Enter your keyword

Sunday, October 31, 2021

They Said Rat Poison Was Racist. Now New Yorkers Are Dying of Rat Diseases

By On October 31, 2021
On Earth Day, New York City’s leftist environmentalists succeeded in pushing through a ban on rat poison. The ban on efforts to fight rat infestations in city parks was championed by The Black Institute, founded by former ACORN boss Bertha Lewis, claiming that rat poison was racist.

Now people are dying.

Over a dozen New Yorkers contracted leptospirosis and are suffering from liver and kidney failure. One of them is already dead. The symptoms of leptospirosis include fever, aches, and jaundice. Even those who survive can end up with brain damage.

In the last 14 years, there were only 57 cases in the Big Apple. Now there’s 15 in one year.

While leptospirosis is common in the third world, it's rare in the United States and was mostly seen in rural areas among farmers who work with livestock. That's because leptospirosis is spread through contact with animal urine and we don't live in cities infested with vermin.

Or at least we didn't until the Democrats and their radical environmental lobby got its way.

The takeover of the Democrats by radical activists backed by billionaire leftist foundations means that major blue cities are now governed by every lunatic leftist idea under the sun from critical race theory to the denial of the existence of women to allowing the rats to thrive.

Baltimore, one of the few major cities with a leptospirosis outbreak back in the 90s, has a notorious rat problem, but despite that decided to ban some rat poisons. Democrats were outraged when President Trump condemned Charm City's rat problem when they should have been outraged that the city not only has a severe rat problem, but that they’re making it worse.

California's Governor Newsom signed a rat poison ban last year even though the state's rat problem had already led to the spread of typhus, a medieval disease, through rats. Now Los Angeles vets are warning about the rise of the "rare" leptospirosis disease in local dogs.

Once the dogs pick it up, it's a lot easier for their owners to get it too.

The story notes that leptospirosis is a “bacterial disease associated with the waste from rats; it is usually seen in rural areas where rats are more abundant.” But these days rats are running the show in Democrat cities which legalized homelessness and banned rat poison.

While many Democrat cities have a rat crisis, no city has gone as quickly to the rats as NYC.

New York City's rat complaint calls shot up from 16,000 to 29,000 in one month. COVID shutdowns killed the weakest rats but led to the rise of so-called "Mega Rats". Viral videos show rats the size of small dogs frolicking around apartment kitchens and biting small children.

And even climbing on a sleeping man on the subway.

The New York Post warned that, "rats as big as bunnies are roaming the streets in broad daylight, nesting in trees and chewing through car engine wires".

With rats overrunning New York City, the spread of rat urine also spreads leptospirosis.

While Democrats and environmentalists fight to ban modern century rat control technology, New Yorkers are returning to the dark ages and hunting rats with dogs. Amateur rat hunters like the Reynold's Ryders Alley Trencher Fed Society (RATS) use terriers to hunt down and kill rats in Manhattan. While the medieval approach has made for great publicity, using dogs to kill rats just leads to a greater risk of the dogs and potentially their owners contracting leptospirosis.

Chinese and Russian state media however enjoyed regaling their viewers with the spectacle of America’s leading city overrun by rats and reduced to hunting them at night with dogs.

Environmentalism destroys societies and kills people.

Rachel Carson’s crusade against insecticides may have led to millions dying of malaria. The green crusade against rat poison is beginning to claim lives in New York and Los Angeles. Modern sanitation helped stop the insects and rats that spread medieval plagues, but as environmentalists put bugs and rats ahead of people, the diseases are coming back.

Environmentalists claimed that they were banning rat poisons to protect dogs and minorities. But rat urine threatens dogs and the spread of leptospirosis is concentrated in minority areas where residents are being terrorized by the giant rats unleashed by their Democrat rulers.

While Mayor Bill de Blasio's wife Chirlane McCray can't account where $850 million from her mental health program went, his administration cut millions from its rat control budget. His wife's staffers alone account for the $2 million cut from fighting rats. But there is more than one kind of rat and the two-legged kind of leftist Democrat is far worse than even the giant “mega rat”.

After banning rat poison, Democrat city bosses have embraced the environmentalist strategy of controlling the rat population through “prevention”. And in New York City and San Francisco that meant buying solar-powered trash cans. The cans, which cost $7,000 in New York City and $20,000 in San Francisco, won’t solve anything in cities overrun with homeless vagrants.

Prevention strategies penalize homeowners and small businesses while leaving homeless encampments infested with colonies of rats intact. Spending thousands of dollars on solar-powered trash cans won’t make a dent in New York City’s 2 million rats.

If the Democrats want to have giant junkie tent cities covered in trash and human waste, they’re going to have to aggressively fight rats instead of pretending that they can cut off their food supply rats with expensive trash cans. And if they want to ban rat poison and resort to prevention strategies, the first step is cleaning up the homeless tent cities and their waste.

But the Democrats want junkie tent cities and a ban on modern rat control methods. And so the “rare” diseases we used to associate with medieval times or the third world are no longer rare.

The first leptospirosis cluster in New York City claimed three victims in 2017. In 2021, it’s already up to thirteen. Around 10% of the infected develop the serious version of the disease requiring hospitalization and around 10% of those die. That means over a hundred are infected. Worldwide annual death rates for the disease are in the tens of thousands indicating how high the potential for serious infections and deaths can be as our cities become third world hellholes.

But rats don't just carry leptospirosis.

A study of New York City's rats found that they carried a “a vast diversity of microbes that may affect human health" including "Seoul hantavirus, which causes Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever and kidney failure in humans", bacterial pathogens that can cause "life-threatening gastroenteritis", and two novel hepatotropic hepaciviruses which can infect humans with hepatitis.

Rats may “serve as mixing bowls”, some researchers warned, “providing an environment in which pathogens may interact and even exchange genes”. While Americans have sneered at Wuhan’s bat soup, American cities are maintaining horrifying breeding grounds for disease.

While New Yorkers studiously wear face masks and show off vaccination tattoos, the next pandemic may be breeding in their parks, their sewers, their subways, and their kitchens.

Face masks don’t stop rat urine.

Like Rachel Carson’s malaria millions, the next pandemic may be due to the assiduous efforts of environmentalists to cripple our ability to fight disease. Democrats are unleashing a rat explosion in major cities and as the rat populations grow, more people sicken and die.

The “mixing bowls” of rat populations are breeding viruses that exchange genes and become deadlier. The rats will survive them, but humans may not. Today’s pandemic came from China, the next one may come out of New York City or Los Angeles, not out of a lab, but a sewer.






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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, October 28, 2021

Eloi and Morlocks in Portlandia

By On October 28, 2021
9-year-old Hadar Kedem was playing with her father, brother, and family dog in a Portland city park when the gunmen came and the bullets began flying.

“They huddled up into this group and we thought they were going to do a race or something, but instead they pulled out guns and started shooting and then I got really scared,” the little girl told the Portland City Council. “There was a bullet that shot like four or five feet away from my right..”

The exchange of gunfire between over a dozen men was just one of the gang shootings that delivered Portland to what its police chief called a “grim milestone” of 1,000 shootings.

Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the police defunding movement had taken Portland from 388 shootings in 2019 to over 1,000 this year. Murders in Rose City rose by 83% breaking its previous high score set in 1987. As the Black Lives Matter race riots got underway, Portland went from 23 shootings in March 2020 to 104 by July of that same year. By March 2021, there were 93 shootings. Gone were the pleasant days of 2019 when Portlanders might complain about 30 shootings. The summer of 2021 saw around 400 shootings: more than in all of 2019.

Rose City Park with its cedars and rose gardens located right next to a golf course is exactly the sort of amenity that its upscale residents moved there for. Now it’s a brutal war zone.

But trapped in their woke fantasies, the city’s Eloi can’t come to terms with what’s happening.

Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem, Hadar’s mother, an “insectional feminist” who “dismantles patriarchy”, and advocated for “Palestinian rights”, denounced her daughter’s “white privilege”.

“We are a white family of privilege,” the leftist hipster artist confessed. “No one in our family wants to see the result of this be more police presence at parks. That’s not the answer.”

What was the answer?

