Council.

Ahsha Nateef Tribble became Obama's Senior Director for Response and even served as an interim Deputy Homeland Security Advisor.

In the waning days of the Obama regime, Ahsha was appointed a Deputy Regional Administrator at FEMA. Either Ahsha had guessed correctly that the next administration would not have the word 'Clinton' in it or she didn't have the right connections. But she had landed safely. And someone had decided that with her impressive resume, she would be perfect for tackling Puerto Rico's power crisis.

Hadn't she served as a senior advisor to Obama's Secretary of Energy?

And, according to her FEMA bio, "led or supported White House response coordination and operational policy for major disasters including Hurricanes Sandy and Irene."

There was just one problem.

The Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency. Disaster relief needs competence, not diversity. But FEMA, like every other part of the government, had gone mad for diversity without ever recovering. For Black History Month, its Diversity and Inclusion unit had promoted a livestream of a transgender panel from the U.S. Air Force Academy. FEMA might not be very competent at managing disasters, but it was great at promoting random lefty social agendas and spending taxpayer money.

Ahsha was the daughter of Israel Tribble Jr, an affirmative action advocate who claimed that the education system pandered to European elitism and was unsuited for those who were “dark or different”. The names of his children reflected the academic’s belief in his own form of Afrocentric Egyptology. In Puerto Rico, affirmative action ran into a wall of corruption and human misery.

A casino in San Juan was a long way from Ahsha’s glory days of traveling to disaster sites with Obama and Biden. Or representing the United States at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

But there were still opportunities here. And she allegedly knew how to take them.

Puerto Rico was a crisis. And the thing to do with a crisis was play it up and then cash in. And Ahsha Nateef Tribble was allegedly influencing the payments going to her new friend’s company.

While contracts in the hundreds of millions of dollars were dispensed, she enjoyed the little things, a helicopter ride, a hotel room, and a fun time in a casino. Also riding the Puerto Rico gravy train was Jovanda Patterson, another FEMA employee and a good friend of Ahsha’s, who got a job with Ellison.

“Thank you both for My day will be great when I get a picture of Ahsha getting her treatment today please,” Jovanda had emailed Ellison and Ahsha.

Times were still hard in parts of Puerto Rico, but there were other priorities for FEMA’s best.

“I’m on it. I will get her down there at 1pm,” Ellison replied.

You didn’t have to be in a disaster area to get personal service like that. Just tasked with managing one.

A Twitter account with Jovanda Patterson’s name and tweets about FEMA and Puerto Rico, includes a retweet of anti-American racist activist Colin Kaepernick, Barack Obama and Senator Kamala Harris.

Why was Hurricane Maria so devastating?

The answer has little to do with President Trump and a great deal to do with the existing corruption by local officials in Puerto Rico, which has already resulted in multiple arrests, and within FEMA.

It was one of Obama’s NSC staffers who had traveled with him and with Biden, who allegedly conspired to rob taxpayers and to abuse money meant to help Puerto Ricans.

What happened in Puerto Rico is the same thing that happens in Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore.

In another hurricane procurement scandal, FEMA gave Tiffany Brown a $156 million contract to serve 30 million meals to hurricane victims. Brown's company had no employees and no experience in large-scale disaster relief. And was not able to actually provide the meals. But "Dr. Brown" does boast that her Tribute Contracting LLC is a "a minority-owned government consulting firm".

The government can help people. Or it can help itself.

It can help the minorities it claims to care about. Or it can just help the well-connected ones.

A quick walk around Newark, Los Angeles or San Juan can clue you in on who’s really being helped.

The money that’s supposed to help people never actually reaches them. But that’s fine. There’s better uses for that money. And the worse things get, the more money will be spent on not fixing the crisis.

And, if you’re lucky, you can have a fun night in a casino in San Juan where everyone is always dying.







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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Monday, October 07, 2019

Bernie Sanders Could Have Died Under Medicare-for-All

By On October 07, 2019
On Tuesday night, Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist candidate who has run on a plan to nationalize medicine and ban health insurance, began to feel ill while doing an event at a Pakistani Halal restaurant.

