Following the launch of our U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report earlier in the week, last night I was featured on Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street show.
When Biden claims climate change is the #1 national security threat, politicians and unelected bureaucrats think they have license to run amok — fleecing the American people and curtailing of freedom and liberty…
WATCH THE INTERVIEW: THE EPA IS STAFFING UP, LAWYERING UP, AND ARMING UP WITH AN EXTRA $100 BILLION FROM CONGRESS
https://nypost.com/2023/07/30/doj-cant-sink-any-lower-after-attempted-arrest-of-hunter-bidens-ex-partner-devon-archer/
The Department of Justice attempted to have Devon Archer report to prison ahead of his expected testimony about his former business partner Hunter Biden before the House Oversight Committee. Alec TabakWhat a coincidence!
On the eve of Devon Archer’s bombshell testimony to the House Oversight Committee, the Department of Justice tried to put him in jail.
If you don’t suspect that’s an attempt to intimidate Hunter Biden’s former best friend before he reveals damaging secrets about the president, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
It’s another example of a DOJ gone astray.
Coming hot on the heels of the first son’s dubious plea deal in Delaware collapsing last week, and amid allegations from senior IRS whistleblowers of political favoritism by prosecutors to protect Joe Biden, you have to wonder how far a weaponized, all-powerful, unaccountable justice system can go.
Two more examples from the past week tell you the sky’s the limit — and they’re not even bothering to hide it anymore.
On Wednesday, federal prosecutors dropped campaign-finance violation charges against cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who just so happens to have been Biden’s second-biggest donor.
On Thursday, new charges against Biden’s chief political rival, Donald Trump, were filed by special counsel Jack Smith over the former president’s handling of classified files.
‘Obstruction of justice’
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/31/robert-taft-a-senator-for-all-seasons/
Contrary to popular belief, the biggest fraud in American politics is not Rep. George Santos. Nor is it the not-so-Native American Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Nor is it the “Stolen Valor” Sen. Richard Blumenthal. It is not even Joe Biden, whose fabulism stretches so far back that Johnny Carson joked about it.
The biggest frauds in American politics are the 27 “Republican” members of Congress who voted for the obscene $1.66 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill last December, 16 of whom still “serve.”
In stark contrast to their example is the memory of Ohio Republican Sen. Robert A. Taft, who died 70 years ago today — July 31, 1953.
Among the few outstanding American statesmen and the fewer whose greatness was contemporaneously acknowledged, Taft’s destiny seemed preordained. First in his class in high school, college (Yale), and law school (Harvard), Taft was the scion of a great American political dynasty and the son of the only man to hold the offices of U.S. president and Supreme Court chief justice. Leaving no branch of government unmastered by his family, Taft scaled the legislative ladder. In the Ohio legislature, he led efforts to reform the state’s antiquated tax code, opposed prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan, and rose to become speaker of the lower house before graduating to the State Senate. But it was as a U.S. senator that Taft became one for the ages.
Elected in 1938, Taft immediately became renowned for his intelligence, parliamentary skill, and principled opposition to government intervention at home and abroad. Impervious to interest groups, Taft never broke an agreement, especially with his constituents. He was always the man they voted for. Taft eschewed political deception and courageously adhered to his principles, garnering universal respect.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunter-biden-foreign-agents-registration-act-robert-mueller-donald-trump-26596b5a?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
Unequal justice has emerged as a theme in the Hunter Biden plea deal, and one example came last week when Judge Maryellen Noreika asked the prosecution and defense in court if their agreement meant the President’s son could still be prosecuted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Hunter’s lawyers said no, but the prosecutor said yes, and Hunter can thank Robert Mueller if he is prosecuted under that statute.
FARA is a long-ignored law dating to 1938 that special counsel Mueller brought out of mothballs in an attempt to pry information out of Donald Trump’s associates. It requires Americans acting as an “agent of a foreign principal” under most circumstances to register with the U.S. government. As we noted at the time, in the nearly half-century up to 2016 the Justice Department brought only seven criminal FARA cases and won three convictions. The rarity of prosecutions created much confusion about how and when the law applies.
That didn’t stop Mr. Mueller. As special counsel investigating nonexistent Russia collusion, he used FARA to prosecute Trump associates who were mostly accused of lying about their work on behalf of foreign governments.