Gugenheim insisted that instead of police, the solution to a dozen men opening fire in the park was dealing with root causes, "services for disadvantaged communities", "education", "gun control", and "a task force of people with equity training to tackle the issue of gun violence".

Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who had called for defunding the police before calling the police on her Lyft driver when he asked her to leave his car, welcomed Gugenheim’s nonsense.

But after years of dealing with root causes, offering more welfare and equity task forces, Portland tripled its shooting rate, and even the nicest places have become war zones.

Portland Democrats cut $27 million from the police budget. Over 200 police officers have left the force leaving the city with far more armed gang members than cops. The failing city has stopped investigating and intervening in some crimes not just because of the pro-crime ethos of BLM, but because the manpower doesn’t even exist to deal with the runaway crime wave.

“We are running on fumes. There’s no way we can investigate thoroughly, and correctly, all these shootings," Daryl Turner, the head of the police union, had warned.

But while the murderous Morlocks roam Portland, its woke Eloi refuse to deal with reality. They munch their soy, graze at trendy eateries, and huddle in their parks when the bullets fly.

“The Eloi, like the Carlovignan kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance,” H.G. Wells wrote in The Time Machine of a future humanity divided between the decadent Eloi who play all day and the Morlocks who live in the dark and prey on them. The Portland Eloi, like their fellow coastal city hipsters, possess their cafes and parks on a sufferance that vanishes when the gun-toting Morlocks come out of the darkness.

Not even bullets flying next to their children’s faces can prompt anything except recitations of hollow dogma. Gugenheim did not blame the thugs who now freely roam the city without fear of the police for the gunfight in Rose City Park, but the desire of her “neighbor to own guns”.

Even though any armed neighbors would be the final line of defense for her family.

How do you stop a dozen men with guns from opening fire in a park? With a dozen other armed men who are willing to put their lives on the line to stop them. The Portland cops, the armed men that the financial analysts and artists like the Gugenheim-Kedems had been paying to protect them from the brutal realities of human nature, increasingly no longer want the job.

And that’s how their son and daughter wound up dodging bullets in the park.

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth," Mike Tyson used to say. “A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality,” Irving Kristol observed. He added though that some liberals “refuse to press charges”.

In her letter to the Portland City Council, Gugenheim denounces individualism and freedom, "the gun laws in this country that obscure us from our freedoms rather than maintain them", and calls for a collectivist "freedom that nourishes interconnectedness, interdependence not the fierce

independence for which gun supporters are staking ground."

The interdependence of the herd animal whose only herd instinct is denial and is incapable of even banding together for mutual protection.

“I could talk about the fear in which children are being raised today. Fear to go to the playground, to walk down the street at night or even during the day,” she pleads.

"And why were they so terribly afraid of the dark? I proceeded, as I have said, to question Weena about this Underworld, but here again I was disappointed. At first she would not understand my questions, and presently she refused to answer them. She shivered as though the topic was unendurable," H.G. Wells' Time Traveler relates.

Why are the mothers and the children of the Portland Eloi so afraid? They know the Morlocks are there. And nothing in their intellectual degeneracy has prepared them to face the threat.

Guggenheim’s incoherent call to action blamed the fashionable culprit of "systemic racism" and insisted that the "racism must be examined and reconciled". But the only systemic racism here was the shutdown of a service that minority communities needed most of all. That’s why polls show that white people are more likely to support defunding the police than minorities.

Minorities are the canary in the crime coal mine. By the time upper class white people are dodging bullets, the situation is catastrophically bad because the warning signs were ignored.

When Jacob Eli Knight Vasquez was shot and killed in Portland, his brother-in-law pleaded, "Let’s please untie the hands of our law enforcement officers. I believe if the proper tools were in place for our law enforcement officers, this wouldn’t even have happened.”

Police defunding is the real systemic racism.

Not everyone in Portland is an Eloi. Firearms background checks increased 32% in Multnomah County. Without the police around, Portlanders have a choice between cringing in fear while prayerfully reciting passages from Ibram X. Kendi or defending their families.

"There is so much to say about the complexity and absurdity of a nine-year-old appealing to her city council to please, please find the means to protect her and others from such wanton violence," Gugenheim complained to the Portland City Council.

“I know that not only do I want change, but everyone wants change,” her fourth-grade daughter told the City Council. “I want to feel safe.”

But it's the City Council and her parents that placed her in danger.

Adults are supposed to protect children. It was the job of Hadar's parents to keep her safe by locking up criminals and empowering the police. They failed her and all the other children. And their only response to that failure is to double down on it, reciting the familiar doctrines, and throwing out worthless buzzwords, instead of doing anything practical to protect their city..

The only thing that will stop the violence is to bring back the cops and lock up the criminals. And that’s the one thing that the mother of a child huddling as bullets whizzed by refuses to do.

“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide,” Wells’ Time Traveler observed.

The suicide notes are scattered across the streets of Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The coastal cities that claimed to be on the leading edge of technology and culture have become hellholes where the Eloi elites tiptoe past human waste, dodge bullets while on a night out, and then huddle in their tiny apartments for fear of the Morlock hordes.

They believe that they are a superior race, standing on the right side of history, and ready to inherit a utopian earth, when they are really little more than a Morlock snack.







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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Corporate Safe Spaces: How Racial Affinity Groups Radicalize Companies

By On October 27, 2021
Workplace chat software like Slack is probably the single most effective tool for making companies go woke. Organizing workers was a difficult challenge in companies that did not have unions. But while companies closely monitored union organizing, they actively encouraged the use of workplace chat software that made it all too easy for leftists to network, identify opponents, get them fired, and use those incidents to radicalize the company.

The second most effective tool is the identity politics affinity group.

Affinity groups or ERGs have become a popular tool by HR departments to organize internal woke caucuses. Corporate affinity groups are a counterpart of campus student groups and were promoted as a way to enable the same kind of experience in the workplace. Identity politics student groups, usually dominated by students and faculty from identity politics studies departments, were the biggest players in campus radicalization and protests. Affinity groups replicated black, Latino, and gay student groups in corporations with executives as their faculty sponsors. The executives were often picked based on their own student activist backgrounds.

During the campus wars, some conservatives had dismissed the student protests as an unreal university bubble. “Just wait until they get into the real world and have to find jobs,” they said.

But campus radicalism had always been meant as a training ground for institutional radicalization. The student activists were being taught how to take over government agencies, companies, and any organization they become part of using internal networking and political pressure. The students didn’t change to accommodate the workplace, instead workplaces changed to accommodate them, making the activist culture a part of corporate culture.

The same system that had ousted conservative faculty, intimidated conservative speakers, and transformed courses had been copied and pasted into the corporate workplace. On college campuses, students were the customers, but workplace affinity group members were employees. Except that corporations began treating the affinity groups as stakeholders who became more important than the actual customers. Affinity groups applied internal pressure that ousted conservative employees and dropped conservative customers and businesses.

Much as student groups had advocated defunding investments in oil companies or Israel on college campuses, affinity groups pressured banks to drop firearms manufacturers and Republicans. Companies that refused faced internal revolts, staged resignations, and pressure on key investors and shareholders that would claim the jobs of CEOs and principled leaders.

The conquest of corporations was swift and effective because it utilized existing leftist revolutionary organizational principles that exploited new technologies while their victims, often liberal and conservative, failed to understand that the discontent, the demands, and the new entities and language invading the workplace were not some odd millennial trend, but part of a plan. Even now the backlash against wokeness has hardly come to terms with the infrastructure behind it, touching mainly on the stories of individuals who were purged for political offenses.

What the testimony of the victims neglects is an understanding of the machinery of the purges.

The affinity groups were not truly new, but their spread and pervasiveness has been breathtaking. Black, Latino, gay, and other identity politics affinity groups not only exist in most corporations but, as revealed in the Freedom Center’s recent booklet, Disloyal, in the military. They’ve become ubiquitous in the non-profit sector and across all levels of the government.

Officially, racial and sexual affinity groups are meant to make minorities more comfortable in the workplace, provide mentoring, and the favorable treatment that enables “diversity”. In practice affinity groups are widely used to advocate for political issues in the same way as minority leaders. Essentially, affinity groups embedded a Sharpton in every company and institution.

