Team DeSantis: We’re about action, not Beltway chatter by Byron York

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/team-desantis-were-about-action-not-beltway-chatter

There’s no doubt Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has fallen far behind former President Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican nomination polls. In the last days of February, Trump had a 12.8 percentage point lead over DeSantis in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, with all the other Republican challengers and likely challengers way, way back. Now, Trump’s lead over DeSantis is 29.2 points, with all the other GOP candidates still farther behind. DeSantis is actually closer to the bottom of the field than he is to Trump.

That has led to a lot of criticism of the DeSantis campaign and talk that they’re just not up to the job. “The DeSantis people are rookies,” one veteran of New Hampshire Republican politics, Fergus Cullen, told Politico recently. Reams have been written about DeSantis himself not being particularly skilled at the kind of schmoozing and glad-handing required of presidential candidates dealing with the public and donors alike.

The loudest critical voice, of course, comes from Trump, whose ratings have soared amid a politicized indictment in New York and a politicized rape lawsuit in New York. Trump has used the increased support to launch a relentless series of attacks on DeSantis. The latest comes this week from top Trump campaign officials Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who released a memo titled “DeSantis is Burning Through Cash Just to Slide Further In the Polls.”

LaCivita and Wiles accuse the DeSantis campaign of wasting millions of dollars on ineffective advertising to “fill the vacuum of leadership the governor left in Florida while campaigning (horribly) overseas in Europe.” Doing so amounts to defrauding donors, the Trump team says: “What you are witnessing is a fleecing on an epic scale. Tens of millions of donor dollars spent, while poll numbers … drop.”

Such concern trolling is obviously an irritant for the DeSantis camp. But they have a simple response: While Trump is campaigning (and fighting off legal actions), DeSantis is … governing. And DeSantis is governing in a distinctly conservative way, a way that embeds conservative principles in the laws of the nation’s third-largest state.

US Weakness Invites Iranian Attacks on Shipping in the Gulf By Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/us_weakness_invites_iranian_attacks_on_shipping_in_the_gulf.html

On Wednesday we learned that the Iranian regime has seized a second oil tanker recently in the Persian Gulf, forcing it to dock at an Iranian port under orders from the regime’s “judiciary.”

It was seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Go-fast boats in the Strait of Hormuz. This remains the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint, according to the US Energy Information Administration, where roughly 20% of the world’s oil transits every day.

Seized tanker Niovi (YouTube screengrab, cropped)

The Pentagon subsequently informed us that these two incidents were just the latest of fifteen cases since Biden came to the White House where Iran has threatened or attacked international shipping in the Persian Gulf region.

These kind of attacks are unacceptable. The Iranians know that, and I guarantee you our enemies and adversaries know that. And yet the Iranians act with impunity. Why?

For starters, they know the current U.S. President and what he stands for. Biden has been taking money and supporting pro-Tehran regime lobbyists since at least 2002, when a group of Tehran-supporters threw a fund-raiser for him in California that brought in $30,000.

From then on, Biden became a reliable vote (along with Senator Chuck Hagel) when it came to opposing sanctions on Iran. He railed against President George W. Bush and his “axis of evil” because it included the Iranian regime.

Since becoming president, he has tried hard to re-invigorate the bad Iran nuclear deal, a deal that not only gave Iran a date certain to become a nuclear weapons state with impunity, but lifted all sanctions on the regime’s ballistic missile programs as well.

Glazov Gang: ‘Sleeper Cells’ Make Their Move On America’s Infrastructure Train derailments, diminishing food supply, U.S. banks and the dollar weakening . . . the Deep State’s ‘play’ is obvious.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/glazov-gang-sleeper-cells-make-their-move-on-americas-infrastructure/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Dr. Paul Cottrell of The-Studio-Reykjavik.com.

Dr. Cottrell discusses ‘Sleeper Cells’ Make Their Move On America’s Infrastructure, reflecting on Train derailments, diminishing food supply, U.S. banks and the dollar weakening – and how the Deep State’s ‘play’ is obvious. 

Don’t miss it!

