Upon hearing the notion that Michelle Obama may be the presidential candidate for Democrats in 2024, many Republicans reflexively recite the mantra that she is enjoying her life and is not political. Let me make one thing clear: Michelle Obama is a political animal. Republicans must quickly begin to prepare for her candidacy.
Michelle grew up as the daughter of a Chicago Democrat party precinct captain. She has written about making the rounds with her father from age 4, visiting homes in her area to get out the black vote for the white liberal Chicago Democrat party machine. Michelle has also noted that people came to her house seeking money from her father, Fraser Robinson. In high school, Michelle was elected repeatedly to the student council and was class treasurer. Michelle befriended Santita Jackson, the daughter of Jesse Jackson, and has said, “I grew up in that man’s house.” Yes, Michelle spent much time at Jesse Jackson’s house while he was preparing to run for president. “I’ve seen it all,” Michelle said of the experience.
At Princeton University, Michelle was elected to the board of the Third World Center, a radical black activist fraternity. Michelle and Barack had a mutual professor at Harvard, though in different years, named Charles Ogletree. When Barack was elected president, Ogletree told TMZ that between Barack and Michelle, he would have thought Michelle more likely to run for president.
In Chicago, Michelle befriended another political animal, the former head of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group and accused cop-killer Bernardine Dohrn. Michelle worked with her for two years at the Sidley Austin law firm and had dinners at her home with Bill Ayers for years, right up until the time Barack ran for U.S. Senate in 2004. Dohrn was Michelle’s first guest speaker at Public Allies, the community organizing group she ran. Yes, like Barack, Michelle was also a community organizer for three years. In marrying a politician, she married her father.
On the 2008 campaign trail, Michelle spoke to huge adoring crowds across the country, trumpeting word for word the anti-American rhetoric she’d learned from Dohrn. The media largely ignored the nastiness until Michelle proclaimed, upon Barack winning a primary, “For the first time in my life, I’m proud of my country.” This earned Michelle a Republican and media backlash. The next day, she hired a speechwriter and declared, “I hate politics. I just want to be the mom in chief.” This earned Michelle an immediate respite and reshaped Michelle’s public persona from a highly political anti-American radical into a mom who hates politics.
To a degree, Michelle was being truthful. All politicians hate politics — it’s grueling and annoying — but they put up with it because they love power.
With this context, you can understand why I researched Michelle Obama’s true life history and published the film and book of the same name, Michelle Obama 2024: Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power. Seeing Joe Biden’s advanced age, immense unpopularity, and terrible polls, Democrat party leaders such as Barack Obama and David Axelrod have observed that Biden is likely going to lose to Trump. In the wings, however, waits the very political Michelle Obama. Lucky for us, she let it all hang out when she tweeted a two-part statement on January 7, 2021, one day after “January 6.” Interestingly, on the day following this statement, the tech companies did what Michelle asked them to do: ban Donald Trump from social media. null
Michelle’s January 7 Twitter manifesto deserves to be read in full. Can there be any doubt that Michelle Obama is a political animal who has her sights on the White House in 2024?
I woke up yesterday elated by the news of Reverend Raphael Warnock’s election victory. He’ll be Georgia’s first Black senator, and I was heartened by the idea that the Senior Pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church—the home parish of Dr. King and a spiritual and organizational hub during the Civil Rights Movement—would be representing his state in the United States Senate.
In just a few hours, though, my heart had fallen harder and faster than I can remember. Like all of you, I watched as a gang—organized, violent, and mad they’d lost an election—laid siege to the United States Capitol. They set up gallows. They proudly waved the traitorous flag of the Confederacy through the halls. They desecrated the center of American government. And once authorities finally gained control of the situation, these rioters and gang members were led out of the building not in handcuffs, but free to carry on with their days. The day was a fulfillment of the wishes of an infantile and unpatriotic president who can’t handle the truth of his own failures. And the wreckage lays at the feet of a party and media apparatus that gleefully cheered him on, knowing full well the possibility of consequences like these.
It all left me with so many questions—questions about the future, questions about security, extremism, propaganda, and more. But there’s one question I just can’t shake: What if these rioters had looked like the folks who go to Ebenezer Baptist Church every Sunday? What would have been different?null
I think we all know the answer. This summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were an overwhelmingly peaceful movement—our nation’s largest demonstrations ever, bringing together people of every race and class and encouraging millions to re-examine their own assumptions and behavior. And yet, in city after city, day after day, we saw peaceful protestors met with brute force. We saw cracked skulls and mass arrests, law enforcement pepper spraying its way through a peaceful demonstration for a presidential photo op.
