The media is full of stories of mask rationing and shortages. Health care professionals are reusing masks, slathering them with sanitizer, or substituting scarves in place of surgical masks. Democrats demand that President Trump make more masks immediately using the Wartime Production Act.

But why aren’t there any masks?

Surgical masks, like anything in the medical field, are tightly regulated. You can’t just make a mask. Some masks have to be certified by the FDA and others by the CDC. Some are certified by both the FDA and the CDC.

Until recently, the public had no problem buying N95 respirators for use in construction. These masks are certified by the CDC. Why is the CDC in the business of certifying industrial masks, you may wonder? Because, as discussed previously, the CDC does every possible thing except what people think it does. The component of the CDC that does this is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

NIOSH is not to be confused with OSHA, even though they were created at the same time, through the same law, and serve a very similar function: making this another skein in the infinitely tangled web of the federal bureaucracy.

The Open PPE Project launched an effort to quickly create N95 masks only to be told by NIOSH that approving a new mask production facility would take between 45 and 90 days.

Meanwhile there are reports of large stockpiles of masks sitting around waiting for an FDA inspector.

The United States government has a stockpile of 12 million NIOSH approved masks and 5 million that are expired, and are therefore not approved by NIOSH. Except it may approve some conditionally for use.

The FDA and CDC bureaucracy are not up to speed with the current crisis. There aren’t enough inspectors and the Wuhan Virus won’t wait on inspectors from the FDA or NIOSH to do their job.

Instead of streamlining its approvals and inspection process, the CDC lowered its mask protection recommendation for health care workers on the front lines.

The CDC is willing to tell health care professionals to use scarves, rather than accelerate approvals.

Meanwhile N95 mask manufacturers feared being sued if masks meant for industry were used in surgical settings, which meant that they wouldn’t sell those masks to health care providers. At least not until a law protecting them against lawsuits was passed. All this, of course, took even more time.

Smaller manufacturers have tried to get in the game, only to discover the regulatory challenges of it. Fashion businesses that tried to jump in have settled for trying to make surgical masks that they hope will be FDA certified. Meanwhile the big manufacturers were making masks in the People’s Republic of China. And those masks are not leaving ChiCom territory except by the express will of its government.

Worse still, as the crisis grew, the People’s Republic of China bought up the world’s supply of masks, at one point importing 20 million masks in 24 hours. American companies even eagerly donated masks.

But why was the United States so unprepared for a run on masks before the pandemic arrived?

After Katrina, the Bush administration had set a goal of billions of masks in case of a major disaster. But that goal was never met. When the H1N1 swine flu outbreak arrived, we were badly unprepared.

The last run on masks took place during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak under Obama. Hospitals and health care providers began running low on masks and the Strategic National Stockpile released 85 million N95 masks. The stockpile was never replenished and today there are only 12 million N95s.

There were warnings back then that "maskmaking operations have moved outside the U.S., and 90% of masks sold in the U.S. now come from Mexico or China" and that "Mexico and China would be unlikely to export their supplies before making sure their own populations were fully protected."

While the Obama administration threw billions at assorted solar and wind boondoggles, it failed to invest the money that would have set up reliable mask production in the United States of America. All the experts who claimed that “science” predicted the imminent demise of the planet had been too busy trying to control the weather through higher taxes to spend money on anything as crude as masks.

The secret warehouses where the strategic mask reserve was supposed to be kept are a mess and millions of the masks are expired. New York City asked for millions of masks and got 78,000 expired masks. Oklahoma got 500,000 expired masks. This is the situation, not just at the federal level, but state mask stockpiles, where they exist, also often consisted of storehouses of expired N95 masks.

Had the Bush administration’s National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza been followed, there would be no mask shortage. And had the Obama administration at replaced the masks that it withdrew from the Strategic National Stockpile, we might have had 100 million or so masks in the stockpile.

And had we brought mask manufacturing back to America, we would have a pipeline for making more.

Instead the Wuhan Virus brought a perfect storm, cutting us off from our manufacturing sources in the People’s Republic of China, after the Obama administration had depleted our mask reserve, while regulatory barriers make it difficult for companies quickly get in the game and produce more masks.

President Trump has done his best to cope with a sudden disaster that was decades in the making.

The mask shortage was not a disaster that could have been remedied in January. We were never going to produce a billion masks in two months. The same nation that could turn out armies and fleets in a year would have, but that nation had its manufacturing at home and fewer regulatory barriers.

Big clothing companies like Hanes have tried to step up. As have smaller manufacturers. But the federal bureaucracy has slowed down the process for both distributing existing masks and making new ones. There are plenty of companies eager to make masks, without any Wartime Production Act pressure. They just need a streamlined process that will clear as many of the barriers and delays out of the way.

Meanwhile making new N95 masks requires melt-blown fabric and there’s a global shortage of the machines that produce it because, once again, China has monopolized the marketplace.

Ordering companies to make them by using the Wartime Production Act won’t bring them into being.

All the posturing by Senate Minority Leader Schumer, House Speaker Pelosi, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and the rest of the circus about the Wartime Production Act is just fantasy socialist wargaming.

Outsourcing our industrial base to the People’s Republic of China came with a price. Reconstructing that base won’t just happen overnight. Not when it often has to be done all the way from the ground up.

President Trump had warned us of the danger of our dependency on China’s Communist regime. The Democrats who denied that reality now act as if waving around a piece of legislative paper can make products spring forth out of thin air as long as the right orders are given and enough money is spent.

Real life doesn’t work that way.

The Democrats had many years in which they could have financed American factories making protective gear or at the very least replenished the mask supplies from the swine flu outbreak in 2009. They did none of those things and now want to blame President Trump because he couldn’t snap his fingers and create a billion masks in two months. Meanwhile they failed to restore 85 million masks in 7 years.

If we’re going to learn anything from this crisis, we have to tell the truth and hold them accountable.

Everyone gave something.

Steven Spielberg and his wife gave $100,000. His former partner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, gave another $100,000. The producers of Lost gave over $50,000. Jett actress Carla Gugino also chipped in.

Not to relief efforts dealing with the coronavirus, but to a hate campaign against Trump.

Everyone has their own brand of patriotism, and for some Hollywood celebrities, that meant giving big to Pacronym: a sleazy money machine targeting President Trump run by Tara McGowan. McGowan, a former 60 Minutes vet reporter turned Obama hack, was supposed to brilliantly transform Dem campaigning with innovative tactics like seeding fake news through fake local papers under Courier Newsroom, and Shadow Inc: the mysterious company behind the Iowa caucus disaster.

But McGowan has never found a sewer she couldn’t crawl out of and is relaunching her reputation by using the coronavirus crisis to run digital ads attacking President Trump. And donors to Pacronym, a PAC affiliate of McGowan’s Acronym, a non-profit, which somehow ties in with for-profits and a PAC, include Hollywood celebrities, writers, CEOs and financial whiz kids, helping divide America during a crisis.

The Hunt, which features lefty CEOs hunting down and killing conservatives, was written by Lost producer Damon Lindelof. The movie, shelved after criticism by President Trump, is back now that no one is paying attention. Lindelof is also a donor to Pacronym. As is the wife of Lost’s producer, J.J. Abrams, and CEO of Bad Robot, his production company, and Brian Weinstein, another Bad Robot executive.

Maybe The Hunt can get a sequel in which wealthy elites spread division and panic during a pandemic, while betting that they can ride out the effects of the virus inside their mansions and on their islands.

Other famous contributors to Pacronym include author Richard North Patterson, and Geraldine Brooks, the authoress most famous for penning, "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women."

And then there are the hip CEOs. Acronym, McGowan's mothership, was co-founded by Dollar Shave Club CEO Michael Dubin. Pacronym donors include Smartypants Vitamins founder Gordon Gould, while SoulCycle CEO Elizabeth Cutler and Knot co-founder Carley Roney helped fund McGowan's ambitions.

The hip rich elites poured money into McGowan’s scams and as the Obama vet launches a divisive campaign to undermine the leadership of a wartime president, they should be held accountable. At a time of fear and uncertainty, a controversial Dem operative is plotting to seed digital ads across Facebook sowing misinformation, and encouraging people to distrust President Trump’s efforts to fight the coronavirus: an irresponsible tactic that can have dangerous public health consequences.

Pacronym’s Facebook digital disinformation campaign targets Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona, the same five states targeted by McGowan’s Courier plot to create fake local news sites. Coronavirus cases have sharply risen in Michigan and Pennsylvania, but McGowan is sticking to her plan to help elect Joe Biden by spreading uncertainty during a time when people need reassurance.

