Biden Abroad: The Moral and Material Collapse of U.S. Foreign Policy

The American post-Cold War order from the Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush administration is over.

Barack Obama began its erosion with his tired lectures about the past sins of the United States.

Obama empowered radical Islamists. He invited Russia back into the Middle East after a forty-year hiatus. He snored while Vladimir Putin swallowed large areas of Ukraine. He nonchalantly allowed ISIS almost to take over Iraq. And he authored the Libyan misadventure.

Joe Biden has greatly amplified what Obama inaugurated. He accentuates the Obama-authored foreign policy disasters by his own family corruption.

If the U.S. had an honest media, a disinterested Department of Justice, and a professional FBI, the Biden family would likely be facing felony bribery charges and an impeachment vote for leveraging the interests of the U.S. for a few millions of Ukrainian and Chinese cash.

Biden has forfeited any moral credibility America once had in sermonizing to the world about the advantages of transparent democracy.

Instead, Washington under Biden went full Third-world. His family got rich from his offices, and Joe Biden warped government agencies in efforts to take out his next possible presidential rival.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s current Secretary of State, is known mostly for meekly accepting a dressing down from Chinese diplomats in 2021 and subsequent ritual humiliations.

Blinken was also the author of the 2020 election shenanigan of soliciting former intelligence authorities to publish a preposterous lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the “hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” Blinken’s inspired farce was dreamed up to aid a then struggling candidate Biden in his last presidential debate.

The net result of the Obama-Biden continuum has been the moral and material collapse of U.S. foreign policy.

Americans are bewildered that China is now buzzing our jets. It plays chicken with American warships.

It mocks our homeland defenses by sending a spy balloon with impunity across the continental United States.

It is defiantly mum about its creation of a gain-of-function virus under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, despite the ensuing Covid epidemic that killed over 1 million Americans.

The weird reaction of the Biden administration to these affronts is either to contextualize Beijing’s aggression or to ignore them entirely.

Under the earlier Obama-Biden “reset” of Russia, we also paid little attention to the past aggressions of Vladimir Putin, appeased his provocations, and earned the 2014 Russian take-over of the Ukrainian border and Crimea.

Then the resetters flipped during the Trump administration.

They now preposterously claimed that Donald Trump—who had neutered Putin by flooding the world with cheap oil, pulled out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Moscow, killed attacking Russian mercenaries in Syria, and greenlighted offensive weapons to Ukraine—was a Putin “puppet.”

After sleeping when Putin invaded Ukraine twice under Obama, and once under Biden (but not at all under Trump), the Left abruptly adopted Ukrainian resistance as their last chance to prove that Russians should have been guilty of “Russian collusion” and “disinformation.”

Their new legacy is a Chinese-Russian-Iranian anti-American axis.

U.S. arms stockpiles are drained so that a beleaguered Ukraine might have the third largest military budget in the world—and a Verdun-like deathscape of static warfare on the borders of Europe.

Biden desperately sought to revive the failed Obama Iran deal. His subtext was to return to the bankrupt notion that by empowering Iran and its henchmen in Lebanon and Syria, and Hezbollah and Hamas, America could...

Boston Bombing Backstory

Local police, not the FBI, are the true warriors against terrorism.

Ten years ago, at the April 15, 2013 running of the Boston Marathon, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev planted pressure-cooker bombs that wounded more than 250 and killed Lingzi Lu, 23, Krystle Campbell, 29, and Martin Richard, only eight years old. The 2016 film “Patriots Day” dramatizes the story but doesn’t start at the beginning.

A year and a half before the bombing, the FBI ignored warnings from Russia about the Tsarnaevs’ terrorist connections. In the film, Kevin Bacon plays special agent Richard DesLauriers, in charge of the “counterterrorism investigation,” after the fact.

Local police, not the FBI, go after the bombers and manage to take down Tamerlan. Dzhokhar hid in a boat and suffered several wounds, including one to the mouth that may have been self-inflicted.

The brothers had murdered MIT police officer Sean Collier, as U.S. Attorney William Weinreb explained, “shooting him in the head at point-blank range twice in the side of the head and once right between the eyes.”

That brought the death toll to four. As they buried their dead, Bostonians had cause to wonder why the FBI failed to learn from previous bombings.

In 1993, the FBI failed to prevent Islamic terrorists from detonating approximately 1,200 pounds of explosives at the World Trade Center. The blast claimed the lives of John DiGiovanni, Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen Knapp, William Macko, Wilfredo Mercado, and Monica Rodriguez Smith. The blast wounded more than 1,000, including 88 firefighters, 35 police officers, and a medical worker.

Three years later, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, the FBI failed to stop Eric Robert Rudolph from planting a bomb, packed with nails, that killed Alice Hawthorne of Albany, Georgia. Turkish cameraman Melih Unzonyol suffered a fatal heart attack and the bomb wounded more than 100 others.