And for those who call others unpatriotic for simply taking a knee in silent protest, for those who wonder why we need to be reminded that Black Lives Matter at all, yesterday made it painfully clear that certain Americans are, in fact, allowed to denigrate the flag and symbols of our nation. They’ve just got to look the right way. What do all those folks have to say now?
Seeing the gulf between the responses to yesterday’s riot and this summer’s peaceful protests and the larger movement for racial justice is so painful. It hurts. And I cannot think about moving on or turning the page until we reckon with the reality of what we saw yesterday. True progress will be possible only once we acknowledge that this disconnect exists and take steps to repair it. And that also means coming to grips with the reality that millions voted for a man so obviously willing to burn our democracy down for his own ego.
I hurt for our country. And I wish I had all the solutions to make things better. I wish I had the confidence that people who know better will act like it for more than a news cycle or two. All I know is that now is a time for true patriotism. Now is the time for those who voted for this president to see the reality of what they’ve supported—and publicly and forcefully rebuke him and the actions of that mob. Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior—and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their technology from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection.
And if we have any hope of improving this nation, now is the time for swift and serious consequences for the failure of leadership that led to yesterday’s shame.
Thankfully, even in the darkness, there are glimmers of hope. It’s something I imagine Reverend Warnock has preached about before—and I’m still heartened beyond belief that he’s headed to Washington. I’m glad his fellow Georgian, Jon Ossoff is, too, and that together they’ll help give control of Congress back to the only party that’s shown that it can put our democracy above its own short-term political fortunes. I pray that every American, especially those who disagree with them, will give our new Congress, President-Elect Biden, and Vice-President-Elect Harris the chance to lead us in a better direction.
But make no mistake: The work of putting America back together, of truly repairing what is broken, isn’t the work of any individual politician or political party. It’s up to each of us to do our part. To reach out. To listen. And to hold tight to the truth and values that have always led this country forward. It will be an uncomfortable, sometimes painful process. But if we enter into it with an honest and unwavering love of our country, then maybe we can finally start to heal.
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“Joy is canceled,” read the signs wielded by Hamas supporters protesting a Christmas tree lighting at Columbia University. While a student group tried to sing, the terror backers shrieked, “there’s no room for celebration.” And no room for anything except terrorism and hate.
Supporters of the Islamic terrorist group took a special pleasure in attacking Christianity.
Carolers singing “Gloria in excelsis deo” or “Glory to God in the highest” at the Washington Square Park Christmas tree near New York University were shouted down by Muslim and leftist allies shrieking, “Shut it down! Shut it down!”
People have been killed for merely drawing cartoons of Mohammed, but Muslims feel empowered to shout down Christian hymns before Christmas a few miles from Ground Zero.
On the Boston Common, Hamas supporters defaced a nativity scene to read, “Jesus was Palestinian.”
Pro-Hamas rioters attacked the Rockefeller Christmas tree lighting in Manhattan. The Muslim American Society, a Muslim Brotherhood organization (the parent group of Hamas) whose mission is to promote “Islam as a total way of life” and Samidoun, a terrorist front group banned in Israel and Germany, announced plans to “Flood the Tree Lightning for Gaza”.
The ‘Flood’ name was a reference to Al-Aqsa Flood: the Hamas name for the atrocities of Oct 7.
Families were blocked from getting to the annual Christmas tradition as Hamas supporters rioted, assaulted police officers and chanted calls for the destruction of Israel and America.
“I had planned my holiday around this event, being a big fan of Christmas. Now I’m walled in by a bunch of terrorist-loving a–holes calling for intifada,” a British tourist complained.
“How many of y’all would come out on Christmas Day and ruin their Christmas?” Nerdeen Kiswani, the chair of Within Our Lifetime, an organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel, shouted at another New York City hate rally.
“Christmas is canceled,” Fatima Mohammed, a fellow former CUNY law student, yelled.
“No Christmas as usual,” terrorist supporters chanted outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral near Central Park while downtown stores were vandalized with graffiti, “Long live the intifada.”
Hamas supporters went on to rampage against “joy” at Christmas tree lightings around the country. In San Francisco’s Union Square, they threw down Christmas ornaments and planted their terrorist flag atop a Christmas tree. In Ypsilanti, Michigan, terror supporters showed up near a Christmas tree to proclaim that, “America is a terrorist state”.
At Seattle’s annual Christmas tree lighting, they brought a megaphone and chanted calls for the destruction of Israel. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds condemned the “protest in support of Hamas terrorists” during her celebration and Sacramento’s Christmas tree lighting in California’s state capital had to be canceled because of the anticipated pro-terror rallies.
And that is what the terrorists wanted.