Americans need to know that they can trust the health advisories coming from the White House. It’s not a time to sow doubt and division. But Democrat political operatives have decided that it’s their moment.

The question is will Biden and other Democrats condemn McGowan’s dangerous campaign?

They ought to be asked that question. And asked to pledge that they will not hire McGowan or any other consultants and operatives who are undermining our response to the coronavirus crisis.

Will Steven Spielberg, Damon Lindelof, and, especially Michael Dubin, disavow the ugly monster they helped create?

Don’t count on it.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee was a major Pacronym backer. Michael Halle, McGowan's husband, worked for the Buttigieg campaign. (As did Shadow Inc., which mismanaged the Iowa Caucuses that Buttigieg allegedly won). And Pacronym aren’t the only ones jumping in the sewer.

American Bridge, the Media Matters version of Pacronym, founded by unhinged smear artist David Brock, is running its own coronavirus misinformation ads meant to convince voters that the country is unprepared for the crisis.

“Coronavirus has the potential to infect millions of Americans and cripple our economy,” American Bridge president Bradley Beychok declared. "We’re going to make sure voters know just how dangerously the president is failing them.”

There's a special place in hell for hacks who see millions of potential pandemic infections as the perfect opportunity to hammer voters with messages of fear and doubt.

Beyond George Soros, American Bridge’s largest donors include Steven Spielberg and his wife who donated $500,000. Is that money now being used to divide the nation during a time of crisis?

Steven Spielberg could speak out and ask Pacronym and American Bridge to stop dividing the country.

The election is far away and there’s no urgent need to run digital ads right now. Attacking the President of the United States over the coronavirus undermines his leadership at a time when we need unity and decisive action. Instead Pacronym and American Bridge are encouraging fear, doubt and panic.

But don’t expect anyone in the media to ask Spielberg the hard questions.

Meanwhile the Never Trumpers of the Lincoln Project have rolled out their own ad comparing President Trump to the coronavirus. The ad, which masquerades as a warning about a virus, is meant to get the attention of a worried nation, but then switches to an attack on the President of the United States.

The only thing that the Lincoln Project’s ad proves is that even coronavirus lows have their own lows.

Diseases often breed in a swamp. And this feverish plot by the Washington D.C. consultant class to cash in on the coronavirus is something that could have only come out of the soulless swamp of D.C. politics.

But these schemes, by Pacronym, American Bridge, and the Lincoln Project, would go nowhere unless the funders of division are held accountable for incentivizing their dirty work with loads of cash.

No one should expect anything from creatures as fundamentally amoral as David Brock or Tara McGowan who long ago sold off anything resembling a soul for the opportunity to be players. They’re mercenaries, literally, David Brock was once just as rabidly to the right as he now is to the left, who cash in on the egomaniacal ambitions of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street donors who will roll up a dump truck full of money to the D.C. offices of any Obama or Clinton vet promising to use Facebook ads to brainwash flyover country voters into voting their way. They’re the supply, not the demand.

As America struggles with the consequences of a shutdown and a pandemic, it may be time to have a conversation about the role that power brokers in New York and California, some of the most affected states, have played in crippling our ability to respond to a national crisis that now threatens them.

Maybe when Tom Hanks gets over being treated for the coronavirus, he can talk to Steven about it.

In March, as the Wuhan Flu was taking off in America, the Oracle of Omaha began buying airline stocks. Specifically, one of the wealthiest men in the country increased his stake in Delta Airlines to 11%.

Warren Buffett wasn’t oblivious to the coronavirus. The University of Nebraska Medical Center, not far from the black gated mansion of the billionaire, was on the front lines of fighting the outbreak. Passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship were being treated 5 minutes from his house.

What was Warren Buffett thinking when he shoved $45 million more in good money after bad?



Berkshire Hathaway now owns 11% of Delta Airlines, and between 8% and 10% of United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and American Airlines. When you’re squeezed into a 17-inch airline seat, it’s because a major funder of Democrat political causes is extracting maximum value from his investment.

And now Airlines for America, whose major members include American, Delta, United, and Southwest, along with lesser airlines, want a $50 billion bailout. That includes $25 billion in grants and $25 billion in loans and tax relief. While the airlines warn about an economic catastrophe, Buffett isn’t worried.

The airlines made up 4% of Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio and amounted to $3.7 billion in losses.

Warren Buffett is no stranger to bailouts. In 2010, he penned a fake folksy New York Times op-ed thanking “Uncle Sam” from his nephew “Warren”. Later that year, he became a key propaganda figure in Obama’s push to raise taxes. By the winter of the year, Obama had placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of the man who had fundraised for him and acted as his financial adviser.

As Peter Schweitzer noted, “It was only on September 23 that he became a highly visible player in the drama, investing $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, which was overleveraged and short on cash… Berkshire Hathaway received preferred stock with a 10 percent dividend yield and an attractive option to buy another $5 billion in stock at $115 a share… As he admitted on CNBC at the time, ‘If I didn't think the government was going to act, I wouldn't be doing anything this week.’”

Buffett seems to think that the government will act and bail out the airlines. Again. And this time for a lot more than the $15 billion price tag of the airline bailout that passed after September 11.

By 2009, Berkshire Hathaway had invested $26 billion in eight financial companies, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, which benefited from around $100 billion in TARP money.

By 2011, Buffett was buying $5.9 billion in Goldman Sachs stock for $5 billion.

There’s no question that the Democrat billionaire is a very sharp investor. But there’s no reason for taxpayers to keep subsidizing his investments. As small businesses are forced to shut down and millions of people are put out of work, should they really be helping Warren Buffett get even richer?

Just as during the bailout, Buffett is betting that the government is going to back his investment.

If the major airlines were really about to go down, Buffett would be trying to get everything out, instead of getting in deeper. The billionaire is betting that Berkshire Hathaway will emerge in a stronger position after the bailouts and the surge of optimism that will follow the lifting of the coronavirus curfews.

He’s almost certainly right.

But if he wants to profit from the turnaround and the potential takeover of an airline, he should do the heavy lifting on his own. Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on $125 billion in cash. But why cash out his treasury bills when the D.C. swamp will be happy enough to do most of the heavy lifting for him.

Where will those taxpayer-funded profits go?

In 2014, the Oracle of Omaha predicted that Hillary Clinton will win. “I will bet money on it, and I don’t do that easily,” he boasted.

And maxed out his contribution to the Ready for Hillary PAC. He also shoveled money into the DNC.

In this election cycle, he poured $245,000 into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Republicans lobbying for an airline bailout are literally fighting to secure taxpayer money that will then be used to fund their political opponents. It’s an insane act of fiscal political suicide.

Beyond political donations, Buffett has spent millions covertly funding abortion activism. Due to his obsessive secrecy, the full scope of his abortion funding is unknown, but the Buffett Foundation donated almost $4 billion to abortion causes, including $674.5 million to Planned Parenthood.

Arguably, the Oracle of Omaha has done the most to promote abortion of anyone in America.

It’s a revelation that clashes with his folksy image and invocation of small-town values. But behind the Garrison Keillor routine, Buffett is just another version of George Soros with an American accent.

That’s not just rhetoric.

At the heart of Soros' power over American politics is the Democracy Alliance, a club of powerful organizations funneling money into transforming this country. The Democracy Alliance's core partners include the NoVo Foundation, run by Buffett’s son and daughter-in-law, and funded by $150 million from the Oracle of Omaha.

NoVo funds hate groups like Van Jones' Color of Change, which plotted to defund the David Horowitz Freedom Center, along with the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Tides Foundation, and the National People’s Action.

That last donation is especially interesting considering NPA’s role in creating the Community Reinvestment Act which forced banks to dispense mortgages to insolvent borrowers. This, as the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks notes, “ranks high among the primary causes of the 2008 financial crisis.” That’s both fascinating and disturbing considering Buffett’s links to that crisis.

Buffett avoided the subprime crisis while profiting massively from the resulting disaster.

Putting money in Buffett’s pocket will mean more cash for Biden, it will mean more Democrats in the House and the Senate, more abortions, and more power for George Soros’ Democracy Alliance.

So why are Republicans ready to make concessions to Democrats in exchange for the privilege of electing more Democrats with a Buffett bailout? Even if one were to argue that a bailout of the airline industry may be necessary, why would Republicans lobby to cut their own throats?