The FBI then tried to frame security guard Richard Jewell, subject of the eponymous Clint Eastwood film, who tried to evacuate the area before the blast. For his part, Rudolph had an example to follow.

Back in 1978 Ted Kaczynski mailed a bomb that wounded Northwestern University professor Buckley Crist. Kaczynski’s bombs also wounded United Airlines president Percy Wood, Vanderbilt University secretary Janet Smith, UC Berkeley electrical engineering professor Diogenes Angelakos, engineering student John Hauser, University of Michigan professor James McConnell, his assistant Nicklaus Suino, and computer store owner Gary Wright.

Kaczinski’s explosive devices maimed renowned computer scientist David Gelernter in 1993 and killed computer store owner Hugh Scrutton, advertising executive Thomas Mosser and lobbyist Gilbert Murray, in 1994. The so-called Unabomber had been active for 17 years, during the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—all without detection by the FBI.

Only with the aid of Kaczynski’s brother, who identified the bomber through his public manifesto, was the FBI able to track down Ted. He pleaded guilty in 1998 and was sentenced to life without parole.

Three years later, the FBI failed to prevent the attack of September 11, 2001, with 3,000 casualties, billions in damages, and suffering that endures to this day. It remains unclear whether any FBI bosses were disciplined, demoted, or discharged over that deadly failure. It was hardly the bureau’s only lapse.

The FBI had been tracking Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan, a self-described “soldier of Allah” who was communicating with al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al Awlaki about killing Americans. Someone in the FBI’s Washington office dropped the surveillance.

On November 5, 2009 at Fort Hood, Hasan murdered 13 unarmed American soldiers, including Pvt. Francheska Velez. She was pregnant and pleaded “My baby! My baby,” before Hasan shot her through the chest, bringing the death toll to 14 with the death of her unborn child.

Hasan was only stopped when civilian police officers Kim Munley and Mark Todd returned fire and wounded the mass murderer. Munley was wounded in both legs and a wrist but “she stayed upright and kept firing at the charging gunman.” Had Munley not done so, Hasan would have claimed many more lives.

The FBI played no role in the takedown.

There is still no word if any FBI bosses were ever disciplined, demoted, or dismissed for the lapses that enabled this massacre, the worst ever on a U.S. military base. The broader public also stood at risk.

On December 2, 2015, in San Bernardino, California, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people at a holiday office party. The FBI did nothing to prevent the attack and played no role in the takedown. The fleeing terrorists fired at least 81 rounds at police officers, who shot the terrorists dead with no loss of civilian life.

In 2013, the FBI twice interviewed Omar Mateen about his connections to the Islamic State, and questioned him again the following year. Knowing his terrorist connections, the FBI did nothing to prevent Omar Mateen from murdering 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016. Orlando police, not the FBI, took down the mass murderer.

The composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, downplayed Islamic terrorism and cast his domestic opposition as the true threat. That is also true of Joe Biden, as the Delaware Democrat made perfectly clear in an angry speech last September 1.

For the FBI, just about everybody less-than-worshipful of Joe Biden is a domestic terrorist or violent extremist. The bureau has even deployed informers in Catholic churches. FBI boss Christopher Wray is “aghast” and wants to “figure out how we can make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.”

If Catholics, Baptists, or Presbyterians thought that meant the FBI would do it more it would be hard to blame them. The FBI has never been held to account and, indeed, is about to be rewarded with a new headquarters bigger than the Pentagon.

With actual terrorism, the FBI prefers to look the other way and leave the front-line combat to the police, as in Boston in 2013. Ten years later in 2023, actual domestic terrorists are again on the march.

Audrey Hale, a woman who thought she was a man, planned an attack on the Covenant School for months, without detection by the FBI. Hale murdered...

In 2023 It Will Be Nearly Impossible to Avoid Facial Recognition in the U.S.

As more airports in the United States adopt facial recognition technology, the privacy of Americans is once again threatened.

In early December, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Transportation Security Administration is beginning to test new facial recognition tools at 16 major domestic airports. The WaPo reported:

The Transportation Security Administration has been quietly testing controversial facial recognition technology for passenger screening at 16 major domestic airports — from Washington to Los Angeles — and hopes to expand it across the United States as soon as next year. Kiosks with cameras are doing a job that used to be completed by humans: checking the photos on travelers’ IDs to make sure they’re not impostors.

TSA representative Jason Lim told the Post that “none of this facial recognition technology is mandated.” Passengers choosing to opt out of the face identification will still need to present their ID. The TSA also said there are supposed to be signs around informing you of your rights.

The report goes on to inform the reader that although you technically don’t have to participate in facial recognition at the airport, “whether you’ll feel like you have a real choice is a separate question.”

Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or STOP, told the Post that he believes there is “no place more coercive to ask people for their consent than an airport.”

“What we often see with these biometric programs is they are only optional in the introductory phases — and over time we see them becoming standardized and nationalized and eventually compulsory,” Cahn said.

