Universal Freedom: The Only Hope for Health Care

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“Universal Health Care” is the increasing drumbeat of advocates who want Americans to place all responsibility for their health care in the hands of government.

“Universal Health Care” is the increasing drumbeat of advocates who want Americans to place all responsibility for their health care in the hands of government. They say health care needs require us to put aside such considerations as personal choice and individual freedom as outmoded ideology that should be dispensed with. First drop the context of individual rights, private property, and privacy—then the government is liberated to micro-manage every detail of the medical treatment you are allowed to have.

The loss of freedom may be unfortunate in this view, but is necessary because most Americans cannot afford to pay for health care, or even for a significant fraction of the cost. Of course if that were true, the government could not afford health care for everyone regardless of cost either. However those who might be relieved to learn that they are not responsible for the cost of their own health care would soon discover that they have become responsible for the cost of everyone else’s. There is a much higher price than that: a government that pays for all of our health care would inevitably come to think and act as if it owns our bodies. That is a big bill to pay to avoid the difficulty of paying insurance premiums. The talk about a “right” to health care really means that no one should have the right to any health care at all except through the government.

Many of us find paying for health care challenging. Many more have difficulty making it a priority in our spending—often because we think it should be someone else’s responsibility. Some who sincerely make the effort can’t pay for everything they need. Others, especially the young who know they will live forever, choose not to make provision for their health care even if they can afford it. That does not mean we should resort to the government to force others to provide it, or that everyone in the country should be herded into the gray and barren landscape of a compulsory government medical system. The fact that some people are hungry does not mean that everyone should be forced to obtain their food from the government, and be taxed to pay for it. The existence of the homeless should not mean that everyone be forced to find shelter only through the auspices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

We are told that because we all need health care so badly, considerations such as individual freedom and especially the rights of medical professionals must be over-ridden, even if all physicians must be drafted into government service as if they were property—so their practices can be micro-managed by the medical police. But it is precisely because our health care is so important to each of us that we need to be especially careful to preserve and protect the rights of physicians and other health care providers.

One rationalization of advocates for Universal Health Care is that insurance companies are wasteful and bloated corporate bureaucracies with high administrative costs, but that government health care like Medicare and Medicaid are models of administrative efficiency. This ignores the cost of the more than 100,000 I.R.S. employees who collect Medicare taxes, as well as the tremendous administrative burden to providers of trying to understand and comply with 130,000 pages of Medicare regulations. Yet those regulations have not been effective in preventing billions of dollars in fraudulent payments, as documented in New York Medicaid by several New York newspapers this year. You can save a lot on overhead if you don’t mind pumping out billions of dollars without oversight. The administrative cost of burning money can be quite low. It is not explained how the efficiency of government works for health care and not for the post office. Markets work better than Socialism. One wonders if any of the current health care collectivists noticed the twentieth century as it was going by.

Universal Freedom is the only proper moral and political foundation for health care policy. “Universal Health Care” must be rejected as a government threat to our liberty. American health care must be based on American values.

Richard E. Ralston, Capitalism Magazine

Trumpism Will Extend Far Beyond the Man Himself

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Since today there is a cultural obsession with rendering everything an -ism, it is only fitting that the presidency of Donald Trump would produce the term “Trumpism.” After all, Trump ignited a conservative revolution that had been brewing for years.

The term Trumpism clearly connotes different ideas and meanings depending on whom you ask, but it really is not all that complicated. Trump was a unique political figure during a unique time — and his raunchiness mixed with “America First” policies appealed to voters who felt perpetually alienated by staunch and plasticky politicians wholly unrelatable. Some say Trump was the figure that changed hearts and minds, and this is certainly true for many Republicans who decided to jump ship from the prior era, but in many ways he is merely the symptom of a fervent discontentment across America with corporate and urbanist centrality.

The former president recognized that there was a vast swath of people not getting their voices heard, people the establishment had made to feel small, and he encompassed that voice. He was their shiny object. He was also the fighter for alienated Americans, enduring the endless attacks and namecalling from a Democratic Party so intent on trying to conform citizens to an unyielding orthodoxy of “wokeness” and supposed virtuosity.

Here’s the thing, though. Trumpism will outlive Donald Trump. It will do so because, as aforementioned, Trump was simply one unique figure who represented millions of Americans who felt underrepresented in our power-concentrated republic. Citizens who support his policies, such as border security, a strong national defense uninvolved in unnecessary conflicts, and trade deals that benefit the American worker and manufacturing sector — to name a few — haven’t left the country. They are here and still desiring of change. Trumpism was even mentioned by Trump in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, last month.

