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October 2020

Is China Funding the Phony Joe Biden Campaign? Does anyone doubt that the Democratic Party—if they thought they could get away with it—would accept Chinese money? By Karin McQuillan

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/29/is-china-funding-the-phony-joe-biden-campaign/

Joe Biden is running a profoundly phony campaign. Hillary’s defeat is famously blamed on her low-energy decision to not show up in the Rust Belt. But Biden isn’t showing up anywhere.

No candidate since George Washington has campaigned so little and with so few live supporters. Joe Biden is no George Washington.

How can Biden be a contender when he gets 30 supporters at his rallies and Trump attracts 30,000? Biden attracted 130 cars to hear him in must-win Pennsylvania. In Miami, Latinos for Trump organized a 30,000 car parade on their own.

In a rare joint appearance, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris went to Phoenix. Biden needs Arizona to win.  Zero supporters turned out to greet them. Zero. Video of the eerie empty scene was carried on a local news station only. The Biden campaign says they did not let the public know about the visit to avoid large crowds.

More oddities: The Democrats are not mounting a ground game. No volunteers knocking on doors. Very little effort to register new voters, either.

This strategy doesn’t pass the sniff test for an honest campaign.

The answer, as usual in politics, is to follow the money. President Obama never came close to the money supporting Biden’s campaign.

It’s ‘High Noon’ in America Just like the movie, Trump makes the last stand against violent outlaws. Joseph Hippolito

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/its-high-noon-america-joseph-hippolito/

“In the long run, November’s election demands answers to these questions: Do we begin the task of restoring the fundamental values on which the United States was built? Or do we allow a self-appointed coterie of arrogant totalitarians to build their “new order” on the bodies of the innocent?”

One of Hollywood’s greatest westerns provides a powerful metaphor for both the November election and the state of the nation.

Nearly seven decades after “High Noon” was released, the United States confronts the same kind of existential decision that Hadleyville, the movie’s fictional town, faced: Will the good citizens allow a band of violent outlaws seeking revenge to intimidate and dominate them, or will they support their marshal and fight?

The band of outlaws, in this case, is not Frank Miller’s celluloid gang. It’s the Left and its “progressive” ideology that permeates education, government, the arts, the church and much of the media. That ideology — which the Democratic Party proudly embodies — seeks to destroy the fundamental values providing the nation’s foundation.

Opposing the outlaws is President Donald Trump, who faces the same problem that challenged Marshal Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper): no support from the powers-that-be.

Kane’s commitment to stay and fight was rejected by Hadleyville’s mayor, judge, practically all the townsfolk and even his own wife. Trump’s commitment was rejected by his own party’s Establishment — the Bushes, Kristols, Kasichs, McCains and Romneys.

Yet unlike the movie, in which the townsfolk abandon Kane, Trump receives enthusiastic support from all demographic categories. That support represents contempt for a movement that wraps itself in the cloaks of “peace,” “social justice” and “tolerance” while subverting those values.

Pollster Who Nailed 2016 Says Trump Fast-Closing Gap With Nonstop Rallies Paul Sperry

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/30/pollster-who-nailed-2016-says-trump-fast-closing-gap-with-nonstop-rallies/

Conventional wisdom says that along with killing more than 228,000 Americans, the coronavirus has killed President Trump’s chances of a second term. Virtually all the Beltway pundits believe it. Wall Street appears to be pricing it in. Vegas is betting on it.

Yet even as most national polls have Democrat Joe Biden ahead by a seemingly insurmountable margin, “America’s most accurate pollster” has crunched the numbers and found a number of recent developments that give underdog Trump hope for another upset.

“The race is on the cusp of entering the competitive zone,” said Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics, a New Jersey-based polling firm that partners with Investor’s Business Daily. (The IBD/TIPP Poll was one of only two polls to predict President Trump’s victory in 2016; and in fact, was the only national poll to show Trump ahead in a four-way race heading into Election Day 2016.)

Mayur filled me in on some very interesting trends his team is seeing that all the gloomy pundits are missing. For one, Trump has “room to grow” in garnering votes in red states, while Biden has “peaked” in blue states. And Trump is creating some “real momentum” every day barnstorming rural areas of battleground states.