Cahn’s statements ring true in light of previous TSA programs which start out as optional before becoming mandatory, including taking your shoes off at the airport and choosing between walking through the body scanner machines or an invasive pat down.

The TSA’s facial recognition works by having passengers step up to the travel document checker kiosk while they scan their identification card. Then passengers are expected to stare into a camera for up to five seconds while the machine compares the ID to the new photo. This is known as a “one to one” verification system.

The Post notes that the TSA’s facial recognition pilot began at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in August 2020 based on alleged concerns of transmission of COVID-19.

While the TSA claims they do not use facial recognition for law-enforcement purposes and are not building a “new national database of face IDs,” they also acknowledge that the agency can hold data for up to 24 months to “evaluate the system’s effectiveness.”

Unfortunately, the introduction of facial recognition tools is not new. The Biden admin’s current expansion of facial recognition in the U.S. is a continuation of policies set forth by the Trump administration.

The TSA Is Not the Only Agency Using Facial Recognition

In late December 2020 — as Biden was set to become President of...

Energy Inflation Isn’t An Accident, It’s A Planned Demolition

Our current energy crisis was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West, and it’s getting worse.

he West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses — the unprecedented post–World War II economic expansion.

The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply.

In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It’s no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs.

This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in a recent powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.

Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that.

As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tried to strangle at...

The Trump Warrant Had No Legal Basis

A former president’s rights under the Presidential Records Act trump the statutes the FBI cited to justify the Mar-a-Lago raid.

Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in searching Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago? The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled that he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit supporting it. But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no—the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.

The warrant authorized the FBI to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519” (emphasis added). These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national-security information, public records or material relevant to an investigation or other matters properly before a federal agency or the courts.

The materials to be seized included “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”—i.e., during Mr. Trump’s term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that “where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.” The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

The PRA dramatically changed the rules regarding ownership and treatment of presidential documents. Presidents from George Washington through Jimmy Carter treated their White House papers as their personal property, and neither Congress nor the courts disputed that. In Nixon v. U.S. (1992), the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that Richard Nixon had a right to compensation for his presidential papers, which the government had retained under the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974 (which applied only to him). “Custom and usage evidences the kind of mutually explicit understandings that are encompassed within the constitutional notion of ‘property’ protected by the Fifth Amendment,” the judges declared.

The PRA became effective in 1981, at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It established a unique statutory scheme, balancing the needs of the government, former presidents and history. The law declares presidential records to be public property and provides that “the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records.”

The PRA lays out detailed requirements for how the archivist is to administer the records, handle privilege claims, make the records public, and impose restrictions on access. Notably, it doesn’t address the process by which a former president’s records are physically to be turned over to the archivist, or set any deadline, leaving this matter to be negotiated between the archivist and the former president.

The PRA explicitly guarantees a former president continuing access to his papers. Those papers must ultimately be made public, but in the meantime—unlike with all other government documents, which are available 24/7 to currently serving executive-branch officials—the PRA establishes restrictions on access to a former president’s records, including a five-year restriction on access applicable to...

How To Erode the World’s Greatest Military

Alienating half the country is not a wise strategy of military recruitment.

The U.S. Army has met only 40 percent of its 2022 recruiting goals.

In fact, all branches of the military are facing historic resistance to their current recruiting efforts. If some solution is not found quickly, the armed forces will radically shrink or be forced to lower standards—or both.

Such a crisis occurs importunely as an aggressive Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea believe the Biden Administration and the Pentagon have lost traditional U.S. deterrence.

That pessimistic view abroad unfortunately is now shared by many Americans at home. In 2021, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute conducted its periodic poll of attitudes toward the U.S. military. The result was astonishing. Currently, only 45 percent of Americans polled expressed a great deal of trust in their armed forces. Confidence had dived 25 points since an early 2018 poll.

Military officials cite both the usual and a new array of challenges in finding suitable young soldiers—drug use, gang affiliation, physical and mental incapacities, and the dislocations arising from the COVID pandemic and vaccination mandates. But they are too quiet about why such supposedly longer-term obstacles suddenly coalesced in 2022—as if their own leadership and policies have had no effect in discouraging tens of thousands of young men and women to join them.

The Greatest Skedaddle in Modern American History

A year ago, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley were assuring the country not to worry over Joe Biden’s strange ideas of abruptly pulling out all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The radical step was purportedly to coincide with Biden’s planned 20-year celebratory event marking his role in ensuring an iconic end of the war on terror that began on September 11, 2001.

What followed was the worst U.S. military humiliation since Pearl Harbor.

U.S. forces abandoned hundreds if not thousands of American contractors and loyal Afghan employees, a $1 billion embassy, a huge $300 million refitted air base, and reportedly somewhere between $60-80 billion in military equipment and infrastructure. That sum was nearly double all the current military assistance sent to Ukraine.