“Many people have asked what is Trumpism, a new term being used more and more. I’m hearing that term more and more. I didn’t come up with it, but what it means is great deals, great trade deals, great ones, not deals where we give away everything, our jobs, money. … It means low taxes and eliminated job-killing regulations, Trumpism. It means strong borders, but people coming into our country based on a system of merit,” Trump said. “So they come in and they can help us as opposed to coming here and not being good for us, including criminals, of which there are many. It means no riots in the streets. It means law enforcement. It means very strong protection for the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms.”

Beyond the fact that there are those who indubitably still favor former President Trump’s various policies, Trumpism goes much deeper and to the heart of a culture war that shows no sign of deteriorating.

In Trump’s seemingly carefree and conversational rhetoric, however out of line it may have gotten sometimes, he did not fit the mold of the typically banal politician. This mold has become the norm for lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle, participating in an establishment crawl toward what is prim and proper — though far from mainstream — robotically repeating party catchphrases, as opposed to speaking to people like actual humans. Trump’s base — which contains a whole host of Americans who made their foray into politics because of his accessibility — can still be tapped into moving forward.

This is not to say Trump’s often careless and ill-advised rhetoric is strictly a benefit over the collected words from politicians who recognize that the whole world is waiting on their screwup. Arguably, one of Trump’s downfalls was his misunderstanding that there is a line, that he crossed it sometimes, and that Americans rely on the president to be a model citizen who is not always looking to one-up his opponent. That said, Trump was treated like garbage by the corporate media and by Democrats, and thus his hostility can be often understood.

Trumpism was tapped into in the 2016 election in the victory of Donald Trump, but it is far from over. Whether the 2024 presidential election candidate is Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or perhaps South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, it is abundantly clear that Republican voters seek to build on the legacy of the 45th president. After all, in the 2024 presidential straw poll at CPAC, 95 percent of attendees said the GOP ought to continue down the path of the Trump agenda.

Trump may not be in the Oval Office, but make no mistake, Trumpism is here to stay. Whether it be 2024 or 2028 or 2032, conservatives are hungry for politicians who both cut through the nonsense and make an honest attempt to preserve American liberty.

Gabe Kaminsky, The Federalist

Are You Fed up with Your Kids’ Education ?

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Are you unhappy with your children’s K–12 education? Do you believe that your children are subjected to indoctrination? If you answered yes to either question, there are alternative educational options worth considering.

If you live in a state with an education savings account (ESA) education savings account (ESA) or school voucher program, you should take advantage of the program and send your child to an outstanding school that you can afford.

If you do not have access to an ESA or school voucher program, and you are not satisfied with your child’s school, you may want to consider other options, such as a charter school, a state-sponsored or privately sponsored K–12 scholarship, homeschooling, homeschool co-ops, parochial schools, private schools, or online private schools.

Whether or not you are satisfied with you children’s schools, you can always supplement their learning by providing educational content they may not be learning at their schools.

NOTE: Links are provided to provide basic information about school alternatives. The purpose is not to promote or advocate specific schools or programs. For best results, readers interested in improving their children’s educational situation should conduct additional research

Brian Garrison, American Thinker

What Will it Take to Wake Up the Millennials ?

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Memo to Millennials: Free yourselves before it is too late. The $1.9-trillion COVID relief bill recently passed by the House is a ponderous set of shackles being placed on you and your future. Your freedom to act and to choose your own future will be limited because of this gargantuan spending bill. And that is on top of other massive spending bills Congress now routinely passes, like the $3.5 trillion already spent by the Trump administration last year on COVID relief.

Not only is this new COVID spending bill arguably irrelevant in the fight against the virus, as case numbers and deaths fall rapidly around the country, but more importantly, funding this bill requires printing money that we do not have. Yes, that’s right. This Democrat spending bill proposed by President Biden and passed by the Democrat House will not spend money we have. The $1.9 trillion bill literally uses money that the government will have to print to spend. And that’s on top of the regular annual budget that must be passed, which has a projected deficit of over $1 trillion.

While trillion-dollar deficits are never a good idea for the country, they most certainly are not a good idea for younger generations, who will be left paying the bill for years to come. It may not matter to members of Congress, who are busy enriching themselves, or the administrative elite in Washington, who will use their hefty pensions and connections to shield their children from the disastrous effects of our exploding national debt. But what about the rest of us? We can only watch as our children’s freedom to make choices for themselves is destroyed by our profligate leaders.

And what is in this critically important COVID spending bill that the Democrats are ramming through Congress? Only nine percent of the spending in the COVID relief bill is for COVID-related expenditures. Nine percent. That means that the other 91 percent is for handouts to groups and businesses that the Democrat party wants to enrich, like $112 million for an “underground rail project” in Silicon Valley, a payoff to Democrats’ Big Tech supporters; $129 billion for K–12 schools, whether they reopen or not, including $1,400 weekly payments to teachers for not teaching, since teachers and administrators are another Democrat special interest group; $39.6 billion to colleges, a pillar of the Democrat establishment, which are losing money as they refuse to fully open; $750 million for the CDC to spend on global health problems and vaccination efforts (that’s right: not here, but overseas); $350 billion to bail out blue states that have needlessly pummeled their economies with simplistic lockdowns; and countless other pet projects that have nothing to do with defeating the COVID pandemic. Not a pretty picture. Why is the next generation acquiescing with nary a peep?