When the wall isn’t funded, how can the GOP justify a second billion-dollar bailout of an industry that will then just turn around and cut another 2 inches from the cramped seats of the taxpayers who bailed them out?

A few weeks after Californians cast their votes for Bernie Sanders, there are huge lines to buy toilet paper. Toilet paper, like dairy products and cleaning supplies, are limited to two per household.

Savvy shoppers have learned, like their counterparts in the old Soviet Union, to get what they need by bartering what they can buy. Toilet paper for antibacterial soap. Milk for wipes.

Yakov Smirnoff had spent his career joking about standing on line to buy toilet paper and discovering that the government store wasn't even selling toilet paper, but something to be bartered for it.

"If I start making jokes about a shortage of toilet paper in America, it won`t make any sense because you walk into a store and see 15 brand names of toilet paper," he had once told a newspaper.

"Yesterday I stood in line for two hours waiting for CVS truck to unload. Everyone was waiting for alcohol and toilet paper. I felt like I was back in Soviet Russia," Smirnoff, who now lives in California, tweeted.

The old Soviet anecdotes finally make sense to Americans. All it took was a little taste of the real deal.

"You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants when children are hungry in this country," Senator Bernie Sanders had once snapped.

And now there are no choices of deodorant. You take what’s on the shelf and learn to like it.

Sanders voters had wanted to live under socialism. And now they have the opportunity to learn what it’s really like. Between the curfews, the shortages, and the absolute government authority, they’re living in the type of system that Sanders and his base have admired when it was far away and safely overseas.

In 2003, Sanders, along with Rep. Conyers, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, had signed a letter of support for Hugo Chavez: the brutal Venezuelan strongman. “If Abraham Lincoln or George Washington were alive and here today, they would be on our side,” they told him.

“These days, the American dream," Sanders once wrote, "is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela."

The socialist dream in Venezuela began with toilet paper shortages, then dairy shortages, and eventually no food, medicine, or drinking water, while the Marxist regime paid its military thugs in food supplies.

A few supermarket lines are only a small taste of “democratic socialism” in action.

The coronavirus isn’t Communism, but it has created social, political, and economic conditions similar to that of Communism, with an authoritarian state, a frightened populace, and resource shortages.

There’s no better laboratory for seeing how the real thing would play out in California.

California’s Sandernistas are invariably on the wealthy and comfortable side. Bernie bumper stickers rarely show up on beat-up Chevys, but on a Tesla, on a Mercedes, or on a Beemer. You can spot Bernie lawn signs outside lavish mansions whose owners imagine that socialism is for someone else.

Someone else’s cars and mansions will be confiscated. Not theirs. Someone else won’t be able to buy basic staples. Not the Silicon Valley tech bros pouring a fortune into the Sanders campaign and its PACs.

Bernie's wealthy donors in the Inner Mission and Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, and Echo Park in Los Angeles, are now discovering the lifestyle that they’ve only romanticized from a distance before as they wait on line in empty supermarkets and stare baffled at ‘Out of Stock’ messages on Amazon listings.

To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, the poet laureate of California socialists, "When Communism comes to California, it will be wrapped in a repurposed paint fume respirator mask, wearing medical gloves, and driving a BMW with a Bernie 2020 bumper sticker while frantically grabbing rolls of toilet paper."

There are two kinds of socialism: the ideal and the real.

Ideal socialism is an entertaining set of intellectual games, castles in the sand, ivory towers in the air, where the right words and attitudes can enable the enlightened to implement heaven on earth.

Real socialism is standing on line for toilet paper.

Capitalism is the best argument for socialism. When the supermarkets are full and there are lots of good jobs, then it’s easy to imagine that the system can be improved with a lot of authoritarian planning. Why not take all those goodies and distribute them more efficiently? There’s so much of the stuff that it seems easy to redistribute it, to add a few zeroes to budgets already filled with imaginary numbers.

And socialism is the best argument against itself.

Socialists always think that they will lose their freedom to a wise ideal, only to discover that they will lose it to a grubby real of incompetent bureaucrats, frightened mobs, and armed men in the streets.

Bernie’s vague rambling plans to nationalize everything from electricity to the internet, to bring into being a nation where the government decides how much deodorant and shoes you get to have, sound great until it stops being a hip ideal and becomes the tawdry reality of waiting on line for toilet paper.

You don’t need a literacy program to realize socialism is a bad idea when you’re living through it.

California politicians have taken a break from a torrent of insane bills that proposed to ban receipts (they’re bad for the environment), ban fur, legalize eating roadkill, (if you run over a rabbit, you can eat it, but don’t you dare wear its fur), and banning separate clothes sections for little girls and boys, to ineptly tumble the state and its major cities headlong into a mismanaged response to the coronavirus.

The incompetence of California Democrats was all fun and games when it led to blowing up the homeless population while wasting billions of dollars, banning police from turning over illegal alien pedophiles to ICE, or accidentally outlawing freelance work across the entire state for the unions.

But now there are real consequences. It’s not just another bunch of zeroes or a handful of victims whose stories will never appear on any cable network except the one no respectable socialist would watch.

Millions of lives have been disrupted. And countless lives are potentially on the line.

Socialism sounds like a great idea if you imagine that the people running things are smart, moral, and competent, as socialists imagine that they are. It falls apart in the real world where people aren’t.

After voting for Bernie Sanders, Californians are discovering what it’s actually like to live in Venezuela, Cuba, or the Soviet Union, where they have no rights, there’s nothing in the stores, and nothing works.

After the Wuhan Flu hit America, the Democrats decided that America should be more like China.

New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo, who got his job the same way as many totalitarian leaders, by being the son of the guy who used to have the job, led the way to the People's Republic of America.

Or, the People's Republic of Sanitizeristan.

"We are introducing New York State Clean hand sanitizer, made conveniently by the state of New York. This is a superior product to products now on the market," Governor Cuomo declared. “To Purell, and Mr. Amazon and Mr. eBay, if you continue the price gouging, we will introduce our product, which is superior to your product. And you don't even have the floral bouquet, so stop price gouging.”

The specific part of the state making NYS Clean is the Great Meadow Correctional Facility: a maximum-security prison which Cuomo had visited two years ago to address the constant violence in the prison.

His new message to the convicts is, “Make hand sanitizer, not shanks.”

Corcraft, also known as the Bureau of Corrections, was already making hand sanitizer at $68 bucks for a five-gallon pail. There’s a nice profit margin there considering that prison workers are being paid between 16 cents to $1.30 an hour. If that doesn’t sound so cheap, that’s because Corcraft’s customer was the government and taxpayers were paying the bill. Local governments, by law, already have to buy hand sanitizer and many other industrial supplies from Corcraft whose money goes to the state.

The People’s Republic of Sanitizeristan was an invisible scam that predated the coming of the coronavirus which diverted money from taxpayers and revenues from small businesses and workers.

Hand sanitizer made by prison labor at as little as 16 cents an hour is always going to be cheaper.

But there’s an underlying reason why hand sanitizer is so out of stock and so expensive. Yes, the small third-party sellers who make up much of the sales volume for Amazon and eBay rushed to buy up all the hand sanitizer they could and then began taking advantage of the panic buying. After politicians threatened Amazon and eBay, the dot com giants banned price gouging listings, and the sellers (at least those who weren’t stupid enough to give interviews to the New York Times) vanished into the less regulated black markets of Craigslist and other more obscure and less monitored platforms.

The upshot is that hand sanitizer is more expensive and less available than ever. And the authorities are confiscating hand sanitizer from hand sanitizer hoarders to be redistributed as the government sees fit.

It worked for the Bolsheviks with wheat. It’s bound to work with hand sanitizer in America.

But why wasn’t there enough hand sanitizer on the market to meet the upsurge in Wuhan Flu demand?

As part of President Trump’s moves to cut the red tape, the FDA announced that it won’t be cracking down on pharmacies that make their own hand sanitizer. Or as the official government release states, “Policy for Temporary Compounding of Certain Alcohol-Based Hand Sanitizer Products During the Public Health Emergency.”

Don’t get the idea that the FDA is throwing all caution to the winds by letting people make their own hand sanitizer. Or freely empowering businesses to just go ahead and mix alcohol with aloe.

The FDA's permissiveness for making hand sanitizer is limited to "State-licensed pharmacies or Federal facilities." And it's not providing permission, per se, but announcing that it "does not intend to take action against compounders that prepare alcohol-based hand sanitizers for consumer use for the duration of the public health emergency." How magnanimous of the bureaucracy.