GDP Explodes 33.1% — Media Bury The Story

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/30/gdp-explodes-33-1-media-bury-the-story/

“So let’s review. The economy is rebounding from the pandemic lockdowns faster than anyone expected. Jobs are returning faster than the experts predicted, with employment growing by 14.2 million since April’s huge COVID-related plunge.”

A few weeks ago we noted that the third-quarter GDP number was likely to be a stunner, defying the endless claims by the press that the economy will struggle to emerge from the COVID-19 lockdowns. We also warned that voters wouldn’t get the news through the mainstream press.

Well, we were right on both counts.

The economy grew an absolutely breathtaking 33.1% from July through September, a quarterly gain never before achieved in this country. That means that we’ve already made up two-thirds of the losses. (Under Obama, it took a full year before the economy regained two-thirds of the loss suffered in the 2009 recession.)

Not only was the growth astonishing, it exceeded all expectations. At the start of the quarter, the Blue Chip Consensus was for the rebound to be less than 20%. After the quarter ended, it predicted that growth would be less than 30%.

The press? Well, it buried the story as deep as it possibly could.

Below is a slideshow presenting the home pages of major news sites as of 11 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday.

See for yourself how much space was devoted to this news. On several sites, the story doesn’t appear “above the fold.” On USA Today’s home page, you have to scroll two-thirds of the way to the bottom to see a link. And the feature story on its Money page was about National Cat Day .

If the stories appeared on the front page at all, the news about stellar third-quarter growth was followed by a big cautionary statement.

“…Problems remain,” says the New York Times.

“…That’s not the whole story,” says CNN

“…But the data is complicated,” says the Washington Post

“…But slowdown emerges,” says USA Today.

There is a cascade preference for Trump among black voters By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/there_is_a_cascade_preference_for_trump_among_black_voters.html

Before Trump took office, conventional wisdom was that American blacks would never vote Republican. As Lyndon Johnson reputedly said after passing the Civil Rights Act, “I’ll have those n****** voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” It didn’t matter that Democrats broke their promises or that their policies worsened the plight of inner-city blacks. Black voters remained loyal. This year, though, after Trump spent four years making a positive difference for black America, blacks are breaking ranks and openly supporting President Trump.

Thomas Sowell wrote in 2016, shortly before Trump was elected, “Black votes matter. If Republicans could get 20 percent of black votes, the Democrats would be ruined.” He added, though, “This is highly unlikely, given the approach used by Republicans.”

Thankfully, Trump jettisoned the traditional Republican approach to blacks, which was to ignore them. He supercharged the economy, which helped blacks. He choked off illegal immigration, which helped blacks. He reversed the disastrous 1994 Crime Bill that sent generations of black sons, brothers, and fathers to prison. He partnered with Sen. Tim Scott to create opportunity zones in black communities. He also worked with faith leaders, academics, musicians, and Kardashians, always with an eye, not to aggrandizing himself, but truly to improving the quality of black life in America.

Trump’s efforts have paid off. Van Jones, a black progressive, has acknowledged that Trump’s efforts have improved life for poor blacks. Van Jones isn’t the only black person to notice these positive changes.

The demise of America has been greatly exaggerated To be an American is to move ever forward, in pursuit of that ‘more perfect union’ Matt Purple

https://spectator.us/demise-america-greatly-exaggerated-exceptional/

One of my favorite quotes about America — mainly because it annoys so many people — comes from the historian Robert Wiebe. In his book Self-Rule, he writes:

‘Telling Americans to improve democracy by sinking comfortably into community, by losing themselves in a collective life, is calling into the wind. There has never been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there will ever be.’

Cue the yelping from nationalists, socialists, Burkeans, take your pick. Yet Wiebe was less making a political argument than he was observing what was right in front of his nose. America has always been a nation of strivers, of men and women who seek to live up to their potential and who get annoyed if anyone throws a roadblock in their way. That quote, weirdly, paradoxically, sums up not just the attitude of individuals but a collective ethos. To be American is to move ever forward, in pursuit of that ‘more perfect union’. That isn’t to say we don’t value the past, but we’re more often looking at the road ahead than we are in the rearview mirror.