Sanders requested a chair in the middle of answering a question. He appeared even more confused than usual and stumbled through his response. The event at the Halal restaurant was cut short and the millionaire campaigner against wealth was rushed to the hospital and admitted that very night.

The Sanders campaign failed to state and the media failed to report the name of the hospital. Why keep the name of the hospital secret? Sanders is most closely associated with a plan to take away everyone else’s access to the kind of health care he just benefited from. Releasing details about his level of care could prove as embarrassing as the socialist millionaire’s recent ascension to the ranks of the 1%.

What we do know is that Bernie Sanders was admitted Tuesday night and by the next day, he had two stents put in to deal with a blockage in an artery. He tweeted, “I'm feeling good. I'm fortunate to have good health care and great doctors and nurses helping me to recover.” And added, “Medicare for All!”

Despite the name, Medicare for All has nothing to do with Medicare. It’s a socialist proposal that would actually eliminate Medicare and reduce everyone to a sub-Medicaid system with limited care options. It draws its inspiration from the British NHS, Canada’s socialized medicine and some European systems.

While Bernie’s timetable of getting an angioplasty within a day might not sound that impressive to Americans, in the British NHS system, the median time from assessment to treatment is 55.3 days. Mean times for treatment have been cited as being 80 days. The maximum NHS waiting time is supposed to be 18 weeks and almost 16% of patients in the UK have to wait more than 3 months for an angioplasty.

Canada’s socialist system has angioplasty waiting times of around 11 weeks. And that’s after you get an appointment to see a specialist. The usual approach is to hand patients some aspirin and to praise Canada’s enlightened socialist system for not “rushing” patients into the hospital like the Americans.

You can go to the ER, but waiting times in Canadian ERs are worse than most other countries.

Senator Bernie Sanders has cited Norway as an inspiration for his socialist policies. 13.4% of Norwegians wait three or more months for the procedure that Bernie got just by walking into an “undisclosed” hospital in the United States.

Bernie waited a day in Vegas to get his angioplasty. In Norway, he would have waited 39 days.

In Finland, which Bernie has also cited as an inspiration for his socialist program, he would have waited 22 days. In Sweden, another favorite of American socialists, Bernie would have waited 42 days.

In New York, the average wait time is a day.

Sweden has improved from its infamous wait times of over a year during the eighties when 10% of cardiac patients on the waiting list were dying while on line to get access to its “Medicare-for-All”.

Socialists also love to tout the virtues of Cuban medicine. Good luck getting an angioplasty in Cuba.

“I think that countries like Denmark and Sweden do very well,” Senator Bernie Sanders claimed.

But, bafflingly, he chose to get an angioplasty in Vegas in a day instead of waiting around for 42 days in Sweden. Bernie Sanders wants Americans to live under socialism. As long as he has other options.

Sanders wants to benefit from a system in which he can get two stents put in one day, but he wants you to live under his Medicare-for-All socialist plan which would force you to wait weeks and months.

And if you die then, just as in Sweden or the VA, that’s one less cardiac procedure on the waiting list.

Senator Sanders had come to Vegas to appear at a Medicare-for-All town hall. He wasn’t able to make it because he was too busy benefiting from the free market medical system that he wants to destroy.

Ironically, if his socialized medicine system existed, he would have plenty of time to appear at his Medicare-for-All town hall while gasping for breath and popping aspirin. He would have had weeks, perhaps months, of waiting for his angioplasty while promoting Medicare-for-All.

Sanders is only able to continue campaigning for socialized medicine because he isn’t living under it.

But Bernie’s leftist speechwriter, David Sirota, insisted that Bernie’s health scare was “a perfect example of why the United States needs to join the rest of the world and pass Bernie’s Medicare for All legislation.”

It’s a pity that Bernie didn’t join “the rest of the world” and wait weeks to get his angioplasty.

Instead of going into an “undisclosed” hospital and getting his procedure done in a day, Bernie could have shown his supporters how socialized medicine really works and the sacrifices they’ll make.

But a camera crew following Bernie for weeks while he gasped for breath waiting to finally be seen would have killed any remaining support for the socialist plan to destroy health care in this country.

It might have also killed Bernie.

