Poking China: Biden Asks Congress to Approve $1.1 Billion in Weapons for Taiwan

As Congressional delegations line up to be more provocative toward China while visiting Taiwan, President Biden has announced that he would like to sell $1.1 billion in new weapons to Taiwan. China is not amused. What could go wrong? Also today: the Pentagon has sent all its toys to Ukraine, leaving US troops with "reduced readiness" to defend this country. Look for bigger military budgets in our future! Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Poking China: Biden Asks Congress to Approve $1.1 Billion in Weapons for Taiwan

Are You Attending the RPI Conference This Saturday?

The Ron Paul Institute is holding its annual conference at the Westin Washington Dulles Airport this Saturday, September 3. It stands to be another outstanding one. I have the honor and pleasure of again speaking at it. I will also be speaking at the conference’s program for young scholars the day before.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Anatomy of a Police State.” As the conference’s web page states, “Authoritarianism on the march. The police state advances. In near-darkness we find the greatest opportunity to make the case for liberty!”

The conference will feature several speakers with whom FFF readers are familiar. John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, is one of them. Practically very week, we feature John’s article in our FFF Daily. Chris Coyne is professor of economics at George Mason University, which has the best overall free-market, Austrian-oriented economics program in the country. Chris has a new book coming out this year entitled,  In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace. Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute will be talking about inflation. Plus Dan McAdams, Gary Heavin, Cheryl Chumley, Doug Macgregor, and, of course, Ron Paul, who is a real-life hero for me.

Every day, I see countless commentators in the mainstream press focusing on Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and other authoritarian, totalitarian, or communist regimes. (I often wonder why they don’t spend any time on Vietnam.)

How much time do I spend focusing on the tyranny of foreign regimes? About 2 percent of my time.

Why so little time on them? Because none of them has ever taken away my rights and freedoms. The regime that has taken away my rights and freedoms is the US government. I would rather spend 98 percent of my time focusing on the regime that has taken away my rights and freedoms rather than get distracted by foreign regimes that have taken away the rights and freedoms of their citizenry,

After all, I want to be free. I want to live in a free society. Given that that is one of my principal goals in life, why should I spend my time focusing on the lack of freedom in Russia, China, North Korea, and elsewhere? How does that bring me closer to a free society here at home?

In fact, it’s definitely in the interests of US officials to have Americans focusing their attention on the tyranny and wrongdoing of foreign regimes, especially Russia and China. The more that Americans focus on those foreign regimes, the less they will focus on the destruction and restoration of their rights and freedoms here at home. 

The mainstream media, of course, feed into this mindset by devoting 98 percent of their time to foreign regimes, such as Russia and China, and 2 percent (or less) of their time on the tyranny here at home. That’s because (1) they have a blind spot when it comes to US-imposed tyranny; (2) many of them consider themselves to be loyal and patriotic assets of the US national-security establishment; and (3) they are scared to death to expose and criticize US governmental wrongdoing for fear that US officials will do to them what they have done to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

The Ron Paul Institute gets all this. That’s why the focus of its conference is not on the police states in Russia, China, and North Korea but rather on the police state under which we Americans suffer here at home — and on what we need to do to rid our nation of their terrible scourge and restore liberty to our land.

I hope you can attend this important conference. Not only will you watch some great talks, you will also have the opportunity to hang out with people who are as concerned about the plight of our country as you are and who are as committed as you are to getting it back on the right track. You can register here. If you do make it, please come up and say hello. 

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from Are You Attending the RPI Conference This Saturday?

Salman Rushdie, Charles Murray, Fatwa and Cancel Culture

At first glance, there would appear to be something wrong with the title of this essay. Surely, the Muslim fatwa against Salman Rushdie (death sentence in his case) for writing The Satanic Verses, a book widely deemed offensive in this community, can have little or nothing to do with Charles Murray in particular and the wokester cancel culture in general?

Not so fast.

Au contraire, there are indeed similarities between the two, and important ones at that. Both Salman Rushdie and Charles Murray were physically attacked upon the occasion of them giving public speeches on intellectual/artistic matters.

Yes, it cannot be denied that no one, at least of yet, has been murdered by the progressives for articulating viewpoints they regard as invasive. But, then, the same can be said of Salman Rushdie. He was recently subjected to a violent attack on him in Chautauqua, near Lake Erie in western New York, at the Chautauqua Institution, a community that offers arts and literary programming; despite that, he is still alive. Moreover, a fatwa is merely a finding emanating from a recognized Islamic authority on a point of Muslim law. By no means do all fatwas call for the death of those judged in this manner.

On the other hand victims of the so-called “progressives” have indeed also suffered from violence. Consider the case of Charles Murray. Conservative and libertarian Middlebury College students invited him to speak on his latest book Coming Apart, which subjects the plight of the white working class to the same type of rigorous analysis for which he most famous for, which appeared in his co authored book The Bell Curve. Leftist students at that institution of higher learning found his views odious, and tried to physically intimidate him.

He escaped bodily unscathed, but the same cannot be said for Allison Stanger, a Middlebury professor who accompanied him; she had to be hospitalized with a concussion. Not as bad as being knifed in the neck? True enough. But we’re getting there.

Here is a very famous statement by New York State Senator Chuck Schumer addressed to two U. S. supreme court judges: "I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” concerning Roe v. Wade. Those words were a clear criminal threat, and should have been punished. I want to now use similar words, not as a threat, but as a prediction: if the liberal – left continues down its present path of quelling free speech, they, too, will be “releasing the whirlwind.”

The chickens will come home to roost; no, they are already doing so. As we have just seen in the case of one of their own favorites, Salman Rushdie, both sides can victimized by this evil, vicious game.

I implore the left, socialist, liberals to cease and desist from this barking mad behavior of theirs. That would include, in addition to cancelling speakers, requiring McCarthyism-type loyalty oaths for hiring, tenure and promotion in academia, safe spaces, microaggressions, promoting the view that all whites are racists and the claim that all racial or sexual diversity is due to racism or sexism to elementary school children and all the other panoply of these modern-day totalitarians.



from Salman Rushdie, Charles Murray, Fatwa and Cancel Culture

Iraq and Libya Imploding - Another 'Successful' US Intervention!

First Afghanistan imploded and now it appears Iraq and Libya are about to follow suit. Syria simmers. The fruits of US interventionism are everywhere the same: chaos and death, not the promised "triumph of peace and democracy." Also today: Facebook exec admits FBI pushed the company to censor "the laptop from hell." Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Iraq and Libya Imploding - Another 'Successful' US Intervention!

Keeping Out the Jacobins

I’ve been reading The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State by Claes G. Ryn, first published in 1991. It’s a short but insightful polemic about the pernicious influence of neoconservatism—the “New Jacobinism”—on American affairs. Here is a brief overview:

This strongly and lucidly argued book gave early warning of a political-intellectual movement that was spreading in the universities, media, think-tanks, and foreign-policy and national security establishment of the United States. That movement claims that America represents universal principles and should establish armed global hegemony. Claes G. Ryn demonstrates that, although this ideology is often called “conservative” or “neoconservative,” it has more in common with the radical Jacobin ideology of the French Revolution of 1789. The French Jacobins selected France as savior of the world. The new Jacobins have anointed the United States. The author explains that the new Jacobinism manifests a precipitous decline of American civilization and that it poses a serious threat to traditional American constitutionalism and liberty. The book’s analyses and predictions have proved almost eerily prophetic.

“Prophetic,” indeed, for two reasons.

First, it was published a decade before “President George W. Bush made neo-Jacobin ideology the basis of US foreign policy,” transforming America into the spearhead of the “global democratic revolution” with all the blood and tears that has entailed. Second, Ryn’s close encounter with neoconservatism helps to make sense of certain intellectual trends today.

The first wave of neoconservatives were liberals and anti-Stalinist leftists who defected to the camp of American conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s. In time, they would exert tremendous influence over the movement, most notably—or notoriously—by championing a hawkish foreign policy, which Ryn describes as neo-Jacobin. Key figures in the early days included Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, both of whose waddling spawn might be their most heinous crimes.