In addition to saddling Millennials with an enormous debt that will limit their options, in what other ways is their freedom being undermined today? Mass immigration, for one. By allowing millions of illegal aliens to flood across our southern border, Biden and the Democrats are importing competitors for working-class jobs, limiting the freedom of young Americans to find opportunities that will help them begin a lifetime of fruitful employment. But it is not just blue-collar jobs that illegal aliens are taking from Americans; it’s white-collar tech jobs, too. As repayment to Big Tech for its unprecedented support during the 2020 campaign, President Biden has increased the number of H-1B visas that can be issued, which had been curtailed by former president Trump. As has been noted frequently, Big Tech loves these visas because it gives Big Tech cheaper, more disposable workers. By hiring foreigners, these people pay less than they would pay American workers. They can also terminate the workers when they want to, not by firing them, which could open them up to litigation, but by simply not renewing their visas. And these are the companies that are always badgering everyone else about good citizenship and corporate responsibility.

Besides the growing constraints on their ability to act and work, Millennials are also having their freedom curtailed through new limits on freedom of speech. Millennials seem to be blinded to this development by the fact that they don’t agree with much of the speech that is being limited; shutting down “racist” conservative views or conservative “lies” doesn’t much bother progressive Millennials. But once the Rubicon is crossed and all speech is no longer equally free, it’s only a matter of time before the speech that Millennials approve of ends up on someone else’s chopping block. Millennials are so immersed in digital technology that they seem incapable of imagining that the technology they love might be used against them, or that restrictions on their freedom might originate with the tech companies. But restrictions have originated there, and they will continue to metastasize unless Millennials decide to take notice.

If they are in college, Millennials soon discover that they are not free to hear every viewpoint on a particular problem or issue. Unlike the generations that came before them, when they want to make a free decision, someone else will be deciding what they can hear on the subject. Nor are they free to hear the whole truth from mainstream television or print news, or on their digital news feeds from Facebook or other online news sources. How am I less free today? Let me count the ways.

It is a sadly truncated and contingent freedom that is being prepared for Millennials by powerful forces in our society today. Will they ever wake up and resist it?

P. F. Kelly, American Thinker

The Cancellation of Dr. Seuss Should Disturb You, Because You’re Next

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Dr. Seuss has been cancelled. Some of his work has been deemed racist, and we can’t have that. On Tuesday, the entity that oversees the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel announced it would no longer publish six of Geisel’s books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Among the works now deemed unfit for children are Geisel’s first book under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” published in 1937, and the much-beloved, “If I Ran the Zoo,” published in 1950. The former depicts a “Chinaman” character and the latter shows two men from “the African island of Yerka” in native garb.

There’s not much point in quibbling over whether these and other such illustrations in the condemned Dr. Seuss books are in fact racist or bigoted, or whether Geisel held racist or xenophobic views. By all accounts he was a liberal-minded and tolerant man who hated Nazis and, as a political cartoonist, mocked the antisemitism that was all-too-common in America during World War II.

He was also a man of his era. Later in life, he regretted some of his political work during the war that stereotyped Japanese Americans, which, as jarring as it might seem today, nevertheless reflected attitudes that were commonplace at the time.

But context and nuance don’t factor into the inexorable logic of the woke left, which flattens and refashions the past into a weapon for the culture wars of the present. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t simply about banning six Dr. Seuss books. All of Geisel’s work is, in the judgment of left-wing academia, an exercise in “White supremacy, paternalism, conformity, and assimilation.” It might be easy for conservatives to laugh that off as nonsense, but they shouldn’t, because this isn’t really even about Geisel.

The Left Is Carrying Out a Cultural Revolution

To grasp how a man known as much for his messages of tolerance as for his artistic genius could be canceled for racism, you have to understand what’s actually happening here. The left’s war on the past, on long-dead authors like Geisel, isn’t really about the past, it’s about the future. It’s about who gets to rule, and under what terms.

There’s a predictable pattern to what we’re seeing now. It’s predictable because it has happened before in much the same way it’s happening now. During China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Chinese Communist Party, at the direction of Mao Zedong, called for the destruction of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. All of these stood in the way of Mao’s socialist ideology, so they had to be destroyed.

Children and students were encouraged by the communist government to inform on their parents and elders, to shame and condemn them in public. The guilty were forced to recant in “struggle sessions,” during which they were mocked and humiliated, sometimes tortured, sometimes murdered. Before it was over, millions were dead.