Thirteen Americans were murdered by terrorists during the chaotic flight. In response, the United States mistakenly blew up 10 innocent Afghans after misidentifying them as ISIS terrorists. The horrific scenes at the Kabul airport surpassed the 1975 catastrophic ending of the Vietnam War on the U.S. embassy roof.

The global aftermath was eerie. Russia in a few months thereafter invaded Ukraine. Iran proudly announced it would soon have enough fissionable material to make a nuclear weapon. North Korea resumed its provocative missile launches. China openly talked of storming Taiwan.

The common denominator was the global perception that any president and military responsible for such colossal, televised incompetence would or could neither deter enemy aggression nor protect allied interests.

In response, widely reported furor arose among the ranks of some American officers and the enlisted. Mid-level officers especially claimed they were ignored after warning that the abrupt withdrawal was suicidal, that Pentagon grandees were lying about the dire facts on the grounds in efforts to lubricate the Biden agenda, and that thousands of Americans and loyal Afghans would be...

‘Pope Francis’ - A Wolf in Shepherd’s Clothing?

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano sheds a disturbing light on the "Deep Church."

“A non-Catholic Pope”? It sounds like a contradiction in terms. But those are the words used to describe Pope Francis by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States. In fact, he rarely uses the term “Pope Francis.” He refers to him instead as “Bergoglio” and to his pontificate as the “Bergoglian papacy.”

Vigano has a following in some Catholic circles but it’s likely that the vast majority of Catholics have never heard of him. Yet the questions he raises about Pope Francis are of great consequence, not just for Catholics but for non-Catholics as well.

Since there are about 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, whoever leads them can have a significant effect on a large segment of the global population. It’s widely thought, for instance, that Pope John Paul II did more to put an end to communism in Eastern Europe than any other individual with the exception of Ronald Reagan. For evidence of the close collaboration between the two men, read historian Paul Kengor’s revealing book, A Pope and a President.

Now we have a new pope and a new president and neither of them seem terribly concerned about the revival of communist power throughout the world. In fact, both men have surrounded themselves with left-leaning advisors and appointees.

In addition, both Francis and Biden have effectively rolled back the agendas of their immediate predecessors. This is obvious in the case of Biden because the reversal has been swift and abrupt. The reversal that Francis has engineered is less noticeable since it has been more gradual, but the resulting change in the Catholic Church has been every bit as radical as the one now taking place in American government and society.

Archbishop Vigano links the two together. He talks of a coup in America and other Western nations led by secular leftist ideologues, and a coup in the Catholic Church led by Bergoglio and the progressive Catholics who surround him.

However, the coup in the Church has been a more silent one. Catholic writers who have studied Francis’s career describe him as a skillful--even Machiavellian--manipulator. According to them, all his actions are shrouded in a deliberate fog. Consequently, most Catholics remain unaware of the magnitude of the changes. It is only when a priest or prelate resists Francis that “the dictator pope” (the title of Henry Sire’s book about Francis) reveals himself. Just as the Biden administration is seeking to purge conservatives from government and the military, Francis seeks to purge traditional Catholics from the Church. And since some of the strongest resistance to Francis comes from adherents of the Latin Mass, he has acted to suppress the Latin Mass. Meanwhile, some conservative prelates find themselves demoted to obscure outposts, and others live in fear that...

New York Magazine Writer Mocks Conservatives Helping Stranded Drivers On Snow-Covered I-95

A New York Magazine writer took to Twitter on Tuesday to mock a conservative group trying to help drivers stranded on snow-covered I-95 in Virginia.

After a snowstorm and subsequent accidents trapped hundreds of motorists in their vehicles for nearly 24 hours, The Reagan Battalion, a conservative media group, offered to connect people in need of food, water, and other help to rescuers armed with supplies.

New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait, however, used The Reagan Battalion’s neighborly offer to take political shots at the conservative group’s namesake, former President Ronald Reagan.

“The Reaganites used to believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” Chait tweeted.

Chait’s insensitivity to the ongoing crisis was quickly reprimanded by several Twitter users including The Reagan Battalion which encouraged the writer to assist the people in need.

“Now if you can use your account to help people in dire need of assistance and put your politics aside for a few hours that would be great,” the group tweeted.

As of Tuesday morning, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam still had not called in the National Guard. Instead, he claimed that the Virginia Department of Transportation had all of the resources it needed to rescue people.

“We have the manpower and people have been working through the night, the National Guard is on standby,” Northam said, before switching his attention to the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“That doesn’t happen at the snap of a finger. I don’t know if anybody remembers the Insurrection. But that happened in the afternoon, we had the National Guard on the ground the following morning. These are civilians that have jobs and need to muster and then be deployed. So again, those are all options that are on the table,” Northam said in a press conference.

Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine was among many of the drivers who slept in his car Monday night while temperatures outside stayed below...