Another important, albeit adjacent figure, is Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. As a critique of the academic left, it impressed conservatives then and remains a key text today. Ryn, however, immediately noticed serious red flags.

To be sure, Bloom insisted he was “not a conservative—neo or paleo.” Nevertheless, his polemic against left-wing intellectual trends was essentially an early articulation of neoconservatism, its pages being marked with the discrediting of tradition and history that characterizes the movement. Ryn was one of the few people who understood its real meaning.

A sign of the great and growing influence of the intellectual and political movement of concern to me was the enormous attention paid to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1930-1992). . . . . To many, Bloom’s book appeared to offer a conservative philosophy of education, but, to me, it seemed to require no special powers of discernment to recognize that, on the whole, the book was really a defense of the Enlightenment mind, which Bloom rather loosely and arbitrarily identified with the American mind. This was the mind whose “closing” he bemoaned. His book exhibited just the intellectual pattern of discrediting history and tradition that has been discussed. . . . Bloom sought to detach Americans from their distinctive historically evolved heritage, formed by classical, Christian, and British tradition. America was great not because of what that history had made it, but because America was founded on universally valid principles that belonged to all humanity.

For Bloom, as with the neoconservatives, America is chiefly an idea rather than a real place and product of a unique history and particular people. And it is this abstraction that provides the theoretical basis for “exporting” the “American idea” by force to the world—at the expense of flesh and blood Americans. This view reaches its apogee in Bill Kristol’s suggestion that “lazy” pockets of the white working class should be replaced with “new Americans.” To be an American, after all, is merely to subscribe to an idea composed of a vague set of principles simple enough to stuff in a Happy Meal and distribute to illegal aliens as they cross the border.

With these points in mind, Ryn was invited to contribute to a symposium in Modern Age on Bloom’s bestseller the year it was published.

I did not consider the book philosophically weighty or otherwise impressive; the huge attention that it was receiving was not due to its intrinsic merit but to its appealing to a large and growing part of the opinion-molding establishment. The celebration of Bloom was symptomatic of the intellectual trends of the time. Bloom did not escape criticism, but he had a large and extensive cheering section. . . . [Bloom’s book] contained ideas that were hard to reconcile with central features of the Western heritage, including the American political tradition. Many read it carelessly and selectively, paying attention primarily to its criticism of intellectually placid students addicted to drugs and bad music, of sycophantic, trendy professors, and of cowardly academic administrators. But only in these limited ways and only as compared to the extreme radicalism that the book criticized might the book appear to have a conservative aspect.

To Bloom, “the essence of philosophy was the rejection of historically formed beliefs and the abolition of all authority in favor of reason.” That kind of thinking tended in the direction of ideological uniformity, toward a Rousseauian totalitarianism.

But it was the next part of Ryn’s account that really caught my eye, because it gets at the “why” that helps explain the warm reception Bloom’s otherwise radical book received among conservatives.

To the extent that my article [in Modern Age] was noticed, purported conservatives seemed merely puzzled or to regard me as a spoilsport. Why question this celebrated critic of leftist trends in education? In one way I was not surprised by this reaction. Intellectuals are much like other people: most are followers who find reasons to assent at the moment. It was also obvious that the forces lionizing Bloom were capable of rewarding sympathizers.

In short, the right was willing to overlook Bloom’s radicalism because it had been easily wooed by celebrity—by the cachet of a prominent someone who had said some of what they had been saying about the left, despite fundamental and, indeed, irreconcilable differences. Ryn took it as a sign of neoconservatism’s ideological ascendancy, propelled by striving social climbers and sympathizers. Ironically, praise for his critique came from what was at the time developing into the “premier neoconservative think tank,” the American Enterprise Institute.

AEI had sought to boost its academic reputation by attracting distinguished scholars. Perhaps most prominent was Robert Nisbet, formerly the Schweitzer Professor at Columbia. But Nisbet obviously did not fit in very well. He called my article on Bloom “a superb indictment” and wrote me twice about it. He said, “Your review of Bloom is by far the best I have seen.” Later he added, “It pins [Bloom’s] Rousseauism/totalitarianism right to the wall. . . . Thank you!”

Still, the neoconservative force with which Bloom has been associated would influence the right profoundly.

I see the same tendency alive and well today among many conservatives who are eager to celebrate “disruptors” they perceive as having social capital or access to new social scenes, like Bari Weiss and others. Every quasi-dissenter is embraced with open arms by conservatives who are eager to compromise to accommodate their new friends—a relationship that is rarely reciprocal.

Too many conservatives are never happier than when garbled variations of right-wing points are mouthed on “Real Time with Bill Maher” by those who consider genuine conservatism the refuge of rubes and reprobates. Never mind that they often attack these positions before embracing qualified and sanitized versions of them.

But what else might explain this curious weakness on the right? Perhaps it is a confusion that arises from the fracas, a cloudy distortion of where and what the center is today. If the left has effectively achieved cultural hegemony in this country, which it has, then the cultural “center” is not midway between right and left but left of center. Take Weiss, who facilitated an attack on yours truly by British neoconservative Douglas Murray.

Like her anti-Stalinist predecessors, Weiss has broken with the “woke” left. But does that make her an ally to the right? Peruse National Review’s coverage of Weiss, and you’ll get that impression. Indeed, a recent piece in the magazine lionized her and boosted Senator Tim Scott—one of the worst Republicans on issues like law and order—against the New York Times. There is one sure loser in a fight between Weiss-Scott and the Times: the right.

A week before that article in National Review, Weiss’ publication ran a story by Peter Meijer, a moderate Republican, complaining about the Democratic Party’s funding of his “far-right” opponent. Democrats supported John Gibbs, who is to Meijer’s right, because they hoped Gibbs might be easier to defeat come midterms. Gibbs ultimately beat Meijer. But more to the point: Weiss has wasted no time since “leaving the left” to start policing the boundaries of the right. Because Weiss has not fundamentally moved, she simply pines for a stage in the revolution that suits her comfort level better.

As Trotskyites, those who would become the first neoconservatives wanted to spread “socialism.” After their transformation, the missionary impulse remained and switched to promoting “capitalism” and “democracy,” but as Ryn notes: “Capitalism, though cruel, was, in Marx’s view, a highly progressive force” because it undermines old traditions and social structures all the same. Similarly, people like Weiss yearn merely for a liberalism that served as the precursor to the woke ideology they now condemn.

Here is an illustrative lament from a typical Weiss reader commenting “on the ideological takeover of Hollywood” by wokeness:

I have been running the Oscar website AwardsDaily.com since 1999. I was one of the leaders pushing for inclusion and diversity starting back in 2001 when Halle Berry became the first black actress (and since, only black actress) to win in the category. It is hard to overstate just how hard it it [sic] was for actors, writers and directors to penetrate the white wall. I felt it was my moral duty to change that. But then Trump was elected. Then the community and the left became locked in a kind of mass hysteria.

The author goes on to decry the Democratic Party for exploiting identity politics and blasts “outrage culture” for stifling the arts.

Utterly absent, however, is any reflection on the role people like her and Weiss played in bringing us to this point—on their making the “explosion of woke” a certainty when they fashioned dynamite out of “inclusion and diversity” to knock down the “white wall.” Don’t they see that they helped set the stage for this moment? Woke ideology is not an aberration born of hysteria as these people pretend; it is the violent resolution of liberalism’s contradictions, the gunshot that ends the tension between individualism on the one hand and social justice on the other.

The real enemy, moreover, is still the reactionary, who reaches the height of his villainy in holding woke “McCarthy trials,” as the commentor puts it. But McCarthy was the good guy, as any genuine rightist knows.

