Federal Bureau Investigated What an independent search of FBI headquarters might turn up. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/federal-bureau-investigated/

On August 8, for the first time in U.S. history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the residence of a former president, Donald J. Trump. That home invasion invites another first for America: a sudden and thorough search of FBI headquarters, with bureau bosses and their lawyers barred from the premises and from contact with anyone inside.

Under these conditions, a crack team of independent investigators, deploying the latest forensic and high-tech tools, could be turned loose on all FBI files and records. The first thing this team might uncover is recent FBI action in a high-profile whistleblower case. Back on February 21, 2020, Philip Haney, author of  See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad was “found deceased” in Amador County, California, killed by a gunshot to the chest. Despite rumors, Haney’s death was not a suicide.

The Amador sheriff, “reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist in analyzing documents, phone records, numerous thumb drives and a lap top that were recovered from the scene and Mr. Haney’s RV. Those items and numerous other pieces of evidence, were turned over to the FBI. The FBI has performed a forensic examination of these items. We expect to receive these reports within the next few weeks.” More than two years later, there is no news on Haney’s thumb drives, documents and laptop in FBI custody.

With the evasive Christopher Wray removed from the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, independent investigators could retrieve this material and possibly develop leads in the Haney homicide case. Somebody had motive, means, and opportunity. As Rod Steiger said in In the Heat of the Night, “we have the body, which is dead.” If investigators establish that the FBI destroyed or altered evidence, that would make for an obstruction of justice case against those responsible, and any FBI bosses who signed off on it.

National Security Threat: China’s Eyes in America by Peter Schweizer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18885/china-drones-dji-spying

The Chinese company DJI controls nearly 90% of the world market for consumer and commercial grade drones.

The excellent reporting on DJI by Kitchen tracks efforts by the company to lobby against passage of a bill called the American Security Drone Act (ASDA), now before Congress, to outlaw federal government use of DJI products entirely. What is the risk? Not only the data gathered by the drones themselves, but everything collected by the mobile app with which users control their drones and manage their DJI accounts. Like many other mobile applications, this includes a user’s contacts, photos, GPS location, and online activities.

Every DJI drone in the skies above America is as good as a hovering Chinese spy.

DJI is engaged in a fierce lobbying effort to prevent passage of the ASDA bill. So fierce that they have enlisted police officers from local jurisdictions to come to Washington and lobby congressional staffers about how great DJI drones are for their cash-strapped local forces…. DJI lobbyists from firms like Squire Patton Boggs, Cassidy & Associates, and CLS Strategies are taking no chances. The company spent $2.2 million in lobbying efforts in 2020 and $1.4 million last year on lobbying activities, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Much as they are doing with products such as solar panels, the Chinese realize that cornering the market in an area where reach equals access is critical to their long-term plans to dominate. Their pattern includes stealing technology they cannot create themselves and using any means available to aid in that theft. Therefore, every bit of access to information they can scour is of more value to them than the product used to get it.

Understanding these patterns is central to recognizing that the Chinese do this to their own people as well…. [through] many different forms of what we may baldly call blackmail.

The Wilson Center, a bipartisan think tank in Washington, reported in 2017 that a small community of PRC students and diplomats have engaged in intimidation tactics ranging from intelligence gathering to financial retaliation… It was just those sorts of concerns that led the Trump administration to create the “China Initiative” within the Justice Department in 2018. This effort generated plenty of convictions of Chinese nationals in the US for technology theft and other forms of industrial espionage. The Biden administration ended the program this year….

China’s strategy has for years hinged on infiltration by some Chinese scientists and researchers working abroad in the US and other western nations, with threats against their Chinese relatives as leverage for them to do so.

Chinese intelligence gathering in the US takes many forms and has different purposes. Most Americans are familiar with some of their means and tactics, but not with how widespread and persistent they are.

We’re ‘Better Off’ Under Biden? Who Is Obama Kidding?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/12/were-better-off-under-biden-who-is-obama-kidding/

When he wasn’t admiring his White House portrait, Barack Obama managed to say a nice thing about President Joe Biden. He must have been joking, though, because what he said defies reality.

“Joe, it is now America’s good fortune to have you as president,” Obama said. “The country is better off than when you took office. We should all be deeply grateful for that.”

Our “good fortune”? Let’s review just how much “better off” we all are thanks to Biden and his fellow Democrats.

COVID deaths: When Biden took office on the promise that he had a plan that would end COVID, the official death count was 424,318. Today it is over 1.044 million. In other words, there have been nearly 620,000 COVID deaths on Biden’s watch. And that’s despite all the interventions Biden claimed would end the pandemic. Are the families of those 620,000 people better off?

Inflation: Despite the recent decline in pump prices, gasoline costs 91% more than it did on January 2021, according to the Consumer Price Index. Food prices are up 14%. Overall prices have climbed 13% in the time Biden has been president. To put that last number in perspective, the overall increase in the CPI during President Donald Trump’s entire four years in office was just 7%.

Real earnings: How about workers, are they better off? While wages have climbed, they haven’t nearly kept pace with Bidenflation. As a result, workers have seen their real wages decline by 5%, which works out to an effective average pay cut of $2,726 a year. Does that, in Obama’s mind, make them better off?