Facebook Bans Conservative Children’s Book Publisher

Social media giant calls patriot picture book ads 'disruptive'

Facebook banned a conservative publishing company from advertising children's books on the site, claiming its ads were "disruptive content."

Heroes of Liberty founder Bethany Mandel said Monday that Facebook permanently blocked the company from advertising on the platform, and locked her out of the company's page when she appealed the decision. Mandel says Facebook's actions cost the company six months of advertising data. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment but told Heroes of Liberty it was being punished for "consistently promoting ads that don't comply" with Facebook's standards.

"We just assumed we were going to be safe from big tech censorship because we are so plain vanilla," Mandel told the Washington Free Beacon. "It's a children's book company. But even a children's book company will not be safe from the tentacles of big tech censorship."

Heroes of Liberty Facebook ads

Heroes of Liberty publishes "quality illustrated biographies of great Americans," including President Ronald Reagan and Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett. Mandel said the company spent most of its marketing budget on Facebook ads. The company will now pivot to a subscription model. Mandel hopes the switch will stop tech companies from interfering with the company, though she acknowledges it is "not what we normally do in America for books."

Facebook is one of the biggest players in online advertising. The company earned more than $84 billion in advertising revenue in 2020, over a quarter of all U.S. ad revenue. The social media giant regularly shuts down right-leaning advertisers and individual users.

In 2021, Facebook suspended the Instagram account of a Gold Star mother who criticized President Joe Biden and blocked ads for a song that criticized Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal. Facebook also removed a political ad that criticized the withdrawal, suppressed claims that Kyle Rittenhouse was innocent, and blocked a Russian activist from posting evidence of abuse of political prisoners.


While Facebook regularly bans right-wing content, it also maintains a "whitelist" of nearly six million prominent users who are exempt from the platform's rules.

At press time, Facebook allowed ads for a children's book titled Who Was Fidel Castro?, which describes the Communist leader as "a boy who...

Former Trump confidante Peter Navarro unloads on the Deep State’s deep-sixing of the 45th president

Personnel is policy.

That’s how Washington actually works. You can study the candidates, weigh their character against their policy pronouncements, against their public persona, against their opponents, and at the end of the day you can elect the right person for the right reasons and they can still disappoint you. Not because they’re dishonest or incompetent, but because the people they bring to power with them may not place service above their own aims and ambitions.

In his latest book, In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro writes that the Deep State in both parties did everything it could to destroy the administration of President Donald J. Trump. When Trump won the presidency, he assembled a polyglot administration including America-first proponents such as Navarro, and Deep State actors who veered between merely disdaining Trump’s populist nationalism to actively undermining it. Trump himself had little to no way of predicting which side a given official would end up on.

The Deep State did not get so deep without developing the ability to shapeshift and cloak its selfish aims in noble rhetoric for decades. Trump’s brand of conservative populist nationalism was a whole new kind of politics, using planks from the likes of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, a dash of Douglas MacArthur and P.T. Barnum, and Billy Graham, to fashion a new platform that thundered across the fruited plain, captured previously blue Rust Belt states, and toppled the Clinton cabal.

Donald J. Trump ran to “make America great again,” and as Navarro writes in “In Trump Time,” he spent every waking second focused on doing that. Trump set out to do the impossible, secure the border, bring American jobs back from overseas, lift up America’s working class to restore the American dream, and take on all challengers from Beijing to Moscow to the DNC and the ivory towers in government and academia. The Deep Swamp hated him.

Trump was largely successful and had the gaudy economic performance to prove it. Under him, the United States had historically low unemployment, particularly among the demographics the media usually claim are “left behind” by Republican presidencies. He led America to energy independence and then dominance. International rivals genuinely feared him, which meant they would not dare take him on. Trump made America safe again.

But the Trump colossus had an Achilles heel. Personnel is policy. As Navarro details with all the receipts, Trump found himself undermined as he fought to make America great again by the usual suspects — the media, academia, and the Democrats — and by many so-called allies in his own administration and the GOP. Navarro, a Peace Corps volunteer in his youth and a Harvard-educated economist, identifies suspects throughout the Trump administration who, either by choice or by circumstance, ended up undermining Trump. Many, according to Navarro, actively sabotaged him on behalf of the swamp that resented him, hated him, and feared him, because unlike many previous presidents and the current one, he would never be their puppet.

Trump’s greatest strength with his most ardent supporters was also his greatest weakness with the swamp: He did not come from them, was not one of them, did not see the world the way they do, and had no use for them. They are mercantilists; Trump is a patriot. So they set out to destroy him at every turn, even using the blight of the COVID pandemic to run interference for China and damage the American president in the midst of crisis.

Navarro highlights a critical moment when the media and Deep State came together to...

Sowing Winds and Reaping Whirlwinds

The Left is being consumed by its own hatreds and hubris.