The conservative insists that an alliance and compromise with these neo-Jacobins is necessary to win the culture war. Access to their audiences justifies the cost because we can “red pill” them. But that, of course, is incorrect. People who thought the main problem with Hollywood until recently was white racism are never going to come around to the right’s point of view, no matter how uncomfortable they are with the left for the moment. And while the conservative is willing to be amenable to change, these castaways are not. Instead, they become more tribal and territorial, convinced that holding the (left-of-) “center” places them on the right side of history.

My takeaway from Ryn’s gloss on the rise of neoconservatism is that the right should strive to be more jealous of its camp. It should want to be as ruthless as neoconservatives in exerting their influence and as willful as the left in asserting its vision. What it shouldn’t be is a refuge for yesterday’s radicals who are frightened by the monsters and maladies they helped create.

Reprinted with permission from Contra.
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from Keeping Out the Jacobins

Biden’s Student Debt Forgiveness Scheme is Unforgivable

Last week, President Biden announced he is creating a new program forgiving 10,000 dollars of student loan debt for those with income under 125,000 dollars a year. The amount rises to 20,000 dollars for borrowers who are Pell Grant recipients. Biden flip-flopped on the issue as he previously denied that the president has the authority to create a new student loan debt forgiveness program. He now claims a 2003 law allowing the Education Department to waive or modify provisions of federal student financial assistance programs to help students affected by war, other military operations, or a national emergency gives him the authority. Biden says debt forgiveness is necessary because of a continuing covid national emergency.

It seems odd that Biden would claim covid is a national emergency when even the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stopped recommending lockdowns, masks, and “social distancing.” A broad student loan forgiveness program also does not seem to fit the purpose of this statute, which was to provide student loan forgiveness for military personal, first responders, and others engaged in fighting the “war on terror.” Another basis offered for the president having the power to cancel the loans is a provision in the 1965 Higher Education Act that gives the Education Department limited authority to modify or forgive student loan debt. Given the Supreme Court’s recent decision narrowing the scope of a federal agency’s ability to unilaterally enact major new policies based on limited grants of authority, it is a definite possibility that the courts will overturn the student loan forgiveness program.

If the courts uphold the president’s action, then as many of 43 million Americans could have significant amounts, or even all, of their student debt forgiven. Of course, the debt does not go away; instead, the “forgiven” debt will simply be added to the national debt to be paid by the taxpayers either in the form of direct taxes or the hidden inflation tax. Thus, these loans will be paid off in part by taxpayers who did not go to college, paid their own way through school, or have already paid off their student loans. Since those with college degrees tend to earn more over time than those without them, this program redistributes wealth from lower to higher income Americans.

The student loan forgiveness will add between 300 and 500 billion dollars to the national debt. This is a greater increase in debt than the supposed “deficit reduction,” which consists of tax increase and expanding the IRS, contained in the phony Inflation Reduction Act.

President Biden also announced he is extending the student loans payment moratorium through the end of the year. “Temporary” federal benefits are rarely, if ever, truly temporary. When the time comes for the moratorium to expire, Congress will almost certainly extend it in response to pressure from constituents who benefit from the program, which includes colleges and universities in Congress members’ states and districts. The expectation that more student loan debt will be forgiven will also encourage more students to take out loans and will give colleges a new incentive to raise their tuition. This will raise the cost of the student loan and loan forgiveness programs.

Increasing debt caused by expanding student loans and loan forgiveness will increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, leading to continued price inflation and an eventual major economic crisis. A step in avoiding this and reversing course is convincing a critical mass of people to understand that the welfare-warfare state and the fiat money system that underlies it are impractical and immoral.

from Biden’s Student Debt Forgiveness Scheme is Unforgivable

The Emperor has no Clothes: US Strategy for Africa

The US government recently disclosed its latest strategy toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The document, while not showing surprises or changes from previous policy permutations, is eloquent on the US real priorities in the continent. For the US, its geopolitical agenda based on unipolar world hegemony is far more important that the issues that really matter Africa and that would allow a viable strategic partnership, namely economic prosperity and political stability. The pecking order of US goals is self-evident while reading the paper, with the fostering of “open societies” and delivering “democratic and security dividends” taking priority over mundane matters such as health, economic recovery, and environmental protection.

To understand what promoting open societies and democracy really means for the US, and notwithstanding the passage of time, NATO’s origins and its former support of the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa is a valid starting point. NATO’s 1949 treaty preamble expressed its member states’ intention to ‘safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law’. With US backing Portugal, a NATO founding member, successfully blocked efforts of some Nordic member countries to confront its repressive colonial policies in the early 1970s. Under US leadership, NATO had no qualms dismissing its idealistic preamble by supporting the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, a straight residue of Europe’s fascist era. In the context of the Cold War, the Nixon administration did not shy away from considering Portuguese dominance of its colonies as a stabilising force in the region.

Back to 2022, it is ominous how the new US strategy document quotes Freedom House - a Washington based US government funded organization – on its assertion that only eight Sub-Saharan Africa countries are nowadays to be considered free. If this is the case and given that “fostering freer societies” is the main US goal in Africa, it then perhaps appears inevitable that the US will need to confront or even subvert the remaining 42 African governments to honour its commitment, which inevitably brings back memories of recent US actions in Iraq and Libya. 

Relative to Russia and China, the US has a hard act to follow in Africa. Beyond NATO’s supportive role in the suppression of African liberation movements, the US delayed response in the fight against South African apartheid is still remembered in the continent. Contemporary racism, discrimination and police brutality against African Americans, a fact surprisingly acknowledged in the strategy paper, is a sad reminder of the realities of US society which do not go unnoticed in Africa. 

Russia and China have a cleaner slate in the continent by not having been part of the scramble for Africa at the end of the XIX century. Both also played a crucial role in support of the African liberation movements in the 1970s. Nowadays, Russia and China seem to approach their relationships with Africa with more pragmatism and respect than the US. It is revealing for instance how the next Russia-Africa Union summit is scheduled to take place in Ethiopia, while the similar US-Africa gathering will happen in Washington D.C.

Africa’s pressing matters are political stability and economic development and both Russia and China can play a key role in helping achieve these objectives. Given its demographics in terms of fast population growth and urbanization, political stability is critical for Africa’s sustained economic prosperity. As Africa’s largest arm dealer, Russia’s role has been demonized in the West, but any criticism needs to be placed in the context of the US ongoing push for an African political architecture tailored to its own geopolitical needs. Concerning China, it is by far Africa’s leading financial and trading partner and will continue as such as the US economic role in world affairs erodes. 

The Ukraine war is a showcase on where US priorities stand. Food insecurity is the most troubling matter in Africa as the UN recently confirmed that 18 out of 23 hotspot countries suffering famine are in this continent. The war has contributed to disrupt food access primarily because of early export restrictions on Russian agricultural exports – by far Africa’s largest grain provider – and also due to the blockade of Ukrainian exports and its mining in the Black Sea, a situation that improved since July as Russia agreed to allow Ukrainian exports of agricultural products from Black Sea ports in exchange of the easing of US-led export sanctions on Russian similar items, the latter a major U turn on US policy.

Since the beginning of the war the US has used propaganda and intimidation in its efforts to align African countries behind its pro-Ukraine policy to ensure Russian sanctions have a bite. The US ambassador to the UN recently warned in Uganda against buying Russian oil and natural gas mentioning that African countries were “only allowed” to buy their agricultural products, prompting the South African Minister of International Relations Pandor, in front of US Secretary of State Blinken, to accuse the West of taking a patronizing and bullying attitude toward Africa. Unsurprisingly, most African countries have been unenthusiastic to US attempts to condemn Russia at the UN in connection with the war. US bombastic support of Ukraine has also had a distorting impact on humanitarian and emergency relief for Africa, which according to the UN has dwindled while there is excess of money for programs helping Ukrainians.