That’s understandable since the FDA recipe for hand sanitizer does list such exotic and formidable ingredients as “alcohol”, “glycerol”, “hydrogen peroxide”, and “water”.

What else? No that’s it.

It’s mighty generous of the FDA to promise not to take action against pharmacies who venture to assemble this alchemical mixture of secret philosopher’s stone ingredients like alcohol and water.

It also has to warn them not to add aloe or any “other active or inactive ingredients.”

That’s what you have to do if you’re already a pharmacist and can be trusted to handle opiates and experimental drugs just to be able to make and sell a bottle of hand sanitizer.

Unless you’re a bunch of killers and rapists working for Governor Andrew Cuomo at 16 cents an hour.

The FDA didn’t unbend this far merely because of a public health emergency. Perish the thought. A mere crisis would not convince it to allow pharmacists to mix alcohol and water. Better that the entire planet perishes than that the FDA should allow a flouting of paragraph 83, subsection c, comma, regulation.

This is the same government agency that made the coronavirus crisis worse by refusing to allow a Seattle lab to test people who had the flu because the lab hadn’t been certified under Medicare.

What really compelled the FDA to act were the “reports that some consumers are producing hand sanitizers for personal use” while “compounders, relative to untrained consumers, are more familiar with standards and methods for producing drug products” and are easier to control.

Given a choice between allowing pharmacists to mix water and alcohol, or facing an apocalyptic landscape of hand sanitizer moonshiners, the People’s Republic of Sanitizeristan protected its authority.

America isn’t facing a hand sanitizer shortage because of capitalism, but because of socialism.

The speculators buying up hand sanitizer and reselling it on the black market were behaving exactly like their counterparts in socialist countries, stockpiling products due to an artificial shortage, and then pricing the inevitable raids by government agencies against hoarders and speculators into the cost.

Communism doesn’t work.

The reason we don’t have enough hand sanitizer is because something so simple is so regulated.

The FDA regulates hand sanitizer like a drug. Its ingredients are simple enough that it's inexpensive most of the time. But the regulations created a barrier to meaningful competition. And when demand spun out of control, there wasn't enough supply. Prices soared and people who needed it were left without.

Governor Cuomo accused Purell of price gouging. But the company wasn't gouging consumers. Resellers who understood the limited supply pipeline did that. And government limited the supply.

The FDA issued its final hand sanitizer rule just last year. This rule finalized the FDA's "tentative final monograph" on hand sanitizer from 1994.

That’s 25 years from "tentative final monograph" to the final rule for alcohol and water in gel form.

Purell was founded in the forties by Goldie and Jerry Lippman: a nice Jewish couple who were trying to solve a wartime problem. Jerry mixed the first batches in his mother-in-law's washing machine. The combination of their names, Gojo, is the company that makes Purell. Goldie died in 1972 and Jerry, who had grown up with his father selling vegetables from a horse and wagon, made it to this century.

But Jerry died long before the FDA ever got around to issuing its final hand sanitizer rule.

Generations passed, countless millions were born and died, wars were fought and won, the television, the microchip, and the telecommunications satellite transformed the world. And finally, the FDA finalized its very final rule on using alcohol to sterilize your hands. A practice dating back to Rome.

The final FDA rule isn’t final. It never is.

According to Janet Woodcock, the director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the final rule, "also reaffirmed our need for more data on three other active ingredients, including ethyl alcohol, which is the most commonly used ingredient in hand sanitizers, to help the agency ensure that these products are safe and effective for regular use by consumers."

After decades of this madness, the FDA would like still more data to determine that alcohol is a safe and effective means of sterilizing human hands.

Perhaps the FDA would like to discuss this with the Roman physician Galen or Paul Walther Fürbringer of the Furbringer Method for disinfecting the hands of surgeons with alcohol in the 19th century?

The epic tale of the FDA’s investigation of sterilizing hands with alcohol proves that government is not only more insane than you know, it’s more insane than you could ever begin to imagine.

If Jerry had known this was coming, he would have joined his father’s horse-drawn vegetable business.

And today’s Jerry and Goldie would probably have stuck to something that wouldn’t involve the FDA.

The coronavirus crisis has stirred perfume manufacturers and liquor companies to start making and giving away hand sanitizer. LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton and Dior, will make and give away hand sanitizer in France. It's out of reach of the FDA there.

A D.C. distillery is making hand sanitizer and giving it away. But they can't call it that or sell it.

“I don’t really know what the FDA thinks about things like this," Pia Carusone, the owner said.

Nothing good.

This is what you have to go through to produce an alcoholic hand cleanser. Now imagine what it takes to invent and market a new medication in a timely enough manner to save lives.

Unless Governor Cuomo figures out a way to have convicts make it for the government.

Quick, when I say “Joe Biden”, you say, “decency”.

"Vote for decency, vote for dignity," Senator Amy Klobuchar said in her endorsement of Biden.

Biden, Senator Kamala Harris, claimed in her endorsement, would, "restore truth, honor, and decency."

Michael Bloomberg endorsed Biden, arguing that he possesses, “decency, honesty and commitment."

Pete Buttigieg hailed Biden’s, “fundamental decency”, which he mentioned three times on MSNBC.

"Joe Biden is decent. He’s kind. He’s caring. He’s empathetic," insisted Beto O'Rourke.

These were obviously coincidences. There's no reason to think that Tom Perez had been working
Amy, Beto, Pete, Kamala, and Michael over with a wet towel and talking points in the basement of the DNC.

If you doubt that, here's more of the decency parade.

Susan Rice, a woman who once had decency droned, endorsed Biden's "compassion and decency". As did her former colleague, Samantha Power, praising Biden's, "empathy and decency". As did James Comey, “restore decency, dignity to the office”, John Kerry, “his ability to persevere, his decency”, and David Axelrod, “character, empathy, decency”. And David Axelrod, a sleazebag who dragged Obama to the White House by exposing his political opponent’s private divorce records, knows all about decency.

"Biden is one of the most honest, decent, practical, & experienced individuals with whom I have ever worked," gushed John Brennan.

Since Brennan, a former CIA director now works for NBC News, that’s probably true, if not high praise.

Virtually every Democrat member of the House and Senate, institutions that are universally hailed as decent, virtuous, and honest, who endorsed Biden cited his incredibly mind-blowing “decency”. And then went on to praise him as “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being.”

Decent people don’t go around telling other people to call them decent. That’s what crooks do.

Decency isn’t especially high praise. It’s just expected. Having dozens of politicians and political appointees, a professional class whose level of decency could only be exceeded by the occupants of a maximum-security prison, line up to testify to your decency is a defensive admission of indecency.

But Joe Biden doesn’t settle for having other people falsely claim that he’s decent. He insists he is.

After winning South Carolina, thanks to an endorsement from House Whip James Clyburn, the king of state pork, who had praised Louis Farrakhan and defended Rep. Conyers over allegations of sexual misconduct because he thought the women accusing him were white, Biden praised his own decency.

“This all starts with a revival of decency and honesty and character,” he insisted.

Rep. Clyburn has been claiming that Biden was having trouble because he was afraid to touch women.

Clyburn called Biden "a feeler, toucher kind of guy" who had "become a victim of the #MeToo movement.”

So really it all starts with a revival of Biden groping, touching, and sniffing women.

#Decency.

“What drives you?” Biden was asked. “Decency and honor,” he replied. Leaving out modesty.

What sort of man goes around touting his own decency? An extremely indecent man.

Biden and his campaign have to constantly tout his decency because that’s a quality that he lacks at a cellular level. He’s never been a decent man or done anything decent in his long and sordid life.

It's like the time that Biden told a man, "I probably have a much higher I.Q. than you do. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship." Then he falsely claimed, that he "ended up in the top half of my class.″

Then he made up a bunch of other stuff that also never happened like graduating with three degrees.

Biden told those lies because he’s not smart. He was a C student who graduated at the bottom of his class. And he keeps insisting that he has decency because, like brains, that’s another missing element.

Biden’s long career of plagiarism, compulsive lying, groping, and corruption never had much in the way of decency to it. The first time he ran for the White House, he had to drop out because he insisted on plagiarizing his speeches and making up stories that never happened. And he’s never stopped doing it.

"I marched in the civil rights movement," Biden falsely claimed in 1987.

"I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto," he lied this year about an arrest while trying to see Nelson Mandela that never happened.