"For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. "

— Hosea 8:7

Joe Biden, first as a candidate and then in the White House, from the outset saw the COVID-19 pandemic mainly as a means of leveraging political support, from the manner in which the lockdowns allowed him to run a virtual campaign from his basement to equating Donald Trump with the COVID-19 virus.

Like many on the Left, Biden was overt in such cynicism. So were Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, and Jane Fonda—who claimed that COVID was a “never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste” moment. Panic and lockdowns could help achieve single-payer health care, or a recalibrated capitalism, or the end of Donald Trump himself.

At the height of the last presidential campaign, Biden in September 2020 declared that Trump was responsible for the then-current 200,000 COVID deaths: “If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive.”

Biden felt no need to list details where Trump had lethally erred or had not “done his job.”

He did not explain how any president should be able to prevent all deaths from a plague. And in 2020, Biden certainly had no expectation that before his own first year as president was over the cumulative deaths from the pandemic would exceed 800,000. He would have found it surreal to even imagine that soon there would be far more deaths under his own tenure than during Trump’s presidency—despite being the beneficiary of ubiquitous vaccinations, new therapies, and antiviral drugs unavailable throughout most of 2020.

During the 2020 campaign, both Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris also had cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of the Operation Warp Speed vaccines. They repeatedly implied that any forthcoming jabs would be tainted by Trump’s sponsorship.

Yet, later in office, both would publicly deplore any doubt similar to their own about vaccination safety or efficacy. Indeed, they equated remaining unvaxed to being unpatriotic. In addition, when Biden was inaugurated, he claimed that no Americans had been vaccinated. In fact, on some days under Trump more than a million people were receiving vaccinations.

Given that the new daily cases and COVID fatality rates had begun to decline shortly before Trump left office, and due to the growing ubiquity of the Warp Speed vaccinations, Biden gladly took ownership of the virus and boasted it would be essentially gone by July 4—due to his own rebranding of Trump’s vaccination programs.

Biden had assumed he could blame Trump for all 2020 COVID-19 deaths, while few would die from the pandemic in 2021, and that, again, he could take credit for the Warp Speed vaccination program.

But fate, not Biden, was the master of our COVID-19 destinies. Soon both the Delta and Omicron variants arrived, and we are now back to a Groundhog Day of possible lockdowns and mask mandates. Certainly, Biden would not wish a political rival to do to him what he did to Trump: question the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, blame Biden for more than 400,000 deaths on his watch, and claim the continuance of the pandemic was Biden’s fault alone.
Truth and Consequences

What’s the moral of Biden’s current troubles? From the Bible and the Greeks and throughout the Western tradition, there is a constant refrain of being wary of hubris, the lying and arrogance that are innate to it, and the divine power that ultimately levels things out.

Biden and the Left so despised Donald Trump that they lost all sense of moderation, of proportion, of logic itself. Thus, they find themselves in the current ridiculous situation of suffering the consequences of their own unhinged rhetoric and actions.

This madness was birthed in part because Trump’s newly calibrated populist Republican Party had the potential to permanently draw the working class away from Democrats. In part, they found Trump’s salesmanship and braggadocio repulsive and contrary to bicoastal manners. Partly his agenda had more success since any first term since Ronald Reagan. Add it up, and the result was toxic hatred and mindless rejection of the successful policies.

Biden’s undoing was claiming not just to be antithetical to Trump, but the antithesis of all that Trump did. His hatred blinded him to the reality that Trump’s record on Afghanistan, the border, COVID-19, the economy, foreign policy, energy, and regulation was in each instance either adequate or very good. To simply nullify all of it, and to claim Trump was an ungodly disaster, meant Biden’s own one-dimensional rejectionist policies had to be winning and successful. And when they were neither, he suffered not just the wages of failure, but of hypocrisy and...

Our Representatives, Not J6 Protesters, Defile the ‘Sacred’ U.S. Capitol

The real heretics continue to rule while Robert Reeder is off to jail.

When politics is your religion and government is your God, a public building is your church.

The four-hour disturbance at the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, according to Beltway aristocracy and the media, wasn’t a legitimate protest that turned violent in some areas—it was a sacrilege. Never mind that the building itself sustained minimal damage—early reports estimated $30 million for repairs but the actual figure is around $1 million—the real vandalism occurred when thousands of Americans wearing MAGA hats invaded the cathedral of government power occupied by America’s political deity.

And the alleged apostates are paying a dear price.

Since January 6, lawmakers, judges, and federal prosecutors have routinely described the Capitol building as holy ground. “To those who engaged in the gleeful desecration of this, our temple of democracy, American democracy, justice will be done,” Pelosi said after the breach. Representative Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.) tweeted on January 6 that “the Capitol building is the center and sacred symbol of democracy.”

After the joint session reconvened later that evening, Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) mourned how “this sacred place was desecrated by a mob today, on our watch. This temple to democracy was defiled by thugs who roamed the halls.” Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) thanked the first responders who protected “this sacred Chamber.”