“Christmas is canceled,” the Philly Palestine Coalition, which had previously been condemned for targeting a Jewish business, threatened. Two police officers were assaulted during pro-terrorist violence during one of its rallies in Rittenhouse Square.
“No Christmas in a Genocide” a San Francisco terrorist rally declared. The SFPD described how the rioters then “began to commit crimes ranging from assault to felony vandalism.”
A “Shut Christmas Down For Palestine” rally targeted shoppers in London and partially succeeded in shutting down local businesses. A terrorist supporter brandished a genocidal sign reading, “Death to settler colonialism everywhere. Viva Palestina.”
The Hamas supporters seemed to take a special delight in ruining Christmas for kids.
In Bradford, England, they berated children who were taking in a Coca Cola Christmas truck. In an Ottawa mall, terrorist supporters frightened children waiting in line for Santa while in a Toronto mall, the rampaging masked mob draped with keffiyahs threatened to kill shoppers.
And before Christmas Eve, terrorist supporters set out plans for blocking and flooding highways and roads near airports and commuter travel points to make sure people would be separated from their families. This was the closest thing to a victory for Muslim terrorist supporters.
When they say Christmas is canceled, they mean it. And they always have.
Before Hamas supporters began trying to shut down Christmas in New York City, San Francisco, London, Philly and at any of the hundreds of other pro-terrorist rallies around America and the world, they were shutting down Christmas in Gaza.
In 2011, it was reported that, “there hasn’t been a Christmas tree in Gaza City’s main square since Hamas pushed the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza in 2007 and Christmas is no longer a public holiday.”
In 2020, Hamas’ Director-General of the General Authority of Preaching had issued a directive to “Limit Interaction with Christmas”. That same year, Ahmad Kulab, the head of Hamas’ Department for Training of Preachers, warned that, “Christians must [keep] the celebration of their holidays to their homes, their houses of worship, and their churches.” And, quoting Islamic teachings, he denounced “the dwellers of Hellfire, the Jews and the Christians.”
After a backlash, Hamas appeared to allow small Christmas tree lightings to go forward.
Instead, Hamas supporters began shutting down Christmas in America. They shout about “occupation”, but they’re the ones doing the occupying. They’re occupying Christmas tree lightings and public celebrations, shouting down prayerful songs with hate, and using the season to call for death and destruction to be visited upon the enemies of Islam.
They’re serious about canceling joy and replacing it with hate and murder. And they’re serious about ending Christmas and intimidating, assaulting and killing those who defy them.
Hamas supporters shout Gaza has been invaded, when Gaza has actually invaded America.
When Christians can’t celebrate Christmas in peace, not only in Gaza, but in America, in Canada, in Australia and across Europe, who exactly has invaded whom?
One of the many pathological critiques offered by our corrupt intellectual culture is an urgent warning about impending Christian Nationalism. This is the latest expression of a decades-long tradition that demonizes Republicans as coming to implement The Handmaid’s Tale and a fierce violation of a treasured canard of secularism: the separation of church and state. Christmas is more and more the cultural centering of Christianity as a cultural and political message. Now is an ideal time to arm ourselves against the serpents of false knowledge to better understand Jesus’ political message.
Of course, there is nothing more political than what has happened in human history than the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This is an important premise in responding to those who wish for Christianity to ‘not be politicized.’ Of course, it is wrong to subordinate Jesus to some ideological idol such as Naziism or the vicissitudes of the KKK. That is rather, however, the necessary point — a point that is profoundly political. Jesus embodies truth that will set us free. The eighth chapter of John contains Jesus’ teaching on the matter that “the truth will set us free” — veritas liberabit vos. This became a motto of many great universities, including Harvard. This great teaching is the cornerstone of 2000 years of critiquing the radical supremacies of human ideologies from Africa to the Asian continent. Humanity’s primary political argument is: we will kill those you love in public unless you agree with Us. No culture or human society has failed to observe this political rule that makes a mockery of truth and requires all of us to live in fear of present political orders. The intellectual commitment of “eternal life” in the manner Jesus described to fellow teacher Nicodemus, changes the entire human calculus grounded in brutal authoritarianism. Death loses its sting with this conviction and resurrects human idealism at the most pivotal moments of human history.