Vivek Ramaswamy’s vision is America first — even more than Trump By Miranda Devine

https://nypost.com/2023/05/03/vivek-ramaswamys-vision-is-america-first-even-more-than-trump/

While Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are busy tearing chunks out of each other, there is an unlikely sleeper candidate in the Republican race who is quietly winning hearts and awakening hope across the country with his sunny version of America First.

Vivek Ramaswamy, 37, the woke-busting entrepreneur, son of Indian immigrants from Ohio and the GOP’s first millennial presidential candidate, is rising steadily in opinion polls, just 10 weeks after announcing his candidacy on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. 

In one CBS poll this week, he managed to tie with former VP Mike Pence in third place among likely Republican voters, ahead of establishment figures such as Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Tim Scott and Asa Hutchinson.

He’s pitching himself as a more energetic but less divisive version of Trump, as “the outsider that doesn’t just talk about draining the swamp,” he said in New Hampshire this week. “I’m going to get the job done . . . I see an opportunity to do in 2020 what Ron­ald Reagan did in 1980, win a landslide election.”

He preaches that it is not enough merely to point out the hypocrisies of the left’s “secular religions” of “racial wokeism, gender ideology and the climate cult.”

These are just symptoms of a national identity crisis, he says, caused by turning away from the founding values of the country, from success by merit and adherence to the rule of law, values that wooed immigrants like his Indian engineer father and psychiatrist mother to Ohio.

“Faith, patriotism, hard work, family, these things have disappeared,” he says, and he wants to “fill that void with a vision of American national identity that dilutes this woke poison.”

Spy Games: Why Private Companies Now Dominate Domestic Espionage by J.B. Shurk

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19626/domestic-espionage

Almost all private companies have now entered the “spy business.”

In the old days, television and movie studios wanted to know what you watch; today, everybody wants to know what you watch, what you like, what you do, where you go, and with whom you go there. In turn, all this information is ultimately used to manipulate human behavior.

US Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, recently confirmed that state and federal governments regularly purchase Americans’ personal data from private companies, so that they may “spy on and track the activities of U.S. citizens.” No kind of personal information is off-limits. Government agents use data brokers to collect information on an individual’s GPS location, mobile phone movements, medical prescriptions, religious affiliations, sexual practices, and much more. It is the type of total surveillance, Rep. Rodgers alleged, that “you would expect out of the Chinese Communist Party surveillance state, not in America.” Yet it is all arguably legal or in an unregulated gray zone.

“A report published last month by the Brennan Center for Justice found at least twelve overlapping DHS programs for tracking what Americans are saying online,” demonstrating that the DHS had “veered from its original counterterrorism mission into tracking social and political movements and monitoring First Amendment-protected activity of American citizens.” — Senator Rand Paul, April 18, 2023.

In a particularly shocking example that seemed eerily reminiscent of atrocities committed by Hitler Youth chapters during the 1930s or young schoolchildren during China’s Cultural Revolution, Paul noted, “In 2021, DHS even put out a video encouraging children to report their own family members to Facebook for disinformation if they challenge the U.S. government narratives on COVID-19.”

Right now… the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is busy capitalizing on recent Pentagon leaks to advance the RESTRICT Act, a piece of legislation that would give the Executive Branch even greater authority to track online communication and label information shared on the Internet as “dangerous.” Known derisively as an “online Patriot Act,” that power grab would come in handy for the government’s domestic surveillance operations during an era when former FBI, CIA, NSA, and DHS spooks are filling the ranks of social media companies and the FBI continues to flag more words as online evidence of potential “violent extremism.”

[D]ozens of members of Congress and their families recently sold off bank shares while they were actively meeting with regulators amid the volatile financial climate prompted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

As part of the military’s “signature reduction” program, the Pentagon even regularly hides forces carrying out clandestine assignments within private companies under false names. Due to the government’s increased reliance on contractors, a small number of corporate firms now dominate the private intelligence industry.

You put all these trends together and you get an expansive corporate-government partnership with vast surveillance powers conducting domestic espionage on American citizens — free from legal scrutiny and done in the name of “national security.”