Here is how Joe Biden’s Justice Department recently described the actions of Robert Reeder, a Maryland man whose life has been ruined since he was charged with four misdemeanors related to his participation in the January 6 protest: “The attack on the U.S. Capitol . . . was one of the only times in our history when the building was literally occupied by hostile participants,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Rothstein wrote in an August filing. “The Defendant chose to be a part of the desecration of the Capitol rotunda. The Defendant stood in the center of the rotunda, where Ruther (sic) Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln, among others, lied in state. What the Defendant chose to record and celebrate at that place, at that time, was antithetical to the events that most Americans associate with...

The Biden No-Go Zones

The Democratic Party won the long march through journalism, but this Pyrrhic victory has meant the destruction of every principle of journalistic integrity liberals ever claimed to champion.

In American journalism, there are supposed to be some clear, nonnegotiable third-rails.

One is zero tolerance for overtly racist language and comportment among our movers and shakers. Reporters, for example, for four years damned Donald Trump for his neutralizing summation that there were both “fine people” and extremists mingled among the hordes of protestors during their occasionally violent encounters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

It mattered little to the media that Trump added qualifiers of “many” and “both” sides of the protests:

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides . . . And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, OK? . . . Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats—you had a lot of bad people in the other group, too.

Selected words from the above quote were recycled ad nauseam as proof Trump was a racist.

Another no-go zone is any hint of contextualizing sexual harassment or assault. No statute of limitations can provide exemption, much less a “she said/he said” defense in the age of “women must be believed.” The Brett Kavanaugh circus of September 2018 was a reminder that a lack of evidence, credible witnesses, or basic logic is no defense against the 30-year-old charges of alleged teenage sexual misbehavior. Bill Clinton managed to use his progressive credentials as an insurance policy to avoid for months any condemnation that he was a callous womanizer, but finally the press corps found his exploitative appetites too egregious to ignore.

A third zero-tolerance zone is any hint of presidential debility. We were told in the dark days of 1973 that Nixon was non compos mentis, nursing his wounds with drink as his legendary constitution finally cracked under the pressure, making him supposedly unable physically to withstand the impending impeachment. “Saturday Night Live” made an industry out of Chevy Chase replaying Gerald Ford’s stumbles. Ronald Reagan was all but declared senile by the press for using index cards in some of his summits and speeches, or putting his hand to his ear and claiming he could not fathom reporters’ gottcha questions amid the din of swirling helicopter blades on the White House lawn.

Finally, lying, fibbing, and even presidential exaggeration are deemed intolerable—or so we are told by the media. It does not matter that the newsroom is currently one of the great purveyors of untruth, as we saw in the Russian collusion hoax, the dubious Wuhan wet-market narrative, or the yarn about the...

US moving only China region carrier to Afghanistan and Sen. Inhofe gives big warning – here it is

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed concerns regarding the redeployment of the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier to help with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, saying it demonstrates the United States military is being asked “to do too much with too little,” and sends a terrible message to China.

“Force protection must always remain our highest priority, and I have complete confidence in the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan. However, the reported redeployment of the Reagan from Indo-Pacific Command to Central Command underscores that we are asking the military to do too much with too little,” Inhofe wrote in a statement provided to American Military News. “There are no other carriers available, and the Ford remains far behind schedule. The Secretary of Defense should not have to choose between providing force protection and keeping an aircraft carrier in the priority theater.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, the USS Ronald Reagan is the only aircraft carrier currently in the Asia-Pacific region, but officials said the ship will leave its post in Yokosuka, Japan, and travel to Afghanistan in early summer, where it will operate for at least four months.

Defense officials added that the Asia-Pacific region will not have a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier for a period of time while the USS Ronald Reagan is in the...

Here’s How You Can Beat Leftism in the Classroom Before It’s Too Late

In her Advanced Placement government and politics class, a high school student named Anna was assigned to read a New York Times commentary that called the U.S. Constitution “imbecilic.” Many of her peers agreed with this conclusion based on the author’s argument that the Constitution is too difficult to amend.

So, Anna approached her teacher with an article that explained why the Times’ piece was historically inaccurate and logically ludicrous.

The next year, the teacher assigned that same Times article, but he also included Anna’s suggested counter-article. And instead of siding with the Times, that class concluded that the Constitution was not “imbecilic,” but, rather, wisely designed to protect people’s rights.

To borrow a phrase from Vice President Kamala Harris, “That little girl was me,” and by speaking up, I was able to positively impact subsequent groups of students. My experience with leftism in school was not an isolated incident and represents a much broader, serious problem within the U.S. public education system.

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Generation Z is on track to be the most educated generation in history, and yet, nearly half hold favorable views of socialism and 70% say that the government “should be doing more to solve problems.”

Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” and if these trends continue, Gen Z will bring that tragedy to fruition.

So what has turned teens who typically yearn for freedom into a herd of statist sheeple? Leftist indoctrination not only runs rampant in higher education—it has infiltrated public schools, leaving young minds susceptible and sympathetic to left-wing propaganda.

