Thursday, July 20, 2023
Biden’s DOJ Will Trigger A Major Crisis If Trump Is Indicted For Jan. 6
The news that Joe Biden’s Justice Department might soon indict and arrest former President Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol should terrify all Americans, regardless of their political beliefs.
Put bluntly, if Biden’s DOJ arrests Trump, the president’s main political rival heading into the 2024 election, it will trigger a political and electoral crisis unlike any America has ever faced. It’s not too much to say that such a move would not only imperil the upcoming presidential election but the republic itself. Jailing political rivals is what happens in tinpot dictatorships like Nicaragua, where President Daniel Ortega’s political rivals often find themselves arrested and imprisoned on charges of treason.
Now it appears it could happen here. On Tuesday, Trump said he had received a letter informing him he is a target of the federal criminal investigation of Jan. 6 being led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump explained he was given the letter on Sunday and that Smith gave him just four days to report to the grand jury, “which almost always means an Arrest and Indictment,” Trump wrote.
This is the second target letter Trump has received from Smith. The first one came in June, in connection with the unprecedented FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last year over classified documents. Days later, Trump was charged with dozens of criminal counts relating to seven different federal laws governing the handling of classified material. (Recall that classified documents, some of them top secret and dating back at least six years, were also found in President Joe Biden’s garage and at his “think tank” in Washington, D.C., last November through January. Rest assured Biden will never be indicted over it.)
Trump and others have rightly denounced this as the weaponization of federal law enforcement and the criminalization of political differences. It’s also just a naked attempt to rig the 2024 election in Biden’s favor. As Tucker Carlson has said, “They’re trying to take Trump out before you can vote for him, and that should upset you more than anything that’s happened in American politics in your lifetime.”
That’s not an overstatement. If this scheme works, if Biden’s DOJ succeeds in taking Trump out ahead of 2024 on bogus charges related to Jan. 6, it’s hard to see how we can ever have a normal election again in this country, how the outcome of any future election will be seen as legitimate.
Forget about the stalwart Trump voters who claim 2020 was stolen. If Biden’s DOJ throws Trump in prison, Ortega-style, for a crime the U.S. Senate already acquitted him of, there’ll be a whole new constituency of voters who will claim, rightly, that 2024 has been preemptively stolen.
Indeed, Biden’s Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland might be badly overplaying its hand here, unintentionally swelling the ranks of Americans who might not love Trump but absolutely loathe the way federal law enforcement has been deployed against him and his supporters from the moment he won office in 2016.
Between the Russia-collusion hoax, two bogus impeachments, and a litany of outrageous indictments, Trump’s enemies in Washington are earning him sympathy from ordinary American people, who can recognize injustice and abuse of power when...
The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1451
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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #2147
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Wednesday, July 19, 2023
The Classic Psychology Text That Predicted Today’s Urban Decay
Why this May, for example, did the citizens of Chicago -- a city where 21,000 students cannot demonstrate a basic competence in reading, science, and math -- choose the teachers union-backed candidate, Brandon Johnson, for mayor? Especially when Johnson’s chief opponent, Paul Vallas, had promised the electorate sensible school reforms?
Why, a few years earlier, did San Franciscans elect a mayor, London Breed, whose obvious reluctance to crack down on criminal behavior has since forced the city’s largest mall to close, two of its best hotels to declare bankruptcy, and tens of thousands of high-earning taxpayers to move away?
Why has there been no serious movement to get New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to initiate proceedings to remove Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who refuses prosecute “low-level” crimes, all while promising to downgrade felony charges and to decriminalize resisting police arrest?
And why, in 2022, did Los Angelinos pick another progressive Democrat to be their next mayor, rather than the candidate who promised to finally do something about the city’s exploding homelessness problem?
In 1954, three academic psychologists -- Stanford University’s Leon Festinger along with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter -- described a very different kind of social dysfunction, but one that helps us understand why so many urban Americans refuse to demand saner government. As reported in the still-widely read college text When Prophesy Fails, Festinger and his colleagues followed the activities of a religious cult, whose leader claimed to have received messages from the planet Clarion. These communications warned of a massive flood that would engulf a wide area around Salt Lake City on December 21 of that year and promised that those who heeded the alert would be rescued by an alien spacecraft just before catastrophe struck.
As researchers specializing in what has come to be known as “cognitive dissonance” -- the tension between what one believes will happen and what really transpires -- the three psychologists saw the alien prophesy as a rare chance to observe people who were clearly committed to a very unlikely outcome. Some in the cult had already left their jobs so they could escape danger on the Clarion ship, while others had ended relationships, given away their savings, or sold their possessions. All the researchers had to do was to quietly infiltrate the group and record the responses to the failed prophecy.
Unsurprisingly, the cult members’ initial reaction to the anticlimactic events of December 21 was to wonder whether their leader had unintentionally misread the original alien messages. Maybe she had gotten the wrong day. Or perhaps even the year.
The interesting development was what happened later. For while some who had been loosely attached to the cult from the beginning started to drift away from the group, those with stronger beliefs became even more convinced of the initial prophesy, variously rationalizing the lack of a flood and even seeking out new converts. Some went to TV and newspaper reporters with periodic predictions of a rescheduled alien landing, while the leader herself kept trying to contact Clarion extraterrestrials right up until her death in 1992.
The lesson of Festinger et al’s 1954 study for our own time is that when people encounter information which contradicts their view of reality, many will adjust their thinking to logically accommodate what has happened. But those with stronger convictions will do the exact opposite, entertaining even the most far-fetched ideas to preserve some semblance of their original beliefs.
According to cognitive dissonance theory, it should come as no surprise that large numbers of city dwellers -- the bluest of all Americans, according to polls -- should react to the seeming failure of left-wing social programs by becoming even more progressive. In the case of crime, what might seem to someone from a small town in Iowa like an obvious reason to enforce existing law becomes for the urban liberal a reason to identify even more closely with the “plight” of those “involuntarily reduced” to wrongdoing. Or in the case of K-12 education, declining test scores are not a reason to raise academic standards, but to decry such solutions as “white propaganda” and to focus instead on teaching schoolchildren about racial and gender inequities.
The good news about this psychological explanation for urban decay is that it does offer some hope for an eventual reversal. It tells us that those city dwellers who continue to vote for increasingly irrational policies are doing so, not (as they say) because of a progressive vision they claim to be drawn to, but because of what they are trying to escape: growing evidence that their political beliefs are...
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