Affinity groups claim that they are structurally disadvantaged and that certain corporate moves make them feel “unsafe” or “threatened”. A key affinity group tactic is pressuring executives to state that the company suffers from “systemic racism” and that minorities are at risk. This is the familiar campus safe space ethos transplanted to some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies.

Once the affinity groups have established the need for corporate safe spaces, they begin pressuring companies to impose political tests on all employees and fire those who disagree. Affinity groups begin by establishing their oppressed credentials before pivoting to become the oppressors. Once executives begin surrendering to them, they’ve established that the company is a dangerous environment for an identity politics group and the leadership “needs to do better.”

While affinity groups typically tend to claim that they represent black, female, or gay employees, they’re just another embedded leftist front group which silences or suppresses those employees who are there for mentorship or work instead of politics. Where unions at least had democratic vestiges, affinity groups have little to none. Like the NAACP, the HRC, or any number of advocacy groups that claim to represent the voices of a group, which has no way of ratifying or removing their representation, affinity groups claim to represent a people as a political group.

And since affinity groups typically have the support of HR and executives, few employees are willing to dissent or speak out against them. Fortune 500 companies now routinely pressure their employees to join affinity groups, including pushing white employees into “white allies” groups for maximum political indoctrination in the workplace. This setup, not at all coincidentally, resembles the old “soviets” which the Bolsheviks began to use as their political power base.

Modern wokes are using the same basic methodology as 19th century revolutionaries but with the added benefit of the internet and smart devices to provide them with far superior coordination. The underlying objective though remains the familiar process of horizontal consolidation of power within an organization, a group of organizations, and then an entire industry, and vertical consolidation across different organizations and industries.

Horizontal consolidation is how leftists took over specific university departments, entire fields of study, academic organizations, and then entire universities, and much of academia. The same process was also used to consolidate the field of education, and is being replicated everywhere from Big Tech to medicine. And, as discussed in Disloyal: the United States military.

Vertical consolidation might use the media, medical experts, and government officials to advance a particular program, or academia, Wall Street, and the clergy for another.

The basis for the mass censorship of conservatives was coordinated between the Justice Department, the media, and Big Tech. Such improbable alliances only seem unlikely until you understand that vertical consolidation transforms culturally incompatible organizations and industries into the components of a single machine whose true mission is that of the Left.

Leftists create cells within each organization. The members of those cells see themselves as members of the “resistance”, the term they embraced during the Trump administration, “working within the system” to achieve a total takeover of society. The old dream, the one advanced by Communist organizations, got a shot in the arm from the new possibilities for organizing and coordinating operatives. Before the internet, communications were a problem requiring in-person meetings, magazines and newsletters, but the rise of the internet, and then social media, and finally workplace chat enabled this brave new world and its social credit system.

The affinity groups merge traditional identity politics organizing with corporate workplaces. The Left has abandoned its old working class politics to focus on the upper middle class and it has accompanied its new base through student identity politics to their workplaces. The stereotypes of dysfunctional millennials unable to cope with adulthood led corporations to create frictionless workplaces that made the transition from college to corporate life as smooth as possible.

It’s also no coincidence that Big Tech, the arena where the top talent was guided into corporate campuses meant to replicate their old college campuses, is also the epicenter of safe spaces, radical politics, and affinity groups. The college dropouts who built Silicon Valley aimed to extend the college experience to the workplace with a casual atmosphere, free food, and all-night working hours. It’s no wonder Big Tech became the first corporate casualty of the Left.

But not the last. Corporate America, eager to jump on a new trend, is succumbing to the virus.

Conservatives were behind the curve on campus organizing. They’ve made up a great deal of ground on college campuses even as the generation that was organized is taking over the corporate workplace. And conservatives are once again behind on organizing the opposition.

Making matters more difficult is the insistence that identity politics affinity groups are apolitical, that their messages, whether Black Lives Matter or Trans Inclusion, are “above politics”, and that implementing these groups is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion which many organizations, from Kellogg’s cereal to the United States Space Force, have defined as central to their mission.

And so it will take a good deal more to crack workplace organizing than calls for equal time.

Workplace civil rights is about more than the right of employees to be free of political tests and indoctrination, it’s about more than denying the Left a space to organize and recruit. These initial considerations have to give way to the realization that an organization hijacked by the Left will horizontally and vertically consolidate to conquer organizations, industries, and the country.

A company will funnel money to leftist causes and deny services to conservatives. It will coordinate with other companies and create industry-wide standards that act as cartels. That means firearms manufacturers and gun stores will be denied loans and payment options, conservative candidates will be prevented from being heard on social media and accepting donations. Vocal conservatives won’t be able to buy or sell, have a bank account or a credit card, not to mention a job, or access any services that are mediated by major corporations.

The variety of companies that appear to be making independent decisions to deplatform, fire, and break ties with conservatives are actually acting as one nationwide woke cartel.

That’s not an alarmist prediction, but a growing everyday reality.

Corporations have adopted critical race theory, anti-racism, equity, and inclusion which, despite its name, insists that it is not enough to include if you do not also exclude. Exclusion, from the marketplace of ideas, from public and private spaces, from employment and finally life, has been equated to safety for the “oppressed” who cannot be safe without the power to oppress.

That is how the social credit system comes to America.

It took conservatives a while to embrace student free speech rights. The shift came with the delayed realization that campuses were no longer in a struggle between moderate administrations and student radicals, but radical administrations and student conservatives. Making that same shift with woke corporations purging conservative employees and customers may be a more painful process. And yet it is an absolutely necessary existential matter.

Conservatives could survive woke academia, but not a woke economy.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Monday, October 25, 2021

California Drove Truckers Out of Business. Now Store Shelves Are Empty

By On October 25, 2021
After a long cross-country flight, I made it out of LAX and into an Uber. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but the driver was. And hearing that I was a journalist, he wanted to tell me a story. I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years, but this may have been the most important one I let go.

He hadn’t always been driving an Uber at 11:30 at night. Not all that long ago he used to have his own business with 7 trucks before he was bankrupted by California’s insane regulations.

I listened, but didn’t pay enough attention. The impact of California’s Democrat legislative supermajority on truckers was just another data point alongside what was happening to freelancers of all kinds and a lot of small businesses. Stories like this were everywhere and there was little interest in them even in conservative circles outside the tarnished golden state.

Back then we still lived in a world where you could walk into a thousand stores with fully stocked shelves. People ordered from Amazon and expected its burgeoning last mile delivery service to make products magically appear overnight. Just in time inventory systems were more efficient and any day now products would be delivered by self-driving cars or aerial drones.

2020 and 2021 have given this Big Tech fantasy world and the rest of us a good kicking.

The massive supply chain mess that’s leaving stores empty and orders unfulfilled doesn’t have a single point of failure, but dozens of them. China’s energy shortages, the overhyped predictive powers of Big Data, the fragility of the global economy, fuel costs, and welfare state worker shortages are all players. But California’s truck bans are a key link in the great failure chain.

While I was riding home that night, California trucking companies were going bankrupt at a rapid rate. Few outside the industry were paying attention or understood what that might mean.

2019 was described as a “bloodbath” for the trucking industry with 640 trucking companies across the country filing for bankruptcy in just the first half of the year. Thousands of truck drivers were left unemployed. Many went into the expanding last mile delivery business, some as contractors for Amazon. But California truckers and businesses had their own special woes.

Two years ago, Governor Newsom signed the Democrat supermajority's Assembly Bill 5 into law. While AB5 was billed as a crackdown on Uber and Lyft, forcing the companies to treat l freelance contractors as employees, the gig economy companies pushed Proposition 22 so that they were the only ones exempt from the law. (A Democrat judge has since illegally blocked the approved ballot measure while falsely claiming that it was unconstitutional.)

AB5 however was less about Uber than it was about outlawing freelance employees in order to force them into unions. The union power grab inconvenienced Uber and Lyft, but crushed freelance workers in a variety of fields including journalism. One of the fields was trucking.

Over the summer, the California Trucking Association actually went to the Supreme Court to fight AB5 and allow owners and operators to use independent contractors. The CTA listed 70,000 owner operators. In the years since AB5, Ubers have become scarcer and more expensive, which is what the law was actually designed to do, but the consequences to the trucking industry have been far worse albeit invisible to most people until now. While truckers are still protected from AB5, many in the industry are not willing to bet their future on SCOTUS.