Race-based 1619 Project curriculum infects 4,500 classrooms across the country, Seattle public schools force “trans-affirming” education on their kindergarten students, and L.A. County schools claim it is “white supremacy” to ask students to show their work.

There are nearly four Democrats for every Republican in the teaching profession, and the nation’s two largest teachers unions donate a total of $51 billion to support...

Florida Republicans Looking To Rename U.S. Highway 27 In Florida To: Donald J. Trump Highway...

 I mean... we already have the Ronald Reagan Turnpike...

Do the Chinese Own Joe Biden?

Americans will need to come to grips with a mounting, deadly serious crisis. The Democrat nominee for the presidency appears saturated with corruption, and worse -- yes, there’s a worse here -- he’s compromised himself to foreign powers, one of which -- the People’s Republic of China (PRC) -- is rightly regarded as an enemy of the U.S. Sly Vlad Putin and whoever runs the Ukraine owns Joe Biden, too. Russia and the Ukraine having the goods on Biden is bad enough, but China is the U.S.’s principal rival for global dominance. The blackmailing of a President Joe Biden is a chilling prospect. Biden as president imperils the nation in ways never experienced before.

What does this mean to the Sino-American rivalry? It means that with Biden blackmailed and in the White House, the Chinese may never fire a shot to gain hegemony over the U.S. -- the domination that tyrant Xi Jingping dreams about.

Did you know that in the last week the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group was deployed to the South China Sea? Let’s examine this development and then tie it in to the growing Biden uber-scandal.

Per USNI News, October 15, 2020:

The carrier strike group] is now operating in the South China Sea for the third time as part of its current underway period. Meanwhile, a destroyer made a transit of the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday.

USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) and its strike group passed through the Strait of Malacca and entered the South China Sea on Monday, according to ship spotters. Accompanying the carrier was guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam (CG-54) and destroyer USS Halsey (DDG-97).

Why has the U.S. sent a strike group back for a third time recently? More from the USNI News report:

USS Barry (DDG-52) passed through the strait on Wednesday, a first for a U.S. warship since Aug. 31. “The ship’s transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” read the statement. [italics added]

While the U.S. under Donald Trump’s leadership has routinely contested the PRC’s fraudulent claim to the South China Sea as its territorial waters, the strike group’s deployment involves much more this time. It targets recent PRC threats to Taiwan. President Trump intends selling advanced weapon systems to Taiwan as a counter to mounting Chinese threats. If war comes with the PRC, sooner rather than later, Taiwan is the flashpoint.

From the Washington Post, October 12, 2020:

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- With tensions soaring in the Taiwan Strait, China responded to Taiwanese overtures for dialogue by releasing new footage showing a large-scale military exercise simulating an invasion and a purported confession from a Taiwanese businessman held captive in China on spying charges.

The double-barreled release by the influential China Central Television late Saturday and Sunday signaled a hard line from Beijing on the same weekend that Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen offered conciliatory remarks expressing a desire to hold talks as fears grow that China's increasing threats toward Taiwan could spill over into military action.

And, finally, this from the Post report:

Man Is Not Free Unless Government Is Limited...

 

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Is Donald Trump Today’s ‘Citizen Kane’? ‘Citizen Trump’ Film Suggests Yes

Through the lens of the 1941 classic 'Citizen Kane,' a documentary filmmaker seeks to understand the life journey of President Trump and his successful venture into politics.

In a culture that follows President Donald Trump’s every move, word, and tweet, few of even his core supporters could name the film he considers most significant. Repeatedly, in separate interviews over the decades, the now-leader of the free world has named 1941 cinematic masterpiece “Citizen Kane” as his favorite movie.

Several observers have noted parallels between Trump’s public persona and the fictional plot: A man of great charisma rises from obscurity into wealth and power, first through popular media, then as a political candidate. Back in 2002, Trump commented on the classic film’s message. “I think you learn in ‘Kane’ that maybe wealth isn’t everything,” he said. “Because he had the wealth, but he didn’t have the happiness.”

On Sept. 7, filmmaker Robert Orlando releases “Citizen Trump,” a feature-length documentary that examines the life and rise of the man who today dominates national politics. “Since my years in film school, I’ve been trained to see nuances in this drama,” said Orlando in a phone interview. “Watching ‘Citizen Kane’ again this spring during the lockdown, it struck me how much the sequencing of this narrative matched up with the rise of Donald Trump.”



Several movies with a political bent have come out recently or are set to be released soon. “Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump” intends to rev up the leftist base, while “Trump 2024” and Dinesh D’souza’s “Trump Card” make the case for a second term. By contrast, Orlando’s previous films “The Divine Plan,” about Ronald Reagan’s partnership with Pope John Paul II, and “Silence Patton,” on the legendary World War II general, have sought to present well-rounded stories of ...