And if Bernie Sanders does, somehow, become the nominee and win the election, a set of events as unlikely as the NHS delivering faster and better care than Bernie’s “undisclosed” hospital, then he won’t be waiting 42 days or 18 weeks for an angioplasty. Instead, he’ll be going to “undisclosed” hospitals.

Socialist leaders don’t live by the same rules they make for everyone else.

“Nobody should earn more than a million dollars,” Bernie Sanders claimed when he ran for Senate. He argued that millionaires in the Senate were “immoral”. These days he’s a millionaire. And that’s okay.

“I wrote a best-selling book,” he sniped. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

“You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” he once argued.

But Bernie Sanders and his crooked clan need to have three homes. Even when children are hungry.

Bernie needed to fly around on a chartered 767 jet serving lobster sliders, crab salad, red lentil soup, herb crusted lamb loin, chocolate ganache, fine cheeses and white wine.

You don’t need a choice of deodorants. But Bernie needs a choice of lamb loin, ganache and crab salad.

There’s no mention of him sharing the fine cheeses or the lobster sliders with the hungry children of America whom he once saw on TV in a Sally Struthers commercial in between episodes of Matlock.

If Bernie gets his way, he won’t wait 42 days for an angioplasty. You will.

Bernie, just like Prince Harry, Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio, will have his jets and his white wines and his medical procedures. And he will have them the moment he decides he needs them.

You will get nothing. Not unless you have the right political connections.

That is socialism.

If Bernie Sanders were some random 78-year-old man, Medicare-for-All might have killed him. But if Bernie gets to run the country, then Medicare-for-All won’t kill him. He’ll never even experience it.

Medicare-for-All will kill you.












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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, October 03, 2019

Hillaryland

By On October 03, 2019
They say that Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, but Hillaryland must be the saddest.

What is Hillaryland? It’s a social network “aiming to connect all the people who’ve worked for Hillary Rodham Clinton during her more than 40 years of public service.” It’s run by “volunteers” and offers a plain white $15 Hillaryland tote bag which it claims that it’s selling “at cost” and “not for profit”.

How the might have fallen.

Once upon a time, Hillary and her people gaslit the country on the big issues. Now they’ve gone from Benghazi to trying to convince a declining handful of suckers that $15 is the cost price for a tote bag.

Hillaryland is the sad successor to Clintonworld networks like the Clinton Foundation which connected world leaders, foreign criminals and a prospective president. The alumni network is now a joke. The Clintons will never hold public office again. Hillaryland isn’t an alumni network, it’s a political leper colony run by “volunteers” too dumb to realize that the S.S. Slick Willy will never rise again.

Hillaryland promotes such promising ventures as Nasty Women Serve which holds an annual Hillary Rodham Clinton Day of Service. The highest level of service in Hillaryland is hosting a “house party” on November 8, which is National Hillary Day, also known as the day of Hillary’s downfall and defeat. The party will have, “in the true spirit of HRC — some Chardonnay” and will go on “until the wine runs out”.

Only Nazi war criminals in Argentina have sadder and more pathetic reunions than Hillary minions.

Nazis and potheads have 4/20 to get high. Hillary fans have 11/8 to get drunk on white wine. And both of them even blame the Russians for the defeat of their miserably corrupt murderous regimes.

And where’s Madame Fuhrer?

Hillary stopped by the Venice Biennale, the umbrella organization that includes the Venice Film Festival, allegedly a favorite stalking ground of old Clinton pal, Harvey Weinstein, to attend the exhibit of “HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails."

For an hour, Hillary sat in a replica of the Oval Office pretending to read her own emails as part of an art project. To make her humiliation more complete, HILLARY was staged at the Despar Teatro Italia, a former theater turned into a supermarket. Confused shoppers watched a former American presidential contender pretending to be the President of the United States in an Italian supermarket.

There’s your chicken, your canned tomatoes and your pasta. Upstairs is a crazy lady who thinks she’s the President of the United States. Go easy on the chardonnay, you don’t want to end up like her.

Even Lady Macbeth went mad with more dignity than Hillary Clinton.