We’re obviously not there yet, but the woke revolutionaries who now run our elite institutions and exert outsized influence in the corridors of power are following this same pattern.

First, they come for the monuments, destroying the icons of the past and re-writing history to turn even our national heroes and Founding Fathers into enemies. The animating ethos of the mobs pulling down Confederate statues is the same as The New York Times editors who gave us the 1619 Project. And because there is no limiting principle to iconoclasm, they have moved on from Confederates.

The City of Charlottesville, for example, having removed or tried to remove every last Confederate monument, is now pleading for someone, anyone, to haul away a giant statue of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The 18-foot-tall bronze statue, which was erected in 1919 and depicts Lewis and Clark with Sacajawea crouched behind them, is free for anyone who can prove he knows how to move it safely—although at this point it’s a wonder the city doesn’t just dynamite the thing to rubble, Taliban-style.

Then they come for the books, destroying any ideas or literature that challenges their ideology—like Ryan Anderson’s 2018 book on the dangers of transgenderism, which Amazon summarily canceled last month. Even seemingly unobjectionable books can be targeted, if not for their content then for the race of their author. Just ask Jeanine Cummins, whose novel “American Dirt” drew the ire of the left last year simply because Cummins, who is white, wrote a book about Mexican drug cartels. The list goes on and on.

So much for statues and books. At some point, the left will come for actual people, because the ideology of revolution demands that dissent—and therefore dissidents—be silenced, by force if necessary.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, recall what happened all across the country last summer when Black Lives Matter “protesters” took to the streets. They didn’t just march and chant, they rioted. They attacked businesses, destroyed entire city blocks, and carried out a campaign of intimidation, harassing, and in some cases attacking random people if they didn’t kneel and repeat the slogans of the revolution. Dozens of people lost their lives in the chaos and violence that ensued.

The people behind the statue-toppling, the digital book burnings, and the street violence won’t stop until all three of these things—history, ideas, and dissidents—have been destroyed. These are all impediments to their cultural revolution, and they mean to eliminate them.

So forget about Dr. Seuss. Forget about the statues and the books. Those things are just the beginning. It could easily get much worse. The woke revolutionaries of the left can’t be bargained with or appeased. They believe this is a zero-sum game, that one side will win and one side will lose. And they’re right.

John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

Unrelenting Madness in the Decline of a Republic

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Texas repealing mask mandates and lockdowns. Meanwhile, according to Breitbart News, British national health officials and occupation leader Biden are conferring about moving to TRIPLE MASK mandates. This isn’t a virus crisis. It’s a mental health catastrophe. And it’s a civil war. Pick a side. Quickly. #NotMyDictatorship

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Even the skewed Harvard-Harris poll shows 71% believe Antifa is a “domestic terrorist group”. 71% are right. And the 29% who deny it are supporters of ACTUAL domestic terrorism.

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Biden, before a speech, asks, “What am I doing here?” I don’t know, Joe. I do wish you would GO TO HELL.

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Consider the lack of imagination & humor it takes to censor Dr. Suess. How devoid of a soul you must be to applaud it. #NotMyCancelCulture

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From Breaking911 and Ben Shapiro on Twitter: BREAKING: Chinese court rules homosexuality can be called a mental disorder (-NYP)

So much for ‘woke’, huh?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

10 Big Signs Biden is the Missing President

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America is a nation facing crisis. Whether it is the coronavirus pandemic response, the crisis at the nation’s southern border, or brewing conflict in the Middle East, it is in need of strong and steady leadership.

During this time of immense national challenges, it appears that leadership is not going to come from the President of the United States. Unfortunately, it appears that Joe Biden is the “missing” president.

1. No Biden Press Briefings in over a month It looks like the last time Joe Biden gave a ‘press briefing’ was on January 25th.

That press appearance consisted of a bizarre moment when he awkwardly put on his mask mid-speech. Watch:

If you void this appearance because he only took five pre-screened questions and called it a wrap, it’s been 40 days of the White House press wandering in the wilderness with Jen Psaki. The White House calendar does not list any “briefing” given by President Joe Biden.

2. Biden schedule not posted online, White House visitor logs a secret

“The schedules for the president and vice president aren’t posted online,” Politico reported. “The White House comment line is shut down. There are no citizen petitions on the White House’s website.The White House has committed to releasing visitor logs. But it doesn’t plan to divulge the names of attendees of virtual meetings, which are the primary mode of interaction until the coronavirus pandemic eases.”

So, who is making the presidential decisions? Who is Biden meeting with? Who are others in his administration meeting with? It’s a shroud of secrecy that America’s failed press isn’t doing enough to penetrate.

3. Biden calls lids, early to bed, takes weekends

President Joe Biden has called numerous “lids,” or early wraps of the day, even amid crises like the Texas freeze disaster. A check of his past schedule shows many daily entries ending mid-afternoon or even early morning, such as on February 18th. It is something the American public has come to expect, sadly, due to it being a Biden practice that gained notoriety during his 2020 no-show presidential campaign.