This is how he nailed Paul Manafort, who took money from the Ukrainians. Michael Flynn admitted to making false statements in documents filed pursuant to FARA regarding his work on behalf of the Turkish government. FARA also ensnared Greg Craig—a high-powered Democratic lawyer and former White House counsel to President Obama—who was prosecuted as an offshoot of the Mueller investigation into Mr. Manafort’s deals with Ukraine.
https://thespectator.com/topic/operation-get-trump/
Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. A case in point was the chyron that Fox News posted briefly on June 13. That was the day that Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami. The news story featured a split screen. On the left was Joe Biden speaking at an event in Washington for the secretary-general of NATO. On the right was Donald Trump addressing supporters in New Jersey. Underneath ran the unspeakable truth: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”
That fresh-breeze-of-truth window was open for a total of twenty-seven seconds. Then it was slammed shut. But that was long enough. Our Guardians on the internet erupted in fury. Fox issued a public apology and canned the veteran producer responsible on the spot. The Washington Post wailed that Fox had “crossed a line” with the unseemly graphic.
Yes, that is amusing coming from a house organ of the leftoid Democracy-Dies-In-Darkness megaphone. But the irony is that such eruptions of unchaperoned truth-telling are more and more rare at Fox, which has molted into a standard-issue mushy media mouthpiece.
Sure, there are still a few conservative-sounding pundits on Fox. But the corporate culture there is 100 percent grade-A woke. There’s also the dwindling audience, of course. As Chadwick Moore reported for The Spectator last edition, “total Fox viewership is down nearly 40 percent from the same time last year, and has tanked a whopping 62 percent in the key demographic.”
https://thespectator.com/topic/william-shakespeare-black-white-race/
Sarah Karim-Cooper first came to public attention at the cosmetics counter. Her book on makeup in Renaissance theater, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, was published in 2006. Its enduring popularity is not so much a testament to her scholarly insights on powdered hogs’ bones mixed with poppy oil — the old stage recipe for pale skin — or Shakespeare’s sardonic references to the kind of beauty “purchased by the weight” in The Merchant of Venice, as to Karim-Cooper’s celebrity: for more than a decade she’s been one of the leading racializers of Shakespeare’s work.
Perhaps the key moment in her rise to fame was her 2018 curation of the Globe Theatre’s first “Shakespeare and Race Festival,” now held annually. Those who are scratching their heads trying to think where, besides Othello, or perhaps Shylock, you can find “race” in Shakespeare, should hie them to the postmodern cosmetic counter. Race is not where we find it — it is where we put it. And Karim-Cooper puts it everywhere.
In 2018 the hype explained: “This festival will highlight the importance of race to the consideration of Shakespeare not only in his time, but more urgently, in our own.” The festival included a lecture by Kimberlé Crenshaw, better known on this side of the Atlantic as an inventor of “Critical Race Theory” and the concept of “intersectionality” — the notion that people who fall into more than one stigmatized category suffer more than the sum of their grievances.
You may be sure that Karim-Cooper is on top of this. She has been effacing Shakespeare professionally for some seventeen years at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where she is currently co-director of education and research. She is also professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College, London, and has written prolifically on the bard and Jacobean theater. This month, Penguin Random House will release her newest book, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-republican-house-needs-to-cancel-john-kerry/
Last week 24 House Republicans introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Climate Zealots Advancing Radical Schemes Act which if passed will defund our “climate czar” John Kerry’s office. This federal feed-bag is beyond political accountability to the voters or Congress, but at least the taxpayers will not be footing the bill for his emissions-spewing, global gallivanting to promote suicidal climate policies.
A Congressional rebuke would be a fitting end to Kerry’s public career––one marked by thoughtless adherence to leftish Democrat shibboleths, new-world-order received wisdom, and bad policies dangerous to our national security and interests.
Kerry’s latest junket was to China last week to coax the communist regime to remain on board with the West’s suicidal “green” energy demonization of cheap, abundant fossil fuels as codified in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. That’s a big reason for the House’s bill to defund the energy czar’s $14 million budget and his staff of 45.
As Rep. Chip Roy (R. Texas) put it, Kerry is the “poster child for the Biden administration’s anti-energy policies that are destroying both our economy and national security.” The trip to China, Roy adds, which is “the top threat to our national security and the world’s number one polluter,” will do nothing but “further hamstring our energy policy.”