Back then, Biden was the youngest candidate, now he’s the oldest, but all he did was slow down. Decency is just another of the many things that he lies about when running for higher office.

"Joe Biden's biggest assets: his decency," the Los Angeles Times claims. "Decency is the secret to Joe Biden's resiliency," the New York Daily News argues.

Except where is that actual decency?

On the campaign trail, Biden called an Iowa voter, "fat", then he challenged him to take an IQ test. It’s a familiar taunt from 1987, just like his lie about the civil rights movement dates back to the eighties.

Back in the eighties, no word association test involving “Biden” and “decency” would have worked. He isn’t running on decency now because he evolved and became a better person, but a weaker one.

Underneath the halting attempts at gravitas and dignity, Biden is still a jerk. He’s just gotten old and incapable of being as aggressive as he used to be. He ends responses early and mumbles his way through speeches. His gaffes have become legendary. The C student is finally out to lunch.

Once upon a time, Joe Biden could have run on being a fighter. But that time is now past. All he and his people can do is try to dress up his ineptness, poor memory, and worse delivery as dignity and decency.

It’s not that Joe Biden is a poor debater, they insist, he’s just too decent to jump into the mud. Even though anyone who remembers the tactics he used against Paul Ryan can’t help but laugh.

The way Biden did throughout that debate.

Biden couldn’t spell decent and dignified. Just ask his classmates at Dartmouth. But, these days, he can’t spell much of anything. And all his campaign can do is pretend that it’s because he’s above the fray, not because he’s a shambling wreck of the obnoxious braying jackass that he once used to be.

And Biden’s final indecency in a long career of indecencies is to pretend that his ineptitude is principle.

There are men and women in politics who would not sink to that level. But Biden has never had a principle that he wouldn’t borrow on, trade, and cash in. He’s not a fanatic because he doesn’t believe in anything except his own delusions of egotistical grandeur which are based on the most obvious frauds.

At the end of his long career, Joe Biden is getting everyone to call him decent because of his indecency with women, with family members, and his offices, not to mention his failing mental faculties.

All the false claims of Biden’s decency accomplish is exposing everyone who calls him that as being every bit as indecent as the corrupt political hack they’re dragging by his worn heels to the White House.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied with Senator Bernie Sanders at New York City’s largest housing project where her politics had cost the city 25,000 jobs, it was the big radical moment.

Sanders had the endorsement of the Squad which was going to hand him the nomination.

The Left unified behind the Vermont socialist as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Rep.
Rashida Tlaib hit the campaign trail for him. The Sanders campaign, already extreme, became more radical with imams like Omar Suleiman, “Zionists are the enemies of God”, and Al-Hassan Qazwini, Sanders is “an honorable man, even though he is a Jew”, appearing at Bernie Sanders rallies uniting the red and the green.

Along with Sunnis and Shiites for Sanders.

The uselessness of the Squad was already apparent when Rep. Ayanna Pressley, the one member of the Squad who had backed Senator Elizabeth Warren, saw Biden win her district.

But it just got worse for the Squad from there.

In Minnesota, Rep. Ilhan Omar was the warmup act for Sanders at the University of Minnesota’s Williams Arena, where Prince's old band was part of the attraction. Omar, who has lived her life by identity politics, called for a "mass movement of the working class that transcends faith, race, gender, and background."

Sanders falsely claimed that, "Ilhan and I share a common link as the descendants of families who fled violence and poverty, and who came to this country as immigrants." In fact, Omar had come from a wealthy and politically connected family. And her ancestors would have been happy to kill Bernie’s.

But despite Omar’s efforts, Sanders not only lost Minnesota, but Hennepin County, Omar’s district. Rep. Omar, a co-chair of the Sanders campaign, couldn’t even deliver her own district to him.

Keith Ellison, another state co-chair for Sanders, proved equally useless.

A third of Sanders’ campaign co-chairs in Minnesota were Islamists. The campaign had bet on the Islamic vote to make all the difference. Islamist organizations promised that the Muslim vote would completely transform politics with a massive turnout. But in Hennepin's Brooklyn Park, once a pleasant suburban community, now a mostly migrant area, with a large Somali population, Biden still beat Bernie Sanders.

Sanders scored some wins in Minneapolis, including decisive victories in the infamous sixth ward of Cedar Riverside or Little Mogadishu, but the amount of votes cast was negligible. While he won Somali and Muslim areas, not that many of them had actually turned out to vote for an old white socialist.

It may be that Omar’s influence in the Somali community is waning after her public adultery.

In Michigan, the results were even more humiliating. Rep. Rashida Tlaib had tweeted a video she made campaigning for Sanders in Detroit. Emgage Action, an Islamist PAC, had also gone all out for Sanders. A Dearborn rally had opened with Keffiyah dancers, Amer Zahr, a hateful BDS bigot, and Imam Sayed Hassan Qazwini who had once referred to Sanders as an “an honorable man, even though he is a Jew.”

“I look around this room and see people coming from so many different backgrounds. It is beautiful. This is what America looks like at its best," Sanders had told a Dearborn rally with women in hijabs standing behind him. While there were plenty of Arab Muslims rallying behind him, there were no black people.

Bernie’s diversity wore a hijab. And the demographics had changed, but not by quite that much.

Biden crushed Sanders, not only in Michigan, but in Rep. Tlaib’s own district. A place she had only been able to secure as a platform because the black vote was split by infighting among the Conyers clan.

Biden beat Sanders 57% to 35% in Tlaib’s district and 54% to 36% in Wayne County.

Sanders did win 62% of the vote in Dearborn. But that only gave him around 12,000 votes in an election where 1.5 million votes were cast. In a closer election with lower turnout, the Islamists might have made a difference. But instead Bernie lost every single county, including Wayne, where Dearborn is located, improving only a little bit in the area where he had bet his entire campaign. Or rather where the Islamists running his campaign had decided to make their stand on behalf of Bernie 2020.

After Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Michigan, the three M’s, three-quarters of the Squad is out.

But the Sanders campaign was always about building the power of lefties more than electing Bernie. That was always a longshot. Instead the campaign became a grift for Islamists and assorted radicals who got jobs, status, and a shot at remaking the Democrats in their own twisted and insane image.

But the revolution hasn’t arrived.

The Sanders campaign is collapsing and the group’s various local candidates haven’t done well either. Instead of mobilizing the Left, Sanders and the Squad succeeded in mobilizing the Democrats to rally against them. The “women of color” were undone by the black voters and working-class white voters who were supposed to flock to Bernie’s call for letting the Boston Marathon bomber vote from prison.

And, after the disasters in Minnesota and Michigan, the lingering question is whether the aggressive Islamist outreach backfired as Muslim voters failed to turn out in significant numbers, while other Democrats were swayed to avoid a campaign that had become toxic with bigots and terror supporters.

Bernie didn’t lose alone. The Squad and its Islamist cohort went down with his sinking socialist ship.

The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.

The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.

At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.

The self-quarantine measures adopted in response to the coronavirus outbreak are partially a response to the lessons of the Ebola disaster.

But during the Ebola crisis, Democrats tried to shift responsibility from the Obama administration by blaming Republicans for cutting the CDC’s budget from $6.5 billion to $5.9 billion. Sound familiar? Where do those billions for the CDC actually go? Among other things, pushing gun control. The terrible budget deal from December allocated $25 million to the CDC and NIH to study gun violence.

During the Ebola crisis, the CDC had been spending a mere $2.6 million on gun violence studies. But the CDC has a history of wasting money on everything from a $106 million visitor's center with Japanese gardens, a $200K gym, a transgender beauty pageant, not to mention promoting bike paths.

The occasional outbreak only calls the CDC’s general incompetence to everyone’s attention. The rest of the time its incompetence, like that of other government agencies, just ticks along wasting money.

In 1999, the CDC announced a plan to end syphilis in 5 years. The Clinton era National Plan to Eliminate Syphilis was an unserious social welfare proposal that wanted to battle racism and was such a success that by 2018, syphilis rates had hit a new record high. But Democrat presidential candidates using the CDC for imaginary proposals to end a disease, not by utilizing science, but social welfare, had become a bad habit under Obama, diverting resources from what the CDC could realistically do for political scams.

In 2011, Hillary Clinton had promised an “AIDS-free generation” by, in part, using the CDC. Like her presidency, the “AIDS-free generation” never arrived and was never going to.

In 2016, Obama allowed Joe Biden to use the CDC for his Cancer Moonshot political stunt.

"If I'm elected president you're gonna see single most important thing that changes America, we're going to cure cancer," Biden promised last year.