AB5 was not only the assault on the trucking industry by California Democrats who were aggressively trying to unionize the industry and to impose environmental regulations on it.

Last year, the California Air Resources Board issued a press release boasting that it had taken a "bold step to reduce truck pollution". The bold step required switching to electric trucks.

"We are showing the world that we can move goods, grow our economy and finally dump dirty diesel," Jared Blumenfeld, California’s Secretary for Environmental Protection, sneered.

Jared and California certainly showed the world something.

While the ultimate truck ban was scheduled for 2045, an initial phase-in of 5% to 9% begins in 2024. Last year, California's DMV began refusing to register thousands of trucks with an estimated 100,000 trucks under threat. With "green" trucks costing $70,000 more, this was a non-starter for already troubled independent owner-operators and even larger companies.

That was part of the plan.

California Democrats and their environmentalist special interests had set out to crush the state’s ports and trucking industry. Had everything gone as planned, this would have been a slow and gradual process. Costs would have crept up and deliveries would have fallen off without an immediate catastrophic impact. But then the pandemic and its consequences arrived.

Business at California’s ports dropped during the pandemic. The loss of traffic convinced trucking companies and owner operators who were already battered by AB5 and the green truck ban that it was better to just downsize or pull out entirely. And when port activity rebounded, there was a huge hole in the delivery infrastructure that backed up the entire system.

Biden called for ports to operate around the clock, but that’s not going to magically bring back thousands of trucks or truckers. California Democrats still haven’t changed their regulations and without that, there’s no incentive or even legal structure that would allow trucks to operate.

The resulting disaster is likely to accelerate the ongoing shift of shipping from California ports. Democrats imposed their green shakedown not only on truckers, but on shipping. With companies moving to Texas, Houston was already becoming a more appealing alternative. It’s now at capacity as everyone is looking for alternatives to the California economic disaster area.

But much of our imports and exports still depend on the California bottleneck that begins with Communist China and ends in Communist California. The red-to-red pipeline has savaged our economy and wrecked imports and exports. Newsom’s survival and the Dem legislative supermajority which passes more extreme leftist regulations every session means that things will only get worse. A radical party that actively seeks to dismantle the economy is in power in Sacramento and its regulations have the ability to hold our entire economy hostage.

What happens in California unfortunately doesn’t stay there unless it’s waiting on a ship.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, October 24, 2021

Hunter Biden and the Muslim Brotherhood

By On October 24, 2021
While Vice President Joe Biden was in the White House, his son Hunter was allegedly trying to cut a huge deal with a $2 million payment and a possible 5% success fee as high as $750 million. All it would take was bringing together Communist China and the Muslim Brotherhood.

And who but a Biden could pull that off?

The UN Security Council sanctions that had been slapped on the Libyan Investment Authority during the civil war between Gaddafi and the Islamists were still in place years later because the Arab Spring had left the country in the throes of a permanent civil war with the Islamists.

The LIA's wealth fund, now worth an estimated $68 billion, had been part of a deal cut between the Libyan dictator and the Bush administration. When Gaddafi abandoned his WMD program, and sanctions were dropped on Libya, the LIA quickly became one of Africa's largest wealth funds, and bought big, investing in American companies, banks, and bonds.

Including billions in treasury bills.

When Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood stabbed Gaddafi in the back and went to war to support the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of Libya, tens of billions in LIA assets were frozen. And as the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists have continued to battle the remnants of Libya’s military for power, the sanctions have remained in place costing the LIA some $4 billion.

When Sam Jauhari, a Democrat donor, sent the email, indicating that Hunter wanted $2 million to lobby on the deal, his father had long been seen as the gateway to all that wealth.

Jauhari, who had plowed $80,000 into the Obama campaign, and tens of thousands more into the Democrat machine, was allegedly an associate of Imaad Zuberi, a Pakistani who had been working on Libya with Biden’s body man and close friend. Earlier this year, Zuberi was sentenced to 12 years in prison for funneling foreign money into political campaigns in the United States. Among his alleged employers was the Qatari Islamic terror state and a prosecutor alleged that "U.S. policy was changed to align with Qatar’s interests.

Prosecutors say that Zuberi received $9.8 million from the Qatari state sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood. He had also allegedly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Saudi Muslim tycoon to the Obama inauguration. His WhatsApp messages have him mentioning, "I need to get the 5 to 6 Clinton donation done by tomorrow" and “You want billions unfrozen. This is nothing. Iranians spent $150 to get $25 billion released."

His recipient complains, "I spent 2.6 million before. What did I get?"

The names of the Libyan officials have been censored, but the deal appeared to involve the Tripoli government. At the time the deals were being discussed, the Tripoli government was largely dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Control over LIA had been a top Muslim Brotherhood priority and the LIA allegedly includes at least one Brotherhood board member.

The first email about retaining Hunter Biden was sent in January 2015. In 2012, a Muslim Brotherhood alliance had conspired to take power through fraudulent elections in Libya. In 2014, the Brotherhood alliance, after repeatedly using Islamist militias to terrorize its rivals in Tripoli, lost new elections and declared that it would continue to govern anyway.

When the Hunter Biden emails were being sent, Libya had two rival governments, the Muslim Brotherhood in Tripoli and a more moderate coalition in Tobruk. The rival governments also staked their own claims to Libya’s wealth whose crown jewel were the LIA’s investments.

While the released court documents of Zuberi’s WhatsApp chats were censored to remove the names and identities of any of the players, he asks at one point, "Does the Libyans want me to introduce them to Turkish president?" Turkey was a strong backer of the Tripoli regime. It’s highly unlikely that political figures in the Tobruk government would have been looking for an introduction to their worst enemy. The Muslim Brotherhood however was backed by Turkey.

The Biden email however provides an even bigger clue when it notes that Hunter “said he has access to highest level in PRC, he can help there.”

The Muslim Brotherhood had gotten Obama and Hillary Clinton to intervene in Libya. That illegal invasion enabled them to take power, but as part of the crisis, sanctions had been imposed by the United Nations. And Obama and Hillary were not able to unilaterally lift those sanctions.

The sanctions had been imposed by the UN Security Council. And could only be lifted by it.

The People’s Republic of China had been a major player in Libya. When the civil war arrived, it sided with Gaddafi and once he was overthrown, Chinese oil companies were frozen out. Getting China to support lifting some sanctions would require a quid pro quo arrangement that would let the PRC’s oil companies and other businesses back into Libya.

Hunter Biden’s ties to CEFC China Energy and the gift of an eighty thousand dollar diamond have already been widely reported. A CEFC executive would later be accused of plotting to provide weapons to Qatar and Libya. Qatar was a major backer of the Brotherhood.

Even without Hunter's diplomatic talents, China and the Islamist government came to terms.

But the China factor explains why the Libyans considered Hunter Biden as an intermediary at all. The Biden family was a perfect halfway point between the Muslim Brotherhood and the People’s Republic. Both the Islamists and the Communists had invested in the Biden clan.

What was really at stake here was a quid pro quo oil deal in exchange for the LIA lockbox of billions that had to be negotiated through the White House and UN Security Council members. It was a thorny problem which the Libyans still don’t seem to have cracked, and it’s unlikely that Hunter Biden could have managed to appease all the different interests if he had gotten the job.

The Zuberi messages mention that, "the negotiation is towards 3.5 to 4% or it will not fly... they said that they have 190 billion outside and they will not give 5%." It’s not clear whether Hunter would have seen any part of that 5%, or whether the WhatsApp messages refer to any deal involving him at the time, but either way there was a whole lot of money at stake.

The Libyan civil war was not just ideological, but economic. The Arab Spring had become a vehicle for not only Islamist theological ambitions, but the economic agendas of its backers.

"Hey read the book Clinton Cash," Zuberi told an associate. "This is how America work. How Washington work."

It’s certainly how the Bidens work. In an already fetid swamp, the Bidens added a new layer of treasonous greed. Only the Bidens could have been up for potentially being hired by the Muslim Brotherhood to cut a deal with Communist China.