Moreover, approaching China as a suppliant and de facto junior partner––Xi didn’t deign to meet with Kerry personally–– in our relationship only emboldens our global rival to continue with its duplicitous diplomacy. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out the obvious, China’s agreement to stick with the Paris deal is “another way of saying Beijing intends to keep increasing its carbon emissions for another seven years. From 2015 to 2022 China’s greenhouse gas emissions grew nearly 12%, while the U.S. cut them by some 5%, according to the Climate Action Tracker.”
And it’s not just China’s duplicity about mitigating “global warming.” China understands that the West is in thrall to the climate-change cult and its “green energy” psalter, and takes such meetings as a way to leverage influence over our foreign policy by dangling the promise of cooperation on greenhouse gas emissions, of which China is by far the biggest emitter––almost as big as the next four emitters combined.
https://victorhanson.com/how-to-create-conspiracy-theories/
It is easy to birth conspiracy theories.
All that is required is chronic government stonewalling of reasonable requests for transparency. Then add in high officials serially lying under oath, along with the blatantly unequal application of the law. Institutionalize arguments from authority of politicians and bureaucrats who refuse to adjudicate arguments empirically.
Include the weaponization of investigatory and intelligence bureaucracies. Finish with the transformation of an obsequious media into a mouthpiece of the state. And presto, you end up with a skeptical, cynical public that learns to believe the very opposite from what it is told by elites.
January 6th
Curiously. some conservative politicians, media and politicos often remark of their surprise that so many of the Trump base insists that the January 6 riot at the Capitol was in part a federally driven conspiracy, or perhaps just a mere “demonstration” gone awry.
But whether true or not, why would some not believe that—given the efforts of the state to hide and warp facts?
Consider what drives rational people to embrace supposed “conspiracy” theories around the so-called “insurrection?”
One reason, of course, is that there was evidence of FBI informants present on January 6. Do not take the word of conservatives for such suppositions.
Instead, remember what award-winning New York Times’s reporter and keen follower of right-wing political activity, Matthew Rosenberg said of January 6, albeit in an ambush interview conducted by Project Veritas:
The left’s overreaction — the left’s reaction to it in some places was so over the top. They were making it too big a deal … that gave the opening for lunatics in the right to be like, ‘Oh, well, nothing happened here. It was just a peaceful bunch of tourists,’ you know, and it’s like, but nobody wants to hear that.”
Rosenberg then remarked that he spotted numerous FBI informants among the crowd milling around the Capitol. Or as he put it, “There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol.” Cannot the FBI refute such allegations?
Apparently not. Given such speculation, one would expect that FBI Director Christopher Wray might at least categorically deny such inflammatory accusations.
Yet in congressional testimony when asked whether the FBI had inserted informants among the protestors, sphinxlike Wray merely shrugged, “So I really need to be careful here talking about where we have or have not used confidential human sources.”
Then there is the mysterious case of Ray Epps, initially sought by FBI “as a person of interest” for allegedly inciting demonstrators to break the law and enter the Capitol.
But then oddly Epps was de facto exempted for some 30 months from arrest—even as hundreds who urged no such action were indicted and convicted of “illegal parading” or unlawfully “demonstrating in front of the Capitol”—misdemeanors that ended up resulting in felony-type sentencing.
In one video clip, as Epps attempts to gin up the stationary crowd to move illegally into the Capitol, he is met with “conspiratorial” accusations from skeptical bystanders calling out: “Fed! Fed! Fed!”
https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/28/what-israels-protests-are-really-about/
“The new, modern Israel is more nationalist, more religious and more traditionalist. That is a wonderful thing. And that reality is not changing anytime soon.”
Many Israelis have once again taken to mass protests in the streets, both in the lead-up to and in the aftermath of the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government’s successful passing on Monday of one tiny sliver of the broader judicial reforms that it had previously floated earlier this year. But any sober analysis of the perhaps-unprecedented civil strife now afflicting the Jewish state leads to one conclusion: The vitriolic pushback has nothing to do with substantive separation-of-powers concerns or the particulars of constitutional theory, and everything to do with the Left’s insatiable personal loathing of Prime Minister Netanyahu and its deep-set cultural anxiety over the more nationalist and religious direction Israel is now heading.