Joe Biden can’t cure anything. Including his own mental state. But, like Hillary, he can waste the resources of the CDC to make false promises to voters while weakening its core competencies.

The CDC is a classic example of a progressive success story, an agency created to fight malaria by spraying DDT, whose original mission has long since become politically incorrect and which instead adopted a politically correct search for the social root causes of diseases like syphilis and AIDS.

Unlike fighting malaria by spraying DDT, fighting syphilis by combatting racism doesn’t work.

The CDC’s fight against the “obesity epidemic” is even sillier. That includes funding 15 colleges to “work with community extension services to increase access to healthier foods and safe and accessible places for physical activity.” That meant giving LSU over a million bucks to work with farmers’ markets.

Obesity obviously can kill people, but it’s not something that the CDC can or should be trying to fix.

America doesn’t need the CDC as a pipeline for pork to state schools. We do need the CDC to fulfill its original mandate by dealing with outbreaks of infectious diseases, initially malaria and smallpox, and now Ebola or the coronavirus. We need science, not social welfare.

Unfortunately, the CDC, like every federal agency, has drifted from its core mission into social welfare.

By the time the Clinton administration had gotten through wrecking the CDC, its labs were infested with mice and rats, and had leaky ceilings. Not only hadn’t it cured syphilis, but it was utterly unready to deal with the anthrax threat. The Obama administration rolled back Bush administration reforms and brought back the old broken CDC under Thomas Frieden. After Frieden botched the Ebola crisis, even mainstream media outlets joined Republicans in calling for his resignation.

The CDC left the Obama era even more damaged than ever before.

Every administration has tried to put its own stamp on the CDC by playing around with organizational charts and adding more pointless initiatives. Meanwhile all those billions of dollars that Americans think are going to fight the outbreaks of contagious diseases are going to anything and everything but.

There is a vast gap between what the CDC should be doing and what it does. What it ought to be doing is utilizing its unique specialties and capabilities to study dangerous contagious diseases. And the CDC’s capabilities in this regard are impressive. But what it ends up doing is battling social problems like obesity, the opioid crisis, or STDs because that’s what politicians, especially Democrats, want.

President Trump is right to hold the Obama administration accountable for the woeful state of the CDC. But the problem didn’t begin in 2008. And it isn’t limited to the CDC, but to the entire government.

The government is full of agencies, departments, and sections that do nothing but waste time and money. Some also manage to advance dangerous and destructive initiatives. But there are times when we urgently need these otherwise useless parts of the government to work correctly and quickly.

And then we discover that they don’t work.

No one thinks about the CDC until we need it and discover it doesn’t work. And then the same story repeats itself a few years later while the CDC goes back to battling obesity and racism.

The solution begins with restating the mission of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, defining what a disease is, and what controlling or preventing it means. Rolling back mission creep starts with ending CDC campaigns against lifestyle behaviors and focusing on preventing actual disease outbreaks through science, not social welfare.

The old CDC studied behavior for targeted medical intervention. It would track malaria to its source and bring in the DDT or study smallpox outbreaks to find where they originated from. But the new CDC treats behavior as the object of study and the cure. It rolls out grandiose proposals to change behavior that never materialize. The CDC’s failure is fundamentally that of the big government welfare state.

Sociology isn’t science. Virology is.

Social welfare isn’t just a dangerous distraction, it prevents the CDC from making the right decisions about keeping infected people from entering the United States when lives are on the line.

The government doesn’t work because most of it is built on changing people’s minds, whether it’s winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, or convincing everyone to drive electric cars in Wisconsin, instead of grappling with physical problems by applying physics and chemistry to the problem of the terrorists or economics to the cost of transportation.

We don’t need a CDC that changes people’s minds about eating chocolate or engaging in unprotected sex. There are already multiple redundant parts of the government that are trying and failing there.

We need a CDC that deals with viruses instead of trying to brainwash people.

If there’s one thing everyone knows about Senator Bernie Sanders, it’s that he hates billionaires.

Now a newly minted millionaire and member of the 1%, Sanders reserves all his old hatred for millionaires, exclusively for billionaires.

Billionaires shouldn’t exist, he insists.

And while Bernie virtue signals about not having a PAC or taking money from billionaires, a big
chunk of his media operation is financed by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and the richest man in Hawaii.

Omidyar, a Franco-Persian who lives in Hawaii, pledged $250 million to First Look Media. FLM’s signature project is The Intercept, a radical leftist, anti-American, and anti-Semitic media hate site.

And The Intercept has a clear and definite candidate in the 2020 race.

The Intercept’s election coverage is filled with hysterical Sanders cheerleading, recent samples include, "The Power of Solidarity Is How Sanders Will Beat Trump", "At Iowa Debate, Bernie Sanders's Biggest Opponent Was CNN", and "Bernie Sanders's Secret to Attracting Latino Support."

But, more significantly, The Intercept acts as the opposition research arm of the Sanders campaign.

Its stories about Bernie Sanders are universally gushing, but its stories about the other candidates are undisguised hit pieces, passed off as journalistic investigations that are recirculated by the media. That includes recent stories about Bloomberg’s plagiarized campaign material and prison labor.

The technical term for this is opposition research.

The difference between journalism and opposition research is motive. Journalists follow a story where it goes. Opposition researchers are out to help a particular campaign win by damaging their opponents.

And there’s no ambiguity about what motivates The Intercept’s hit pieces about politicians like Buttigieg that the tech billionaire’s pet radical site had never bothered slinging mud at until now.

This opposition research financed by a tech tycoon who is the wealthiest man in Hawaii is then retweeted by the Sanders campaign account, staffers, surrogates, allies and assorted Bernie Bros.

Beyond the assembly line of hit pieces on Buttigieg, "Pete Buttigieg's Mostly White Mayoral Cabinet", "Pete Buttigieg Dodges Questions on Black Marijuana Arrests", and "Buttigieg Used Mechanical Turk Workers for Polling", or Klobuchar, "Amy Klobuchar Defended Prosecutions of Khat Possession", "Sen. Amy Klobuchar Sought Earmark for Anti-LGBT Ministry", and "2020 Candidate Amy Klobuchar Pushes Bill to Fund Police", is The Intercept’s role as the conspiracy theory spin room for the Sanders campaign.

The Intercept hysterically pushed claims that Sanders was winning in Iowa, and when victory failed to materialize turned to spreading conspiracy theories meant to prop up the lie that Sanders had won. It’s now already preparing the ground for a brokered convention with multiple stories attacking the legitimacy of a process that risks denying its chosen candidate the 2020 Democrat nomination.

Billionaires funding political sites that support their views is just politics. But the closeness between the Sanders campaign and a billionaire’s hate site that supplies him with PR and opposition research ought to be discussed, especially in light of the millionaire socialist’s posturing about his hatred for billionaires.

The Intercept doesn’t just happen to supply content that the Sanders campaign finds useful.

Briahna Joy Gray, Bernie's National Press Secretary, was the senior politics editor for The Intercept. Gray was hired by the tech billionaire's site after becoming a vocal supporter of Sanders in 2016. When the campaign officially hired her, she stated that, "It was the progressive vision embodied by Sanders' 2016 campaign that sparked my writing career." Her final article was, “Bernie Sanders Asks the Right Question on Reparations.” Next month, she was officially working for the Bernie Sanders campaign.

The Intercept has a very clear political identity. But it’s also the media arm of a movement bent on electing and promoting lefty candidates. And nobody asks who is financing all of it and why.

Pierre Omidyar, the richest man in Hawaii, has spent a fortune on The Intercept. He’s also a major donor to Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Not coincidentally, The Intercept has vigorously defended Soros. The site, whose hatred of the Jewish State frequently verges on anti-Semitism, and whose co-founding editor, Glenn Greenwald, had defended Hamas and Hezbollah, accused Soros critics of anti-Semitism.

At a time when digital media is running out of money, The Intercept is awash in the stuff while being extremely unprofitable. With only $156,857 in revenues, Greenwald was making over half-a-million a year. Nearly $10 million was spent on salaries in one year.

These are not normal numbers in journalism, but they are for influence operations.

One obvious difference between journalism and an influence operation is cyberwarfare. Greenwald was recently charged with cybercrimes in Brazil for allegedly coordinating with hackers to undermine an investigation into the corruption by the country’s former left-wing government. The Intercept has made use of stolen emails and messages to target political opponents, including Elliott Broidy, the former RNC finance chair and Trump ally, whose emails were hacked by Qatari agents.

