Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

In 2014, a mentally unstable man jumped over the White House fence, overpowered an armed female Secret Service agent, and made it to the East Room before an off-duty agent about to leave for the night finally took him down. The 2014 incident led to the resignation of the Secret Service’s first female director who had emphasized diversity over effectiveness. A year earlier, Barack Obama had appointed Julia Pierson (pictured above) and the move had been hailed as a milestone for diversity that would “change the culture” of the excessively male organization. Pierson launched diversity initiatives to recruit and promote women and minority personnel. “Julia is eminently qualified to lead the agency that not only safeguards Americans at major events and secures our financial system, but also protects our leaders and our first families, including my own,” Obama claimed when picking Pierson. A year later he had accepted her resignation because she had failed to keep his family safe. But the d...

“Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together,” Rep. Barney Frank, whose prostitute aide ran a male brothel from his Capitol Hill home, once observed. The former congressman claimed that he had no idea his boyfriend was running a male brothel and most people don’t know the government had racked up $34 trillion in debt. Sometimes the things we do together are really the things being done to us. Back in 2020, the national debt was at $26 trillion and that amounted to $80,885 for each of us. Now, after three years of the “adults” being “back in charge”, our share of the debt is $100,000 each. Or $100,696, if you want to be exact, and $257,275 per household. In the four years since 2019, a whopping $12 trillion was added to the national debt. During the subprime mortgage crisis, the national debt hit $10 trillion. In 2010, the Tea Party movement arose in response to an unacceptably high $13 trillion national debt and endless government spending. But by the t...

Senator Chris Murphy has proposed combating widespread loneliness in the country by creating a National Office of Loneliness. This new arm of the government would use the CDC to track loneliness statistics and develop a national strategy to fight loneliness including creating guidelines telling Americans how many friends they should have to be less lonely. The only ones keeping company with the National Office of Loneliness would be the myriad of other White House offices including the Office of Public Engagement, the Office of Neighborhood Partnerships, and the Office of Communications which all claim to talk to the public. With so many government offices talking to us, how can we possibly be lonely? Inviting the CDC to fight loneliness is like ushering an arsonist into a house party. Loneliness increased dramatically after the CDC’s lockdowns isolated people, tore apart families and broke down communities. There are still family members who are not speaking to each other due to the h...

“I want to make it clear, I’m gonna raise some taxes,” Biden threatened Americans last week. While Biden claimed that the taxes were targeted at the “billionaires out there”, the proposed tax hikes in his new budget are going to hit millions of Americans, not just the 700 or so billionaires. During the election, Biden had already warned those who favored Trump’s tax cuts, “If you elect me, your taxes are going to be raised, not cut.” At least that’s one promise he’s keeping. After insane spending sprees, Biden claims that tax increases are needed to cut the deficit and save Medicare. Meanwhile he’s proposing to give government bureaucrats their biggest raise since the Carter administration. From the Inflation Increase Act, which massively boosted the size of the IRS, which is now pursuing waiters for their tips and targeting people who sell used clothes on eBay, the Biden administration has focused on building up the federal bureaucracy at the expense of Americans. Biden’s budget calls...

When Danny Werfel first appeared before Congress after the IRS scandal, he told them all the right things. “It’s completely inexcusable,” the new acting IRS commissioner reassured members of the House Appropriations Committee. “This important agency is founded on the principle of operating impartially, and we failed in that most basic core principle.” “The agency stands ready to confront the problems that occurred, hold accountable those who acted inappropriately, be open about what happened, and permanently fix these problems so that such missteps do not occur again.” In the wake of the revelation that the IRS had targeted conservative nonprofits, there was a lot of outrage and the Obama administration sent in Werfel to clean house. He condemned Lois Lerner, the key figure and arguably the scapegoat for the IRS operation targeting conservatives, and claimed to be very upset that this sort of thing had been going on.. “We have to get to the bottom of it,” Werfel told Congress. “We will...

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. Politicia...

The National Education Association was caught spending 9% of its budget on member assistance and 50% on various political programs. Teachers’ unions have become enormously powerful by turning their membership and their resources into assets for the Democrats. Democrats have generously returned the favor by negotiating favorable contracts and allowing teachers’ unions to dismantle the educational system, including shutting down schools for an extended period during the pandemic, eliminating standards in favor of promotion and turning a blind eye to sex abuse. While the shutdown of schools traumatized a generation, leading to increased suicide rates, loss of learning skills, social decline and even higher crime rates, school sex abuse is an ongoing crisis that targets a narrower population of abused students. That doesn’t mean that the damage is any less. A recent report reveals that nearly one school employee has been arrested a day on child-sex related charges. In just the last week,...

The pandemic divided Americans into two classes: those who could work from home and those who could not. Federal government employees were members of the privileged class. And they don’t want that to change. During the pandemic, over 90% of the EPA, USAID, the Department of Education and, ironically, the Department of Labor, were 'working' online. The utility of federal agencies could roughly be measured by whether their employees were mostly showing up to work, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, or were permanently out to lunch like the Department of Housing and Urban Development which did the vast majority of its work over the internet.. While the pandemic is over, the privilege of the political pajama class isn’t. Long before the pandemic, Obama had signed into law the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010. Two years before the pandemic, Rep. Sarbanes of Maryland, who had originally introduced the Act, alongside Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bot...

 “It is our lowest income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions,” Kamala Harris told the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum during the recovery effort for the victims of Hurricane Ian. “We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.” That is what FEMA is already doing. FEMA uses something called the National Risk Index to calculate the risk to any area. The NRI can then be used to determine which communities should get how much funding to cope with natural disasters. Armed with an NRI evaluation, cities, counties and towns can apply for Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants. Billions in these grants have been handed out. The trouble with the NRI is that it’s less science and more sociology. And very leftist sociology at that. The Index is made up of three components, the actual natural hazard, “community resilience” and “social vulnerability”. The last is really affirmative a...

"I direct that any additional resources… shall not be used to increase the share of small businesses or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Treasury Secretary Yellen wrote to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig. That directive has been used by media "fact checkers" to deny that the massive increase in IRS personnel under Biden’s Inflation Increase Act will also increase audits of the middle class. Yellen’s statement initially seems reassuring until you look closely at its curious language. Treasury Department spokeswoman Julia Krieger used the same phrasing when claiming that "audit rates relative to historical norms for people earning under $400,000 each year" would not increase. “Historical” is an interesting term. Media fact checkers act as if it means current rates. But if it means current rates, Yellen and the Treasury spokeswoman could have just said so. The specific use of “historical norms” by both women ...