As long as the money from America’s enemies was right.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Kellogg’s Goes Woke While Its Workers Go Broke

By On October 21, 2021
In the late 19th century, John Harvey Kellogg, a eugenicist and celibate vegetarian, became the leading health food nut of the era and along the way accidentally invented corn flakes.

Back then Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium was a spa for the rich where patients got electric baths and enemas (the subject of a scathing parody in the book and movie, The Road to Wellville). These days, Battle Creek, Michigan is in much worse shape and Kellogg’s is the area’s biggest employer. But the corporation, like most of its multinational woke ilk, spends most of its time virtue signaling social justice while outsourcing American jobs.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, another of the multitude of hijacked radical foundations, is the biggest shareholder of Kellogg's through the Kellogg's Foundation Trust. The left-wing activist foundation had originally been founded as the W. K. Kellogg Child Welfare Foundation by John's brother who idealistically but foolishly told his board, "Use the money as you please, so long as it promotes the health, happiness, and welfare of children."

An example of the Kellogg Foundation's promotion of the happiness of children is its Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Implementation Guidebook which claims that "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" is racist, and saying, “People are people. We are all alike regardless of the color of our skin,” is even more horrifyingly racist.

A century after John Kellogg’s involvement with the Race Betterment Foundation which called for a registry deciding who should be sterilized in order to improve the “race”, an idea later embraced by the Nazis, Kellogg’s is hopelessly racist. The only difference is that it traded eugenic racism against black people for social justice racism against white people.

Kellogg’s cereal pushes Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby board book on parents to teach that even white babies are evil racists. “We know that by two years old children are already consuming racist ideas,” Ibram X. Kendi declared. That wasn’t true until he got started.

With some help from Kellogg’s.

But while Kellogg’s was working hard to promote the ”health, happiness, and welfare of children” by feeding them sugary cereals and teaching them that white people are evil, it was also busy wrecking the economy of Battle Creek, Michigan to make a little more money.

It didn’t count though because much of the Kellogg’s Battle Creek workforce is white.

Under CEO Carlos Gutierrez, later Bush's Commerce Secretary, much of the operation was shut down and moved to Mexico. After that Battle Creek's unemployment rate went from 3.9% to 7.5%.

"He knows exactly what it takes to make American businesses grow and create jobs," Bush said of Gutierrez.

Which was true. Just in Mexico.

Since then, Gutierrez became Romney's Hispanic chairman, and endorsed Hillary and Biden, but not until he created Republicans for Immigration Reform after turning on Mitt Romney for not being sufficiently supportive of replacing Americans. "I think we lost the election because the far right of this party has taken the party to a place that it doesn't belong," he huffed.

Maybe some Republicans opposed to endless immigration used to have jobs in Battle Creek.

The workers who do still have jobs in Battle Creek are on strike. 1,400 workers are now walking the picket line after Kellogg's announced that it would cut 212 jobs

The local union president, a fourth-generation worker, said that they were tired of Kellogg's moving jobs to Mexico.

"We work seven days a week, that’s what we do. In exchange for that, we live the American dream. At the end of the day, that’s what they want to take from all of us."

Kellogg’s prefers the Kendi dream of getting rich by accusing Americans of racism while screwing the American working class. And it’s not just the American workers who get the shaft from the woke virtue signalers in the C-suite. A few years ago, Kellogg's moved its cereal plant from Ontario to China. And it closed its Australian plant and shifted over to Thailand.

When Kellogg's isn't firing its American workers and trading them for foreign workers who will work for a fraction of the cost, it's terrorizing its workforce with Equity, Diversity & Inclusion. While Kellogg's won't pay its workers fairly, it has hired a roster of diversity executives who make 4 times their salary to tell them how racist they are.

CEO Steve Cahillane responded to the drug overdose death of George Floyd and the subsequent devastating riots by the Black Lives Matter racist hate group by falsely claiming that there were "racial injustices" and declaring that "in North America, we cannot reinforce strongly enough our commitment to a diverse and inclusive environment". In North America, maybe not as much in actual racist countries where Kellogg's offers fewer “race conscious” classes.

The 360 degree turn from the Race Betterment Foundation to the Kellogg’s Race Conscious learning series shows that horseshoe theory also applies to woke cereal companies.

“Kellogg recognized, along with the rest of the country and world, that we had entered a point of no return in terms of social justice,” a quote in Kellogg’s Equity newsletter screams. “What if we created a dialogue about the intersectionality of race and food?”

Or what if Kellogg’s stopped firing workers while telling them they’re racist?

While Kellogg’s touts the “Fight for Food Justice”, it treats its food workers like garbage. C-suite woke virtue signaling can cover up a multitude of sins. That’s why it’s taken over corporations. Instead of actually practicing ethics and decency, major corporations now hire diversity executives to assemble social justice word salads that make Corporate America sound like Che.

The more jobs Kellogg’s cuts at its Battle Creek birthplace, the more it talks about equity.

Kellogg’s boasts that it’s a Top 50 Company for Diversity and that diversity and equity are “paramount to achieving our success”, but the real secret sauce is cheap foreign labor.

An Amnesty International report accused Kellogg's and a variety of woke food multinationals, including Unilever, the parent company of antisemitic BDS advocate Ben and Jerry's, of getting palm oil from plantations where 8-year-olds worked under hazardous conditions.

While the C-suite virtue signals about social justice, children are dropping out of school to labor on plantations, women are working for $2.50 a day, and breathing in toxic pesticides.

“I don’t go to school,” a 10-year-old boy working on a plantation said. “I carry the sack with the loose fruit by myself but can only carry it half full. It is difficult to carry it, it is heavy. I do it in the rain as well but it is difficult…My hands hurt and my body aches.”

No one actually likes to see how the woke sausage or the cereal gets made.

"George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery are among the many names burned into our consciousness," Kellogg's CEO Steve Cahillane declared.

Maybe the name of that 10-year-old boy or the fired Kellogg’s workers should be burned into his consciousness instead. But accusing America and white people of racism is cheap, running an ethical company is expensive. Just stop by Battle Creek or a woke palm oil plantation and find out how many children had to suffer and how many American workers had to lose their future so that Tony the Tiger could rot children’s teeth with sugar and their souls with racist wokeness.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Hillary Clinton Gets a Job Lying on Purpose

By On October 19, 2021
Gone are the days when Lebanese billionaires, Qatari royalty, and the son-in-law of the former president of the Ukraine would shower the Clinton Foundation with gold. The crime ring originally co-created by Jeffrey Epstein now spends more moolah than it takes in.

All that’s left for the Clintons to do is get real jobs. If only they were qualified to do anything.

Bill isn’t about to work the fry machine at McDonald’s, Hillary won’t answer customer service calls for AT&T, and Chelsea, the only one of the bunch who had a real job this century, isn’t going back to interviewing the Pets.com sock puppet for NBC News. Instead, following in the footsteps of the Obamas, they’re doing all they know how to do. Get paid for making stuff up.

Hillary Clinton, the least interesting low-functioning sociopath in politics, has churned out three memoirs. The first, Living History, was about the time Bill cheated on her with Monica, the second, Hard Choices, was about the time she got Americans killed in Benghazi, and the third, What Happened, was about losing the 2016 presidential election.

Rarely has anyone outside reality television or a carnival spent this much time milking their own humiliation. Having run out of embarrassments to monetize, Hillary tried horning in on Chelsea’s scam, writing thumbnail biographies about feminist heroines by co-writing The Book of Gutsy Women, a reworking of Chelsea's She Persisted series, only to have it perform worse than Chelsea's books. It’s pretty sad when people would rather buy Chelsea’s books about Greta Thunberg and Sonia Sotomayor than Hillary claiming she was inspired by Donna Reed.

(The episode in which Donna Reed sold out America to the Chinese, covered up her husband’s sexual abuses, and tried to frame Emily as a Russian spy to win an election is not available.)

Simon and Schuster invested millions in Hillary and doesn't have much to show for it except Grandma's Gardens, a book targeting the most gullible audience, little children, to try and convince them that Hillary Clinton ever set foot in a garden for any purpose that didn't involve Vince Foster's body. (See Grandma put the gun in Vince’s hand, see her squeeze the trigger, see her guzzle a glass of chardonnay, and then start digging a hole under the oak tree.)