The Christmas accounts of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke give us great insight into the politics of fear that dominate the historical and, yes, secular political imagination. The classic point elucidated by Linus in the Charlie Brown Christmas special describes the terror of the shepherd at first sight of angels:
“And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood near them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. 10 And so the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; 11 for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”
Matthew’s gospel is more draconian and provides an elaborate plot of King Herod, who deceives in order to kill the baby Jesus before public hope can galvanize behind a possible messiah and savior in the region:
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he became very enraged and sent men and killed all the boys who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had determined from the magi. 17 Then what had been spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:
Fear of political power is an unbroken thread of Matthew’s account, running from Joseph’s fear for Mary to their flight to Egypt trying to escape Herod’s plan. Christmas continues to illuminate the 21st century because political tyranny extrapolated by false ideologies continues to threaten humanity around the world. Agnosticism’s best hope of snuffing out the intellectual light of Christmas depends upon rooting out the public killing of the innocent as an argument. If the 20th century has any political message to communicate to us here in the impending 2024, it is that secularism has not only failed to deliver on such a promise of social justice, it has added itself as a rhetorical accelerant to the human bonfires of mass killing. Contrarians will observe that “religion has killed,” but again, that misses the rather profound and evident dialectic between Jesus the Teacher and the powerfully religious intellects of his day. Christianity is not anti-intellectual, but it does recognize intrinsically how dangerous intellectuals can be — especially when they choose to join in on the ‘big lie.’null
The recent three queens of America’s finest universities testifying to their ethical flexibility about rhetorical calls for “genocide of the Jews” are a crystal-clear reminder of how dangerous false knowledge is and how it grounds the deadly genocides of any age we care to look at. Christianity’s unusual care for individuals such as Jesus’ mother, Mary, the woman at the well, the furtive and frightened Nicodemus, and the associates of Lazarus devastated by the death of a close friend point to an intellectual critique of false knowledge. The wise men who deceive Herod are certainly from outside of town, but they know how knowledge can work to deadly ends that do everything but free us.
Ultimately, the Romans attached over Jesus’ head in Latin a rhetorical signature of mockery: “King of the Jews.” They were making the first and fierce rhetorical deconstruction of nascent Christian nationalism. Theirs was not the last word. But the Word that predates the world of human cruelty continues to give light to our lives today and hope for a future free of death as a text.
Dr. Ben Voth is a professor of rhetoric and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He has published six books on rhetoric, argumentation, and public policy.
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Was John Schneider really wrong? Not if you think the Biden regime is guilty of attacks on the U.S. and its Bill of Rights, i.e. treason: Opening the borders, allowing physically violent criminals into the country … Allowing weapons to get into the hands of Afganistan terrorists … Forcing Americans to take experimental medicine against their will … Partnership with fascist social media corporations to censor Americans against the First Amendment … Use of executive orders to thwart the Second Amendment … Arresting and harassing political opposition … Supporting removal of political opposition from the ballot … Arming (via billions in aid) one of America’s biggest enemies, Iran, assisting in the destruction of Israel and potential nuclear attacks against America … On and on. The outrages are daily, and worse than what the American colonies suffered at the hands of the British in 1776.
If America were still rational and in observance of its Constitution, Biden and everyone associated with him would be charged and prosecuted with treason.
Google “treason”:
United States. The offense of treason exists at both federal and state levels. The federal crime is defined in the Constitution as either levying war against the United States or adhering to its enemies, and carries a sentence of death or imprisonment and fine.
The actual traitors and insurrectionists occupy the offices intended for the preservation of individual rights. That’s our crisis. Not people like John Schneider.
The graph below seems prosaic enough. Technically, it tracks in 2023 dollars of purchasing power the rise of the public debt since 1966. Beneath the figures, however, lies a shit-ton of modern political, policy and financial history—deeply embedded forces which drove the numbers and set the nation’s fiscal trajectory on a pathway to disaster.
The starting point of 1966 isn’t random. The latter was the year in which LBJ’s “guns and butter” policies went into high gear, fueled by a spending surge for both the Great Society and the dramatic escalation of Johnson’s genocidal war on the peasants of Vietnam. And it was also the point just after LBJ had famously manhandled the Chairman of the Federal Reserve down on his ranch in Texas, demanding that the Fed print the money to support his boys “bleeding and dying in the jungles of Southeast Asia”, as he so crudely put it.
Notwithstanding these unfortunate lurches toward the drink, an inspection of the graph makes clear that the actual inflection point in terms of the explosion of the nation’s public debt did not occur for another 15 years. Thus, in current dollars of purchasing power the public debt of $2.36 trillion in 1966 rose only slightly to $2.76 trillion by 1980, representing a pretty tepid 1.4% annual growth in real terms.
So even with a moderately more accommodative Fed after William McChesney Martin got the LBJ “treatment” and surging bills for the domestic Welfare State that Nixon and Ford did little to reverse, there was simply no sign circa 1980 that America’s politicians were about to uncork a runaway public debt.
Alas, the next 43-years proved otherwise, as what had been the flat part of the chart below virtually went vertical.