For the first four and a half decades after modern Israel’s founding in 1948, the Jewish state operated according to the British model of governance: no written constitution, parliamentary supremacy, and a subordinate, common law-based judiciary. Israel lacks a written constitution to this day, but things began to change in the early 1990s, when former Supreme Court of Israel President Aharon Barak self-pronounced a so-called “constitutional revolution.”
By snapping his fingers, Barak – absent any statutory basis for doing so – arrogated to the Supreme Court of Israel powers that no other judicial tribunal in the world possesses. Those powers include, among other things, the power to hear any issue – no matter how transparently political, and regardless of a plaintiff’s legal “standing” to bring the suit – at any time, for any reason; the ability to overturn any law, policy or even cabinet/ministerial appointment for effectively any reason, from judicial review grounded in Israel’s 13 quasi-constitutional “Basic Laws” to judicial nullification based on an ultra-subjective finding of “unreasonableness”; and the nepotistic power to veto the justices’ own successors, due to the idiosyncratic makeup of Israel’s Judicial Selection Committee.
Anyone vaguely familiar with comparative constitutionalism, to say nothing of American constitutionalism as propounded in The Federalist Papers and ratified in the U.S. Constitution, can spot the glaring problems here. Judge Robert H. Bork, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 before having his nomination derailed by a loathsome Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)-led character assassination, wrote in his 2003 book Coercing Virtue: “Pride of place in the international judicial deformation of democratic government goes not to the United States, nor to Canada, but to the State of Israel. The Israeli Supreme Court is making itself the dominant institution in the nation, an authority no other court in the world has achieved.” And the situation has actually gotten markedly worse in the two decades since Bork made that observation.
Netanyahu’s Likud party and other allied right-wing parties made reform of the imperious, leftist-dominated Israeli Supreme Court a key campaign plank ahead of the Jewish state’s election last November, which resulted in a 64-seat (out of 120) majority conservative coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. The coalition advanced a wide-ranging suite of reform measures, from amending the Judicial Selection Committee’s composition to adding the hotly contested Knesset “override clause” provision to paring down the binding powers of Israel’s overweening “attorney general,” earlier this year; this column wrote in favor of those broader reforms, at the time. However, amidst a secularist-leftist national meltdown that saw myriad of highways shut down by protestors, army reservists threaten not to report for duty, billions of investment dollars flow out of the country, and the country’s lone international airport briefly close due to a strike, Netanyahu backed down in late March.
https://victorhanson.com/americas-razors-edge/
We are the most powerful country in civilization’s history but not invulnerable. Even America will finally bleed out if we continue to open our own veins.
Was it $40, $50, or $60 billion in equipment, weapons, supplies, and infrastructure that the U.S. simply abandoned in Afghanistan? That was that—no problem?
We had too much military junk anyway? We can just print the money to buy more replacement stuff?
Our enemies took no notice and instead thought, “Wow, what a powerful adversary just to scram out of Kabul and leave priceless weaponry behind—my God, we don’t wish to tangle with such a formidable power!”
Was that the idea in leaving as we did?
Was that “Flight of the Americans” the fitting epitaph to 20 years of blood-and-treasure nation-building to ensure another Bin Laden did not partner with the Taliban to attack the U.S.? Are we safer in 2020 from Talibanian terrorism than in 2001, given the two decades of costly occupation?
Are we so wealthy in treasure and blood, that Americans can fly pride flags, paint George Floyd murals, and birth gender studies programs in Islamic Kabul, while losing 2,400 lives, and seeing 24,000 wounded—before abandoning a $1 billion new embassy and a $300 million refitted secure airbase to the Taliban?
Is it no big thing that it will take years to resupply our 155mm artillery shell stocks, our Javelin missiles, our short-range missiles, after giving Ukraine $100, $120, or is it $130 billion in weapons, economic aid, training, and supplies?
Is America so internally secure that it can normalize shoplifting in its major cities?
Exempt smash-and-grab destruction of parked cars in San Francisco?
Hector the middle class on their incorrect use of gas water heaters while allowing flumes of feces to stream in the bays of Los Angeles and San Francisco, on the theory that such organic pollution is not pollution if the excrement emanates from the homeless?
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