A US perennial mantra has been that democracy leads to stability and peaceful societies while so-called weaker democracies make countries vulnerable to extremism and foreign interference. Paradoxically, the US traditional tools of statecraft include regime change, subversion and instability. Due to naivety, relative statehood inexperience vis-à-vis Russia and China, or perhaps just because of sheer imperial ambition, the US has historically been incapable to understand that each society has its own path towards progress, often different from the one followed in the XVIII century by thirteen small and homogeneous English colonies in North America. There is no pre-conceived road to reach prosperity and justice and countries that respect themselves will always abhor the imposition of Western templates to achieve this worthy goals.

from The Emperor has no Clothes: US Strategy for Africa

Falling Military Recruitment Is Another Sign of Waning Faith in the Regime

The US Army reports it is having some serious problems when it comes to recruiting new soldiers. Last month, according to the AP: “Army officials … said the service will fall about 10,000 soldiers short of its planned end strength for this fiscal year, and prospects for next year are grimmer.”

The army is not alone in missing recruitment goals:

Senior Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps leaders have said they are hopeful they will meet or just slightly miss their recruiting goals for this year. But they said they will have to dip into their pool of delayed entry applicants, which will put them behind as they begin the next recruiting year.

In fact, recruitment prospects are so grim that 2022 is looking to be the worst recruiting year for the army since 1973, when the US military transitioned to an all-volunteer—i.e., nonconscripted—force. The days of the post-9/11 surge in enlistments are long gone, and noted for two lost wars in recent years, the US military now faces a new environment of declining public support. Moreover, with its recent drive to showcase its commitment to so-called woke policy goals, the military may be alienating conservatives—a group that has long been a reliable source of recruits and political support.

Ultimately, of course, the military can always get more troops by raising pay and lowering standards. The latter requires only a policy change. And, given the federal government’s ability to essentially print money, the former is unlikely to be an insurmountable problem for the Pentagon either.

The good news, however, is that the military’s recruiting woes are likely yet another signal of declining support for the federal government and its institutions. The federal government has benefited immensely from the fact that the military has long been one of the most popular institutions within the central government. Even as many Americans claim they distrust the government or oppose “the bureaucracy,” widespread support for the government military bureaucracy has long helped to prop up the legitimacy of federal institutions. If falling enlistments are an indication of declining faith in the military overall, that would be a positive development, indeed.

The Economics of Recruitment

As has often been the case in the past, the military is now struggling to find enough willing recruits in an environment of low unemployment. After all, many recruits are motivated at least in part by promises of steady income, veterans’ benefits, and tuition reimbursement. These benefits look relatively less attractive when private-sector jobs are easy to find.

As a result, the military has been “throwing cash” at the problem. All the services are now “leaning on record-level enlistment and retention bonuses” to attract recruits, with higher bonuses for riskier or more skill-intensive work.

Military recruiting efforts, however, have long sought to “subsidize” salaries by promising psychic profits in the form of positive emotions obtained by fulfilling one’s supposed patriotic duty. Another benefit suggested by recruiters has been an alleged opportunity for “adventure.” Historically, recruitment efforts have relied on promising a variety of nonmonetary forms of “payment.”

In their analysis of military recruitment efforts, Peter Padilla and Mary Riege Laner identified at least four different types of benefits promised to potential recruits. These include patriotism, adventure/challenge, job/career/education, social status, and money. Emphasis has differed based on social trends (such as the prevalence of antiwar sentiment) and, of course, on the personal preferences of individual recruits.

The military, in any case, has recognized the need to appeal to all these aspects to meet recruitment goals. Even when military pay is generous, it is still necessary to get potential recruits to accept a job in which one cannot legally quit. Moreover, if a large number of potential recruits view the military as pursuing values and goals contrary to their own, monetary rewards would have to be raised quite high to overcome nonmonetary concerns.

Another strategy that can increase recruitment is to lower (or change) standards for new recruits. This has been done in various ways. For example, as tattoos have become more fashionable among middle-class youth, the military has granted many more waivers. The Air Force is now considering allowing members to grow beards. These changes, however, are based largely on appearance. Broader changes that would qualify as truly lowering standards include efforts to lower physical fitness requirements for women, older members, and marijuana users. For more than a decade now, the army has also been accepting more and more recruits with lower scores on aptitude tests and with no high school diploma.

Of course, there is no “correct” number of employees for the armed forces, and there is no functioning marketplace in the provision of “defense.” The size of the US military is arbitrarily determined by Congress and the White House based on political interests and goals. The military is nonetheless partly constrained by market realities, and by the subjective values of potential workers.

Support for the Military Is Falling

All else being equal, however, falling enlistment is evidence that workers are less interested in serving in the military outside mere economic considerations. This is reflected in the survey data suggesting that the military’s reputation among members of the general public has declined significantly.

For example, as the Military Times reported last year, “About 56 percent of Americans surveyed said they have ‘a great deal of trust and confidence’ in the military, down from 70 percent in 2018.” Moreover, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who believe that military officers “have high ethics” dropped 10 percent from 2017 to 2021.

As has long been the case, the military remains among the more trusted institutions in the US, but, as even the relentless pro-military Heritage Foundation admits:

A more candid appraisal, however, would see this for what it is: a vote of declining confidence by America in its oldest and heretofore most trusted institution.

More worrisome still—from the Pentagon’s perspective—is that much of this decline is coming from a drop in conservative and Republican support. Gallup reports that in its survey, military officers’ “image among the GOP is now the lowest Gallup has recorded since the first reading, in 2002, a period spanning Republican and Democratic presidencies.”

Moreover, political rhetoric among many conservatives has decidedly turned against the Pentagon. This was noted last year in Foreign Policy:

The long Republican romance with the military appears to have finally come to an end. And as conservative politicians and pundits have put the US military—and especially the top brass—in their cross hairs, their supporters and listeners have taken note. The consequences for the US military could be dire.

Part of this is apparently due to the growing feeling among conservatives that military bureaucracy has committed itself to so-called woke politics. From Tucker Carlson to Ted Cruz to Sabastian Gorka, conservatives apparently are not nearly as enamored with the US military establishment as they once were. As Tucker Carlson complained back in May:

Most of the generals we see quoted in the press seem more committed to meeting some counterproductive diversity goal—hiring more pregnant Air Force pilots, assembling the world’s first transgender SEAL team—than on defending the United States.

The Effect on Enlistments

These trends among historical supporters of the military may be finally showing up in recruitment realities. It’s difficult to directly measure the ideological leanings of new recruits. After all, enlistment forms don’t ask for one’s political and ideological beliefs. But we can indirectly make some guesses about who is joining the military based on where most of the recruits are coming from. For example, as the New York Times reported in 2018, military recruiters rely heavily on new recruits from the nation’s most politically conservative region—the South—to meet recruiting goals:

In 2019, Fayetteville, N.C., which is home to Fort Bragg, provided more than twice as many military enlistment contracts as Manhattan, even though Manhattan has eight times as many people. Many of the new contracts in Fayetteville were soldiers signing up for second and third enlistments…. Military service was once spread fairly evenly—at least geographically—throughout the nation because of the draft. But after the draft ended in 1973, enlistments shifted steadily south of the Mason-Dixon line. The military’s decision to close many bases in Northern states where long winters limited training only hastened the trend.

The significance of geography for new recruits can also be seen in the fact that politically conservative regions also tend to grant military recruiters better access to local schools. As school districts in many left-leaning urban areas restricted recruiters' access to high school students in recent years, this has further increased the reliance on recruits from promilitary suburbs, exurbs, and rural towns. These are areas that tend to be more politically conservative. Moreover, new recruits lopsidedly come from families with a history of military service. While the extent to which military personnel support Republicans has been overstated, the military does nonetheless lean conservative. All this would suggest that new recruits come both from households and regions that lean conservative themselves.

In other words, the military has becoming increasingly reliant on a dwindling number of communities and families. The military brass admits this model is not sustainable.

The larger issue here is not whether or not the military can meet recruitment goals without big changes to current standards and pay. After all, if the economy continues to weaken and unemployment rises, this could bail out recruiters in a big way. Rather, the enlistment situation helps to illustrate what may be a developing and hopeful trend in which many conservatives are finally abandoning their long love affair with the US regime through its military institutions.