CNN has even made it apparent that Biden is an early-to-bed type.

“Unlike his most recent predecessors — night owls who spent the dark hours reading briefing materials (President Barack Obama) or watching television (President Donald Trump) — Biden is more of an early-to-bed type,” CNN noted.

“He has expressed a preference for a fire built in the Oval Office fireplace,” CNN adds, “and sometimes adds a log himself to keep it going. His dogs, two German Shepherds called Major and Champ, sometimes join him.” Sleepy Joe must find it very cozy.

4. Kamala Harris takes meetings with Heads of State

On President’s Day weekend, while Biden had taken off work to play Mario Kart with his granddaughter, Vice President was taking calls with major heads of state. The National Pulse noted that Biden was missing from a call with French President Emanuel Macron. This is from the White House’s press readout:

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke today with President Emmanuel Macron of France, and expressed her commitment to strengthening bilateral ties between the United States and France and to revitalizing the transatlantic alliance. Vice President Harris and President Macron agreed on the need for close bilateral and multilateral cooperation to address COVID-19, climate change, and support democracy at home and around the world. They also discussed numerous regional challenges, including those in the Middle East and Africa, and the need to confront them together. The Vice President thanked President Macron for his leadership on the issue of gender equality and for France’s contribution to NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover.

Harris also spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. These are not Kamala Harris’s counterparts. And despite being vital to the Democrats’ agenda as the deciding vote in the Senate, she makes sure to attend most of the president’s daily briefings.

“The President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified update on the country’s top intelligence, is back to a daily occurrence after happening only sporadically under Trump,” CNN reported without adding context that he read them anyway. “Joined in the Oval Office by Vice President Kamala Harris — who has used an iPad to receive the briefing, like Obama — Biden is run through the update by a range of intelligence professionals.”

5. No State of the Union Address yet

President Joe Biden was expected to have given his first State of the Union address by now.

Although the mainstream press is issuing “fact checks” to dispute the claim Biden was supposed to have had one by February 20th, the AP earlier reported that he was supposed to have had one by February 23rd. It is now March 1st.

This is the latest any president has given a State of the Union address in his first time since Jimmy Carter, who did not give one at all that year.

Meanwhile, an astonishing 31 million people tuned into former President Trump’s CPAC speech on Sunday, and that is just online viewership. The running joke on Twitter is that this was America’s ‘real’ State of the Union address.

6. Biden is an executive order-signing machine President Biden entered office and immediately issued a record-setting flurry of executive orders, which he signed as if he were a human auto-pen. Those orders were reportedly drafted and fast-tracked with the aid of a DOJ office under the supervision of former Attorney General William Barr, according to former Trump adviser Peter Navarro.

“Trump’s last Attorney General actually also turns out to be Joe Biden’s first Attorney General,” Navarro said. “Because here is what was happening. We had over 30 executive orders queued after election day, ready to go. But we kept running into all of these roadblocks and roadblocks and hurdles. It turns out that Bill Barr’s office of legal counsel was fast-tracking all of these Biden EOs.”

Of course, President Biden could not have had all of these executive orders ready to go by himself on day one. They were drafted for him and merely handed to him to sign.

7. It took nearly 2 weeks to visit Texas

President Biden took his sweet time getting to Texas after brutal freezing cold contributed to deadly rolling blackouts in the state that lasted for days. Despite the Texas governor declaring a disaster on February 12, it took until February 26 for Biden to show up in the state amidst warmer weather. A full two weeks. Trump would have been crucified in the press.

Additionally, Biden refused to entirely fulfill the relief request that was issued by Governor Abbott in response to widespread energy failures that has been attributed with the deaths of at least ten people.

“President Joe Biden declared a major disaster for 77 Texas counties, the White House said Saturday morning, two days after Gov. Greg Abbott had asked for a declaration that covered all 254 counties coping with the effects of a winter storm that knocked out power and heat across the state,” reported the Dallas Morning News. The press yawned, much like Joe Biden.

8. Biden forgets names, mask rules While on his Texas visit, Biden reminded the world once again that his memory seems to be slipping.

“Representatives, uh, Shirley Jackson Lee, Al Green, Sylvia Garcia, Lizzie Pannili, uh, excuse me,” Biden said and winced. “Pannell, and uh, what am I doing here?” he said. Good question.

Biden, since the day he first issued his mask mandate, has often needed to wear a mask in order to keep up appearances. Here is Kamala Harris reminding Biden to take his mask in what makes for some very poor optics.

LOL pic.twitter.com/A085qix2Fh

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) February 26, 2021

9. Biden loses train of thought in mid-sentence The awkward moment during his Texas visit wasn’t a one-off for Biden. It appears that his ability to keep his train of thought running is diminishing daily.