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” That rhetorical gem, credited to various scientists and political leaders, shows up on mouse pads and posters and wherever else suitable inspiration is found wanting. It is also a remarkably accurate mission statement for two professions: financial investors and spies. In both occupations, a person is rewarded for either (1) collecting and processing enough available information to predict future events or (2) creating a set of preconditions that will make future events all but certain.

We’re Taking Bets: How Long Before Environmentalists Start Attacking EVs?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/05/were-taking-bets-how-long-before-environmentalists-start-attacking-evs/

Today, you’re not allowed to say a bad word about electric cars. They’re planet savers, after all. Environmentalists tell us so. But there will come a day — in the not-too-distant future — when the climate change fanatics will decide that EVs are planet killers, too.

We’ve seen this bait-and-switch tactic before.

Back in 2007, energy producers pumped money into environmental groups to promote natural gas. The Sierra Club used the funds to mount a “Beyond Coal” campaign touting the benefits of gas. Joe Romm, a climate advocate at the Center for American Progress, declared that natural gas “may be the single biggest game changer for climate action in the next two decades.”

Then came the fracking revolution, and the resulting abundance of natural gas caused power plants across the country to switch to gas from coal. Then environmentalists decided natural gas wasn’t so good after all. By 2015, they were at war with it. The motto for the Sierra Club’s new “Beyond Natural Gas” was “Dirty, Dangerous, and Run Amok.”

Environmentalists tried to stop fracking, opposed new pipeline development, and then started pushing for bans on gas-fueled appliances.

More than 70 cities in California alone have voted to ban natural gas hookups in new homes. New York became the first to impose a statewide ban. Sarah Fox, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University School of Law, gleefully told CNN that this ban “is becoming a mainstream policy.”

Soon it will be the auto industry’s turn.

Just as natural gas producers before them, they are bear-hugging green groups and working arm-in-arm with government while promising to bring forth a magical electric car future.

New York’s Perfect Progressive Priorities No gas stoves in new buildings, and only a handful of new charter schools.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-budget-kathy-hochul-progressives-legislature-charter-schools-gas-stoves-181e2a19?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The Democratic left is running New York state these days, and Kathy Hochul appears to be largely Governor in name only. That’s the message from the $229 billion state budget that passed this week after months of haggling behind closed doors. The biggest losers are parents hoping for a good charter school for their children.

Ms. Hochul went into the talks with priorities she knew would be a hard lift in a Legislature controlled by progressives. They included modest bail reform, which passed, and her signature plan to expand housing by allowing the state to override local zoning laws, which was rejected.

Alas, she also succeeded in getting the first statewide ban on natural gas in most new construction beginning in 2025, which was also a progressive priority. When the Consumer Product Safety Commission first raised the idea of banning gas stoves, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer dismissed it as myth pushed by “shameless and desperate MAGA Republicans.” Care to revise and extend your remarks, Senator?

The Governor says the new ban doesn’t ban existing gas stoves. But it is the first step in making gas appliances more costly and difficult to replace. Consider this an echo of another infamous political promise: if you like your gas stove, you can keep it. This is part of the progressive method of denying that they favor an unpopular policy when it is first publicized, but then implementing it on the sly and gradually so current voters don’t get too upset.

Ms. Hochul’s most embarrassing loss was on charter schools. As a candidate she had called for raising the state cap on charters of 460 schools. She compromised with herself on that by proposing in her budget to keep the cap but eliminate the regional caps.

Miguel Cardona, Miseducation Secretary National history test scores plummet, and he attacks Republicans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/miguel-cardona-naep-scores-national-assessment-of-educational-progress-civics-history-schools-ron-desantis-acc73985?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The federal Department of Education’s mission is supposed to be . . . what exactly? Apparently Education Secretary Miguel Cardona thinks it’s something other than improving educational results. New national test results this week showed eighth-grade U.S. history scores at an all-time low, and Mr. Cardona’s response was to attack the GOP.

The data released is from 2022 tests on U.S. history and civics under the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the “nation’s report card.” The average eighth-grade history score is down five points from 2018 and nine points from 2014. It’s the lowest on record, going back to 1994. Scores dropped the most among the lower performers. Only 13% of students were deemed NAEP proficient. The civics results are similarly depressing.