Reprinted with permission from Mises.org.

from Falling Military Recruitment Is Another Sign of Waning Faith in the Regime

Scott Ritter’s Show — Conversations with Russians to Improve Understanding between America and Russia

Scott Ritter’s Show debuted this week — at a time when it is much needed.

Big money media is painting Russia as an archvillain, the United States Congress and president are imposing sanctions on Russia while sending weapons and other aid to Ukraine in order to kill Russians, and the US Secretary of State is steadfastly avoiding pursuing diplomatic efforts to improve US-Russia relations. In contrast, Ritter, who many followers of Ron Paul Institute (RPI) activity be familiar with from his articles posted at the RPI website and his speech at a June 4 RPI event, has been saying the US should be following a more peaceful path in regard to Russia.

It appears that a desire to promote understanding between America and Russia is at the core of the new show’s purpose. It thus stands in contrast to efforts of media and government politicians to regularly manipulate presentation of information to direct Americans into hating and fearing Russia. Ritter talks about his goal for the show at the beginning of the show’s first episode. Ritter states:

I’d like to welcome you to the inaugural edition of the Scott Ritter Show. The idea behind this is to have a conversation with important Russian figures to enter into a dialogue—a discussion—a debate about the current events in order to create a better understanding between the United States and Russia and indeed anybody who is watching this show.

Good luck to Ritter in pursuing this goal.

In the first episode of Scott Ritter’s Show, Ritter has an interesting discussion with Leonid Petrovich Reshetnikov whose background includes having been the head of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies and having worked in Soviet and then Russian foreign intelligence. The discussion is largely related to the ongoing war in Ukraine. You can watch the episode here.

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/august/26/scott-ritter-s-show-conversations-with-russians-to-improve-understanding-between-america-and-russia/

Lawless! Biden Side-steps Constitution In Promise To Write Off Student Loans

In a blatantly unconstitutional move, President Biden yesterday announced that his Administration would be obligating upwards of half a trillion dollars - or more - to "forgive" student loans in households making $125K per year or less. Good thing the Inflation Reduction Act was passed or we might be in real trouble! Also today: Did you know the US was still occupying and bombing Syria? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Lawless! Biden Side-steps Constitution In Promise To Write Off Student Loans

Is ‘Autocracy’ America’s Mortal Enemy?

In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden declared to the nation and world: "We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy."

On her trip to Taiwan, Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed Biden: "Today, the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy. America’s determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan and in the world remains iron-clad."

But is this truly the world struggle America is in today?

Is this the great challenge and threat to the United States?

Are autocracy and democracy in a climactic ideological crusade to determine the destiny of mankind?

For if that is the future, it is surely not America’s past.

Indeed, in the two-century rise of the United States to world preeminence and power, autocrats have proven invaluable allies.

When the fate of the Revolution hung in the balance in 1778, the decision of an autocratic French king to enter the war on America’s side elated Gen. George Washington, and French intervention proved decisive in the 1781 Battle of Yorktown that secured our independence.

A decade later, King Louis XVI would be overthrown in the French Revolution and guillotined along with Queen Marie Antoinette.

In World War I in 1918, the US sent millions of troops into battle in France. They proved decisive in the victory over the kaiser’s Germany.

Our allies in that Great War?

The British, French, Russian, Italian and Japanese empires, the greatest imperial and colonial powers of that day.

In our war with Japan from 1941 to 1945, our foremost Asian ally was the autocrat Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek of China.

In our war with Hitler’s Germany, America’s crucial ally who did more fighting than any other to ensure victory, the USSR’s Joseph Stalin, was the greatest tyrant of his age.

During the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, the leader of the South Korean regime was the dictator-autocrat Syngman Rhee.

During four decades of Cold War before the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Empire and Soviet Union, autocrats were allies of the United States. The shah of Iran. Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile. Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua. Gen. Francisco Franco of Spain. Anwar Sadat of Egypt. The kings and princes of Saudi Arabia.

During that Cold War, India was the world’s largest democracy and sided most often with Communist Russia rather than the United States. Autocratic Pakistan was our ally.

Gary Powers’ U-2 flight, shot down over the Soviet Union, initiated in Pakistan, as did Henry Kissinger’s secret mission to China in 1971 to set up the historic Nixon-Mao meeting of 1972.

Across the Arab and Muslim world during the Cold War, many of our foremost friends and allies were kings, emirs and sultans – autocrats all.

The seven-year war in Yemen, in which US air support has been indispensable, was waged by the Saudi monarchy to prevent Houthi rebels from retaining the power they seized in a revolution.

US-Saudi goal: restore a deposed autocrat.

This recitation is not to argue that autocracy is superior to democracy, but to demonstrate that the internal politics of foreign lands, especially in wartime, have rarely been America’s primary concern.

The crucial question, and rightly so, is usually this: Is this autocrat enlisted in the same cause as we, and fighting alongside us? If so, the autocrat has almost always been welcome.

When the Arab Spring erupted, and the dictatorial President Hosni Mubarak’s 30 years of rule came to an end, we cheered the free elections that brought to power Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

A year later, Morsi was ousted in a military coup and power seized by Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, causing Secretary of State John Kerry to cheer that Egypt’s military was "restoring democracy."

Kerry explained that Morsi’s removal was at the request of "millions and millions of people."

Since then, the number of political prisoners held by Sisi has run into the tens of thousands.

If Pelosi and Biden see the world struggle as between autocracy and democracy, a question arises: As leader of the democracy camp in this world struggle, why do we not insist that our allies in places like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, the UAE and Oman begin to hold regular elections to bring to power legitimate democratic rulers, rather than the autocrats that currently occupy the seats of power?

And there is a historical question about the Biden-Pelosi description of the global struggle for the future between autocracy and democracy.

When did the internal political arrangements of foreign nations – there are 194 now – become a primary concern of a country whose Founding Fathers wanted it to stay out of foreign quarrels and foreign wars?

America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," said Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. "She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

And so it once was, long ago.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM

from Is ‘Autocracy’ America’s Mortal Enemy?

How Did America Survive Without an Espionage Act?

(See Jacob Hornberger speak live at the Ron Paul Institute's Sept. 3rd Washington Conference!)

For some 140 years, the United States did not have an Espionage Act. It didn’t come into existence until 1917, when US officials used it to punish Americans who had the audacity to question the US intervention into World War I, an intervention that ultimately led to the rise of the Hitler regime in the 1930s. 

No one can deny that the United States did not fall into the ocean during those 140 years when it didn’t have an Espionage Act. So, the question naturally arises: How did the country survive without an Espionage Act for almost a century and a half?

Just think: The whole world was free to spy on America without fear of being prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated by US officials. Think about how scary that must have been for all those Americans who were living during those 140 years. 

After all, everyone knows that the whole world wants to spy on America. And without an Espionage Act, we all know that everyone in the world would spend large portions of their lives and fortunes spying on America.

There is no question but that throughout the world, there have to be secret files that contain information that spies came up with during those 140 years. Isn’t it amazing that so few of those files has yet surfaced? They have got to be out there somewhere. Surely, all those spies kept records of what they saw when they spied on America.

And don’t forget that for most of that time, the United States had a policy of open borders with respect to foreigners who wished to come here to live or just to visit. That means that spies galore must have flooded into the United States during that period of time. 

What possibly could they have been spying on? Well, they could have sat in on congressional sessions to see what Congress was up to. Or they could have monitored the president’s activities, such as who he was meeting with and playing golf with. Or they could have been spying on the Supreme Court to see what cases they were working on. Or they could have visited some of the few military installations in the country. They couldn’t have been spying on the CIA or the NSA because Americans lived without those two totalitarian-like institutions until the Cold War racket came into existence after World War II. Or they could have been spying on the activities of the American people — things like cattle roundups or cross-country train trips..