The unlearned lessons of 9/11 A short memory may be helpful as a coping mechanism, but it is deadly in matters of foreign policy. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-unlearned-lessons-of-9-11/ (September 11, 2022 / JNS) Sunday marks the twenty-first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. The magnitude of the audacious assault on key symbols of American greatness and power—the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia—was so extreme that it was likened to an apocalypse. Footage of […]

That Day, Yet Again Twenty-one years later, how many Americans still don’t know our enemy? by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/that-day-yet-again/ When the U.S. entered World War II, the director Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life) left Hollywood and, at the age of 44, enlisted in the Army, where General George C. Marshall put him to work making pictures for the war effort. The films, several of which were released under the umbrella title Why […]

On September 11, Kamala Harris Likens Trump Supporters to the 9/11 Terrorists By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/09/11/on-september-11-kamala-harris-likens-trump-supporters-to-the-9-11-terrorists-n1628541 Old Joe Biden said it during his ominous black-and-red speech on September 1: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” On Sunday, the twenty-first anniversary of the September 11, 2001, jihad terror attacks that killed nearly three thousand people, Chuck Todd on Meet the […]

Yokel Wokeism Personnel is policy, especially at the university level, so stakeholders of an institution must learn to recognize the warning signs of wokeness. By Andrew Cuff

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/10/yokel-wokeism/

On April 8, a Hillsdale College professor named David Azerrad gave a spirited lecture at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, advancing arguments conservatives have heard many times before. In his talk, Azerrad attacked practices such as affirmative action, disparate-impact law, and other privileges that have been accorded to non-white Americans as supposed recompense for past racist injustices.

Azerrad used some provocative rhetoric, including the phrase “black privilege” (a play on the ubiquitous “white privilege”), a reference to America’s “semi-official racial hierarchy,” and observed that Vice President Kamala Harris’ skin color was one reason she was chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate. He ended with an exhortation that no American should find controversial: “We either develop the stomach for color-blindness, treating everybody equally under the law, not discriminating . . . or we decide to tear down our civilization in this mad quest to achieve equal racial outcomes.”

The talk was part of a conference at St. Vincent’s Center for Political and Economic Thought, a conservative institute for research and education that has hosted many contentious speakers and debates in decades past. It was slotted as the 2022 installment of CPET’s Culture and Policy series, titled “Politics, Policy, and Panic: Governing in Times of Crisis.” The conference featured a number of high-profile speakers, including health-policy expert Scott Atlas and Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker, who attacked politicians’ use of the COVID-19 pandemic to unjustly seize and centralize power. As a Latrobe resident and adjunct professor at St. Vincent, I attended the conference and had lunch with Azerrad just before he spoke.

The aftermath of the talk was far more momentous than the talk itself, which generated a heated question-and-answer session but not the usual chants, disruptive behavior, or physical violence that are now commonplace on American campuses. Graduating senior Joseph LaForest informed me, “Many more St. Vincent students supported Dr. Azerrad’s talk than the media has reported. Groupthink is not something that characterizes me or my peers.” Azerrad confirmed this as well: he stayed at St. Vincent for a couple days after his talk and numerous students and faculty came up to greet and thank him.

The university administration, on the other hand, lost its mind.

The Biden Administration Is Engaged in a Massive Censorship Campaign By Kenin M. Spivak

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/biden-administration-engaged-in-a-massive-censorship-campaign/

In a federal lawsuit, discovery reveals a multi-agency effort to censor and suppress voices that disagree with administration policies.

The bedrock of American democracy, the First Amendment, prohibits Congress from making laws “abridging the freedom of speech.” The Supreme Court has repeatedly applied this prohibition to executive actions, as well.

The Biden administration’s campaign to censor, demonetize, and suppress dissenting voices on social media is much broader than previously known, as demonstrated by an amended complaint filed last month in federal district court in the case of Missouri v. Biden. The complaint, by the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general along with the New Civil Liberties Alliance on behalf of leading health-care professionals, provides strong evidence of the administration’s vigorous campaign to coerce and collude with social-media companies in suppressing and deplatforming criticism of the administration as well as views with which it disagrees on subjects such as Covid, elections, the Hunter Biden laptop, and climate change, among others.

The evidence shows that at least 80 senior officials have participated in a concerted federal enterprise involving at least eleven federal agencies, including the White House, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Office of the Surgeon General, Census Bureau, and FBI. The manifestly unconstitutional public–private partnership between the administration and Big Tech disregards Chief Justice Warren Burger’s warning that it is “axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

Responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and emails produced in discovery show that White House, DHS, and HHS officials flagged specific content and examples of content for censorship, including factually accurate dissenting views, under the guise of suppressing “domestic terrorism.”

The Forgetting of 9/11 Alexander Riley

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-forgetting-of-9-11/ How did this coordinated mass murder become so irrelevant? I have written a lot about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 over the years, including a book on United Flight 93, which went down a few hours from my home in central Pennsylvania. In much of that work, I argued for the importance […]

Biden declares war on half the country The malignant and divisive spirit of his speech will not soon be quelled Roger Kimball

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/biden-declares-war-on-half-the-country/

Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on Thursday was one of the most remarkable in living memory. By “remarkable,” I hasten to add that I do not mean “good.” On the contrary, it was a breathtaking act of what the psychoanalysts call “projection,” blaming others for the bad things you do yourself.

The speech itself was a malignant act of demagoguery that will have colonels and generalissimos everywhere catching their breath with envy. The neo-totalitarian stage set, replete with red lighting effects and military personal flanking the shouting, gesticulating Biden, was right out of central casting. Next time, perhaps Biden will wear epaulettes along with his signature aviators.

The speech was billed as a reflection on the “soul of the nation.” Remember, Biden was sold to the country as Mr. Normality, as someone who would bind up the nations’s wounds after four years of the bad, horrible, no good, unacceptable, supremely divisive Donald Trump.

It hasn’t worked out that way, notwithstanding Trump’s occasional zingers and rhetorical molotov cocktails that have kept the fires of outrage burning. In this respect, Biden’s speech typified the new Democratic dispensation, according to which the world is divided sharply in two. The good guys are those who espouse the Democratic agenda. The bad guys are anyone who dissents.