90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Historic USMCA Trade Deal Takes Effect

The United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) goes into effect on Wednesday, marking a win for the Trump administration. The deal replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). President Trump called NAFTA a "disastrous trade deal,” after building a substantial portion of his presidential campaign around replacing it. Previous presidents talked about replacing the decades-old deal, but President Trump is the first to sign a substantive replacement into law.

The USMCA will incentivize production at home by implementing regulations surrounding digital trade, altering rules for trade across borders without tariffs and restructuring labor enforcement systems. In particular, USMCA will bolster job growth in the agriculture sector and auto industry.

President Trump touted USMCA as the "fairest and most balanced" trade deal negotiated thus far:

"When I ran for President, I made a solemn promise to the American people that I would end the job-killing failure called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and replace it with a better deal for our workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses—the men and women of Main Street who built the most prosperous and equitable economy in human history. Today, with NAFTA ending forever and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) entering into full force, our grateful Nation pays tribute to America’s workers and celebrates their ability to overcome decades of bad deals and failed policies," President Trump said. "The USMCA is the largest, fairest, and most balanced trade agreement ever negotiated and contains innovative provisions to help grow the economy and support American jobs. It is a tremendous victory for our manufacturers and autoworkers, meaning more cars and trucks will be produced in the United States."

In a rare moment of bipartisan governance, USMCA was sent to President Trump’s desk by overwhelming majorities of...

Prof Who Predicted Trump Win in 2016 Says It'll Happen Again & Be Even Bigger This Time

He has a track record of being right, and that must infuriate the left.

Helmut Norpoth, an election forecaster and political science professor at Stony Brook University, told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Friday that President Donald Trump will most likely win re-election based on what he calls his “Primary Model.”

And Norpoth predicted not just a win, but a landslide victory over presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

The model gives Trump a 91 percent chance of being re-elected and also predicts he will earn 362 electoral votes.

Some recent GOP victories seem to reinforce his predictions.

On May 12, Republicans won two special elections. Tom Tiffany won his race to represent Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District in Congress, while Mike Garcia flipped a Democratic seat in California’s 25th District.

“OK, the key to the November election is the primaries. And the early primaries are already giving us a lot of information,” Norpoth said on “The Ingraham Angle.”

“And based on that, Donald Trump won them very easily in his party. Joe Biden, the likely nominee for the Democrats, had a great deal of trouble holding it together. But on balance, it’s that stronger performance in primaries that gives Donald Trump the...

11,000 Assault Weapons Parts Smuggled In From China, Says U.S. Border Agency

AUTHORITIES SEIZED NEARLY 11,000 ASSAULT WEAPONS PARTS SMUGGLED INTO THE U.S. FROM CHINA IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY – A CITY FACING VIOLENT RIOTS RIFE WITH ILLEGAL FIREARMS – AMID A FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION INQUIRY INTO CHINESE INVOLVEMENT IN NATIONWIDE PROTESTS.

The shipment, valued at almost $130,000, originated from Shenzen, China and was intended for a residence in Melbourne, Florida.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers in Louisville, however, intercepted the illegal weapons deal, emphasizing unreported weapons minimize the U.S.’s “safe and strong” status.

“The importing of any type of munitions is regulated by the ATF,” said Thomas Mahn, Port Director, Louisville. “This smuggler was knowingly trying to avoid detection, however, our officers remain vigilant, ensuring our community is safe.”

The June 26th announcement cast Wall Street Journal reports of illegal firearms appearing around Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in Louisville and across the country in an interesting – and perhaps foreign – light.

It also follows a fatal shooting in the area leaving one American dead, perhaps, as a result of illegally imported Chinese weapons.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray stated the bureau was “looking carefully” at foreign involvement or interference, chiefly at the hands of China, in nationwide protests responding to the death of George Floyd.

Wray also noted the FBI has over 2,000 active investigations into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Chinese state media, mouthpieces for the CCP, have reveled in the violence and destruction faced by the U.S., with a Global Times editorial noting “protests and chaos have spread from the US state of Minnesota to the rest of the country, and Chinese netizens are cheering.”

China is responsible for the deaths of countless Americans – whether fueling the country’s opioid epidemic or...

The Hubbub About ‘The Boogaloo’ Is the Worst Kind of Fake News

Meanwhile, let’s keep pretending Antifa doesn’t exist.

As self-described Marxists and anarchists rampage through American cities, threaten lives, destroy historic monuments, burn churches, and terrorize the public, the Department of Homeland Security’s crack analysts have emphasized the real threat: Hawaiian shirts and cartoon frogs.

Politico reports that the National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium (NTIC), a DHS Fusion Center for Washington D.C. and the surrounding area, warned of the threat of “Violent adherents of the boogaloo” ideology, which the outlet headlined as “far-right extremists.”

That headline caused the Department of Homeland Security to object to Politico’s mischaracterization of its sharp intelligence assessment, tweeting out,

Another work of fiction by @politico. The @DHSgov intel bulletin does NOT identify the Boogaloo movement as left-wing OR right-wing. They are simply violent extremists from both ends of the ideological spectrum.

It is true that the bulletin does not refer to “adherents” as “far-right.” But this is only because the report attempts to construct an ideology essentially out of thin air, based entirely on a set of internet memes largely created by activist trolls. The DHS report warns that violent Boogaloo extremists frequently wear Hawaiian shirts and may display images of “Pepe the Frog,” an internet meme of a sad frog that became popular with some elements of the Right.