This is a damning record for the educational establishment, on top of last year’s news that NAEP math scores for eighth-graders in 2022 fell to a 20-year low. For all the money the U.S. keeps pumping into education, surely somebody in authority ought to be embarrassed by these pitiful outcomes, working to reverse them, and explaining to the citizenry what is being done. Maybe that person is supposed to be the U.S. Education Secretary?

Mr. Cardona’s statement on the poor NAEP showing begins by saying that it “further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading.” This might be a workable start if Mr. Cardona went on to acknowledge that Zoom classes were a generational error and that the teachers unions that lobbied to keep schools closed should accept some responsibility.

Instead Mr. Cardona turns to a partisan diversion. “Now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes,” he says. “We need to provide every student with rich opportunities to learn about America’s history and understand the U.S. Constitution and how our system of government works. Banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice.”

The Transgender Follies—More Madness from the Left The transgender craze, like the word itself, is new, dangerous to the persons involved, and hasn’t a shred of evidence to support it. Joan Swirsky

https://cnav.news/2023/05/05/editorial/guest/transgender-follies-madness-left/

Growing up in the 1950s, I remember distinctly that all of my high school classmates were obsessed with figuring out who they really were, males or females. Every conversation, the special clubs we formed to talk about this issue, the heated arguments we had with our parents who didn’t “get” that the children they thought were boys or girls were not at all what those dinosaurs imagined sex and gender to be, and the total lack of understanding we got from the powers-that-be, including teachers, counselors, coaches, doctors. It was truly a horrible time to be a girl or boy.

Tomboys

All that my girlfriends talked about, starting about the age of 11 or 12, was having their budding (or in some cases, formidable) breasts cut off, and the hormones coursing through their systems somehow, magically, eliminated altogether. The same with the boys. “How can we cover up our Adam Apples,” they lamented. “How can we hide our penises and put barrettes in our hair and be the girls we were really meant to be?”

After high school, I married and became a young mother at 18. And my son told me that when he was in high school in the 1970s, the same thing took place, although more intensely. “All we talked about,” he told me, was “who was a real boy and who was a real girl, and how the tomboys could become real boys and the guys who liked cooking could become real girls.”

“But at least things had progressed,” he said, “and there were teachers and guidance counselors willing to encourage the girls who were tomboys and the boys who liked cooking to stick to the genders “they were born to be and not to allow parents to interfere.”

Reality check

Please re-read every word of the above four paragraphs and know that NOT ONE WORD of them is true! In the 1950s—and for centuries before and decades after—girls knew they were girls; boys knew they were boys and that was that.

Climate Envoy John Kerry’s Jet-Set Spending Is Getting Plenty of Cloud Cover By James Varney

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/05/03/slipstream_climate_envoy_john_kerrys_jet-set_spending_is_getting_plenty_of_cloud_cover_897101.html

John Kerry leads an international jet-set life that might exhaust a runway model. If President Biden’s special envoy for climate was not in Washington or relaxing at his mansion near Nantucket Harbor, he could be found in Brazil, Panama, the Bahamas, or Germany. And that’s just in February and March. 

The boss and his climate czar: Kerry is indefatigable in attending conferences and meetings in far-flung posts and glittering capitals. But details are scant.

While Kerry trumpets his meetings and appearances around the world, the State Department wraps the rest of his efforts in a cloak of secrecy usually reserved for CIA black box operations. It has refused to specify lists of people he is meeting with and who is advising him as he circles the globe. His office has stonewalled requests for budget and staffing information from legislators and government watchdog groups. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed last year by RealClearInvestigations for a breakdown on how the climate envoy’s roughly $16.5 million 2022 budget was spent, the State Department said it could not comply with the request until April 2025, months after both the 2024 election and the expiration of President Biden’s current term. 

The secrecy surrounding Kerry’s work is reaching a boiling point with the threat of a congressional subpoena. 

Frustrated that Kerry’s office ignored two previous requests for detailed information about its budget when his party was in the minority, Republican Rep. James Comer, who now heads the House Oversight Committee, sent what he labeled a final courtesy letter on April 25 and added that a subpoena would accompany the next request if Kerry’s “powerful, unchecked position” continued to hide the information.