We saw this recently at the Republican National Convention, when Kimberly Guilfoyle screamed, ‘You are capable! You are qualified! You are powerful! And you have the ability to choose your life and determine your destiny!’ We saw a distorted version of it in the summer, when left-wing rioters decided that their narcissistic concept of progress meant much of American history had to be torn down. That’s the dark side of the striving mentality: it can too easily degenerate into cheap self-help platitudes and even Jacobin style radicalism. Sometimes we lurch ahead without considering whether it’s wise or desirable. If we invent electronic kiosks that put fast-food employees out of work, is that really progress? Are sex robots a waypoint towards a brighter tomorrow?

These are questions that Americans are going to have to confront in the years ahead. Yet there are also benefits to having the national gear shift set eternally to drive. Rather than wallowing in our problems, accepting them as indelible facts of history or insurmountable defects of the human person, we seek to overcome them.

The Biden Contradiction He’s running on Covid and character, but his policies are the most left-wing in decades.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biden-contradiction-11604012546?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Wall Street Journal hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928—Hoover—and we aren’t about to change this year. But we do try to sum up the risks and promise of the candidates every four years, and we’ll start today with the contradictory candidacy of Joe Biden.

The former Vice President is running as a reassuring moderate, a man of good character who can reunite the country and crush Covid-19 after the disruptive Trump Presidency. Yet he also is running on the most left-wing policy program in decades.

Voters have little idea about these policies because Mr. Biden mentions them only in the most vague, general terms. The press barely reports them. Americans may think they’re voting for Joe’s persona, but they will get the platform of Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Joe Biden’s Covid Fairy Tale His plan seems to be to wait until a magical sprite waves her wand and makes the virus vanish in a poof.By David Gelernter

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-covid-fairy-tale-11604011900?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Democrats want to turn Covid against the president, and they appear to be succeeding. But their strategy makes no sense in the end—perhaps because Joe Biden makes no sense.

The first big problem is that President Trump’s handling of the plague has been sensible from the start. Be careful until treatment improves and a vaccine is ready. Pour all the money and resources you’ve got down the throats of America’s best research labs. This scheme is working. Fatality rates are way down, treatment has improved, and several vaccines are almost ready, all in record time.

It’s hard to attack a plan that is accomplishing its goals. Consider Mr. Biden’s claim that our high Covid death rate is the president’s fault. Actual scientists have other explanations, such as the high rates of pre-existing conditions in the U.S., and New York City—with its large population and population density—being one of our first hot spots and still exercising heavy influence on the figures. Our death rates remain lower than those of several large European countries. This accusation is pure Bidentalk: not merely false but greasy.

If Mr. Biden were a sensible man, he’d be promising more programs like Operation Warp Speed—the federal effort to accelerate the development of a vaccine. Naturally, Americans remain scared of the disease: It is highly infectious and can be serious to the elderly and, occasionally, to others. It’s hard to notice progress when you’re frightened.

No Newsroom Is Safe If The Intercept Can Fall Victim to Media Groupthink By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-newsroom-is-safe-if-the-intercept-can-fall-victim-to-media-groupthink/

Glenn Greenwald founded The Intercept in 2013 with the explicit goal of creating a news outlet that would be insulated from the partisan and financial pressures inherent to corporate media.

As he acknowledges in a resignation letter published Thursday, that project has ultimately failed.

The Intercept’s editors, who Greenwald notes repeatedly are almost all based in New York, forbade him from publishing a column airing well-documented allegations of Biden family corruption. They told him that he couldn’t publish the piece as written at The Intercept, supposedly in violation of his contract, and discouraged him from publishing it elsewhere, as doing so would be “unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept.”

“The final, precipitating cause [of resignation] is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden,” Greenwald wrote. 

In so doing, the editors were following in the footsteps of their media betters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC, all of which have either ignored the documents and first-hand accounts of corruption proffered by the former CEO of a Biden family business, or woven them into some meta-narrative about the importance of media gatekeeping in protecting credulous readers from foreign disinformation.