What’s amazing about all this is that it doesn’t seem that our Americans ancestors were terribly scared about being spied on, as today’s Americans are. In fact, it’s obvious that they really didn’t care if foreigners were spying on them.

Ironically, it seems that when the federal government began doing bad things, such as intervening in foreign conflicts that were none of its business or engaging in dark-side communist-like activity like state-sponsored assassinations, that US officials became obsessed with people spying on the US Could it be that were concerned that the spies would uncover their nefarious and dark-side activity and circumvent it, object to it, or report it to the world?

After all, what if you were planning a coup against a foreign regime, one that would oust the country’s democratically elected ruler and replace him with an unelected military brute. Would you want spies to be be able to uncover your plans and possibly foil them? Of course not.

Or imagine that you were planning the assassination of some foreign leader. Would you want spies to be be able to uncover your plans before you were able to complete them? Of course not.

This notion is buttressed by the fact that US officials today are using this dinosauric World War I law to prosecute Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. I suppose the theory is that by disclosing the US national-security establishment’s dark-side activity to the world, they were “spying” because the information they disclosed ultimately reached foreigners through media coverage of the wrongdoing they disclosed.

Ironically, the US government doesn’t have anything against spying per se, given that it spies extensively on foreign countries. It’s only foreigners who spy on the United States who are considered to be bad people. 

World War I was one of the biggest fiascoes in American history. It resulted in the senseless deaths of tens thousands of American men, many of whom had been forced to kill and die in the intervention. It has brought the destruction of the civil liberties of the American people during the war. The Espionage Act is a fruit of that poisonous endeavor. It is time to bury it by repeal. If the United States could survive for 140 years without an Espionage Act, it can survive another 140 years without one. 

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from How Did America Survive Without an Espionage Act?

Twitter’s 'Tricky' Timing Problem: Lawsuit Reveals Back Channel with CDC to Coordinate Censorship

“Tricky.” Over the course of 110 pages in a federal complaint, that one descriptive word seemed to stand out among the exchanges between social media executives and public health officials on censoring public viewpoints. The exchange reveals long-suspected coordination between the government and these social media companies to manage a burgeoning censorship system.

Twitter just reportedly suspended another doctor who sought to raise concerns over Pfizer Covid records. Former New York Times science reporter Alex Berenson is also suing Twitter over his suspension after raising dissenting views to the CDC.

In the meantime, Twitter is rolling out new procedures to combat “misinformation” in the upcoming elections — a move that has some of us skeptical.

The recently disclosed exchange between defendant Carol Crawford, the CDC’s Chief of digital media, revealed a back channel with Twitter and other companies to censor “unapproved opinions” on social media. The “tricky” part may be due to the fact that, during that week of March 25, 2021, then CEO Jack Dorsey was testifying on such censorship before Congress and insisting that “we don’t have a censoring department.”

It seems that any meeting on systemic censorship with the government would have to wait until after Dorsey denied that such systemic censorship existed. The exchange is part of the evidence put forward by leading doctors who are alleging a systemic private-government effort to censor dissenting scientific or medical views. The lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana was joined by experts, including Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya (Stanford University) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University). Bhattacharya objected this week to the suspension of Dr. Clare Craig after she raised concerns about Pfizer trial documents. Those doctors were the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates.

Many are now questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdown as well as the real value of masks or the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination. Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a year ago. Some found themselves censored on social media for challenging claims of Dr. Fauci and others.The Great Barrington Declaration was not the only viewpoint deemed dangerous. Those who alleged that the virus may have begun in a lab in China were widely denounced and the views barred from being uttered on social media platforms. It was later learned that a number of leading experts raised this theory with Fauci and others early in the pandemic.

Fauci is accused of quickly scuttling such discussion and critics point to his own alleged approval of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Fauci and other leading experts now admit that the lab theory is a real possibility, even if they do not agree that it is the best explanation.  Social media companies like Facebook declared that the previously banned “conspiracy theory” would now be allowed to be discussed. Yet, some in the media continued to push the media to avoid discussing it. The New York Times science writer Apoorva Mandavilli declared the theory “racist” even as Fauci and others were saying that it is now considered a possible explanation.

Indeed, many of the views that the media attacked as conspiracy theories or debunked are now again being seriously considered. That includes claims of adverse responses to the vaccines, natural immunity protection, and the psychological costs from masking or isolation, particularly among children. None of these views are inviolate or beyond question — any more than the official accounts were at the time. Rather, they were systemically “disappeared” from social media – pushed to the far extremes of public and academic discourse.

The First Amendment is designed to prevent the government from censoring speech. While the new lawsuit will face legal challenges, it has already forced previously unknown government-corporate coordination into the public view.

While the CDC now admits that it made serious mistakes during the pandemic, it allegedly worked with companies to ban opposing views. Those who sought to raise these questions found their accounts suspended. There is every reason for the CDC to combat what it considers false information through its own postings and outreach programs. However, the involvement in censoring dissenting views is deeply troubling.

That brings us back to the “tricky” part. The request for the meeting was made on March 18, 2021. That week, Dorsey and other CEOs were to appear at a House hearing to discuss “misinformation” on social media and their “content modification” policies. I had just testified on private censorship in circumventing the First Amendment as a type of censorship by surrogate. Dorsey and the other CEOs were asked about my warning of a “little brother problem, a problem which private entities do for the government which it cannot legally do for itself.” Dorsey insisted that there was no such censorship office or effort.

The new lawsuit sheds new light on that testimony. It now appears that the CDC was actively feeding disapproved viewpoints to these companies, including a list of tweets that the CDC regarded as misinformation. In one email, Twitter senior manager for public policy Todd O’Boyle asked Crawford to help identify tweets to be censored and emphasized that the company was “looking forward to setting up regular chats.”

Facebook also received lists of “offensive” posts to be “dealt with.” Facebook trained government officials in using its “CrowdTangle” system used by “health departments [to] flag potential vaccine misinformation” to allow the company to review and possibly remove it. It added that “this is similar to how governments and fact-checkers use CrowdTangle ahead of elections….”

That was another eye-raising reference since these companies were criticized for killing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election. The story was blocked as presumed “Russian disinformation,” a move that Dorsey admitted in the March hearing was a mistake. Now, a year later, story is accepted not just as legitimate but potentially a serious threat for the Biden Administration.

Whatever the outcome of the litigation, the filing raises, again, whether our concept of state censorship and a state media are outmoded. The last few years have seen a striking uniformity in the barring of certain political and policy viewpoints, including dissenting medical or scientific views that could potentially protect lives. That occurred without any central ministry of information or coercive state laws. It was done by mutual agreement and shared values between the government and these companies.

What was not known were the moving parts in what has been arguably the most successful censorship system in our history. To some extent, no direction was needed beyond the periodic announcements of figures like Fauci or the CDC, which were treated as gospel and not to be challenged. Even when Fauci was criticized for reversing himself on key issues like the wearing of masks or their efficacy, it did not change the concerted effort to suppress opposing views.

The “tricky” part for the public is how to deal with the circumvention of the First Amendment in a system of censorship by surrogates. Outsourcing the suppression of opposing views threatens the same core values in our government. Just as the CDC overstepped its bounds in mandatory moratoriums on evictions, it should not be allowed to exercise control over free speech, directly or indirectly. It’s mandate to ensure “a Healthy World–Through Prevention” should not apply to unhealthy thoughts.

Reprinted with permission from JonthanTurley.org.

from Twitter’s 'Tricky' Timing Problem: Lawsuit Reveals Back Channel with CDC to Coordinate Censorship

The Coronavirus Crackdown Continues: School Kicks Out Four-Year-Old Child for Not Wearing a Mask

Over two years after the coronavirus crackdowns began across America, much of the authoritarian “public health” measures have been jettisoned. But some draconian government mandates pursued in the name of countering coronavirus remain in place. Included are outrageous mandates at some schools requiring children, who have always been at nearly zero risk of becoming seriously sick or dying from coronavirus, to wear masks. The masks, by the way, have not been established to provide net protection from coronavirus but do cause health problems.