Grandma’s Gardens currently ranks #1,401,680 in the Kindle store because even if their parents voted for her, the smallest children have been raised on fairy tales warning them that grandma has no pants suit and that it’s best to avoid her gingerbread cottage and socialized medicine.

After trying and failing to steal Chelsea’s feminist children’s books racket, Hillary went back to the linchpin of her political career, stealing Bill’s gig. Bill Clinton had given up on memoirs and began “co-writing” thrillers with James Patterson. The Washington Post headlined an article about Bill's co-pilot with, "James Patterson mostly doesn’t write his books." But that's okay because as long as he can walk a straight line, he's still miles ahead of Bill Clinton.

The only mystery of the series that began with The President is Missing is who is writing these things. The last one, The President's Daughter, might have been controversial if anyone were actually reading these things, because it depicted Islamic terrorists yelling, “Allahu Akbar”.

“Please. Islam is a religion of peace, isn’t it?" the novel's stand-in for Chelsea Clinton pleads. “Oh, you young ignorant girl. What you don’t know about me and Islam could fill a container ship," the terrorist replies. It’s a shame that whoever is writing Bill Clinton’s novels wasn’t instead writing policy briefings for his administration during the rise of Al Qaeda.

More seriously, the novel also appeared to suggest that Bill Clinton bombed the Chinese embassy during the Yugoslavian war to stop them from making off with F-117 parts.

Had anyone in China or anywhere on the planet actually read the book, there might have been an international incident. Fortunately no one, outside Gitmo, will pick up a Clinton book. But that doesn’t stop the Clintons from writing them anyway and from being paid millions for it.

After Bill Clinton’s series about a president who is just like him, apart from being a former Army Ranger who can kill men with his bare hands, Hillary Clinton decided to “write” her own thriller.

State of Terror, the first admitted work of fiction from Hillary, is now in bookstores. Despite its name, it’s not actually about the experience of working for her or being married to her. Instead it features Secretary of State Ellen Adams whose husband is dead, as Hillary wishes Bill could be.

“Co-written” with Canadian mystery novelist Louise Penny, State of Terror is Hillary fanfic.

Hillary, that is Ellen, is forced to cope with a Republican president nicknamed “President Dumb” who pulls out of the Iran Deal and then goes to Florida to play golf, and his Democrat successor who is described as “rude” and a “fool”, but appoints his worst enemy as Secretary of State.

There’s also a “vast right wing conspiracy”. Obviously.

(But while Bill and Hillary’s fictional adventures battling Islamic terrorism are implausible, they’re more plausible than Huma Abedin’s upcoming memoir "BOTH/AND: A Life In Many Worlds”.)

There’s always been a thin line between fact and fiction for the Clintons. Now they’ve crossed it by switching from fictionalizing their real lives to turning reality into fiction. For a woman who falsely claimed that she had landed under fire in Yugoslavia and brought peace to Northern Ireland, Hillary can finally legally make up things she didn’t do and have people pay her for it.

And yet Hillary was much better at making things up when she expected people to believe it.

State of Terror, like Hillary, is tedious and badly written. Hillary's lies were interesting because of their implausibility. State of Terror though is fan fiction about herself. "The appointment of Ellen Adams was fodder at DC dinner parties. It was all anyone at Off the Record, the basement bar of the Hay-Adams, could talk about. Why did she accept?" State of Terror asks.

The answer has nothing to do with the small army of Clinton Foundation donors who lobbied the State Department during her term because Hillary isn’t about to tell the truth even in fiction.

“By far the greater, more interesting question was why had then President-Elect Williams offered his most vocal, most vicious adversary a place in his cabinet? And State, of all things?”

In the Hay-Adams basement bars, the men come and go talking of Hillary Clinton.

There were already two fan fiction TV series made about Hillary, Commander in Chief and Madam Secretary: the latter backed by TV’s version of Harvey Weinstein. And the Clintons created HiddenLight Productions with Richard Branson’s son to make Gutsy Women into a series for Apple TV. With two decades of Hillary Clinton fan fiction, State of Terror doesn’t just jump the shark, it shoots it into outer space. There’s something truly pathetic about Hillary jumping into the fading market in her own fan fiction to make a little more chardonnay money.

Last year there was Rodham, a novel which imagined what would have happened if Hillary hadn’t married Bill Clinton. This year, When I'm a Moth, an indie film, depicts Hillary going to work in an Alaska cannery and sleeping with its Japanese workers. The ad pitch for it is, "History, News, Fake News, Fake History." Or, more simply, fake everything.

“Don’t you ever feel like you’re not a real person?” Moth’s fictional incarnation of Hillary asks.

A better question would be whether Hillary Clinton was ever a real human being and who cares.

The establishment and its media told us for two decades that Hillary was an extraordinarily talented human being who, if not for the shadow of her husband, would have changed the world. But even as Bill faded, Hillary’s future collapsed in a web of scandals and defeats. Since the unraveling of her presidential aspirations, she’s done little but copy everyone else.

The production company is a ripoff of Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. After ripping off her daughter’s feminist book brand didn’t work, she’s ripping off Bill’s thriller book brand.

Hillary is a shallow parasite who can’t even come up with her own money making gimmicks.

After generations of lying to get ahead, she’s now lying on purpose. But Hillary’s lies were only interesting because of the spectacle of a prominent political figure just making stuff up. It’s much less entertaining when Hillary is stuck making things up because that’s the only way to cash in.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Monday, October 18, 2021

Occupy Wall Street’s Co-Founder Just Wants to Get Rich

By On October 18, 2021
Micah White, PhD, the co-founder of Occupy Wall Street went to Davos last year to party with the super-rich. He’s been pitching cryptocurrency, including Sparkle: a coin he invented.

“Occupy Wall Street generated tremendous money,” White complained. “This whole idea that activists should do it for free and all that b____t is over. Like somehow I’m supposed to be a full-time activist and have zero income from it? It’s ridiculous.”

A decade after the Marxist grad students of Occupy Wall Street trashed some city squares, its co-founder has been working harder than many capitalists to make money from OWS.

For only $179.88 a year, you can enroll in White’s Activist School and watch video classes from Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, antisemitic racist Lenora Fulani, and Micah White.

Not to mention, fake black woman, Rachel Dolezal.

For the eighth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, White launched his own cryptocurrency.

According to him, “every time Sparkle is bought or transferred, 2% is taxed and redistributed to the entire economy” as a Robin Hood Tax. But according to his old OWS buddies, the 2% “is redistributed proportionally to the largest holders of Sparkle (i.e. Micah himself)” and “Micah ensures that he maintains a monopolist status in his platform by also taking 1% of all purchased Sparkle, and another 3% if someone tries to swap for their ETH back.”

Move over Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo. Had it worked, Wall Street would be bowing to White. But Sparkle doesn’t seem to exist anymore, and Micah seems to be promoting a new environmentalist cryptocurrency while touting his status as a cryptocurrency activist.

That follows his decision to move to Nehalem, Oregon, a small town of 271 people that lives off Airbnb rentals to hipsters, and run for mayor. White figured that he couldn’t lose a mayoral election in a town with fewer voters than a New York City apartment building.

Occupy Nehalem didn’t work any better than Occupy Wall Street.

“Ex-Occupier Is Bringing Revolution to Small-Town Oregon,” a headline blared. The small town still has the same mayor it did five years ago. Maybe the locals were tired of the hipster occupation. And even more humiliatingly, Tillamook County came out for President Trump.

White is still plotting revolution with his wife, the daughter of Obama's ambassador to Turkey, even as his old colleagues in the movement keep dismissing them as rich quick schemes.

Micah White, PhD was there at the beginning and at the tenth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, he’s forced to watch latecomers like the Black Lives Matter gang cash out big from their activism while he’s out there shilling for cryptocurrency on social media. Why are Black Lives Matter’s co-founders millionaires out there buying mansions, while White tries to get someone to pay $180 bucks a year to watch videos of Rachel Dolezal and the Kony 2012 guy.

Like most visionaries, White was ahead of his time. And he’s been forced to watch Colin Kaepernick become insanely wealthy for taking a knee, Shaun King buy an $842,000 mansion, and Ta-Nehisi Coates go from calling 9/11 heroes “less than human” to writing a black Superman movie. Everyone is getting rich off the brand of activism White invented.