The Qatari connection is not incidental. The Intercept acts as a mouthpiece for the wealthy terror state.

Beyond its anti-American and anti-Israel politics, The Intercept has very transparently waged an informational campaign against the UAE on behalf of Qatar backed by hacks and cyberwarfare.

Headlines like, "UAE Ambassador Yousef al Otaiba's Sordid Double Life", "Leaked Document Outlines Plan for UAE Financial War", and ironically, "Think Tanks Take UAE Money To Push Dictatorship's Agenda", make that all too plain. The Otaiba story was, predictably, the work of Qatari hackers.

The Intercept's Qatari stories read like straightforward regime propaganda, "Leaked Documents Expose Stunning Plan to Wage Financial War on Qatar - And Steal the World Cup", "At Neocon Think Tank Steve Bannon Bashes Qatar and Praises Saudi Arabia", and, "Saudi Arabia Planned to Invade Qatar Last Summer, Rex Tillerson's Efforts to Stop It May Have Cost Him His Job."

This sort of stuff makes RT, Xinhau and even Al Jazeera seem subtle and understated. Foreign influence operation sites have been forced to register as foreign agents even when they were more discreet.

Why was The Intercept pushing foreign influence operations in this country? Ask its funder.

Pierre Omidyar provided $87 million of The Intercept’s $90 million in funding. Despite the claims of editorial independence, of which there is no sign in the party line publication, it’s his baby.

And that amounts to a media shop for the Sanders campaign that’s worth tens of millions of dollars.

The Sanders campaign shares a media shop with Qatar. It’s funded by a tech tycoon who has spent a good deal of money to influence political outcomes in this country, using the façade of journalism.

These are question worth asking. It’s a shame that no one is.

Bernie Sanders claims that billionaires have too much influence over this country’s political system. Yet he hired the political director of a billionaire’s pet political organization and his accounts tweet opposition research from that same organization. And, just as with his houses and his 1% status, he can’t have it both ways. If he really thinks billionaires have too much power, he should disavow The Intercept.

But he can’t and won’t.

The official Sanders campaign, with its shrill claims that it is financed by small donors, is a front. Not only are those small donors coming from the wealthiest zip codes in America, but the campaign is the tip of a much larger political iceberg of non-profits that form a far bigger movement than the campaign.

Bernie Sanders doesn’t need a PAC. He doesn’t need to do fundraisers with billionaires. The millionaire socialist benefits from a much more sophisticated infrastructure that actively promotes his campaign while targeting his rivals. Its operating cost far outweighs the PAC spending of other candidates.

The Intercept and the shadowy motives of its backer is one example. It is far from alone. And the people with the money to fund these massive networks, like Omidyar or Soros, have to be billionaires.

Nobody asks Bernie about them. No one talks about what they might want from his administration.

They should.

71 years after NATO was founded to watch for an invasion, the invaders came from a NATO country.

After Turkey’s brutal Islamist regime suffered setbacks in its grandiose scheme to rebuild the Ottoman Empire by invading Syria, it decided to launch an invasion of a much softer target.

Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu has, with sublime chutzpah, kept a running count of the number of Muslim migrants invading Europe through Adrianople (renamed Edirne by its Turkish Islamic occupiers) on his Twitter account. At last count, the number of invaders was 100,577.

Soylu’s tweets are the equivalent of sending ransom notes while holding a gun to the head of the EU.

That 100,000 is a down payment. Turkey’s Islamist regime is threatening an invasion of millions. And NATO is absolutely helpless to stop a NATO country from masterminding an invasion of Europe.

"Hundreds of thousands have crossed, soon it will reach millions," Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the brutal Islamist thug fantasizing about becoming the next Caliph by rebuilding the Ottoman Empire, declared.

There’s nothing spontaneous about this invasion of Greece by tens of thousands of migrants where the new ‘Gates of Fire’ are shoddy fences under assault by mobs throwing stones, bars, and firebombs.

And a moral assault by crying women pinching and burning their children to make them weep.

Turkey’s media, firmly under Islamist control after Erdogan’s Reichstag coup in 2016 allowed the greasy butcher to purge the last resistance to his rule, loudly urged announced that the invasion was here.

The European media, just as firmly under party line control, has been feeding a steady stream of staged photos and videos of crying women and children. Crowd photos show masses of young men. The women and children are there purely as human shields and sacrifices. Women in hijabs wail and cry on photogenic rocky shores while media freelancers elbow each to get the best shots. Children are made to cry by burning them and killed outright to guilt the infidels into selling out the future of their children.

There is already a dead migrant child. Who killed it? The migrants overturned the boat to avoid being returned by the Greek coast guard. The child went in the water and despite the best medical efforts in Europe, died. But mere cold facts like these are impossible for the average westerner to comprehend.

What kind of people are capable of drowning their own children for access to Europe’s welfare state?

To quote Colonel Kurtz, "I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres." Drowning children or strapping bombs to them is a monstrously inconceivable crime to civilized people who no longer really believe in anything anymore.

The Alawites of Syria, their Shiite allies from Lebanon and Iran, will defend their borders. As the Turks discovered the hard way. They will lie, cheat, and steal, and die and kill to protect those borders.

And the Europeans will ask you for your papers. If you refuse, they will eventually let you in anyway.

America lost every war in the last three generations because we were willing to die, but not to kill. The Europeans are neither willing to die nor kill. And so, the continent is being overrun by those who are.

In WW2, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, as a last resort, turned to child soldiers as the war was lost. But being forced to face them did not make us question our morality. We understood that the monsters are the ones who dispatch children to fight their wars, not the soldiers who are forced to face them.

Seeing child soldiers made us determined to end the evil horrors of the Nazi eugenic breeding houses and concentration camps, and the Japanese biological experiments, mass rape, and ritual cannibalism.

By the time Vietnam came around, our elites no longer knew what they believed in anymore. When the enemy did horrifying things, it convinced us that we must be the monsters because they very clearly believed in something so compelling that they could do these things. And we didn’t believe in anything.

Erdogan, in his billion-dollar palace surrounded by costumed guards, understands this. So does the migrant hurling a cinderblock at a border guard. Westerners won’t fight for their countries. They will.

When the EU envoys go to negotiate with Erdogan, they will be up against a man who had the last independent military, police, and judicial leaders rounded up, and anally raped by Islamist thugs.

Whom do you want to bet on?

Last time, the Euros gave him nearly $7 billion. This time the price will be a whole lot higher. And no matter how much Danegeld is paid to the Sharia Vikings, the migrant streams will march on.

As to war.

Erdogan and the Islamists of the world are using refugees as a weapon because they know that Europe has the technology and the infrastructure to resist military forces, but can’t resist mere bodies.

Migrants are a weapon. They’re one of the more potent human missiles in the arsenal of globalism which has shifted the future from the technocratic upstarts of western civilization with their skyscrapers and empty houses of worship, to the old civilizations of Asia which have the relentless will to take them.

The latest invasion of Europe is a blatant move to extract more money for Turkey’s corrupt failing economy whose chief purpose appears to be supplying wealth to the Islamist nomenklatura, and to force countries already staggering under the weight of previous migrant invasions to help Turkey out in the Sunni-Shiite war set off by its invasion of Syria. But these are mere details of the political moment.

Western humanitarian nations want to fight their wars with bombs and tanks, but their ruthless eastern enemies prefer to fight them with humanitarian weapons. Muslim countries dispatch refugees, and when they turn terrorist, pay for their lawyers. The Russians and Qataris hack their way into poorly defended databases and disguise the attacks as leaks from journalists, and human rights activists.

Latin American countries send huge chunks of their populations to come to America and send back checks. Our elites blanch at being accused of locking children in cages. But the migrants, knowing that families will be immediately released, buy or steal children, as their golden tickets to the welfare state. And we are the monsters for wanting to apply DNA tests before releasing them to their captors.

Nobody wants to fight us on our own terms. And why should they? Who’s going to try to punch the giant in his armored chest when he has a glass jaw? Why bother equipping 30,000 men with rifles, when you can just dump them ashore, accompanied by a few women and children, for a successful invasion?

Resisting humanitarian warfare requires drawing firm lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’. That’s the line that globalism erases. And if there’s no line, then their crimes are evidence of the evils of our society.

Wars are won only by those nations, peoples, and people who can draw that line.