The Oval Office recreated in an Italian supermarket is only the second most famous piece of eponymous Hillary art. The National Museum of Women in the Arts also features a 6-foot-tall painting of a black fabric swatch named Hillary gifted to it by Heather and Tony Podesta. Heather and Tony have since split up. And Tony, a Hillarylander, got caught up in the Russia scandal and shut down his lobbying operation.

Sic transit gloria clintonmundi.

Hillaryland and the Italian supermarket presidency cast a dim light on Hillary’s prospects. What do you do when you run out of Chardonnay and ways to market yourself to an audience that no longer cares?

Audiences turned up their noses at Bill and Hillary’s theatrical appearances. The real Bill and Hillary flopped and so did fictional versions of them played by John Lithgow and Laurie Metcalf in Hillary and Clinton. Everyone, including Italian supermarket shoppers, want Hillary to go away. But she won’t go.

After churning out way too many books, Hillary is back with The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience. This one is supposedly co-written with Chelsea, but just sounds like a revamp of Chelsea’s collection of She Persisted books which seem to have the same premise and theme.

This just means another Hillary Clinton book tour that nobody asked for and nobody actually wants.

Nevertheless, Hillary's desperation tour will still be coming to such world-renowned locations as the Women's Club of Ridgewood, NJ (no books will be signed), the United Methodist Church in Denver, CO, and the San Ramon Valley High School gym. Next stop, a random Appleby’s in Great Forks.

What’s the point of all this?

Jeffrey Epstein is dead, Ed Buck is in jail, and Harvey Weinstein is tapped out. The money has to come from somewhere. Even if it means sitting dead-eyed and drunk in a high school gym while Chelsea launches into an enthusiastic explanation of how Rachel Carson made the world safe for malaria.

But it’s not as if the Clintons really need the money. Their greed is as compulsive as all their vices.

Hillary Clinton loathes other people, but is incapable of existing without them. She can’t do what every other contender did and go away because she has nowhere to go. There’s a mansion in New York, but it has too many mirrors. And at night, she might start wandering and muttering, “Out, damned spot.”

And she won’t be talking about the neighbor’s dog who committed suicide in a local park.

Desperate and malicious, Hillary’s restless spirt wanders the nation and the world, haunting random supermarkets, gyms and colleges. To paraphrase her inspiration, Karl, a specter is wandering D.C. That’s where Hillary showed up to George Washington U to claim that she only lost Wisconsin because of Republican voter suppression. It had nothing to do with her failure to campaign in Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, only 300 people turned out to hear her latest set of pathetic excuses and lies.

“I was the first person who ran for president in more than 50 years without the protection of the Voting Rights Act,” she whined.

The Voting Rights Act had been put into place to stop Democrat voter suppression in segregated states in 1965. Not to protect Hillary. It had nothing to do with why a rich white Democrat lost Wisconsin.

Who actually invited Hillary to rant at GWU? Who else? Hillary Clinton. In Defense of American Democracy, the conference at which Hillary spoke was sponsored by Onward Together. Her own group.

Hillary told attendees that the crisis caused by her defeat requires "national soul searching."

Would you have "risked arrest to demand votes for women or bled on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand voting rights for all?" she demanded.

Why would anyone get arrested or bleed for Hillary? They’re not even coming to hear her speak.

Just like they didn’t bother turning out to vote for her.

Hillary wants to fight a war until the last Hillarylander, but nobody would sacrifice a bunion for her, let alone their life and liberty to see that the flag of Hillandia flies proudly over a burning White House.

That’s what happens when you live in your own imaginary echo chamber of wealth and power.

Hillary claimed that Republicans had prevented American Indians on reservations from voting for her. But maybe they were just saving their votes for Elizabeth Warren, the first Cherokee president.

The only thing democracy needs defending from is Hillary Clinton.

The 2016 election was not hijacked by the Russians, Facebook or UFOs. It was nearly hijacked by Clinton operatives who spread false claims that Trump was a Russian agent that her campaign manufactured and paid for, and then passed along to government officials who used it as a pretext to spy on the opposition. Hillary began her rise with Watergate and ended her career by trying to recreate Watergate.

And now it’ll be on to the next stop in her endless self-humiliation world tour.

Hillary’s election hijacking failed and the only way she’ll ever be president is in an Italian supermarket.







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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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