Everyone except him.

Getting rich is hard, but to give White credit, he’s trying. In the decade since protesting against the 1%, he founded a boutique activist consultancy (it’s gone), wrote a book, (#986,183 rank on Amazon, #553 in Canadian Politics), launched a mayoral campaign and a cryptocurrency, has his own “activist school”, and was an Activist-in-Residence at UCLA. (Being an Activist-in-Resident is probably the more comfortable way of occupying UCLA.)

It’s hard work making money by denouncing the rich.

Last year, White headed to Davos.

“Why I'm going to Davos - and why I'm hoping my peers don't find out,” White’s post at the World Economic Forum was headlined. Just to make sure no one would find out, he also wrote op-eds about it at The Guardian and The Independent, and gave an interview to the BBC.

"There's a way to keep your revolutionary integrity, to maintain these people as adversaries but say we need a united front with them," he explained the contradiction to the BBC.

But that’s the thing about White, he never stops. Even when he probably should.

When the pandemic arrived, he created Flu Mob, a "groundbreaking activist" platform to "be the vaccine" along with "helpful tips like how to make your own COVID19 mask” and “recipes to make your own hand sanitizer." The pandemic is still around, Flu Mob isn’t.

As Occupy Wall Street hits its tenth anniversary, it’s obvious that Adbusters, the magazine that Micah White edited and used to promote the movement, was actually advertising. In the decade since, White has embodied the frantic start-up ethos of leftist activism which is constantly generating new gimmicks in the hopes that some leftist 1 percenters will agree to fund them.

White just happens to be particularly bad at it. He’s the hardest working man in the activist business, but his ideas have a Krameresque absurdity to them that makes it impossible even for socialists to take them too seriously. And maybe that’s White’s tragedy: he tries too hard.

Leftists are supposed to make money without looking like they want to make money, while White sounds like he should be on Wall Street. He’s got the work ethic of Gordon Gekko, but he’s in an industry that doesn’t appreciate dedicated hustlers and salesmen. On Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, White might have been rich by now. Instead he’s stuck trying to earnestly get rich in an industry that is publicly hostile to wealth. And sneers at obvious social climbers.

Activists want what everyone else wants, they just take the least honest and the most abusive approaches to getting it. A leftist can’t be seen to be working to buy a big house, he has to wage a revolution to get a big house. Corporate America has long since picked up on the AdBusters brand and its ads for deodorant, sneakers, and diet soda sound like revolutionary manifestos.

No one buys products anymore, they join transformative causes by shopping for toilet paper.

A decade later, Occupy Wall Street is Wall Street, Adbusters is advertising, and Corporate America is the counterculture. All the elites hate the rich even while getting rich. But the guy whose beautiful dream helped usher in the wonderland of class doublethink is on the outs.

In a world in which Wall Street has been fully occupied and radicalism is used to sell everything from razor blades to cars, Micah White, PhD is still trying to sell someone on his vision of a new radical for-profit activist order. But in a world in which everyone is an activist, it’s much too late.

Despite his best efforts to join the 1%, the co-founder of Occupy Wall Street is stuck in the 99%.




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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Saturday, October 16, 2021

Dems Complain Putin Stole Their Election Theft Ideas

By On October 16, 2021
Like two actresses who wore the same dress to an awards show, the Biden administration and the Putin administration are acting huffy over the latest stolen election. The theft in question involves not just stealing elections, but stealing ideas for how to steal elections.

“The Russian government’s use of laws on ‘extremist organizations,’ ‘foreign agents,’ and ‘undesirable organizations’ severely restricted political pluralism and prevented the Russian people from exercising their civil and political rights,” State Department spokesman Ned Price sniffed.

That playbook ought to sound familiar because it’s the one Democrats used in 2016 and 2020.

Democrats invented a false conspiracy theory claiming that President Trump and his associates were Russian agents. They took a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and passed it out to their associates in the DOJ, the FBI, and every three letter acronym in Washington D.C. After years of eavesdropping, trials, and investigations that destroyed lives and influenced elections, the “foreign agents” conspiracy proved to have as much substance as a Maddow vodka rant.

But that didn’t stop Democrats and their allies from using another variant of the Russia conspiracy theory to pressure Facebook into censoring negative stories about Democrats.

That included censoring news of an investigation into Hunter Biden by crying, “disinformation”.

Putin just took a page out of the Democrat playbook by expanding a law that allowed him to declare his opponents to be “foreign agents”. Ned Price might have some more credibility in complaining about the practice if he hadn’t spent years playing the same rotten game.

"Putin is essentially turning down a White House visit and, instead, summoning Trump to Moscow," a typical Price tweet read. "This is what he paid for."

Price could discover a conspiracy in a phone call in which President Trump offered Russia assistance with its wildfires, and repeated the conspiracy theory that the 2016 election had been rigged by Russia, and that Trump and Republicans were acting as foreign agents.

If restricting “political pluralism” by labeling your opponents “foreign agents” is okay in D.C., why shouldn’t it be fine in Moscow? When Democrats deploy 25,000 soldiers to Washington D.C. to “protect democracy” after a disputed election, who can tell apart D.C. and Moscow?

Putin was sufficiently impressed with Biden’s reliance on Big Tech censorship to rig elections to enthusiastically adopt the practice. And Google, which long ago traded its old motto of “Don’t Be Evil” for “Obey, Comrade”, did its part for the regime. YouTube censored opposition videos and Google Docs even removed documents being used to coordinate opposition voting.

The media is pretending to be outraged at this as if it hadn’t spent five years demanding that Big Tech censor conservatives in exactly the same ways. Why can’t the Russians also “protect democracy” and suppress “disinformation” from “foreign agents” and “extremists”?

After taking down Parler, Apple and Google also took down Russian opposition apps.

“We call upon Russia to honor its international obligations to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to end its pressure campaign on civil society, the political opposition, and independent media,” Price lectured Moscow. But when is the leftist elite that Price represents going to end its pressure campaign on the political opposition and a free press?

In July, Jen Psaki admitted that the Biden White House was issuing demands to Big Tech companies to take down “problematic posts” that spread what she claimed was “disinformation”.

The Biden regime was even touting some sort of “robust enforcement strategy” and demanding that all Big Tech companies should censor the same people.

"You shouldn't be banned from one platform and not others," she declared.

Putin would agree.

A decade ago, the White House could credibly condemn election suppression in other countries, now Biden’s cronies are complaining that Putin is ripping off their shtick without paying a fee.

In between complaining that Russia is using conspiracy theories to suppress the opposition, the Biden administration is already preemptively blaming midterm losses on a Russian conspiracy.

Also in July, Biden delivered remarks at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and alleged, “look what Russia is doing already about the 2022 elections and misinformation.”

Biden appeared to be referencing some sort of classified briefing dealing with “disinformation”.

If Russia or China’s leaders made remarks like that, we would all understand that they were preparing to tamper with an upcoming election. Now we know the same thing is true in the U.S.

What is Russia doing about the “2022 elections”? It’s secret, but you can bet it will require a lot more censorship of conservatives. Maybe Google and Apple will need to delete a few more apps, and Amazon will need to cut off cloud services to the political opposition. And then maybe Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, and PayPal can cut off donations to enemies of the state.

Under Biden, the ODNI had already issued a report claiming that Russia had tried to help President Trump while advancing claims about Biden and his family’s corruption.

If you think something might be off about Hunter Biden’s business, you’re spreading Russian disinformation: “election integrity” and “protecting democracy” requires silencing you.

And if you think that’s a theoretical scenario, ask Twitter and the New York Post.

The State Department still delivers its familiar lectures about free elections even as its political bosses plot to federalize elections, a trick they picked up from Putin, and its security colleagues are coming after the midterm elections by blaming Russia, so no one takes it too seriously.

There was a time when Americans laughed at foreign diplomats who believed that General Douglas MacArthur’s return foreshadowed a coup. Such things didn’t happen in America. But these days a lot of things happen in Washington D.C. that would have once been unthinkable.