Out-performed every presidential challenger in US history… pic.twitter.com/3vFPdBjuTo

— Jason D. Meister 🇺🇸 (@jason_meister) February 23, 2021

The mainstream news media tries to blow this off as “stuttering,” but it is not related to the ability to pronounce words. It is related to a fundamental ability to compose thoughts.

Former Secret Service agent and popular conservative podcast host Dan Bongino told Fox News host Sean Hannity on this week that Biden is in “real significant trouble.”

“He is in real significant trouble, Joe Biden,” Bongino said. “And listen to me. everyone around him. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows it. This is the scandal that they’re not telling you – how bad his condition really is… I’m telling you from what I’m hearing from people in my network, everyone knows how bad it is. Everyone. It’s not a mystery, it is the worst kept secret in the White House.”

The American people are in real significant trouble, as well.

10. Biden’s campaign was a predictor of all of this

It is not that Biden’s conspicurous absence is coming out-of-the-blue, either. Neither will be the talk of using the 25th Amendment to remove Joe Biden from office; if and when that day comes.

In October, Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats began pushing a 25th Amendment bill, even before Biden took office. The Democrats would later try to coax former Vice President Mike Pence to sign onto it, which he refused to do.

Then-President Trump commented at the time that the House bill was aimed at future president Joe Biden.

“President Trump… agreed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that her plan for a 25th Amendment commission to evaluate presidential fitness isn’t really aimed at him — saying it was instead a plot to install Kamala Harris in the White House,” he said.

“Crazy Nancy Pelosi is looking at the 25th Amendment in order to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris,” he tweeted. “The Dems want that to happen fast because Sleepy Joe is out of it!!!”

How right Donald Trump was. Joe Biden has been the “missing president.”

Trump asked at his CPAC speech on Sunday, “Miss me yet?”

Millions of Americans are not only missing Donald Trump as president, they are missing what it’s like to have a president at all.

At CPAC, Trump Doubles Down on Populism

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In his CPAC speech on Sunday, former president Trump articulated a populist vision for the future of the Republican Party and for America. At the heart of the president’s thinking lies a powerful message of hope for America’s working people. Unlike the Democrats’ idea of governance by and for the elite, Donald Trump believes in the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — the principles of equality, opportunity, and unalienable rights.

These principles did not vanish with the 2020 election, nor has President Trump. The conflict between the elitist and populist vision of America is the most crucial social and political issue of our time. I believe that the 2020 election was stolen because the political elite realized they could not defeat President Trump in a fair fight. Trump’s populist vision is shared by at least 74 million Americans, and likely by far more. If the fraud can be contained, 2022 and 2024 will be victorious elections for the GOP and for populism in America.

Declaring that his political journey is “far from over” and hinting that he may be the GOP presidential candidate in 2024 (and ruling out a third-party run), President Trump laid out the policy differences between his and President Biden’s administrations. For most watching the speech, Trump’s policies on immigration, job creation, constitutionalism, and foreign policy are clearly superior to those of Biden and Democrats in Congress. A CPAC straw poll revealed that 95% of those voting wished to see Trump’s policies and agenda advanced.

Underlying all of Trump’s remarks was the stark divide between heartland Americans and the coastal elite. The president’s assurance that conservatives will win in 2022 and 2024 rests on his belief that conservative thinking is “common sense” and that the conservative vision of America is founded on God-given rights. If that thinking truly is common sense and those rights truly are God-given — and if, as Trump stressed in his speech, Republicans set about to forestall election fraud before the next election — a conservative victory is likely.

Since before its founding as a nation, America attracted a population that sought personal liberty and economic opportunity. A despotic, class-based system of privilege stood in the way of this population, and the British Crown imposed the same sort of tyranny that liberals seek to implant in America today. Americans do not want a European-style government with power centralized in the capital and exercised by a permanent elite akin to the graduates of Oxbridge in Britain or the École nationale d’administration in France. The European political mentality — a mentality that would accept unelected members of a commission in Brussels as rulers — derives from centuries of serfdom that taught acceptance of an inherited class system. That mentality is alien to America’s thinking, but elitists in the Democratic Party are trying to impose it on us.

Biden and the elite that surround him know little about the real America or the wishes of the American people. Secretary of state Antony Blinken, for example, has practically no business experience outside government or, from what I can determine, any significant contact with ordinary Americans outside the coastal culture. He has served in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations and with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and with a liberal think-tank when Democrats were out of power. Blinken attended an elite prep school in New York City, followed by Harvard and Columbia Law School. His father and uncle were U.S. ambassadors, and Blinken himself began working on Democrat presidential campaigns as early as 1988, when he was just 26.