One poignant example of the vile enforcement that backs up the remaining mask mandates on children at schools is on display in a report at KRON-TV news. The report concerns school officials, including an on-campus cop, on Thursday kicking a four-year-old boy out of a Mountain View Whisman School District school in California because the boy would not wear a mask. You can watch the report here:

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/august/24/the-coronavirus-crackdown-continues-school-kicks-out-four-year-old-child-for-not-wearing-a-mask/

Jared Kushner and the Mystery of the First US Lockdown

[Kushner: On March 11, 2020, Vice President Mike Pence asked for my help with the COVID response. I called my friend Nat Turner (left) and Adam Boehler (far right), successful healthcare entrepreneurs who helped me procure lifesaving supplies and equipment from around the world. Avi Berkowitz (center) was a critical source of counsel throughout our government service. (Courtesy of the White House Photo Office)]


The possibility of US lockdowns – never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics – was already in the air in early March 2020. The theory of lockdown had been floating around for 15 years but now China was first to try it, and claim enormous success, however fraudulently. 

Incredibly, the US was set to try it out too but getting Trump on board was going to take some doing. The federal government had the quarantine power since 1944. That much we knew. But just how expansive could its exercise be? Would they dare quarantine the well with the sick? How far would this go?

Thanks to several journalistic accounts, we have a better idea of what went on in the White House before the dreadful March 16, 2020, press conference of Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, and Deborah Birx in which the lockdowns were announced. Along with that came a flier with tiny print about which the ever-trusting Trump apparently knew nothing: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

Read those words again. Has anything like this ever been issued by any government in the history of the world, before China did it? I cannot think of a case. It shuts not only the places where people do “congregate” but also everywhere where they might congregate. Churches. AA meetings. Civic clubs. Libraries. Museums. Homes! And this happened under Trump’s watch right here in the US! There ought to be a word to describe something more extreme than totalitarian. 

There were a number of people in Trump’s circle in those days who proved panicked and confused enough to embrace the idea. But who precisely wrote those words in the sheet handed out to reporters? 

We cannot say for sure but Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner played an important role. He had enlisted two close friends from college to help: Nat Turner and Adam Boehler. Both were graduates from the Wharton School, like Trump. Jared somehow believed that they knew something about pandemics because they worked in health-care delivery. So he called them. 

Boehler headed the $60 billion US International Development Finance Corporation and still does. It’s one of those many agencies that throws contracts and cash to big shots within industry. Before that job, he was head of Landmark Health delivery services, which means that he knew business and finance, not public health. He is among those high-finance execs who were drawn to healthcare not for the science but for the money. 

As for Turner, he is a serial entrepreneur who got his start selling snakes from his parents’ garage. Truly. He founded an ad agency that he eventually sold to Google 10 years ago, Invite Media, for more than $70 million. His company Flatiron – oncology-related electronic record software – sold to Roche in 2018 for $1.9 billion. His page at the Wharton School describes him as “Young, Entrepreneurial and Google-Owned.” He is now a billionaire investor at an implausibly young age. 

And Google-owned! 

The book Nightmare Scenario (2021) explains what happened next. On March 13, 2020: 

Boehler and Turner burrowed into a room in the basement of the West Wing and started calling people who grasped both the scale of the crisis but also the politics. Over that weekend, they put together recommendations and then circulated them with Birx and Fauci. The guidelines were refined further before being presented to Trump in the Oval Office. They wanted to recommend shutting down in-person education at schools. Closing indoor dining at restaurants and bars. Canceling travel. 

Birx and Fauci saw the guidelines as a crucial pause that would buy them some time to better understand the pandemic. Shutting down flights was not enough, they said; more would have to be done. …. Boehler, Kushner, Birx, Fauci, and other aides presented Trump with the recommendations several days later, anxious over what he might say. Kushner had been preparing Trump for the possibility that they were going to need to take more “draconian” actions.

This account was not speculative. Kushner himself in his new book tells a very similar story:

On my way to the White House early the next morning, March 12, my [billionaire investor] brother Josh called from New York City. He described the worrisome signs: the city had canceled its annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade, thousands of people were self-quarantining, and millions more were leaving the city. When I told him that I was asked to jump into the response, he made a suggestion: “You should call Adam.”…

Call Adam! 

Why not call, oh, for example, a public health scientist? Someone with some expertise in viruses? A medical doctor? Universities are packed with them. Someone, anyone, with actual knowledge and experience? Nope. It was entirely a crony operation, privileged fools about to take over the private lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Boehler was the perfect person to help us with the federal government’s COVID response, especially because he had the skills to overcome the fierce rivalries among the administration’s health-care team….After the meeting, Boehler and I huddled in my office and began sketching out how we could help with testing and supplies. To get additional support, we called our mutual friend and successful health-care entrepreneur Nat Turner. … 

As we dealt with the shortage of cotton swabs and other supplies, we faced another problem: the need to develop public health guidelines. 

Let’s just stop right there and consider this realization. Oh, they needed guidelines for the rest of us to follow, for reasons of politics and public relations. After all, they are surely the masters of the craft. Continuing: 

Given that people across the country were confused and concerned, Birx and Fauci had been discussing the need for a unified set of federal standards to help Americans understand what they should do to keep themselves safe and slow the spread of the virus. They insisted that these guidelines would help prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. Despite all the talk over the past week, no one had taken steps to produce a document. When Nat Turner flagged the issue, 

Again, let’s stop the tape there. Nat Turner pointed out that no one had yet issued any orders? Good call, dude. Someone needs to get right on that. Just open up a Google doc and get to work on writing a central plan for the whole country. You have a two-hour deadline. 

I asked him to coordinate with Derek Lyons to produce a draft and encouraged him to call Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA and a renowned public health expert [and Pfizer board member]. I had been trying to persuade Gottlieb to come back into government for a short-term stint to help us better organize our response and support our effort to develop a vaccine. 

When we called Gottlieb, he was grateful that we were preparing guidelines. “They should go a little bit further than you are comfortable with,” he said. “When you feel like you are doing more than you should, that is a sign that you are doing them right.”

Look, this whole scene truly just boggles the mind. Phone calls. Rushed documents. Friends of friends. Pharma executives. People in the know! 

The result was a document that shut down the US and the world, all banged out by rank amateurs with ungodly privilege, with nary a thought of asking disinterested experts. Whatever they typed would affect the lives of 333 million people coast to coast. Did they think about that? Did they even care? Did the even once think about people not of their class and pedigree?

The result: Trump agreed to the “guidelines,” which led to the most momentous lockdown decision in the history of public health and even in the whole of human history. It locked down hospitals, nursing homes, and every commercial establishment in the country except those called essential. Homes too: the CDC said no more than ten can come to your house for dinner. 

So let’s get this straight. This decision, which wrecked life in the US and all over the world, and eventually caused the loss of the presidency and the Congress, was made by a handful of well-connected tech entrepreneurs with ZERO experience in infectious disease, epidemiology, immunology, pandemic history, or anything other than management and business classes at the Wharton School. With close Google connections. And they did this in cooperation with one name board member of Big Pharma that ended up making billions in profits from mandated vaccines that were forced on the American people. Also, Google made a mint. 

Apparently, the above is a true story, based on one first-hand account and one journalistic account. The world was wrecked by a literal snake salesman, the Google-funded inventor of DoorDash for medicine, a big pharma executive, some bureaucrat who lived off AIDS largess, an octogenarian media star who had been in government for 40 years, plus the son-in-law of an easily bamboozled name-brand purveyor who imagined from his years as a CEO that he could just shut down a country and turn it back on! They constitute a plethora of elites who scammed their way to the top and deployed their new-found power in grossly immoral ways that wrecked this country and many others. 