What would have been unimaginable a decade ago has become almost routine. America’s elections now take place under the shadow of states of emergency and counterintelligence operations and while Putin still holds the lead in contrived suicides and radioactive teas, the Democrats have learned from him and he has learned from them. At the end of Animal Farm, the farm animals couldn't tell apart the pigs and the men. It’s getting hard to tell them apart now.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, October 14, 2021

Biden’s 'Evacuation' Was a Taliban Human Trafficking Scheme

By On October 14, 2021
After Biden evacuated tens of thousands of Afghan “translators”, refugee resettlement groups are desperately looking for translators to translate to the translators.

Why do Afghan translators, who were supposed to be able to translate from English to their native language, need help from translators?

It’s because they’re not translators.

In the last two years, Front Page Magazine ran multiple articles like How the 'Interpreter' Scam Brought 75,000 Iraqis and Afghans to America and 'Saving Afghan Interpreters' is a Scam That Would Bring 100,000 Afghans to U.S. exposing the “translator” scam. Now tens of thousands of Afghans are arriving in this country and they need translators because they don’t speak English.

As I previously pointed out, there were more Afghan “translators” applying for visas than there were American soldiers for them to translate for. But the vast majority of SIV visa applicants were never translators. The number of actual translators, Afghans embedded with U.S. forces who risked their lives by working in the field, was miniscule and was its own special category.

But by the end, almost any Afghan who worked for any U.S. organization could apply for a visa.

Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan retreat made that existing scam so much worse because he didn’t evacuate the approved SIV visa holders who might have actually worked for the U.S.

State Department sources have said that the majority of SIVs were actually left behind.

The Biden administration claims to have evacuated 124,000 people, of them only 5,500 Americans, from Afghanistan. 60,000 have been brought into the United States. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that only 1,800 are SIV holders, another 8,000 are citizens or have green cards.

That leaves over 50,000 Afghans who were just brought here with no legal basis.

And there are tens of thousands of “evacuated” Afghans who might still be brought here.

According to Mayorkas, the "balance of that population are individuals whose applications have not yet been processed for approval who may qualify as SIVs and have not yet applied, who qualify or would qualify—I should say—as P-1 or P-2 refugees who have been employed by the United States government in Afghanistan and are otherwise vulnerable Afghan nationals, such as journalists, human rights advocates, etc.”

Mayorkas describes bringing a whole lot of people who “might” qualify as SIVs, if they were to apply for them, who “would” qualify for P-1 and P-2 visas: categories that took the existing translator scam and turned it into a free-for-all and allowed virtually anyone to qualify.

The Biden administration evacuated all these planeloads of “journalists” and “human rights advocates” who immediately began sexually assaulting some of the girls they were trafficking.

Two Afghan refugees at Fort McCoy have already been charged, one for sexually assaulting two minors, and another for beating his wife who alleged that he “beat me many times in Afghanistan to the point I lost vision in both eyes.”

The wife also told a translator “that nine women have been killed since getting to Fort McCoy and that she would be the tenth.” There’s been no confirmation of this, but even well before these two criminal cases, anonymous officials at Fort McCoy were warning that "older men were admitted together with young girls they claimed as 'brides' or otherwise sexually abused."

That’s strange behavior for “human rights activists”.

The human rights activists that the United States funded in Kabul were largely middle-aged women who didn’t wear burkas. We’ve seen and heard almost nothing from any of them at Fort McCoy or anywhere else in the resettlement system. Some have remained in Afghanistan and are risking their lives by courageously organizing protests against the Taliban.

They’re not raping children in Wisconsin.

The Afghan evacuees lean heavily toward “military age males” and older men with young girls. The women in those families that have come through tend to wear burkas and appear fearful.

Whoever the hell these people are, they’re not “human rights activists” and “journalists”.

Nor are they translators since most of them need translators and few have SIV visas.

The question no one asked Mayorkas is why the vast majority of SIV visa holders never got on board those planes, but people who he thinks “might” qualify did.

What process could have possibly resulted in such a strange outcome?

The answer comes in two damning parts.

Kabul embassy personnel had tainted the pool of applicants by sending out "electronic credentials". State Department officials claimed that the passes were widely distributed by the applicants and that soon everyone had them and was demanding access to the airport.

"Within an hour, everyone in the crowd had that pass," a senior official claimed.

He noted that, “every credential we tried to provide electronically was immediately disseminated to the widest possible pool,”

And while that might explain why a lot of people showed up who weren’t qualified, but were waving credentials, it doesn’t explain why so few of those who were actually qualified made it into the airport and onto a plane. The only explanation is that they were deliberately kept out.

The Biden administration outsourced security to the Taliban, which passed it along to checkpoints manned by the Haqqani Network which is allied with Al Qaeda. Biden officials provided the Taliban and Haqqanis with lists of qualified people they were supposed to admit.

And yet the Taliban repeatedly prevented some Afghans from getting to the airport while allowing others to make it through. They did so regardless of the official credentials.

The media reported on this behavior but treated it as random sadism or malice. It’s not.

The Taliban were experts at cashing in on the American presence in Afghanistan. At one point the Jihadis were making more money from “taxing” contractors working for us than they did from opium. There was no chance that the Taliban would leave all the money to be made from providing access to the evacuation flights on the table. And there’s no reason to think they did.

An Australian Financial Review columnist reported that, "Taliban fighters are allowing people to pass through if they pay thousands of dollars in bribes."

That was likely only the tip of the iceberg.

The distribution of electronic credentials was deliberately tainted in the pipeline and the Taliban controlled access to the Kabul airport to keep out legitimate SIV visa holders while allowing the tens of thousands of Afghans who were illegitimately evacuated to bribe their way in.

This wasn’t an evacuation: it was a massive Taliban human trafficking scheme.

The Taliban didn’t just cash in on all the reconstruction projects and the weapons left behind, they undoubtedly made a fortune from every seat in Biden’s Kabul airlift.

Now that tens of thousands of Afghans are here, they won’t be leaving. They can’t be deported and whether or not the “parolees” qualify for an SIV or P-2 visa is a mere technicality.

The truly explosive question is whether the Taliban just cashed in on the usual corruption in Afghanistan, or if they got any Al Qaeda or ISIS terrorists into the evacuation pipeline?

Did any of the Taliban grab the chance to get their own family members into the airport?

Probably.

Sources have said that 0.5% of Afghan evacuees have been flagged for terror ties. That’s a high percentage for “translators” and “human rights activists”. Some of the flags were reportedly triggered by terrorist family ties. In a tribal and clan society, Taliban and Al Qaeda family members are extremely unlikely to be working as translators or human rights activists.

Beyond just getting family members into the evacuation pipeline, did the Taliban get actual terrorists into the United States. Probably. But it’ll take us years and bodies to find out.

Biden and his administration have treated the Kabul airlift as a massive triumph, when it was actually the final act of a disaster that has brought rapists and terrorists to America.

The “translators” need translators, children are being sexually assaulted and women are being beaten before the refugees have even left Fort McCoy. Afterward things will get much worse.

Untold billions in taxpayer money will be squandered on resettling the beneficiaries of the Taliban’s human trafficking scheme. The Afghans will be signed up for every possible welfare program and a fortune will be spent just on translating for the “translators” at resettlement agencies, government agencies, schools, hospitals, and the local police.

More money will be spent on dealing with their abuses through the criminal justice system.

The SIV holders and their families who were left behind in Afghanistan, but who manage to eventually make it over here, will also have to be resettled, doubling our refugee load.

And then the terrorist plots will begin.

The Kabul airlift wasn’t heroic: it was a bleak farce in which the Biden administration allowed the Taliban to select who got on the planes. And then it’s shocked that the Afghans whom the Taliban chose are not the SIV visa recipients that were on the list, but a whole other crowd.

It will take us decades to discover exactly who are the Afghans that Biden brought to America.

The Biden administration will cling to the myth of its heroic airlift by retroactively legitimizing the tens of thousands of Afghans to cover up the final installment of its humiliating disaster. And the Taliban, once again, will have the last laugh as their human trafficking scheme pays off.

Human trafficking isn’t only for Mexican cartels, the Taliban likely made a fortune trafficking rapists and terrorists, and anyone who could pay, to Kabul airport. The old men raping young girls, the military age men scowling at the camera, and all the best of Afghanistan is here now.

And the Biden administration will cover up its final crime in Afghanistan.




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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Popular

Blog Archive