There is no record of Blinken’s ever working in the private sector (that is, producing or building anything), but he has played an important role in WestExec Advisors and Pine Island Capital Partners, for which he was hired, according to its chairman, for his “access, network and expertise.” This sounds to me a lot like influence-peddling, something the Biden family appears to have engaged in as well, so much so that the New York Times — hardly a unfriendly source — questioned Blinken’s potential conflicts of interest if appointed as Biden’s secretary of state.

As it is, Blinken is not the only person associated with Pine Island Capital Partners close to Biden. The list includes Lloyd Austin and Michele Fournoy. In fact, almost all of Biden’s Cabinet appointees, from Blinken to Janet Yellen and John Kerry, fit the same mold: graduation from elite schools, long histories of government service, no real business experience, and complete loyalty to the Washington elite.

It is this elite that President Trump is determined to defeat as he continues to work for the good of “every American,” as he declared on Sunday. As he reaffirmed his overriding policy of “America First,” Trump was in effect declaring that he will not accept the influence of the political elite, either in this country or from other countries that wish to exploit the American people by way of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, weak trade agreements, flawed immigration deals, and other failures of Democrat administrations.

What all of these failures have in common is their disregard for the ordinary working American, who is forced to pay for giveaways that enrich foreign entities through deals negotiated by liberals who then benefit in some way from them. In his CPAC speech, President Trump presented a remarkably clear-eyed assessment of the stakes we face and of the difficult road ahead. It will not be easy to defeat an articulate and united political elite determined to retain its privileges at the expense of a less organized and less unified public. But the great weakness of the left, as our former president pointed out, is that leftist policies are simply wrong.

In the long run, no reasonable person can defend the idea of surrendering our sovereignty to our enemies. Once it is clear what Biden intends, most Americans, I believe, will rally around conservatives in 2022 and 2024. To paraphrase Isoroku Yamamoto, the American electorate is a sleeping giant. Biden’s radicalism may be just what it takes to awaken it.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Secession Is A Radical Solution That Sadly Doesn’t Seem So Radical Any More

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Some things in life are constant. My entire life America has been one of those things. Despite Vietnam, Watergate, Iran Contra, the Dot Com bubble, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession and more, the United States has been constant.

America, rife with internal conflicts, differing opinions and more than a few lying politicians was always the land of freedom, the land of opportunity, and the land of endless possibilities.

America and freedom were like the earth below us and the sun and the stars above… constants.

But constant is relative… Wait long enough and the earth will be gone. Wait long enough and the sun and the stars will be gone. So too with nations. Ronald Reagan knew this. He said: Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. That generation is upon us and we are most certainly watching in real time as American freedom is extinguished, and with it America.

America was fundamentally built on freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. Freedom of speech, religion, the right to peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government. But it’s not just the Constitution itself that makes America. It’s ideas that flow from it and our history. Free markets, private property, entrepreneurship, 4th of July, baseball, high school debate team, cars, suburbs, bake sales, Thanksgiving dinner, spelling bees, Pledge of Allegiance, Christmas antlers, the National Anthem and more.

All of that, both the actual rights and the ideas beyond them all are under attack in America of 2021. Whether petty tyrants using the Covid hysteria to eviscerate our freedoms of religion and assembly and to crush our businesses or social media oligarchs shutting down debate in the 21st century town square or education departments causing Martin Luther King to spin in his grave as they abandon his dream, the America of Norman Rockwell paintings is being torn apart idea by idea by idea.

This past summer Americans were helpless as cities from coast to coast burned in response to the killing of George Floyd and they were told the violence was understandable and “mostly peaceful protests”. This past year many Americans saw their lives upended as their jobs or businesses were destroyed, their families turned into strangers and churches and schools turned into ghost towns as a result of a disease with a 99.99% survival rate, but we were told that America was facing the gravest public health threat in history. Now we’re watching as children are taught that math is racist, that hard work is racist, and there is no difference between boys and girls and we’re told that all of this is healthy and reasonable.

At the same time, we’ve watched our history upended as we see monuments to our heroes, from Columbus to Washington to Grant and Lincoln to Booker T. Washington to Reagan toppled in the name of racism! We’ve watched the indoctrination of grievance as the defining characteristic of American life. We’ve witnessed the politicization of every single aspect of American society, where everything from sitcoms to sports to sex no longer have intrinsic value on their own, but rather have become mere Rorschach tests for measuring one’s degree of submission to the new normal.

America has become a nation where objective reality no longer matters, where the free exchange of ideas is no longer allowed and where the exercise of an individual’s rights are tolerated only to the degree that they do not hurt the feelings of some aggrieved victim class. America has become a bizzarro world where everything from science to math and history to law are no longer constants upon which society rests but rather malleable frameworks for the destruction of everything that does not comport with todays’ woke mores.