Now, to be clear, there is surely much more to this story. For one thing, even as these birds were deliberating, the Department of Health and Human Services had already issued on March 13 a lockdown order marked as classified. So it was already in the cards. Maybe these bozos only believed they were in charge when the real power was higher up. I do not know. But I would like to. It’s like a kaleidoscope that never stops turning. What we know now is enough of a scandal. 

Reprinted with permission from Brownstone Institute.

from Jared Kushner and the Mystery of the First US Lockdown

Reinforcing Failure in Ukraine

US Military loading HIMARS rockets for Ukraine

In an open letter entitled “US must arm Ukraine now, before it’s too late” 20 notable American advocates for the war against Russia in Ukraine argue that the conflict has reached a decisive moment. To win, the authors insist, Ukrainian forces need an abundance of new equipment, including the constant resupply of ammunition and spare parts for artillery platforms, short- and medium-range air defense systems to counter Russian air and missile strikes, and ATACMS munitions fired by HIMARS with the 300km range necessary to strike Russian military targets anywhere in Ukraine or Crimea.

Meanwhile, the initial flood of equipment and ammunition from Washington’s European Allies into Ukraine has been reduced to a trickle. Daniel Fiott, a European defense analyst at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, complained, “Ukraine needs hardware, not hot air.” Equally important, refugee fatigue is setting in across Europe.

Germans and Hungarians lost their patience with the unrelenting influx of refugees into Europe some time ago, but now the Poles are reaching the saturation point. Polish households confront serious economic headwinds. Poland has one of Europe’s highest inflation rates—15.6 percent in July—caused in part by the war in Ukraine. As conditions worsen in the fall and winter, it is not hard to imagine enormous public pressure on Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Paris, and Rome to end the war in Ukraine.

The hard truth is the introduction of new weapon systems won’t change the strategic outcome in Ukraine. Even if NATO’s European members, together with Washington, D.C., provided Ukrainian troops with a new avalanche of weapons, and it arrived at the front instead of disappearing into the black hole of Ukrainian corruption, the training and tactical leadership required to conduct complex offensive operations does not exist inside Ukraine’s 700,000-man army. In addition, there is an acute failure to recognize that Moscow would react to such a development by escalating the conflict. Unlike Ukraine, Russia is not currently mobilized for a larger war, but it could do so quickly.

American military and civilian leaders routinely ignore the historical record and its lessons. Most importantly, they ignored the criticality of human capital in uniform that frequently constitutes the margin of victory in war. 

On June 22, 1941, the German Wehrmacht launched its invasion of Russia with more horses than tanks. For the most part, the German ground forces were composed of Great War-style infantry divisions dependent on horse-draw logistics and artillery. The German soldiers were indisputably excellent, but only a minority were equipped with the firepower, mobility, and armored protection needed for warfare in Eastern Europe.

Of the millions of German soldiers who marched into Russia, roughly 450,000 to 500,000 were assigned to Germany’s mobile armored force, the offensive striking power that rapidly crushed its Polish, British, Dutch, Belgian, and French opponents. These soldiers were the best of the best with the lion’s share of the modern equipment. 

It took four years, from 1939 to 1943, to wear down this core element to the point where large-scale German offensives were no longer possible. The critical data point to remember is that 55,000 German officers had been killed in action by October.

These German officers were among the best and most experienced officers in the army. They performed the brilliant maneuvers that brought the ill-equipped Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow in a war on three fronts—Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. They led it through the offensives that culminated in the battles of Kursk and El Alamein.

Read the whole article here.

from Reinforcing Failure in Ukraine

America’s Perpetual Foreign-Policy Crises

Ever since the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state after World War II, America has lived under a system of ongoing, never-ending, perpetual foreign-policy crises. That’s not a coincidence. The national-security establishment — i.e. the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — need such crises to justify their continued existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess. 

An interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that oftentimes the crises are ginned up by the national-security establishment itself. Once the crisis materializes, the Pentagon and the CIA play the innocent. “We had nothing to do with ginning up this crisis,” they cry. “We are totally innocent.” 

After the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon and the CIA were desperately in need of a crisis that could replace the Cold War crisis, which they were convinced would last forever. That’s when they began going into the Middle East and killing people. When that massive killing spree, which included killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, ended up producing terrorist blowback, the national-security establishment had its new crisis — terrorism, which replaced communism as America’s big official enemy. 

The “war on terrorism” replaced the Cold War’s “war on communism.” Americans began fearing the terrorists (and the Muslims) almost as much as they feared the Reds. With the new crisis, the national-security establishment, including its army of “defense” contractors, was assured of continued existence and ever-expanding taxpayer-funded largess.

Notwithstanding the ostensible end of the Cold War, however, the Pentagon and the CIA never lost hope of reestablishing Russia as an official enemy. But the challenge was: How to make Russia an official enemy again and how to get another ongoing crisis environment with Russia to keep the US national-security establishment in high cotton?

The answer they came up with was NATO, the old Cold War dinosaur that was called into existence to protect Western Europe from a supposed attack from the Soviet Reds after World War II. Never mind that the Soviet Union and the United States had been partners and allies during the war. Never mind that the Soviet Union was totally devastated during the war, having its industrial might decimated. Never mind that it also lost millions of people to the Nazi war machine that almost succeeded in conquering the country. And never mind that US officials had nuclear bombs and had shown the willingness to use them on populated cities. In the minds of the NATOites, the Soviet Reds were hell-bent on invading Western Europe and then proceeding across the Atlantic to invade, conquer, and occupy the United States.

Once the Cold War ended, there was no reason for that Cold War dinosaur — NATO — to continue in existence. But the Pentagon and the CIA saw NATO has an excellent opportunity to gin up another big crisis with Russia, even after the “war on terrorism” crisis had materialized. What could be better than two big simultaneous crises — Russia and terrorism — to justify ever-increasing warfare largess for the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA?

Oh, but they didn’t just keep the old dinosaur in existence. Instead, they used it to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact, inexorably moving US forces and US missiles eastward toward Russia. Russia objected, but, of course, its objections fell on deaf ears. 

Once Russia openly and publicly declared Ukraine as a “red line,” the Pentagon and the CIA had Russia right where they wanted it. All that the Pentagon and the CIA had to do then was use NATO to threaten to absorb Ukraine. At that point, the Pentagon and the CIA knew that Russia would either have to back down in humiliation and let NATO absorb Ukraine (and install US nuclear missiles on Russia’s border) or invade Ukraine to prevent it from becoming a part of NATO. 

We know, of course, how things ended up — with another great big crisis involving Russia as a once-again official enemy. The recent state-sponsored assassination of accused 9/11 co-conspirator Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan reminds us that we now have two ongoing perpetual crises — Russia and the “war on terrorism” — to keep the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA in high cotton.

Oh, but that’s not all. They also have never given up hope of reestablishing their Cold War crisis with respect to China. Don’t forget: The Reds are still in control of China! 

The challenge has been: How to bring that Cold War crisis back, so that it can run alongside the Russia crisis and the “war on terrorism” crisis. 

No problem. China has long openly and publicly made it clear that Taiwan is its “red line,” just as Ukraine was Russia’s “red line.” China’s position has been unequivocal: Taiwan is part of China, and China will never permit its independence.

So, what do US officials do? They knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately push on that red line, just as they did with Ukraine. US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently made a highly publicized trip to Taiwan, knowing full well what the reaction would be among Chinese officials. And while the Pentagon presented itself as opposing Pelosi’s trip, we now learn that the Pentagon has been stationing US troops in Taiwan for at least a year, training Taiwanese forces on how to oppose a Chinese invasion, thereby establishing Taiwan’s independence. 

No one should be surprised over China’s reaction to these US provocations, given China’s previous emphasis on this “red line.” Make no mistake about it: If China invades Taiwan, US officials will play the innocent, just as they have done with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And they will then have three big crises — Russia, China, and the “war on terrorism” — to justify their permanent existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from America’s Perpetual Foreign-Policy Crises