If there is no “us”, then what are we fighting for? If there are no nations, why defend their borders? If all beliefs are equal, then great conviction establishes moral superiority over those with lesser conviction. It doesn’t matter if the belief is in the supremacy of Sharia law and the descendants of Mohammed.

The EU established that there are no nations. The Ummah and Caliph Erdogan are taking it at its word.

And the Europeans protest against the mass invasion by tens of thousands of migrants, not because it’s bad for Europe, but because it’s bad for the migrants to have the burden of doing all the invading. They tell Erdogan, who would drown every one of them, that it’s not the best solution to the refugee crisis.

Erdogan sees the millions of migrants as Turkish national assets. Cannon fodder to be used in asserting his Ottoman dreams at the expense of Europe. The Europeans care more about them than he does. That’s what makes them effective weapons. When fighting monsters, humanity becomes a weakness.

American police officers were prevented from fighting crime because of all the people who would be locked up and maybe even shot. And now Baltimore has racked up 50 murders in just two months. Our soldiers were prevented from killing terrorists to save civilian lives, and thousands of our soldiers, and countless civilians died, and entire regions devolved into savage bloodlands of ethnic cleansing.

Europe allowed its cities to be swarmed before and thousands of women were raped, bombs and vehicles were used as weapons in crowded streets, and it still hasn’t learned to say “no” and mean it.

The members of the Ummah at the gates of Greece know what they believe. The thugs throwing stones, and the wailing women burning their children to make them cry, combine a perfect conviction in the providence of Allah, with the selfish collectivism of the family group into which they were born.

The EU believes in the selfish collectivism of its bureaucracy. But free health care, free education, and a short work week isn’t something you fight and die for. Once upon a time, hungry people did. But, as Nietzsche said, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” The hungry became obese burghers. With their appetites sated, they turned into moralizers filled with platitudes, but no actual beliefs.

They are not about to fight for what they have, because they aren’t hungry yet, and they believe in nothing except the power of socialist goodness that enables them to have their goodies. If they understood how finite those goodies are, they might fight, but then they wouldn’t be socialists.

Refugees are a weapon. But not one that comfortable people in prosperous societies understand. And by the time they come to understand what is happening, it may be because they will be the refugees.

When you believe in nothing, and family is an empty word, then you will only fight for what you have.

Einstein reportedly said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

World War III was fought and won with humanitarian weapons. That’s why World War IV is already being fought with sticks and stones on the borders of Europe.

Senator Elizabeth Warren née Herring only lost the Democrat primaries because of sexism.

Hillary Clinton blamed Warren's setbacks on "unconscious bias" and "gendered language". If only the media had referred to Warren as "him" or "xer" while being unconscious, it might be the nominee.

"Sexism Sank Elizabeth Warren," bleats The Nation. "Gender is at the core of this," Salon insists.

There’s no such thing as gender when it comes to castrating 7-year-old boys, or in weightlifting
competitions, but is a serious problem for the political ambitions of millionaire 70-year-old professors.

Vox even falsely claims that "women are feeling so defeated after Elizabeth Warren's loss".

If women are feeling so defeated by Warren’s primary faceplant, why didn’t they vote for her?

In her home state of Massachusetts, 34% of women voted for Joe Biden, 36% for Bernie Sanders, and only 24% for her.

That's 1 in 4 women. The other 3 out of 4 Democrat women must be sexist.

Among white women with college degrees, a third voted for her. But only 15% of white women with no degrees did. But, obviously, anyone who didn’t go to college must be a sexist pig.

The sexism problem was much worse among South Carolina women only 8% of whom picked Warren.

Half of Democrats who identify as women, as opposed to ducks, maple trees or windshield wipers, voted for Joe Biden, 17% for Sanders, 12% for Tom Steyer, and Warren tied with Buttigieg for 8%.

Not even 1 in 10 Democrat women in South Carolina were willing to support Senator Herring.

And, in South Carolina, quite a few of them would have been black women. Black voters make up 55% of the Dems in that state. The vast majority of black women didn’t pick Liz Warren. Something must be off.

Sexism, obviously. Or maybe witchcraft, space aliens and Russian bots.

But that’s South Carolina. They probably don’t even have consciousness raising circles and copies of But She Persisted, Even After They Asked Her to Stop, and Told Her This Was Dunkin Donuts. What about the enlightened state of California where you’re forced to pass a test on unconscious bias to be allowed to disembark at LAX before contracting the coronavirus and six different types of hepatis in baggage claim?

32% of Democrat women in California picked Bernie "A woman... fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously" Sanders. Another 28% chose Joe “Your hair smells like chamomile and Ukrainian rubles”*. Only 14% chose Warren. Why are 86% of California Democrat women such sexist pigs?

In Texas, the pattern continued as 33% of women chose Biden, 27% went for Sanders, and only 14% settled for Warren. In North Carolina, 42% of women chose Biden, 21% picked Sanders, and only 13% took Warren. In Virginia, 57% of women went for Biden, 19% for Sanders, and 12% for Warren.

In Vermont, 16% of women picked Warren, in Colorado, 17%, in Maine, 18%, in Minnesota, 19%, in Nevada, 15%, in Oklahoma, 16%, and 12% in Tennessee.

In Alabama, only 6% of women picked Warren. The other 94% of women are sexists.

Even from the start, Warren did badly with women. She only won 10% of the female vote in New Hampshire and 18% in Iowa.

While Warren usually did a few percentage points better with women than with men, the gender gap rarely went any wider than that. If Warren lost because of sexism, it was a genderless sexism.

The vast majority of women did not vote for Senator Elizabeth Warren. They didn’t vote for her in the earliest primaries or on Super Tuesday. She did not manage to do any better than secure the votes of 1 in 5 women outside her own state. Either 80% of women are sexists or Warren was a terrible candidate.

Given a choice between condemning 80% of their own party’s women as sexists or admitting that Warren was an unpleasant and unlikable politician, the media chose Warren over women.

Who are the real sexists here?

How is it that the same women (and men) who voted for Hillary in 2016 have suddenly turned sexist?

Was Hillary Clinton actually a man? Were Cory Booker and Deval Patrick forced to drop out because the Democrats are racists? Was Kamala Harris forced to end her campaign because the Democrats are both racist and sexist? Did Julian Castro have to end his miserable campaign because Democrats also hate Latinos? And there’s Andrew Yang? Did his campaign sputter because Democrats also hate Asians?

And Buttigieg? That one’s obviously homophobia.

If you believe the media, the Democrats are a diverse party of racist, sexist homophobes.

And the media has made all of these arguments. Booker, Harris, and Castro all piteously beat the racism drum before going on their good riddance tour. When Buttigieg dropped out, it was homophobia’s turn.

"Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the presidential race, and homophobia helps explain why," an NBC News column claims.

That and statistics.

But if the Democrats are really so racist, maybe it’s time to call it a day and break up this bigoted organization. The media has made a convincing case that black Democrats hate black people (Kamala Harris and Cory Booker had even less black support than Warren had female support), female Democrats hate women, and gay Democrats must be homophobes. The New Hampshire exit polls asked voters if they were gay, lesbian, or transgender. There weren’t enough responses to support anyone.

Alternately, identity politics is really stupid.

Since that would be a heretical hate crime, we have to conclude that the Democrats are a hate group. Their victims are the assorted annoying millionaire candidates who never managed to take off. And they would have, if it weren’t for the incredible hatred lurking in the hearts of the nation’s Democrats.

According to The Atlantic, "America punished Elizabeth Warren for her competence".

How competent was Elizabeth Warren? So competent that she had a plan for everything except losing every primary, including both her home states. Sadly, she even lost Cherokee County. Her enormous competence led her to lie about being an American Indian to advance her academic career and then to try and lie about it again with a DNA test that proves she’s 1/1024th honest. The climax of her competence led her to embrace Bernie’s socialist plan to destroy Medicare while claiming to be a capitalist. Warren was all things to all people and, paradoxically, nothing to anyone. Including women.

Who decided that Warren was competent? The media did.

If Warren is a flake, then so is the media. And the media would rather accuse millions of Democrats of being sexist, racist, homophobes than admit it was wrong. Just imagine what it’ll accuse Americans of.

The last time the media was wrong about an election, it blamed a vast Russian conspiracy, and spent the next few years demanding that Facebook censor every conservative outlet that called it correctly. Just imagine the complete meltdown that will come upon us in 2020 when it’s proven wrong all over again.

When Biden loses, the media will be forced to accuse the entire nation of ageism and hating the Irish.





*That’s not the correct name of the currency. It’s a joke.