From Memes to “Menace”

The term “Boogaloo” refers to an online meme about the potential for a second American civil war. The term is derived from the 1984 break-dancing movie, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” and the subsequent movie meme which appends the mocking term “electric boogaloo” to derivative or uninspired sequels. Boogaloo memes often take the form of hypothetical discussions about what one would do “when the boogaloo”—meaning when civil war—begins. Boogaloo memes are often sharply fantastical or couched in video game language, referring to “equipment drops” or “leveling up.”

It is of course possible, even likely, that some individuals participating in this internet subculture could attempt to actualize such fantasies. Law enforcement should be careful and take such threats seriously. But this is not the same as being a “movement,” let alone a coherent ideology.

For one thing, fear of a second civil war is no longer an extreme idea. A recent Rasmussen poll revealed substantial numbers of Americans, on both the Right and the Left, are concerned about the prospect of civil war with just over a third (34 percent) of those polled saying they believe such a national catastrophe is likely within the next five years.

Despite DHS’s tweet insisting that its Boogaloo bulletin was intended to be nonpartisan, the reality is that the report relies almost entirely on biased reporting which attempts to portray the Boogaloo internet phenomenon as an overarching and coherent far-right movement posing a dire threat.

Substandard Sources

A look at the sourcing of the Boogaloo bulletin shows that the document, like other of Homeland Security’s NTIC products, cannot withstand objective scrutiny.

One of the NTIC bulletin’s primary sources is the Tech Transparency Project, a project of the Campaign for Accountability (CfA), which is a left-leaning nonprofit that “almost exclusively targets” conservative politicians and organizations for opposition research and dubious...

Time Magazine now says white superheroes such as Superman and Batman have to go

It looks like we have officially gone from the crazy to the absurd.

The so-called “cancel culture” has already cost Cops and LivePD, had a 30-year-old episode of “The Golden Girls” removed because two of the characters were wearing mud masks, and went after a children’s television program called Paw Patrol.

Now, some people at Time Magazine, referred to as the “Woke Taliban” by John Nolte at Breitbart News says that make-believe superheroes, such as Batman and Superman have to go.

We are in the middle of a pandemic, with millions of people unemployed, we have criminal thugs destroying our cities, and shootings, murder and mayhem are running rampant, yet Time Magazine is concerned about superheroes. You cannot make this stuff up.

Time of course doesn’t want to eliminate ALL superheroes.

Only those who do not fit the agenda. Breitbart notes that such characters as Black Panther, Blade, and the Spider-Man stories, as long as they feature the black kid instead of Peter Parker are fine. It’s the white ones that are the issue.

Time made the following observations:

“In the past several weeks, as calls to defund the police have gone mainstream, pop culture critics and fans have been reconsidering how Hollywood heroizes cops.

Legal procedurals and shoot-em-up action movies have long presented a skewed perception of the justice system in America, in which the police are almost always positioned as the good guys.
These “good cop” narratives are rarely balanced out with stories of systemic racism in the criminal justice system. The “bad guys they pursue are often people of color, their characters undeveloped beyond their criminality.”

[…]

“With a few notable exceptions (more on those later), most superhero stories start straight, white men who either function as an extension of a broken U.S. justice system or as vigilantes without any checks on their posers.

Usually, they have some sort of tentative relationship with the government: The Avengers work for...

I was once told if we’re not careful, 2 percent of the passionate will control 98 percent of the indifferent 100 percent of the time.

The more I’ve thought about this phrase, the more I believe it. There is now a small group of passionate people working hard to destroy our American way of life. Treason and treachery are rampant and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals who uphold our laws are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history. These passionate 2 percent appear to be winning.

Despite there being countless good people trying to come to grips with everything else on their plates, our silent majority (the indifferent) can no longer be silent.

If the United States wants to survive the onslaught of socialism, if we are to continue to enjoy self-government and the liberty of our hard-fought freedoms, we have to understand there are two opposing forces: One is the “children of light” and the other is the “children of darkness.”

As I recently wrote, the art and exercise of self-governance require active participation by every American. I wasn’t kidding! And voting is only part of that active participation. Time and again, the silent majority have been overwhelmed by the “audacity and resolve” of small, well-organized, passionate groups. It’s now time for us, the silent majority (the indifferent), to demonstrate both.

The trials of our current times, like warfare, are immense and consequences severe and these seem inconquerable.

As a policewoman from Virginia told me, “People don’t feel safe in their homes and our police force is so demoralized we cannot function as we should. In my 23 years with my department, I have never seen morale so low.”

Another woman from Mississippi told me that we need our leaders to “drop a forceful hammer. People are losing patience. It simply must be stopped! Laws MUST be enforced … no one is above the law.”

Don’t fret. Through smart, positive actions of resolute citizen-patriots, we can prevail. Always keep in mind that our enemy (these dark forces) invariably have difficulties of which we are ignorant.

For most Americans, these forces appear to be strong. I sense they are desperate. I also sense that only a slight push on our part is all that is required to defeat these forces. How should that push come?

Prayers help and prayers matter, but action is also a remedy. Our law enforcement professionals, from the dispatcher to the detective and from the cop to the commissioner, are a line of defense against the corrupt and the criminal. It is how we remain (for now) in a state of relatively peaceful existence.

We must support them with all our being. They are not the enemy; they bring light to the darkness of night through their bravery and determination to do their jobs without fanfare and with tremendous sacrifice.

The silent majority (the indifferent) tend to go the way of those leading them. We are not map- or mind-readers; we are humans fraught with all the hopes and fears that flesh is heir to. We must not become lost in this battle. We must resoundingly follow our God-given common sense.

Seek the truth, fight for it in everything that is displayed before you. Don’t trust the fake news or false prophets; trust your instincts and your common sense. Those with a conscience know the difference between...