Again, in today’s dollars of purchasing power the theretofore contained public debt rose 14-fold, from $2.7 trillion in 1980 to upwards of $33 trillion today. That surge embodied a dramatically higher 6.0% per annum rate of real growth.
Needless to say, over any considerable period of time, the law of compound arithmetic is a monster. Had the public debt stayed on the 1966 to 1980 path of 1.4% real growth, the public debt today would be $5 trillion, not $33 trillion, And annual interest expense on the Federal debt calculated at a standardized 4% rate would be $200 billion, not $1.3 trillion. That is, the added cost of debt service is now roughly equal to the annual cost of Social Security.
So, the fiscal apostasy since 1980 truly does need some ‘splainin’. The flattish trend before 1980 shows that burying the nation in insuperable public debt wasn’t the inherent tendency of elected politicians after all. Something major changed…
Pope Francis fancies himself a moral leader. Yet he supports famine-inducing Marxism; woke censorship; BLM-like racist supremacy; and anti-semitism. He lectures Americans for their alleged lack of empathy and refusal to ban guns and fossil fuels, while he embraces all things Islam, including the baby-beheading barbarism of Palestine and Iran, while sternly lecturing Israel for its attempts to survive a war it did not start. Oh, and he presides over an organization that tolerates and covers up the molestation of children.
I don’t think I know a single Catholic who can stomach this truly satanic Pope. And, really — how is Pope Francis any different or better than the world’s dishonest, corrupt secular governments, America included?
One of the White House’s main talking points is that under President Joe Biden, the U.S. economy has dramatically improved, but the reality throughout the country is that his “Bidenomics” policies are not translating into visible results.
Prices are still much higher today than when he took office, and while jobs are plentiful, the inflationary pressures mean that worker salaries are not going nearly as far as they otherwise would.
One place where Bidenomics appears to be having a negative impact is food banks around the country, many of which are struggling to keep up with higher demand as the country heads into the final year of Biden’s first term.
According to Fox News, the nonprofit group Feeding America says that, according to its data, the amount of money Americans earn is not keeping up with the escalating prices of nearly everything they need. As such, the group says that about 1 in 7 people are struggling to feed themselves.
Jen Muzia with the Seattle Ballard Foodbank told the network that operating the food bank has become much more expensive during the Biden era.
“It’s not only our guests that come in to shop. We’re also seeing it on us as we go to buy food. It’s costing us way more to buy food,” she said, adding that her food bank had to buy a lot more this year to keep up with demand.
“For us, we are seeing more than double what we saw pre-pandemic. And then we’ve seen even a greater increase when snap benefits were rolled back in February or March,” she said.
Brian Greene, president of the Houston Food Bank, told Fox News that inflation — which reached double digits for months — has had a major impact in a number of ways.
“Food inflation is only running about 3% now, but rent inflation is over 7%. And for low-income or working families, rent can account for about 50% or more of their income. So, as those costs are continuing to go up, the money just isn’t going as far, and food tends to be a flexible expense”, Greene told Fox News.
The Department of Agriculture reported that between 2021 and 2022, 13.5 million more people became food insecure as inflation skyrocketed.
Feeding America’s Vince Hall said: “We estimate that almost 50 million people have visited food banks in the past year seeking help. The Federal and State governments have rolled back nearly all support that was provided for people during the pandemic at the very time that inflation was taking an extra large bite out of their income.”
The only fix, he noted further, is adding more volunteers and bringing in more donations.
Meanwhile, most Americans hold Biden responsible for the economic conditions. In key swing states crucial for the 2024 elections, Democrats have largely disassociated themselves from the term “Bidenomics” and are moving away from using it as the election cycle gains momentum.
Biden trotted out the phrase earlier this year after claiming it was first coined by members of the media. NBC News reported, “But early on, it became clear that the phrase wasn’t resonating with voters, and by the end of November, Biden had only used the phrase once since the start of the month.”
The network also noted that the phrase never caught on with most Democrats.
A poll earlier this fall found that only 39 percent of voters in four key swing states—Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina—have confidence in the president’s ability to handle the economy, RealClearPolitics reported.
Steve Cortes, the chairman and founder of the League of American Workers, said in a column posted to the site that the reason 77 percent of the voters surveyed said that the nation is on the wrong track is because of the economy.
Of the 39 percent that had a favorable opinion of the president’s handling of the economy, a mere 9 percent said they gave him “strong approval.”
“So, despite the propaganda of media apologists and cherry-picking of a small set of data points that appear temporarily uplifting, voters clearly understand their tough economic slog and place blame squarely upon Biden and his allies,” the author said.