And so it is thorough this looking glass one wonders what is the solution? In 2016 Americans went to the ballot box and said they’d had enough of the perversion of everything ostensibly American into a cancer on the history of the world and elected a leader who was unabashedly patriotic. After four years of constant, relentless lies about said leader they returned to the ballot box and reelected the man who was seeking to upend the demonization of America, only to have the election stolen under the cover of the night. That theft was enabled by the fiction of an existential threat to life on earth posed by a novel virus. Americans went to the ballot box and their will was thwarted.

Rather than set the nation afire, jilted voters looked to the courts for a Constitutional remedy. A split Supreme Court had demurred from solving the problem before the election but after the election had the opportunity to revisit the question before the votes were certified. Again they demurred. Once the fraudulent administration was in place the Court had one last opportunity to address the fraud once and for all, and again chose not to act.

So we have a circumstance where citizens go to the polls only to watch those votes stolen. They then petition the nation’s highest court for redress and are rebuffed. As they watch the cabal who perpetrated the theft work to institutionalize the very tools with which they purloined the election in the first place, what are citizens who revere the Constitution and love liberty supposed to do?

Do they stand by and watch as what’s left of their country is taken over by those for whom freedom and rule of law are simply obstacles to the permanent domination over the nation? Become slaves on a modern day plantation where Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington are the masters and the woke anarchists are the overseers who keep everyone in line? Riot in the streets like BLM and Antifa have done so often?

Or they could pursue secession, where the woke are welcome to the coasts while the heartland and the south choose freedom and the Constitution… It is indeed a radical notion, but the constant of the free America most of us knew is gone so perhaps the time has come… When all conventional Constitutional avenues have been impeded, when opponents seek to eliminate citizens’ Constitutional rights and thwart the language of the document itself, what other choice is left? We can accept the slow death of the Republic as the gangrene of wokness starves the body politic of the blood of freedom, or amputate the cancerous limbs and allow freedom to flow once again through the veins of a nation defined by liberty. The left has made the radical normal. Secession is a radical solution that sadly doesn’t seem so radical any more.

Vince, Flopping Aces

The New Journalism is Destroying Us

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Presstitute is a contraction of press prostitute. It is a term that has come into widespread use to describe the media’s service in behalf of the narratives of the corrupt Western ruling Establishment. That the presstitutes serve the material and political interests of their Establishment owners is completely obvious. But the media did not give up its integrity for material interests alone. The media have become acolytes to the religious ideology of “social justice.“

In the Winter 2021 issue of the Manhatten Institute’s City Journal, Martin Gurri explains that the media have abandoned all pretense of objective reporting, because the media, or enough of it, believe that objectivity upholds systemic racism and defeats social justice.

The ideology of systemic racism is institutionalized in the US educational system and in the NY Times “1619 Project.” (See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/02/22/the-demonization-of-white-americans-is-official-educational-corporate-and-government-policy/ ) This ideology comprises the mind-set of the woke generation and accounts for the media’s disregard of facts and intolerance of other views. According to the ideology, as white people are systemic racists, social justice can only be obtained by overthrowing whiteness. This overthrow is now the purpose of the media.

Gurri points out that newspaper owners and editors bought into this as a business model to sell a creed and an agenda to like-minded online subscribers. The liberal/progressive/left can conveniently go online to get their hate fix for the day. This tells you all you need to know about the NY Times’ subscribers.

Trump’s election in 2016 was a boon for the launch of the new post-journalism. During Trump’s four years the NY Times digital subscriptions increased by 600%. Gurri writes that the intent of ideological journalism is not to report factual reality and inform the public, but to foment and justify hatred of the enemy.

Russiagate provided the narrative. Gurri reports that a Google search turned up 3,000 NY Times Russiagate articles—multiple articles per day–during Trump’s four years. “This was journalism as if conducted under the impulse of an obsessive-compulsive personality. Virtually every report either implied or proclaimed culpability. Every day in the news marked the beginnings of the Trumpian End Times.” The NY Times organized its newsroom in behalf of a single story that turned out to be empty. Under the rules of real journalism, the NY Times experienced the embarrassment of massive failure, but under the new rules the NY Times was wildly successful in fomenting hate and establishing the narrative.

Fomenting hate is now what the media does—all of it: not only the NY Times but also CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Washington Post, and the rest. All of the hate targets are still around—Trump, whiteness, Russia, Iran, China—and are likely to be for some time. If these targets wear out and fail to bring in digital subscriptions, what woke infraction will bring forth the new target?

Meanwhile post-journalism’s targeting of Trump and Trump supporters will eventually radicalize white people and further divide the country. The demonizations of Russia, Iran, and China will lead to war and humiliating defeat for America. The dollar will lose its world currency role, and the US will be unable to pay its bills.

Those of us who can see it coming will be silenced for unapproved speech while our country goes to hell.

Paul Craig Roberts